Page 98 of Wrong Mail

I stand in that kitchen and look at my husband, ruined and honest for maybe the first time since I've known him. I want to believe him more than I have ever wanted anything.

I just can't.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The morning is calm, which is how I know something is coming.

The lake lies still under a low sky, and every house along the road looks innocent.

It shouldn't.

Nothing is over. The Ericksons are dead. Lena is dead, with a funeral no one's held yet. Julia is still missing. Chris is a closed case with a gun beside him. And the hospital badge logs are waiting somewhere with David's name inside them.

All week the Point has told itself the worst is past.

The pressure behind my eyes says otherwise.

David didn't sleep in the spare room, which I half expected. He slept beside me, both of us on our backs in the dark, neither touching nor pretending to be asleep.

Near morning, staring up at the ceiling, he said he'd understand if I couldn't get past it. He didn't reach for me. He didn't make it pretty. He said the hard thing and let it lie there.

For one worn-out hour, I almost believed we could carry something this size and stay standing.

Then it was light. He got up, dressed, and went to see a lawyer, because the news has started circling him and he needs one now.

After he left, the house went quiet again.

I text him mid-morning, when the quiet gets too loud to sit in.

Forget last night. I'm not going anywhere today. Do what you need to do.

It isn't warmth. It's a white flag run up by a woman too tired to keep firing. He sends back one phrase, Thank you, and I sit a while with how strange it is to be thanked by my husband for not leaving him.

Then I do the only thing I have left. I work.

I pull up the photographs on my laptop and open my notebook beside it. The Oregon dead stare back at me in their columns of small print. After an hour, I reach for my phone and call Cassandra before I can talk myself out of it.

"Mal," she says, pleased and wary at once, because I don't call. I never call. "Tell me you're ringing to file something."

"Remember the Oregon thing I mentioned." I hear my voice drop into a register I haven't used in two years. "Wealthy couples killed in their homes, a whole run of them, ten years or so. The police called it the Cascade Killer and then the file went cold. I told you back then there might be something under it. There is. I think I found the thread."

"Tell me," she says.

"It's the real estate. And before you say it, I know how that sounds. I chased it once already, and it came apart in my hands. The houses sold after the deaths, sure. Different little agency every time, no two names the same. By itself, that's nothing. A normal market doing a normal thing." I turn the notebook toward the window as though she can see it. "But I never went under the agencies. I did this week. I pulled the filings and ownership records and traced the holding companies behind them. The ones I can trace so far all run back to the same place. The names on the doors are different, but behind the doors it's the same ownership chain, buried under firms that are supposed to have nothing to do with each other."

There's a silence on the line, the good kind, the kind an editor makes when a pitch has a floor under it.

"Say that again," Cassandra says. "The part about them running back to one place."

I say it again.

"There she is." She says it softly, and something in me tips over, because I haven't heard that voice pointed at me since before the water. "That's the writer I know. The one who follows the money while everyone else chases the body." She goes quiet for a moment. "You sound like yourself again, Mal. You know that?"

There's warmth in her voice I haven't earned in two years. I let myself have it for a second before I continue.

"There's one more thing," I say. "The early coverage, back when this was still news down there. A few of those pieces feel like the writer saw more than they printed. I can feel it. Maybe there were notes that never ran, names they couldn't use, something held back. I've been trying to find the writers, but the bylines go nowhere. Old emails, dead mastheads, editors who don't answer or don't remember."

"That can happen on the ugly cases,” Cassandra says, unsurprised. "Crime work can get a person hurt. Freelancers use pen names. Sometimes the outlet knows, sometimes only one editor does. Send me the bylines, but I'll tell you now, public bylines won't get you far. Pen names are built to stay clean from the outside. You can search all day and only ever see the name on the piece."