Chapter 6
Raymond’s jaw tightened. "Keep digging, Cross. The jury's going to love this."
"Listen to me!" Gavin lunged forward again, slamming his forearms onto the metal with a concussive bang that shook the legal pad. The guard outside touched the viewing glass, but Raymond held up a flat hand without taking his eyes off the prisoner. "His foster parents! The Harrows! Arthur and Brenda Harrow, up in Chester Creek! Look up the file, Vance! Look up the file from October twenty-first, three years ago!"
Raymond didn't move. "I know his foster parents died in an accidental fire."
"Accidental?" Gavin’s voice climbed into a shrill, hysterical pitch that cracked against the cinder blocks. "Brenda Harrow was my sister! She took that boy out of the county shelter because she couldn't have children of her own. She loved him! She bought him clothes, she bought him books, she gave him the sunny bedroom on the second floor! And six months later, Arthur woke up at three in the morning to the smell of gasoline coming under the master bedroom door!"
Gavin leaned across the table, his breath sour with bile and fever, his chained hands shaking so violently the link clattered against Raymond’s pen.
"Holden didn't run," Gavin whispered, his pupils dilating until they were almost black. "Arthur tried to kick the door open, but Holden had driven four-inch drywall screws through the outside casing before he poured the fuel. He wedged a steel pry bar under the frame. He sat on the front porch with Brenda’s golden retriever on a rope, watching the upstairs windows turn yellow. Arthur was beating his fists against the glass, screaming for help, and Holden just sat on the steps, eating an apple, petting the dog."
"The Chester Creek fire was ruled an electrical fault in the baseboard heating," Raymond said coldly, though a cold droplet of perspiration formed at the nape of his neck.
"Because Holden burned the dog too!" Gavin shouted, spray hitting Raymond’s collar. "He threw the dog into the mudroom and set the main breaker box on fire with kerosene to mask the origin! The whole house was timber and pine—it burned to the foundation in twenty minutes! The county coroner couldn't find human accelerant because the floor caved into the furnace room! But I knew. I knew because three days before the fire, Brenda called me in tears. She told me she found a stray cat in Holden’s closet, nailed to a board through its paws, still breathing. She was going to commit him to the state hospital on Monday. The fire was on Sunday night."
Raymond stared at the ruined man. The level of detail was grotesque, elaborate, and delivered with a frantic, unhinged velocity that made the hairs on Raymond's arms stand on end.
*Classic displacement,* Raymond told himself, remembering the forensic psychology seminars at the academy. *The perpetrator projects his own sadism onto the victim to absolve his conscience of the horrors he committed.*
"And you," Raymond said, keeping his tone flat as slate. "You took him in. If you knew he was a murderer, why did you take custody of him, Gavin?"
Gavin closed his eyes, fresh tears cutting tracks through the grime on his skin.
"Because she was my sister," he sobbed, the fight abruptly draining out of him, leaving him hollow and sagging against the bench. "And because I thought... God forgive me, I thought he was just broken. I thought the state system had poisoned him. I thought if I brought him out to Linden Lane, if I kept him away from other kids, if I gave him structure, the sickness would pass."
Gavin looked down at his own trembling, calloused hands.
"It didn't pass," Gavin whispered. "It grew. He doesn't feel anything, Raymond. Nothing. You look into those big, wet eyes and you think you’re looking at a wounded lamb. You’re not. You’re looking at an anglerfish. The lamb is just the lure dangling in front of the teeth."
"Is that why you were planning to shoot up an elementary school?" Raymond asked, his voice hardening like concrete. "Is that what was in the black notebook you kept by the breadbox, Gavin? Cleansing the avenue?"
Gavin froze.
The man’s head jerked up, his mouth opening slightly, his bloodshot eyes widening in absolute, petrified astonishment.
"The... the black notebook?" Gavin whispered, the sound barely audible over the hum of the light fixture.
"Holden told me," Raymond said, watching the man's face for the slip, the tell, the confession of guilt. "He told me about the schedule. He told me about the crossing guard without the sidearm. He told me you were going to burn the basement with him in it and walk across the avenue with that .308."
Gavin stared at Raymond.
For five seconds, the only sound in the room was the heavy, wet rasp of Gavin’s breathing.
Then, Gavin Cross began to laugh.
It was not a defiant laugh. It was a high, thin, keening sound—the laughter of a man who had climbed to the peak of a mountain only to realize the ground beneath his feet was made of rotting ice. He leaned his forehead down against the steel table and laughed until his stitches pulled, fresh blood soaking through his white compression bandage, spreading across the unbleached canvas of his suicide smock.
"The notebook," Gavin wheezed against the cold metal, tears and spit mixing on the surface. "He told you... he told you *I* wrote the notebook."
"Didn't you?"
Gavin lifted his head. His eyes were wild, swimming with a terrible, vindicated madness.
"I found that notebook four months ago, Raymond," Gavin said, his voice dropping into a flat, dead monotone that chilled Raymond more than any scream could have. "Under the loose floorboard beneath his cot. It wasn't my handwriting. It’s his. Holden’s neat, tiny, perfect cursive. The floor plans aren't for an active shooter. They’re the floor plans of the six houses on Linden Lane that have children under the age of ten."
Gavin leaned in, his chains clinking.
"Holden spent five months mapping their bed times. Which windows have latches that don't catch. Which yards have dogs that bark and which ones take hot dogs stuffed with sleeping pills. He didn't want to shoot them from across the street, Vance. He wanted to go through the sills at two in the morning with a six-inch boning knife from my kitchen block. He wanted to see how many he could finish before the sirens reached the turnoff."
Gavin’s face was inches from Raymond’s now, his breath burning hot.
"That’s why I bolted the windows," Gavin hissed, his fingers gripping the edge of the steel table until his nails turned blue. "That’s why I put the plywood on the frames! Not to keep the world from looking in, you blind, self-righteous fool! To keep him from climbing out! I chained him to the radiator because the deadbolts on the utility room didn't work—he picked them with a piece of spring steel from an old bra wire! I couldn't sleep! For four months, I sat in that armchair with the rifle across my knees because every time I closed my eyes, I heard him testing the chain against the pipe!"
