“Apparently.”
I sense rather than see her glance. “Helping Melvin kill those women?” I don’t answer that. The road noise grinds up the silence, and she finally says, “He seems to have a type.”
“I’m not like Sheryl.”
“You are somebody people think is a killer. He’s wrong, we both know that. But it makes sense in whatever passes for his mind.”
“I want to stop and buy a pay-as-you-go phone. We can’t use this one. I need to check on Sam and the kids.”
“No.”
“I need it.”
“You know he’ll be watching us.”
“We’re not trackable right now unless he’s the freaking NSA.”
“And maybe he is the freaking NSA, you thought of that? Hell, I don’t know what those people get up to in their spare time, and neither do you! You underestimate him, we lose.”
I want to argue, but she’s not wrong enough for me to be right. It feels like we’ve launched into space, in this tight little can of a car, driving through the dark. Far from home and shelter and safety.
“You’re worried about the kids,” she says, and her tone is gentler this time. “I know. But Sam is there, and he’s not going to leave them. You know that.”
“I know,” I say. “But I’m their mom.”
“And you’re doing the best thing you can. You’re taking the danger away.” Kezia reaches over and tries the radio. It’s tinny and full of static, but she finds a country station, and we silently let it play for a while.
I’m not sure when I fall asleep, but when I wake up, we’re in a different climate—warmer, more humid. The land’s flatter. And the sun’s coming up on our left. “Morning,” she says, and yawns. Stretches without letting go of the wheel. “I’m pulling off at the next truck stop for gas and coffee and bathroom. Want to take the wheel after?”
“I’ll drive,” I say. “Where are we?”
“North Carolina, just passed the border. Got another few hours to where we’re going,” she says.
I check the map on the phone, and we’re on target. The marked spot is called Salah Point, and it’s barely a dot on the map. Screw it, I think. He gave me a phone that has internet access, so I’ll use it. I search the area around Salah Point and come up with a little history. The area isn’t much . . . rural, depressed, same as a lot of the South, only with more humidity. Fishing failed in the mid-1990s for good. The main industry is—was—a cannery that’s been shut ever since, and a couple of glassmaking and pottery factories that are barely hanging on. Like most little downtowns, the snapshots the search function turns up feature antique stores heavy on southern nostalgia, light on actual valuables. A Sonic Drive-In and a Dairy Queen. A regional Wal-Mart. The usual.
The last page has a shot of a lonely-looking lighthouse sitting on the horseshoe-shaped bay, and a brief, dry history about it. Apparently it’s a historic site, and also a private residence. The harbor it once guarded—though there’s no evidence the beacon still works—is called Cully Bay, but the article notes it has another nickname, for the legend of ship wreckers who used to turn off the lighthouse beacon and let ships founder on the rocks to loot lost cargo.
Heartbreak Bay.
“Why does he want us there?” I ask her. She shrugs. “It can’t be his home turf. He’s not that stupid.”
The burner phone he gave us has a small, eye-straining screen, but I make do. I search for anything with Salah Point, any notable events. I strike gold, and my intake of breath makes Kez give me a quick, concerned look. “What?”
I take a swig of water to moisten my suddenly dry mouth. “The top search result for the place is about an abduction and murder,” I say. “About ten years ago. An eleven-year-old girl named Clara Watson was abducted, and her older brother, Jonathan, was badly hurt, almost killed. He suffered severe injuries. Her body was found months after out in the salt marsh.”
“Jesus,” she whispers. “Did they find him?”
“The killer?” I scroll through entries, then click a link and read results. “Not according to the last update. The brother struggled with the abductor, who hit him with some kind of pipe. All the kid could remember after he woke up was that the man drove a van. Case unsolved.”
“That has to mean something,” she says. “Is the brother still alive?”
“I think so. The parents aren’t. Mother died a year after the girl, and the father committed suicide a year after that. The boy was about seventeen when this happened. There’s a mention that he recovered. Nothing else.”
But I’m wrong, I realize. Putting in Jonathan Watson plus Salah Point gives me a later article. A profile piece. The mention of his sister’s murder is one line, described as a “tragedy.” The family owned a large cannery on Heartbreak Bay that shut down in the late 1990s. Losing a child and having another one seriously injured wasn’t enough for this family; death and suicide weren’t enough. They also lost everything in the fishing industry crash that took down a lot of businesses in this area.
The article, though, uses that as a setup for a miracle, because Jonathan Bruce Watson bought a lottery ticket in 2015, on the anniversary of his sister’s death.
“What?” Kez asks. I realize I’ve been silent too long. “What’s that look?”
“He won the Powerball multistate lottery,” I say. “He lost everything, Kez, and then he won the goddamn lottery. Seven hundred fifty million dollars.” I feel the hair raise on the back of my neck. What someone could do with that kind of money, if they were single-minded . . . I can’t imagine what Melvin would have done with it.
No, I actually can. He’d have become another Israel Keyes, burying murder kits in strategic locations all over the country, killing at his pleasure and disappearing without a trace. Israel Keyes called them vacations. It’s impossible to know the ghastly toll he really took; he traveled constantly, and admitted to only a few of the apparently unrelated deaths. A serial killer with massive funds, free time, focus . . . could do anything.
And then I blow up the photo that goes with the story as large as the small screen will handle. It’s not great. A man of medium height accepting an oversize check, looking not delighted but oddly unemotional. A baseball cap on his head.
I feel the knowledge go through me like a sudden, heart-stopping lightning strike.
Leonard Bay. That’s a photo of the man I tackled running from the mailing store. Bay, as in Heartbreak Bay.
The injury that flattened the side of his head.
I frantically google one more thing. Malus Navis.
A navigational beacon.
Leonard Bay had an address on Beacon Street, according to his license. Which had looked real enough, but $750 million will buy quality fakes.
Kez is asking me questions, but I’m not listening. I do another search, and I find another article about the abduction of little Clara Watson.
Jonathan Bruce Watson suffered severe head injuries. I remember the shocking sight of Len’s head as his hat rolled away. It isn’t visible in the Powerball photo, but there’s no mistake. Len is Jonathan Bruce Watson. Jonathan Bruce Watson is MalusNavis.