“Who?”
“The spitting devil.”
“Evan, I’ve told you not to make up stories like that. It’s creepy. You’re scaring me.”
“No, Mom, listen.” The boy cupped a hand over her ear and whispered again. “I think he wants to kill us.”
Alison stiffened with dismay. Cold needles traveled up her skin. “Kill us? Don’t talk that way. Why would you say something like that?”
“I’ve seen him with a knife,” Evan said.
Alison rose slowly off her knees, like a ghost coming out of a grave, and spoke to her son in a calm, soft voice. “You have to be honest with me now, Evan. You can’t lie or pretend, okay? This is very important. Did you really see a man with a knife in this house?”
“I told you. He lives in my closet.”
She stared at the door to Evan’s bedroom above her and tried to bridge the gap between what was real and what was not. Her son had a vivid imagination, fed by his voracious appetite for fantasy books. It was also possible that Evan had seen Michael carrying a knife out of the house and had made up a fairy tale to explain away his father’s behavior. It was a child’s defense mechanism for something he knew was wrong.
She would have been certain that the spitting devil in Evan’s closet was nothing but a bad dream if it weren’t for one thing.
The ants.
The ants living in the ceiling and in her nightmares. Watching her. Tormenting her. Like a million eyes driving her mad.
What if her paranoia was real? What if her brain had conjured the ants to send her a message? The same message over and over. You’re not alone.
“Evan, how long have you been seeing this man?” she murmured.
“I don’t know. Since the weather got cold.”
Since the weather got cold and the women started dying.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“I thought it was my fault he was here.”
Alison didn’t know what to believe. She saw the earnestness in Evan’s face and knew that he believed it. She bent down in front of her son again and gave him a reassuring smile.
“You stay here,” she told him. “I’ll make sure there’s no one in your closet. Okay?”
“Be careful, Mom. Don’t let him spit on you.”
“I won’t.”
Alison put Evan in one of the kitchen chairs and gave him several of his comic books from a stack on top of the refrigerator. She opened the utility closet and removed a heavy silver flashlight that had once belonged to her grandfather. With a weapon and a light in her hand, she climbed the stairs toward the dark second floor. At Evan’s door, she hesitated, but then she turned the knob and crept inside. She shot a cone of light around the dirty space, and the plastic eyes of stuffed bears glistened back at her. She stopped in the middle of the room, listening to the quiet. She inhaled but smelled only the cigarette she’d smoked in the car. Nothing felt out of place.
Evan’s closet door was open by six inches.
Alison opened the door with her foot and tensed. No one jumped out at her. No one spat at her. There were no devils. She examined every inch of the closet floor with the light and saw nothing but Evan’s mess thrown together in small mountains. The man with the knife was only a comic book villain. He wasn’t real.
She was almost sorry. She’d almost hoped it was true.
As Alison turned away, her flashlight beam swept upward and glinted on a small gold ring in the wall. Around it, she saw the outline of a square access panel, and she realized that one of the sliding stairways to their sprawling, unfinished attic was located here in the closet. She flinched at the odd coincidence that her son’s closet, where his spitting devil lived, led upward into space that loomed over the entire house.
It was a spying ground for every other room upstairs. Including her bedroom and her bathroom.
Standing in the closet, uncertain and afraid, Alison realized that something had changed inside her head. The ants were gone. They’d fled. For the first time in months, she didn’t feel them or hear them above her.
Maybe they had finally delivered their message; maybe she’d finally heard what her mind had been screaming at her.
Look upstairs.
She doused the light. In darkness, she tugged the gold ring, anticipating the squeal of the hinges on the access door. Instead, the door opened silently, as if the hinges had been freshly greased. She reached up by feel to unhook the laddered steps, and the steel structure slid smoothly down to the floor, creating a narrow, angled staircase leading to the upper level.
Alison listened again. She heard wind blowing through the peaks of the roof. The tunnel of air flowed onto her face. She put a bare foot on the lowest step, which was metal and cold, and she used her hands on the railings to climb upward. She ascended into blackness. When her torso cleared the hole, the wind became a gale. She shivered as she stepped from the ladder onto the plywood floor.
As she reached for the switch of the flashlight, she froze.
Behind her, someone coughed.
“Hemoptysis,” Maggie said to Michael Malville.
“Our guy coughs up microscopic particles of blood,” Stride added.
Malville thumped his chest with his fist. “Do I look sick? I’m a swimmer, for God’s sake. I swim one hundred laps a week. Do you think I could do that if my lungs were so weak I was coughing up blood?”
“No, I don’t,” Stride acknowledged.
“Then let me go. I didn’t do this.”
Stride shook his head. “Unfortunately, Mr. Malville, we finished searching your car, and our technicians discovered the same kind of microscopic blood pattern that we found in the homes of the women who were murdered.”
“That’s not possible.”
Stride pushed a photo across the desk, showing the steering wheel and dashboard of Malville’s car under a luminol spray. The dispersion of tiny blue dots looked like paint shaken from a brush.
“The blood at the crime scenes came from a male,” Maggie added. “It wasn’t your wife.”
Malville stared at the photograph. “Look, test my lungs. Go ahead. It’s not me.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I’m the only man who has ever driven that car, and I don’t have any kind of lung condition.”
“Do you know someone who does?”
“Possibly, but it’s not like I do chest x-rays on my friends. I also don’t go around handing them my car keys.”
Stride leaned forward across the table. They were all tired. They’d been going back and forth with Malville over the course of several hours. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Malville, I’m not convinced you did this. Without the blood evidence at the crime scenes, you’d probably be in a cell now because of everything your wife told us. But we do have blood evidence, and that means a DNA test will rule you in or out. I’m guessing you’re right, and you’re healthy, and you’ll be ruled out. That doesn’t change the situation. We’ve got spatter in your car that matches the murder scenes, and if it doesn’t belong to you, then who the hell does it belong to?”
“There’s also the mileage overnight,” Maggie added. “If your wife is correct, someone drove your car to Sherry Morton’s apartment and back.”
“And there’s the missing knife in your house,” Stride said.
Malville frowned. “Unless you think my ten-year-old son taught himself to drive, there’s no one else in our house.”
“Who else has access?”
“I’m telling you, no one.”
“Relatives? Service people? Painters, plumbers, cleaners, anyone who could have taken a knife or copied your car keys?”
“No, no, no, there’s no one like that.”
“It wasn’t a ghost,” Stride told him. “Someone was inside your house. Someone drove your car.”