Page 76 of The Angel Maker

And most of all, Siena was.

Her gaze moved over the photos, her heart beating harder and a sick feeling rising inside her. They all appeared to have been taken covertly, most of them from a distance. Here were the three of them in a supermarket. Siena was standing between her and Sam, looking back over her shoulder with a curious expression on her face as she made eye contact with the camera.

Their kitchen window. Siena was sitting in her high chair wearing a bib stained with juice, while Katie held a spoon in front of her mouth.

Sam sitting on a bench in the park with his headphones on and his eyes closed, Siena playing in the sandpit in front of him.

Siena’s bedroom window at night, her daughter a black shape behind the glass peering down toward the garden. Katie remembered the pale, misshapen face she’d seen in the red car driving past her at her brother’s apartment.

Moon came to say hello again.

She tried to swallow, but her throat failed her. And as she looked at the pictures and notes tacked up beside the photographs, the sick feeling inside her intensified. They were basic and badly drawn, but she could tell what she was seeing. Lists of dates and times—who was where andwhen. School start and end times. Sam’s gigs. There were maps of the streets around their house and the day care and the local places they visited, all of them dotted with arrows and circles.

Parking spots, she realized. One-way systems. Cameras.

Escape routes.

She stared helplessly at the whole awful lot of it.

A soft creak outside the room.

Katie froze. Her gaze moved from the display on the wall to the single bed against the wall—and then something fell away inside her. Because it had clearly been slept in recently. And yet there was another bedroom up here. The one with the door ajar, the air outside it stinking of old, sour wine.

Faltering footsteps now, out on the landing.

“Michael?”

A man’s voice.

“Is that you?”

Cold panic washed through her. She looked quickly around the room, but there was nowhere obvious to hide. The best she could do was step quickly over behind the open door and press her back to the wall there. A second later, a figure moved into the doorway. The stench coming off him was terrible.

She held herself still. The voice had sounded tentative and wavering. An old man—Hyde’s father, perhaps. She braced herself for him to come all the way into the room, but he remained on the threshold, just inches away from her. Her heart was beating so hard now that it seemed impossible he couldn’t hear it.

And yet he just stood there, breathing shallowly.

The photographs and drawings were right there, in full view on the wall in front of him. He must have been able to see the family his son was stalking—her family—and the plans he had been making. But as Katie listened to the old man breathing beside her, she realized he didn’t seem shocked or appalled.

He didn’t even seem surprised.

A moment later, he turned off the light.

Then he closed the door, and the room was pitch-black. Katie heard those same faltering footsteps moving slowly away on the landing. A few seconds later, she was alone again, standing in the darkness, the silence broken only by the quiet hum of the laptop and the thudding of her heart.

And then by a sudden blast of music.

She looked around the darkness frantically, not understanding what was happening—and then panic flared as the volume of the music grew even louder, and she felt the vibrations against her chest from her jacket pocket.

Her phone was ringing.

Twenty-nine

Dusk.

When Chris was living out on the street, it had occurred to him that existence was divided into two.

There was the daytime world: the one in which the normal people moved about, living their lives according to schedules. They woke, showered, and kissed their partners goodbye; they went to their places of work and then trudged home afterward.

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