Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(19)

Regardless of the motion light, I stand up, and I run for the front door.

The light blazes on again before I’m more than two steps out of cover, but I don’t hesitate. I hear Sam moving behind me; he hasn’t shouted my name, and I’m a little surprised he’s followed. I know he’ll be angry. We cross the open space and flatten out against the wall on either side of the front door. After what seems an eternity, the light clicks off again, and I have to blink away the bright afterimages.

“The hell are we doing?” Sam whispers.

“Going in!”

“Gwen, no!”

“Yes!”

There isn’t time for a long debate, and he knows it. He sends me a look full of fury and frustration, but he pivots, balances, and slams his boot into the door just at the lock. The door shudders, but it doesn’t open. He tries again. And again.

Nothing. The door’s meant to withstand worse than us.

But the windows aren’t.

I go around to the side. The window there is locked, but we’re in this now, and I’m not about to hesitate. The glass proves to be breakable, even though it’s thick and double-paned, and once I’ve shattered enough of it, I reach inside, flip the catch, and slide it open to climb inside.

I pull the gun that I’ve kept holstered until that moment. Sam’s already got his own weapon ready as he slithers through behind me and rolls back up to his feet.

There’s no sound. No light. I glimpse a lampshade and frantically feel around for the switch; it blazes on when I find it, and we’re confronted with a couple of plush chairs, a hooked rug, a small table on which the lamp sits, some bookcases with a jumble of contents, a kitchen with a tiny stove and refrigerator that look like they date back to the 1950s.

There’s no one here.

Sam’s still moving. There’s a door to our right, and he opens it and covers the room with his gun while I flip on an overhead light.

There’s a twin bed. Neatly made with a forest-green blanket for a cover. Behind a small divider, there’s a shower and toilet.

And there’s no one here at all.

Sam ducks into the small bathroom, then out again. “The shower’s still got some moisture in it. It’s humid, so that might be left over from earlier today.” He gives me that look. “You got lucky, Gwen. He could have been in here.”

“Come on, he had everything on timers, which meant he wasn’t,” I snapped. “Handling this with kid gloves isn’t going to get us anywhere, Sam. And it won’t protect my kids.”

Sam shakes his head, but he can’t fault my feelings . . . he loves my kids, too, I know that. Our friendship is, by any standards, peculiar; it shouldn’t exist, and sometimes I feel like it’s skating on thin ice over a terribly dark fall. But he wants what I want. That will never change.

Standing in this stranger’s cabin, I can feel that sense of darkness again. This man leads a hidden life. I don’t know what variety of depravity he practices, but I know it will be something awful.

It’s hard to look at this normal place, the calm neatness of it, when he’s dedicated his life to destroying other people’s. I’m angry. Probably too angry. I want to smash everything. And what’s stopping me? Truth is, we’re already committing a crime just by being inside. Breaking and entering. Vandalism seems like a reasonable add-on.

“Look around,” I tell Sam. “There has to be something we can take with us. Something to tell us what he’s into, and maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll have correspondence with Melvin.”

Sam nods, but he pointedly checks his watch; if there was some kind of alarm system, we’re already in trouble. I doubt there is, though. Someone who makes a practice of living so far away from civilization doesn’t depend on 911. Our security provided by Smith and Wesson. If he was here, or anywhere near, he’d have opened fire on us already. We’re safe. For now.

“Papers,” I tell him. “Electronic records. Anything that looks like it could be of use, okay? Ten minutes.”

“Five,” he says, and then he leaves me to it.

There’s a small desk shoved into the corner of this small room. Like everything else, it’s painfully neat and clean, made of burnished maple in plain country style. I open drawers, then pull them out and dump them to look behind and underneath. We can’t conceal our intrusion here. Might as well do a thorough job of it.

I find nothing I can immediately identify as important. Receipts, mostly. Printed papers that seem not very illuminating. I grab everything and shove it into my backpack.

I’m wearing gloves, so I’ve left no prints behind; I put everything back in the drawers and slot them back in place. I check the closet. There’s a gigantic gun safe, but as I’m staring at it, I see a shoe box up on top. I open it. More receipts. I cram those into my backpack. One drifts down behind the safe, and as I’m groping blindly back there for it, my fingers brush the sharp edges of something that doesn’t quite belong.

I push it, and it moves.

Magnetic. I detach it from the safe and pull it out. It’s a shallow box with a sliding top, like the old hide-a-key my grandmother used to put in the wheel well of her car.

This one holds a USB.

I never would have found it if I hadn’t dropped a page behind the safe. It was in a space that would have been missed in a search, and the gun safe is too huge and heavy to move without major effort.