Why? If she’d been blackmailed, wouldn’t she have at least suspected that the stranger would tell Adam?

She had also reacted by, what, running away? Did that make sense? She had run so quickly and haphazardly, barely contacting him and the school and, most surprising of all, just leaving the boys in the lurch.

That wasn’t Corinne.

Something else was going on here.

He did a mental rewind to the night at the American Legion Hall. He thought about the stranger. He thought about the young blond woman with him. He thought about how calm and concerned the stranger seemed. The stranger took no joy in telling Adam what Corinne had done—nothing about him indicated psycho or even socio—but then again, he hadn’t seemed businesslike, either.

For the hundredth time that day, Adam checked the phone-locator app, hoping that Corinne had charged her phone back up since her visit to Pittsburgh. He wondered again whether she had chosen to stay there or was just traveling through. He bet traveling through. He also bet that she had realized somewhere along the way that one of the boys would put together that they could find her on the phone locator, so she had simply turned off the power or maybe found a way to turn off the app.

Okay, so if Corinne were traveling from Cedarfield through Pittsburgh, where would she be going?

He didn’t have a clue. But something was really, really wrong. Duh, thank you, Captain Obvious. Still, Corinne had told him to stay away. Shouldn’t he listen to that? Should he sit back and see how it all played out? Or was the threat too real to be idle?

Should he get help? Should he contact the police or just let it be?

Adam couldn’t say which side of the fence he would have fallen on—both options were fraught with problems—but suddenly, as he made the turn onto his street, that didn’t seem like an issue anymore. As he pulled up to his house, Adam noticed three men standing on the curb in front of his lawn. One was his neighbor, Cal Gottesman, who was pushing those glasses up his nose. The other two were Tripp Evans and Bob “Gaston” Baime.

What the . . . ?

For a moment, just a split second, Adam expected the worst: Something horrible had happened to Corinne. But no, these guys wouldn’t be the ones to tell him. Len Gilman, the town cop who also had two kids in the lax program, would be the one.

As if someone had heard his thoughts, a squad car with the words CEDARFIELD POLICE DEPARTMENT emblazoned across the sides turned onto the road and slid into the spot where the three men were standing. Len Gilman was in the driver’s seat.

Adam felt his heart drop.

He quickly put the car in park and swung the car door open. Gilman was doing the same. When Adam stood, his knees almost gave way. On teetering legs, he sprinted toward where the four men had congregated, on the curb right in front of Adam’s house.

All four men looked at him solemnly.

“We need to talk,” Len Gilman said.

Chapter 26

Beachwood, Ohio, Police Chief Johanna Griffin had never been to a homicide scene.

She had seen her share of dead bodies, of course. Plenty of people called the police when they found that a loved one had died of natural causes. Same with a drug overdose or a suicide, so, yeah, Johanna had been around death and then some. There’d also been a fair number of gory car crashes over the years. Two months ago, a semi cut across the divider line, and when it slammed into a Ford Fiesta, the car’s driver had been decapitated and his wife’s skull had been crushed like a Styrofoam cup.

Bloody and gross and even dead didn’t bother Johanna. But boy, this did.

Why? First off: murder. It was just hard to get around the word. Murder. Just say it out loud and feel the chill. Nothing compared, really. It was one thing to lose your life to illness or accident. But to have your life snatched away from you intentionally, to have a fellow human being actually decide to snuff out your very existence—that just offended on so many levels. It was an obscenity. It was something beyond a crime. It was playing God in the most ungodly way possible.

But even that, Johanna might have been able to live with.

Johanna tried to keep her breath steady, but she could feel it coming in hurried gulps. She stared down at the corpse. Heidi Dann stared back up out of unblinking eyes. There was a bullet hole in Heidi’s forehead. A second bullet—or maybe the first bullet, come to think of it—had blown away her kneecap. Heidi had bled out on the Oriental carpet she’d bought for a song from a guy named Ravi, who sold them out of a truck in front of the Whole Foods. Johanna had halfheartedly chased Ravi off more than once, but Ravi, who gave his customers great value and a ready smile, always came back.

The rookie working with her, a kid named Norbert Pendergast, was trying not to look too excited. He sidled up to Johanna and said, “The county guys are on their way. They’re going to take this away from us, aren’t they?”

They would, Johanna knew. Local cops in this area spent most of their days dealing with traffic violations and bicycle licenses and maybe a domestic dispute. Major crimes, like murder, were handled by the county police. So yep, in a few minutes, the big boys would come in, swinging their little dicks to make sure everyone knew they were in charge now. They would cast her aside, and not to sound overly melodramatic, but this was her town. Johanna had grown up here. She knew the lay of the land. And she knew the people. She knew, for example, that Heidi loved to dance and played a great game of bridge and had a naughty, contagious laugh. She knew that Heidi enjoyed experimenting with weird-color nail polish, that her favorite TV shows of all time were The Mary Tyler Moore and Breaking Bad (yep, that was Heidi), and that she had bought the Oriental rug on which she had bled out from Ravi in front of the Whole Foods for $400.

“Norbert?”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s Marty?” Johanna asked.

“Who?”

“The husband.”

Norbert pointed behind him. “He’s in the kitchen.”

Johanna hoisted up her pants—no matter how hard she tried, the pants waist on the police uniform never quite fit right—and started toward the kitchen. Marty’s pale face tilted up when she entered as though pulled on a string. His eyes were shattered marbles.

“Johanna?”

The voice was hollow and ghostlike.

“I’m so sorry, Marty.”

“I don’t understand. . . .”

“Let’s take it a step at a time.” Johanna pulled out the kitchen chair across from him—yes, that had been Heidi’s chair—and sat down. “I need to ask you some questions, Marty. That okay with you?”