I don’t know what he means, but I know he’s talking about Sam. Lanny. Connor. Even Vee. I call home. I can’t do anything else. And I’m relieved when the phone is answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Ms. P.,” Vee says. “Good news. Ain’t had to shoot nobody yet.” She sounds ghoulishly cheerful.
“This isn’t a game, Vee,” I snap. “You understand?”
“Yes ma’am.” Her tone goes instantly cooler. “Ain’t like I’m stupid. I get it. I just thought you’d like to know everything was all right. We just ate some lunch. Sam sure does make a mean chili. Saved some for you, I think.”
I let out a slow breath and try again. “I didn’t think you’d stick around, Vee.”
“It’s my day off. I get to do what I want.”
“Can I please talk to Sam?”
She yells his name so loud that I have to pull the phone away. I’m sure the ride-share driver can hear it, but luckily, he’s not the chatty type. While I’m waiting for Sam to get to the phone, I run down the mistakes I’ve made. I’ll be on the exit video for the store, but I was moving fast, and I wasn’t facing the camera; if I’m lucky, I can get to the cloud data storage for the mail center and delete that footage. Can’t do anything at all about other surveillance cameras on the street, though, and I surely attracted notice chasing after Len. I walked a long way before I called a ride-share, so hopefully that puts me well out of any search circle . . . but all in all, I know I got lucky. Len doesn’t seem like he’s going to call in a complaint, and the mail clerk will want to keep things low key. The manager might kick up a fuss, once he realizes he’s got a blank piece of paper and a fake phone number. Hard to know.
Right now, my best defense, if the police come asking questions, is to just face it down and lie. They won’t like it, but with the fake badge gone, and the warrant deleted from my computer and search history, they won’t waste their time trying to prove it.
Unless something else comes up that’s a bigger problem. Like Len turning up dead.
“Hey,” Sam says, and I relax a little. Didn’t even realize I was tense. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I say. I don’t want to tell him about the risks I took. “I have some video of the guy who mailed the package, but . . . turns out he was paid to do it, and I don’t really have much of a lead on the one who hired him. Got a credit card that Kez may be interested in, though.”
“As long as you’re all right. We’re fine here. Lanny’s agitating to get out of the house, but I’m making her finish her English class reading first.”
“English isn’t the problem. Make sure she’s done the math. She always leaves it for last.”
“Yeah, I’ve got my hands full making sure that she and Vee don’t decide to sneak off somewhere, but thanks for the advice.” He sounds mostly amused, thankfully. “Connor’s fine. He’s already finished with classwork, so he’s taking a nap.”
It all sounds so lovely and normal, and I hate to break that illusion, but I need him on guard. “Sam? The guy I talked to had another letter to deliver. I have it.”
His tone shifts, goes lower and darker. “And it’s not good. Right?”
“It’s not. We need to find this troll. I don’t know how he got his hands on Melvin’s letter, but . . . maybe that’s a way to track him, somehow. Melvin didn’t give it to him. He took it from someone.”
“How can you be sure he wasn’t one of Melvin’s little helpers?” Melvin had assembled a sickening little cadre of fans, no doubt. Some of them had been willing to smuggle out letters for him, aimed like poisoned arrows at me.
“I just know,” I tell him. “Everything he says points to seeing himself as some sort of . . . white knight. He may be on the dark side, but he sure thinks he’s the hero. Hey. He talked to a fair number of people on the Lost Angels forums. Any chance he might have also been talking to people on the boards where Melvin’s fans like to lurk?”
“Maybe. Want me to check?”
“No,” I tell him. “I will.” I don’t want Sam to have to dig through that filth. People who worship Melvin Royal are in many ways worse than the ones who hate him. The things they say about the victims . . . no, I don’t want him to have to experience that. If our troll—MalusNavis, whatever he’s calling himself—is there, I’ll spot him even under another name. The one thing he can’t seem to change is how he writes.
Or maybe that’s another puzzle designed for me to put together. He seems to like to have me following his clues. I wish I could see another way past this, but . . . I can’t.
I sit tense and silent the rest of the ride until I’m dropped at my house.
Sam’s putting his keys in the tray on the table, and I can’t help but notice that he’s wearing his gun on his belt. He looks down at it, noticing my glance, and unclips it. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I’m a little jumpy. I’ll put it away.”
“Where did you go?”
“I took Vee home. She said she wanted to change clothes. I’ll pick her up later.”
“She get inside okay?”
“Yes. And her new alarm system was installed yesterday; I made sure she set it after she went in. But it’s anybody’s guess how diligent she’s going to be with it. You know Vee.”
“You see anything odd?” I’m transferring the contents of my pockets to the table, and taking off my shoulder holster to put that away too. “Anyone watching her?”
“Nothing,” he says. “But God knows it’s easy enough to set up a surveillance camera these days. Our guy doesn’t even need to be close to be watching her. Or us, for that matter.”
That is a particularly specific paranoia that I hadn’t tripped over until now, and I have to resist the urge to storm out the front door and check the trees for cameras. And our neighbor’s trees and eaves too. Which will just make me look strange, so I rein myself in. If he’s watching, there’s not much I can do about that.
I wasn’t going to tell Sam everything, but now I realize that I need to. He needs to understand where things stand and what might happen, and so I tell him about chasing down Len at the mailing store, about tackling him, about being seen and noticed coming and going. And he takes it about as well as I could have expected.
“Gwen, dammit—” He stops, takes a breath, and shakes his head. “I know you didn’t deliberately put yourself in danger, but damn. If he’d had a gun—”
“I had a gun,” I point out. “And he didn’t draw one. Which is good, because I don’t know how I’d have played off a broad-daylight gunfight.” I sound confident, but I’m not. “Sam. I’m okay. Really. But we do need to be aware that this could trace back to me, if the KPD really, really wants to take an interest. And then it could get rough.”
He nods, but his eyes stay dark. “Okay. Would you consider handing all this over to J. B., or Kezia, or, well, anyone? Just get out of the middle of it, please. I don’t like where this is going.” He doesn’t ask me for things like that often; he knows me all too well. But he’s right. This isn’t just a simple harassment campaign.