Chapter 7
"You could have called us," Raymond said, though his own voice sounded hollow in his ears, thin against the suffocating pressure in the room. "If any of this insane fairy tale were true, you could have called the police. You could have called Child Protective Services."
"And tell them what?" Gavin screamed, the fury erupting back into his face like a geyser of hot ash. "Tell them my nephew was having bad thoughts? Tell them a sweet, beautiful, orphaned boy who cried whenever a nurse walked by was planning to butcher a family? The police wouldn't have locked him up, Raymond! They would have taken him away from me, put him in another foster home with another Brenda and another Arthur, and he would have burned them in their beds!"
Gavin leaned back against the cinder blocks, his chest heaving, his face slick with sweat.
"He knew you were coming," Gavin whispered, his voice dropping back into that dreadful, intimate register. "He set the clock. He stole a burner phone from the hardware delivery guy three weeks ago. He’s been waiting for a night with heavy rain so the sirens wouldn't carry across the valley. He called you, Vance. He called 911, he put the phone under his hip, and then he screamed into the receiver and hammered his own head against the radiator pipe to make the sound of bone breaking."
Gavin Cross reached out, pointing his bloody, chained index finger directly at the center of Raymond’s chest, directly at the badge beneath the unzipped jacket.
"He didn't call you to save him," Gavin said, each word landing like a lead weight in the small room. "He called you because he knew you'd bring guns. He knew you'd kick the door in with your heart full of holy fire. He turned you into his personal executioner, Raymond. He used you to clear me out of the way. And now... now you've given him the whole world."
The heavy steel door swung open behind Raymond with a loud, mechanical *clang*.
Detective Marcus Miller stood in the threshold, his face dark with disgust. Behind him, Captain Thorne was leaning against the corridor wall, arms crossed over his chest, his expression hard and dismissive.
"That’s enough, Ray," Miller said, stepping into the room and grabbing the back of Raymond’s chair. "Don't let this psycho waste your oxygen. We’ve got the preliminary report from Chester Creek. The Harrow fire was an electrical short. Case closed three years ago. This scumbag is just throwing dead family under the bus to dodge the needle."
Raymond stood up slowly.
His knees felt stiff. The yellow legal pad on the table remained completely blank; he hadn't written down a single word.
Gavin looked up at Raymond as the investigator turned toward the door. The manic rage had vanished from the prisoner’s eyes, replaced by an empty, hollow sorrow that looked entirely, terribly genuine.
"Check the radiator, Detective," Gavin whispered, his voice catching in his throat. "Check the cuffs. Check the locks on the inside of my bedroom door. Ask yourself why the deadbolts on the utility room were installed on the *outside* of the frame."
"Shut your mouth," Miller snapped, gesturing to the guard outside. "Take him down to cell five. Suicide watch. Full observation."
Two guards stepped in, hauling Gavin to his feet by his upper arms. The wounded man didn't resist. He let his feet drag along the concrete floor, his head lolling back as they pulled him toward the heavy iron gate of the lower corridor.
"He's in a room with a window, Vance!" Gavin screamed as the gate clanged shut between them, his voice echoing off the concrete subterranean walls with frantic, desperate clarity. "He’s got a bed with sheets! Check the locks! Look at the house before he leaves that hospital! Look at the goddamn house!"
The iron gate slammed. The corridor fell into a sudden, ringing silence.
Miller let out a long, disgusted snort, tucking the case file tighter under his arm.
"Fucking monster," Miller muttered, shaking his head. "Blaming a sixteen-year-old kid for his own sister's death. I hope the DA asks for the death penalty on the kidnapping alone."
"Yeah," Raymond said softly.
He stood in the middle of the hallway, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like an angry hornet trapped in glass. He looked down at his own right forearm.
Beneath the sleeve of his jacket, where Holden’s cold fingers had gripped him in Room 412, the skin felt strange. Numb. As if the cold from those calloused fingers had seeped through the nylon, through the cotton of his shirt, and settled deep into the marrow of his bone.
*Seventy-one beats per minute.*
Raymond pulled his car keys from his pocket, his knuckles grazing the cold brass of the ring.
"Where are you going?" Miller asked, noticing Raymond turning back toward the stairs instead of the captain's office. "The press conference is in twenty minutes. DA wants you on the podium."
Raymond didn't look back.
"Tell the DA I got held up," Raymond said, pushing the heavy fire door open into the stairwell. "I'm going back to Linden Lane."
The rain over Linden Lane had softened from a downpour into a greasy, persistent mist that smelled of wet asphalt and rotting sycamore leaves.
Yellow crime-scene tape had been strung from the porch railing of Number 44 to the rusted chain-link fence of the neighboring lot, drooping under the weight of the damp air. The squad cars and television vans were gone, their tire tracks cut deep into the mud of the curb like open gashes. The suburban street had retreated into an uneasy, suffocating quiet.
Raymond pushed through the tape, his trench coat heavy with moisture.
He didn't turn on his department-issued flashlight until his boots crossed the threshold into the ruined foyer. The front door hung crookedly from its splintered frame, the strike plates hanging loose like pulled teeth. Inside, the stagnant air had curdled: gun smoke, copper, the sour bite of unwashed laundry, and the faint, sweet chemical tang of dusting powder left behind by the mobile crime lab techs who had cleared out an hour ago.
Raymond reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of purple nitrile gloves, and snapped them over his knuckles.
*To cement the indictment.* That was what he had told the desk sergeant when he checked out the secondary scene kit. That was what he had told himself in the car during the three-mile drive from the county lockup. He was going to find the black notebook Holden had described. He was going to photograph the entry points, measure the throw of the deadbolts, and gather the physical evidence that would bury Gavin Cross under a mountain of consecutive life sentences.
He walked past the living room, where chalk outlines marked the spot where Gavin had fallen bleeding across the cardboard boxes.
Instead of turning toward the rear utility room, Raymond stopped at the foot of the stairs.
Gavin’s words from Interview Room C echoed in his ears with an ugly, rhythmic cadence: *Check the locks on the inside of my bedroom door.*
Raymond took the stairs slowly, avoiding the center of the treads to keep the warped pine from groaning. The second floor was freezing, smelling of dust and undisturbed cedar. There were three doors off the narrow upper hallway: a shared bathroom with a stained clawfoot tub, an empty linen closet, and the master bedroom at the far end.
