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“Call me Kal,” he said to me with an attempt at a smile. “It’s short for Khalid. It’s what you can call me before my shift starts.”
“Kal,” I said. “You’re saying that this man picked up Rhonda Jean, stabbed her, then put his jacket on her and left her at the side of the road? Why would he do that?”
Kal shook his head. “I wish I could tell you. Max doesn’t have a criminal record. He’s twenty-eight. He works on his parents’ farm. He had a fiancée for a while, but it didn’t work out. She never called the cops on him that we know of.” He lifted both hands and scrubbed them through his hair, his frustration and confusion evident. “I keep thinking, I’m a cop in this town and I had no idea Max could do something like this. No idea at all. And then I think about the other hitchhiker a few years ago.”
“Katharine,” I said.
“Could he have done that?” Kal asked, tormented. “We’re looking into the timeline, but it looks like Max was in town when that happened. Katharine was strangled and left dead—not stabbed, put into a jacket, and left alive. But she was a hitchhiker on that road. Which means it could be—Jesus, I can’t even think the words. In my town, right under my nose, while I was dealing with drunks and teenagers and car accidents and beach parties. It can’t be.”
Eddie supplied the words for him. “A serial killer.”
Kal nodded. “Yeah. That.”
“Quentin has thought about it, though,” Eddie said. “That’s why he and Beam showed up so fast that night.”
“It’s been going on for twenty years,” Kal said. “Hitchhikers getting killed on Atticus Line. But it isn’t all the time, you know? There’s a stretch of years between each one. The victim before Katharine was in 1991, and he was a nineteen-year-old boy. The force is pretty divided about it. Some cops think it’s just bad luck—something that happens when you get a lot of hitchhikers on a back road like that, where there’s no one to see. People are partying, drinking hard, doing drugs. Sooner or later someone gets killed, and how will you ever solve it when everyone who was there has already left? Most of them don’t even give their last names. So maybe it’s just a numbers game.”
“That isn’t what Quentin thinks,” Eddie supplied. “That’s why he kept asking me if I’d been here before, why we were on that road. Like it couldn’t have been a mistake.” He shook his head. “He wanted to know if I was hunting.”
Or me, I thought, remembering my conversation with Beam. Maybe it was me that was hunting.
“Katharine O’Connor was only two years ago,” Kal said. “Max could have killed her. So could you. The kid in 1991, too.” He and Eddie exchanged a glance, and Kal looked away. “Katharine was an upper-middle-class girl who was taking a year to travel while she decided what she wanted to do with her life. She wasn’t a runaway. She was meeting people and having fun. She called her parents collect every other day from wherever she was, until the day that she didn’t. Her family was beside themselves. They made a lot of noise. Quentin and Beam worked the case hard, but they never got anywhere. The case went cold.”
“And then we showed up,” I said. It made sense now, why we’d been leaned on so hard, why we were suspected. The police had nothing to show for Katharine, no results after all of that pressure. They had been looking for someone to blame.
“I haven’t been on the force all that long,” Kal said. “There’s a class system between the local PD and the state police, and with my name and the color of my skin, you’d better believe I’m at the bottom of it. Guys like Quentin and Beam don’t sit down with me to talk about their murder cases.”
Exactly what Rose had said about Robbie. “Still, you’re involved,” I said.
“Of course I am. This is my town. I suspect that Quentin has talked to experts to give advice on whether this is one killer. Maybe some of the deaths were linked and others weren’t, you know? Maybe one serial killer started in the seventies, and when Atticus Line got a reputation, it drew another psychopath to keep it going. Maybe there’s just one person, hunting along that road, starting in his twenties and still going. He wouldn’t be that old.” He shook his head. “If so, that person couldn’t be Max. But Quentin doesn’t think any of it is bad luck or a numbers game. He doesn’t think those murders happen just because it’s a dark, remote road. He thinks there’s a killer. There have never been any witnesses—just bodies on the side of the road. No one has ever seen anything. Until you two.”
The sun was rising now, the light orange tinged with yellow, like a bruise. The sky was hazy and the wind was hot. Eddie and I had been the break in Quentin’s case, until the evidence had pointed to Max Shandler instead. If Max was convicted—if the blood and fingerprint evidence connected him, along with the fact that Rhonda Jean was wearing his jacket and her backpack was in his truck—then it blew up the theory of a single serial killer on Atticus Line. It also blew up the theory that Eddie and I killed Katharine O’Connor—or anyone else. It sent Detective Quentin back to square one for the earlier murders, which would stay unsolved.
I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“One of the kids at Hunter Beach saw Rhonda Jean get into a black truck that night,” I said. “She was hitching. She wasn’t heading for Hunter Beach; she was leaving.”
“You two went to Hunter Beach?” Kal looked shocked. “Who said they saw her?”
“A kid named Mitchell,” Eddie said. “Age twenty or so, long, curly hair. Dark blond. Five-six, five-seven maybe, a hundred and eighty pounds. If you’re lucky, he might still be there.”
Kal looked flustered. “Jesus. I—I’ll need you both to come to the station and make an official statement.”
“No,” Eddie said. “You have your killer. You’re done with us. Do your own murder investigation. We’re getting our car back and leaving town.”
“Mr.Carter, this is important.”
Eddie crossed his arms over his chest. In the old tee he’d yanked on to come out here, the pose made his biceps rise. He wasn’t posing like that on purpose, but it still had an intimidating effect. “My wife and I are leaving town,” he said again. “There’s nothing you folks can do to stop us. We’d like our car back, but we’ll walk if we have to. No more interrogations. No more drives on Atticus Line. We’re done.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The sky didn’t clear as the sun rose. Coldlake Falls was breathless. Sweat clung to your skin and mosquitoes whined in your ears when you stepped outside. My cold shower only cooled me off for a few minutes, and then I was wilting again.
Still, we packed our bags after having breakfast with Rose and telling her our plans. Eddie wanted to pay her for our stay, but she said she was going to send a bill to the Coldlake Falls PD. “I won’t give them a discount, either,” she said.
“I guess we’ll go home,” I said as I stuffed my bag of toiletries in my suitcase and dashed a sweaty lock of hair from my face. “Some honeymoon that was. I’ll see if the bowling alley can give me some extra shifts.”
Eddie put his arm around my waist, and despite how hot we both were, I felt some of my grumpiness evaporate. “I could call the Five Pines Resort,” he said. “Maybe they can still squeeze us in for a few days.”
