Malville gave a hollow laugh as he struggled for an explanation. “Well, my son thinks we have a spitting devil.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s something he read about in his comic books. It’s a demon who lives in your house and does bad things.”
Stride’s eyes narrowed. “Why would your son think that?”
“He’s a boy, Lieutenant. Boys have active imaginations.”
“Maybe so, but have bad things been happening at your house?”
“Bad things? No, not really. Evan has simply been acting out more because of the difficulties between me and Alison. Yesterday he broke one of Alison’s collectibles and didn’t want to admit it. Little things like that have been happening for weeks. Rather than tell us he’s upset, he created a monster to take the blame.”
“What else has he done?” Stride asked.
“Lieutenant, I hope you’re not suggesting my son is a serial killer.”
“I just want to know what other problems you’ve observed in your house.”
Malville shrugged. “Food has gone missing. Cookies, cheese, leftovers. Evan has been in my office a couple of times, even though he knows he’s not allowed in there. My papers have been moved around. He’s been on my computer.”
“What if it wasn’t Evan?” Maggie asked him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, could someone else be responsible for the things that have been happening?”
“I already told you, there’s no one but the three of us in the house,” Malville said.
“Are you sure?” Stride asked.
“Am I sure? What the hell are you saying?”
“I mean, is there any space in your house where someone could be hiding?” Stride asked.
“You’re suggesting a stranger could be living in my house?”
“Is that possible?”
“Well, we have an unfinished attic, but that’s crazy.”
“Not necessarily. It happens more often than you think. Homeless people will sometimes make a nest in an unused space and only come out when the family is away or asleep. The incidents you describe are consistent with that possibility.”
“You think someone could live in my house for months, and I wouldn’t notice?”
“It sounds like you did notice,” Maggie told him. “You just didn’t realize what it might mean. Has anything else happened that seems unusual?”
Malville opened his mouth to protest again, then closed it as he remembered something. “My e-mails,” he said.
“What about them?”
“Someone hacked my home e-mails. They got into my wi-fi and gave e-mails to the plaintiffs in litigation against my company. The other parties claimed the information came from an anonymous source.”
“Could someone do that from inside your house?” Stride asked.
“Sure.”
“If that’s true, it doesn’t sound like the kind of risk a homeless stranger would take,” Maggie said. “It sounds personal.”
“Do you have any enemies?” Stride asked.
“I run a business. When you do that, there are people who don’t like you.”
“Is there anyone in particular?”
“Take a number,” Malville replied. “I’ve had major layoffs because of the recession. People are suing me. Everybody’s got a grudge.”
Stride shook his head. “This is more than a grudge, Mr. Malville. We’re talking about someone capable of several brutal murders. Someone willing to destroy you and your family. Do you know anyone like that?”
Malville’s face, which was closed and confused, slowly came alive. A dark horror spread across his features. “There is one man.”
“Who?”
“His name is Carl Flaten,” Malville said. “He’s a software engineer. I fired him.”
“Why?” Maggie asked.
“Carl was brilliant but severely anti-social. A lot of the good ones are rain men, but they’re mostly harmless. Not Carl. He sabotaged equipment for co-workers he didn’t like, he used company technology to develop sick video games, he was abusive to our customers. I kept him around longer than I should have because he was a genius, but finally, I had to get rid of him. That was about three months ago.”
Malville paused, shaking his head, and then he added, “He had something wrong with him, too.”
“What do you mean?” Stride asked.
“He was sick.”
The cough rattled like the sound of death.
Alison spun, illuminating the corner of the attic with the beam of her flashlight. There he was. The spitting devil living in their house was tall and bony, like a walking skeleton, and his clothes sagged on his frame. She recognized the black turtleneck and jeans he wore; they were Michael’s. The man’s face had a sunken, ghostly pallor. His dirty blond hair hung low on his forehead. He was young but looked old, except for glistening blue eyes that pierced her with a naked malevolence.
Behind him, Alison saw old blankets shoved together on the floor; they’d been taken from their closet. Remnants of food stolen from their refrigerator and freezer sat on a wooden tray. She saw a laptop computer fed by wires that climbed the walls and disappeared toward an electrical conduit. The bare beams of the attic surrounded him, and he’d stuck dozens of paper photographs to the protruding roof nails. The pictures flapped in the air currents that blew through the space.
She recognized close-up color images of herself. Naked, in and out of the shower. Pictures of her and Michael making love, from weeks ago, before she drove him out of their bedroom. Pictures of women with red hair, dressed in her clothes, dead from dozens of stab wounds.
He coughed again, and sputum bubbled up from his lungs and dribbled onto his mouth. He wiped it with his sleeve.
“You did it, didn’t you?” he rasped. “You turned him in to the cops. I knew you would.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Carl,” he told her. “Don’t you remember me?”
“No.”
“You saw me at your husband’s office dozens of times, but you looked right through me. I was a non-person to a woman like you. I was invisible.”
“Carl Flaten,” she murmured, as her brain put together the pieces.
“That’s right. You won’t forget me again, will you?”
Alison did recognize him, although he’d wasted away from the man she remembered. She also knew the stories that Michael had told her about his sadistic behavior at the office. If he didn’t like you, he tormented you, like a boy with an insect in a jar. He could smell a person’s weakness and exploit it.
“My husband fired you? That’s what this is all about?”
“Oh, it’s about more than that.” Carl took a step toward her, and Alison retreated. “I used to watch you hanging out with him, you know. It made me sick. Michael had everything. Money oozing out of his pockets. Power to dictate everybody’s else lives. A kid to show off. And you. This beautiful wife he could fuck whenever he wanted. And what did I have? Terminal cancer, that’s what I had. You call that fair? I’m twenty-six.”
“You’re right, that’s not fair. I’m sorry.”
“Shut up. I don’t need your pity. I’m the one with the power now. An invisible man who controls your whole life. How does it feel, Alison?”
Carl Flaten laughed, and then he coughed so hard that his knees buckled. She took a step toward the hole, looking for a way to escape, but he reached into his front pocket and withdrew a corkscrew with a sharp, spiral point that he nestled between his fingers. From his rear pocket, he extracted an eight-inch saw with jagged, rusty teeth that had once hung on a peg board in their garage. He blocked her way to the stairs that led down into Evan’s closet.
“Michael dumped me by the side of the road like garbage,” he told her. “The bastard thought he was better than me, even when he was making a fortune off my brain. He had everything, and he left me with nothing. I wasn’t going to crawl away and die like that. I wasn’t going to let him win. So I figured out how to commit the perfect crime. The ultimate revenge. I decided to steal his perfect life.”