Page 74 of Murder Road

Right. Go into the Coldlake Falls police station again? Sit in that little room with Quentin and Beam and tell them what happened to me last night? Tell them that their serial killer was a literal ghost? That wouldn’t help anyone, least of all me.

“I can’t help you,” I told Kal, because I owed him something that wasn’t a lie.

His brows drew down in concern. “Is someone threatening you?”

What a loaded question that was. “In a way,” I said. Shannon’s ghost was definitely threatening me.

He tried not to look defeated. “I have to go back,” he said. “I’ll write a report and start the process of identifying her the best I can. That poor man lost his daughter. I ask that you please don’t bother him.”

“Of course we won’t,” I said.

Kal gave a reluctant nod, and then he got back into his cruiser, started it, and drove away.

Eddie was still staring at the house, unmoving.

“Eddie?” I asked. We’d been sitting in this hot, still car for too long. Sweat was soaking my back.

“Just wait.” Eddie’s voice was calm, detached. He didn’t move.

I opened my mouth to say something else but stopped. For once, I agreed with Kal—we should go back to Coldlake Falls. I wanted to see if the Snell girls had found Trish. I wanted to know if she was okay, if she remembered last night. I wanted to know if there was a way to find out how the case against Max Shandler was progressing.

But Eddie was so still, it was scaring me. He was watching for something, for someone. For a second I pictured him just like this in the desert somewhere, waiting for the enemy, and despite the heat in the car, I shivered.

A minute ticked by, then another. The front door of John Haller’s house opened and he came out. Without looking left or right, he got in his car and pulled out of the driveway, heading in the opposite direction from Kal.

“Perfect,” Eddie said, his voice still as detached as a robot’s. “Now.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we go in.”

He couldn’t be serious. “To the house? What are you talking about?”

Eddie turned and looked at me. “She lived in that house, April. Grew up there, maybe. Had a bedroom there. He probably still has her belongings, old photos. There’s still a lot more to find.”

“That’s breaking and entering!” I hissed. “Eddie, we’re done here. We need to leave.”

But he didn’t hear the end of my sentence. He was already out of the car, moving swiftly across the street toward the house. I had no choice but to get out and run after him.

He was fast—army fast. He moved down the attached row of houses with silent speed, his feet making barely a sound on the pavement. Around the corner was a gate opening to the narrow lane behind the houses’ backyards. As if he’d been here a dozen times, Eddie unlatched the gate and slipped through.

I followed, trying to keep pace. I had never seen Eddie move like this, as if he was on a mission. He knew exactly what he was doing.

We passed the back gates of several houses, and Eddie stopped at one, pressing his hand to it. It was locked from the inside. He gripped the top of the wooden fence, hoisted himself over, and dropped down. A second later, the gate opened for me as he unlocked it.

“Eddie, stop,” I tried to whisper, but he was already gone.

The screen door creaked as Eddie opened it, trying the handle of the back door. Locked. He moved to the nearest window, which looked into the kitchen. He ran his hands over the edges of the screen, feeling with his fingertips. He popped the screen off and dropped it to the ground, leaning it against the house. He fiddled with a latch in a way I couldn’t see, lifted the window, and disappeared inside.

The whole operation had taken seconds.

My heart was pounding, and cold sweat had replaced the heat from the car. This was wrong, all wrong. We weren’t supposed to be here. Eddie wasn’t a thief; I had never seen him act like this. I hadn’t thought he knew how to break into houses. Why was he so determined to break into this one? What did he think he was going to find?

I hesitated, glancing around. What if a neighbor saw us from a window? The police could be here in minutes. I walked to the window and pulled myself over the sill, swinging my feet down to the kitchen floor inside.

The house was dim and quiet. It was small, untidy, run-down—the house of a man who lives alone as he grows older, year after year. Empty beer bottles lined the kitchen counter, and my sneakers touched something sticky on the yellowed linoleum floor.

I couldn’t see anything unusual. There were auto magazines on the kitchen table, an ashtray with cigarettes stubbed out. An empty can of baked beans in the sink. John Haller had no wife, no photos on the fridge. His daughter had left long ago, and Carla had said that Shannon’s mother was dead.

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