Page 148 of Long Way Down

“But,” he continued, “there’s still the inconsistency with Lana and Lynn, and then April. Different locations, different scenarios, different levels of violence. The timeline of Doug at the school while the body was dropped with his car.”

“We know someone else wrote that message on my door,” she said, more snappish than intended. “I think we’re well past the point of wondering if he has an accomplice.”

“I know, I know. But I’m thinking Doug is an accomplice, and it’s the mastermind we’re looking for.”

She turned her head, and in the flare of the next streetlight, she saw the frown tugging at his mouth, the lines of tension around his eyes as he mulled it over.

“You saidan. He’sanaccomplice.”

His gaze cut over, a flicker of shine beneath the next light. “You’re not gonna like this.”

“I don’t like anything about this case.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. I’m starting to wonder – and it’s just a wonder. We’ll have to see what the final Forensics reporting tells us. But. If we include the three girls from the Dirty Dog–”

“We can’t.”

“Not officially, no. But just for now, if we consider them. And the pattern of escalation. And then April. And then Lana, then Lynn. We know Doug did something, and we know there’s a whole group of men meeting to discuss their violent urges. We might be looking at Doug and one other guy…or we might be looking at as many as six different rapists.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t considered that. “Shit.”

He lifted both hands off the wheel, briefly. “I’m just spit-balling. It could just be one guy, and then Doug. We don’t know.”

No. They really didn’t know anything, did they? As awful as last night had been, capturing Doug had felt like at least they’d accomplishedsomething…but what if they hadn’t? What if there were five more guys out there in the wind, waiting to do it all over again?

It was enough to break a person.

A headache was sprouting at her temples, and when she reached automatically to massage at it, she pressed on her stitches and sent a flare of hot pain shooting along her hairline. “Ouch!” she hissed, and dropped her hands. She hadn’t taken so much as a Tylenol for the pain today, she realized, and was suddenly swamped with it.

“Hey,” Contreras said, softly, “you okay? We can–”

“I hate this job,” she blurted, and flopped back against the seat, which sent a fresh stab of pain through her skull. “Shit. I mean – Idon’t, but–”

“It’s been a rough forty-eight hours,” he said, soothingly. “Maybe we should–”

“My pastor raped and killed my cousin,” she said, and then some internal filter snapped, and she couldn’t stop talking. When he fell silent, she said, dry-eyed and clear-voiced, “I was six and she was eleven. My parents worked odd hours, and Granddad was supposed to watch us – he did the best he could, honestly, bless his heart – but Ivy kept wanting us to go explore the swamp. I wanted it, too, but was too scared to go alone. That was always me, the big baby: couldn’t even tell anyone when I found him with her body. Pastor Keith. God, my mother loved him. The whole town did. In tiny little Southern towns like mine, the only celebrities are high school football stars and pastors. Our football team sucked, so Pastor Keith didn’t have to share the spotlight as Most Beloved Liar. God, I don’t know how none of them saw through him. Thought he was so good. There was Mama, smiling at him like he’d hung the moon, and he’d snapped Ivy’s neck in a shack in the woods.”

She said this tonelessly, without threat of tears, without her breath hitching. Telling Pongo had been one kind of catharsis – the revelation to a person who cared for her, who she cared for in return. This was another: admitting to her partner, and therefore the professional side of her life, that she’d walked into this career schlepping a shit-ton of baggage.

It felt good to say it. When she glanced at Contreras, she found that she wasn’t braced for his reaction; however he responded, she could handle it.

After a long beat, he said, “Does Pongo know?”

It was sweet, in a way: him wondering, probably wanting her to have confessed to her boyfriend first. If her career had been a mistake, a misguided attempt to rectify an unfixable past, meeting Rob Contreras had been anything but.

“Yeah, last night,” she said. “I figured he deserved to know why I was so fucked up.”

“You’re not fucked up, Dixon,” he said, right away, and even sounded like he believed that. Then: “Shit. I’m sorry that happened to you. Your family okay? Well. As okay as they can be?”

“I don’t keep in touch with them.” Saying all of this to Pongo had lanced the boil that had lived and grown more and more tender beneath her skin for years. The wound was pierced, the putrefaction drained away. She could speak about it and examine it with clear eyes. Mostly. The hollowness in her chest was, she knew, a forced detachment; her brain’s way of sparing her further trauma. The therapist he’d encouraged her to see wouldn’t have been her first; she was familiar with the ways a person tried to protect themselves from memory…and knew, too, that sometimes it wasn’t possible. “They hated me: first for accusing Pastor Keith, and in my aunt’s case, for not saying something years earlier. The only one I still talk to is my grandfather – and he’s doing time for administering a little shotgun-style open-heart surgery to the good pastor.”

“Ah.” A wealth of understanding resided in that one syllable.

Melissa let out a deep, deflating breath, and made the mistake of rubbing at her temples again. “Shit, that hurts.”

He reached into the center console and came out with a rattling bottle: Aleve, she read in the glow of the next streetlight.

“Thanks.” She dry-swallowed one and said, “I tried several other majors when I started college. Even tried to go the pre-med route, like Leslie, thinking that if I could help people, fix their hurts, stitch them up, save their lives, it would be like I was atoning for not having saved Ivy.”

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