Page 87 of The Angel Maker

“I can’t tell you that right now.”

But it was obvious from his tone of voice that it had been. What did that mean? She knew the police had been looking for Chris at her mother’s house yesterday, and now something had taken them to Hyde’s house today. And yet she’d seen no obvious connection to Chris there at all. It washerfamily that Hyde appeared fixated on now.

“If you tell me,” she said, “I’ll come in.”

“I can’t right now. But I think—”

Katie ended the call. For a moment, the street was silent aside from the humming of the streetlight above.

Then Alderson spoke quietly.

“You’re in trouble too, I take it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Is it to do with Chris?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

Alderson nodded to himself, then raised his hand and took a last drag on his cigarette. On the surface, he was trying to remain calm. But his hand was trembling and she could tell how scared he was deep down.

He dropped the cigarette and ground it under his heel.

“So what do we do now?” he said.

What indeed?

She wasn’t sure how much effort Detective Laurence Page would put into tracking her down, but the first thing she did was turn off her cell phone.

She felt a pang of despair as she did so. Not only was she getting herself deeper into trouble, she was cutting herself off from Sam and Siena. The thought of them both created a yearning inside her—an intense desire to go home and for everything to just be okay again. She loved them both so much, and they seemed such a vast distance away from her right now.

After Alderson had put the backpacks on the back seat of her car, he clambered into the passenger side. They didn’t speak as she drove. She took them west out of the city center, keeping to minor roads as much as possible, and then pulled in at a high-rise travel hotel on the edge of an industrial park. At the reception, she checked them into a twin room, and they took a cramped, stinking elevator up to the eighth floor, standing in silence with their heads tilted back to watch the numbers change, two backpacks resting at their feet. The doors pinged and slid open. She ledAlderson down the corridor until she found their room, turning the plastic key card between her fingers as they went.

The room was simple and smelled little better than the elevator. But it would do. She walked over to the window and lifted a couple of the slats in the blinds. An intricate carpet of tiny lights was spread out across the dark land, but her attention was drawn upward instead, toward a sliver of brightness that seemed to be hanging unsupported in the air against the night sky behind. It took her a moment to work out what she was seeing. The prison on the hill. Dark right now aside from a single window, high up in one of its towers.

She lowered the slats and turned around.

Alderson was sitting on one of the beds. He had opened his backpack and taken out a bottle of vodka and was now busy pouring a slug into one of the cheap plastic glasses on the table between the beds.

She walked over and sat on the other bed across from him, then picked up the other glass and held it out to be filled.

“So what happens now?” he said.

She looked at the glass.

“What happens now,” she said, “is that you tell me everything.”

Thirty-four

A little less than two years earlier, Chris had been at his lowest point.

It had been a couple of weeks since he’d stolen from Katie, and that money had run out quickly. The days since had been a series of worn couches and damp front rooms that blurred into one. He slept fitfully at best, shivering in his thin sleeping bag, frequently unable to remember where he was. He was scared by every creak of the floorboards above, dreading who might be up there and what they might want from him when they came down. There was freezing cold water, assuming the taps ran at all. Chipped porcelain sinks. Broken mirrors in which he could barely see his lank hair as he stubbornly attempted to re-create the center part he’d had as a boy, the scar on his face standing out even among the cracks in the glass.

And the constant voice in his head.

This is all that you deserve.

You shouldn’t exist.

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