Leaving it behind feels like freedom, even though I know that’s a temporary relief; regardless of what happens while we travel, we’ll come back to the Belldenes, who must be mad as a nest of poked hornets by now that my daughter is the main witness against one of their own. They wanted us gone, and I’m willing to make them happy on that front. But I’m not going to ask my child to lie for them.
The chill of the morning morphs into rain before we hit Mississippi, but the temperature rises along with it. Sam drives, and I sleep as much as I can before I call ahead to Remy’s father. No answer, I get voice mail. I explain to him that I will be coming into town and would like a meeting to talk about his son. I leave my phone number and the address of the place we’ll be staying, since I booked ahead.
We’re all tired and cranky by the time we arrive.
Remy’s hometown isn’t anything much—a wide spot in the road, basically, with a few thousand residents, the usual Dairy Queen and Sonic and truck stops. A few Cajun restaurants, all brightly lit with neon signs.
We slide into the motel pretty close to 10:00 p.m., and I have a flashback of all the cheap wayside inns I’ve stayed at these past few years, as the kids and I fled from one compromised home to another. I stayed at even more with Sam as we went on the hunt for Melvin. It’s strange how simultaneously depressed and nostalgic I feel about motels in general.
I deliberately chose something nicer this trip. Clean, well lit, relatively modern if not fancy. J. B. probably would have paid for something really upscale, but I’m more comfortable here, and it’s the best place that’s close-ish to the Landry family home. I haven’t gotten a call back yet, but I’m hoping Joe Landry will reach out in the morning. If not, I’m prepared to doorstep him. For tonight, we pile into our rooms—one for me and Sam, one for Lanny and Connor, though Lanny’s already making mutinous noises about wanting her own room and why does she have to share a bathroom anyway. But they’re okay. She’s relieved, I think, to be away from Stillhouse Lake right now. So is Connor.
Sam and I settle in, but I find I’m restless in the heavy humidity. I can’t get comfortable. I give up and coax a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the room—the results are surprisingly good—and open up my laptop to check messages.
There are quite a few, which is odd. I’ve put in certain keyword filters, so anything that contains rape or fuck or kill goes into a folder called RADIOACTIVE unless it’s from someone I already know. But these have bypassed that filter setup. They’re all from anonymous accounts, most just strings of numbers.
The message contents are nothing but pictures.
It takes a lot to shock me these days, to be honest. I’ve seen gruesome crime scenes, in real life and in vividly colored high-resolution photographs. I’ve seen mutilations and violations and so much more; a lot of it has been forced on me through accounts just like these, designed to horrify and incite terror.
But these are still disturbing. One’s a crime scene photo—God knows from where—in saturated color so the blood is a distinctively bright hue. A woman lies on the ground. She’s got no face, just a ragged mashed hole where it ought to be. One eye lies on the ground next to her. It’s a cloudy brown.
The caption on the picture says Soon, bitch.
I brace myself for the next message. And the next. And the next. It’s all bad, but some stand out. One’s a direct death threat against Sam. I put that one aside. I linger, horrified, over threats to both my children. There have always been assholes who fixate on me. But threatening to rape and murder my children just to make me feel the pain is beyond monstrous. They don’t care about Lanny and Connor; to these sick bastards my kids are just flesh dolls they can rip apart for effect. It makes me rage inside, and shake with fear, which is what they want. I know that and still can’t help it.
I tell myself this is normal, that panic comes in waves and it’ll subside again soon . . . but even if it does, this avenue of attack never closes. There’s always someone new stumbling upon a message board, a thread, a call for action. They feel powerless. It makes them happy to lash out.
The internet enables and organizes hate very effectively; it lets people believe they’re righteous warriors for justice when in reality they’re just clicking keys. All the emotional hit of adrenaline, none of the risk. Most of them will never do anything else; one shot, and they’re gone.
But there’s always a possibility that one of these messages is from a stalker with time and inclination to travel. To shadow our family until an opportunity presents itself. And that terrifies me, because I know better than anyone that safety is an illusion.
I stop at the thirty-fourth message, because that one is a picture of the four of us together. Me, Sam, the kids. We’re in front of the cabin, talking as we carry in groceries. Lanny’s smiling. I’m wearing my favorite red sweater. There are targets on each of us.
This picture is recent, within the last month, because I just bought that damn sweater when the weather started to turn.
The caption feels like a knife at my back. You don’t get to be happy. How many times have I heard that? From the lips of victims’ families, former friends, perfect strangers.
Often enough that I have to work not to believe it.
I archive all the emails, complete with all the header information, onto a thumb drive, and then I dive into the radioactive folder for another unsettling swim in the sewer. It’s even worse, but at least most of it is just words, not pictures. I put those on a separate drive. Close to two hundred of those.
Sam’s hand falls on my shoulder, and I flinch. “You’re quiet,” he says.
“Yeah.” I shut the lid on the computer and turn with a smile. But my smile dies at the serious look on his face.
“I need to talk to you,” he says. “Got a minute?”
“Sure. Remy’s father hasn’t called back yet anyway.” I let a second go by before I ask the question I’m kind of dreading. “What is it?”
He sits on the edge of the bed across from me and rubs his hands together. That’s a tell of his; it means he’s feeling very uncomfortable, working himself up to something personal. “I’ve been contacted by the Lost Angels,” he says.
Contacted. Not targeted? I don’t answer, because I’m not sure what to say. He doesn’t, either, for a moment.
“They wanted me to know that they’re about to do a podcast. You know how popular those are right now.”
They are. Listeners in the millions. I even subscribe to some myself.
“About me?” I ask. He shakes his head. He’s looking down now. It alarms me more than the rest of it.
“Not directly,” he says. “It’s about me. They believe I had something to do with Miranda’s death.”
Miranda Tidewell and Sam had a . . . relationship. Not the traditional, sexual kind as far as I’m aware, though she was possessive of him; she and Sam shared a deep trauma. Miranda’s daughter had been murdered by my ex-husband. And so had Sam’s sister. She’d been the one to help him through that grief, not me. She’d been the one who’d channeled Sam’s grief into a pure, burning rage against Melvin, and against the woman she believed had enabled Melvin to commit his crimes.