Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(46)

Now we are getting to it. “Did he give you regular reports? Information?”

“Some,” he says. “Not as much as I’d hoped. He was due back to me with more details on the day he vanished. And now it’s time for you to explain to me how exactly you located my missing man.”

We do. We leave Lustig out of it, but we tell him about the video we recovered—though not where we found it. Mike Lustig has the thumb drive, but Sam has taken the precaution of uploading it to the cloud, and he offers to play it for Rivard. Rivard provides a laptop, and Sam gives him the link. I don’t watch. I try not to listen, but I hear when Sauer gives up the name Rivard.

Rivard stops the video. We are all silent for a moment, and then Sam says, “Do you recognize anyone? Any voices?”

“No,” Rivard says. He sounds subdued and thoughtful. “And you found his body there?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find anything else? Any clues?”

“Just his wallet. The police will have it all now.” I consider mentioning the FBI, but I decide not to.

“Would you be willing to give us what you have on Absalom?” Sam asks. My impulse would have been to demand it, but Sam’s right. Rivard’s sense of entitlement responds better to what he considers politeness. Whatever works. My ego isn’t at stake. “Mr. Rivard, I know you can hire a hundred investigators to go at this, but we’re here. We’re invested. And we’re going forward with or without you, so you might as well join with us, don’t you think?”

“You’re proposing an alliance.” He glances at me, then back to Sam. “You realize that I’m a very public figure. I would have to ask you to withhold any mention of my involvement. I can, however, offer you resources to help you along. You’ll keep me informed of what you discover?”

“Yes,” Sam says. “At every step.” He sounds completely trustworthy. But then, he lied to me successfully, too, for quite a while. He’s good at deception when he needs to be.

Rivard seems to accept that at face value. “All right. He gave me a few names. Most of who Absalom seems to recruit are just kids, fifteen and sixteen years old. Sociopaths, yes, but too young to be held criminally responsible, and followers, definitely not leaders. Of the adults Mr. Sauer was able to track down, two were already dead when he located their identities.” Rivard takes in a raw breath. “He’d called that information in the morning he vanished, but I was hoping for more. He said he’d be back in touch. He wasn’t.”

I try to keep my voice quieter. Softer. More feminine, which is what Rivard seems to favor. “Will you give us the last name that Mr. Sauer reported to you?” I ask it carefully. Quietly. I don’t look at him directly, for fear of raising his hackles again.

Rivard considers. He does it a long time. There’s a knock—a discreet one—at the door, and it opens a small amount for the man in the blue suit to lean in. “Sir,” he says. “It’s almost time for treatments.”

“So it is,” Rivard says. “A moment, Mr. Chivari.”

Chivari waits inside by the door. Rivard works in silence for a moment on the laptop. As he punches keys, he says, almost absently, “The last name I was given by Mr. Sauer is Carl David Suffolk. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. Your old home, I believe, Ms. Proctor. I leave locating him up to you. Ah. Here. I believe that there is one last thing that you should see.”

He faces the computer out toward us. I glance at his face, then down at the screen, and Sam leans forward. I’m expecting to see something about Carl David Suffolk, but he’s sucker punching me, and I don’t even see it coming.

I recognize the house in the video. It’s . . . it’s mine. It takes me just an instant before that creeping sense of familiarity clicks in, and I feel like I’m drifting out of my body. For a second I think, Someone must have fixed our garage, but that’s stupid; the garage was never fixed after the wreck that broke open that brick wall and poured out my husband’s secrets. The house was torn down instead. There’s a park there now. I’ve been to it.

But this video is of our old house, before. Before the world knew who we were, what Melvin was.

I don’t know what I’m looking at, and I quickly glance up at Rivard’s face.

“Wait for it,” he says.

The video’s a little rough, but perfectly clear. It’s night, and the security lights fixed around the roof of our house—Melvin’s insistence—are all dark just now. They were motion sensitive, I remember. There’s a streetlight right at the curb that casts an unrelenting glow over the side of the house, and the one next door, and I remember how much trouble I went to, to find blackout curtains that Melvin liked because he hated sleeping in a room that wasn’t dark, and . . .

I see an SUV come into the video frame. Its lights turn off, and it glides quietly into the driveway of our house.

That’s our old minivan. I have a visceral memory of being in that vehicle, of driving it on the day that everything went wrong. That feeling of the world turning over sweeps through me again. I don’t know why Rivard is showing me this, but I’m afraid.

The minivan triggers the motion light at the back of the house. Whoever’s filming moves jerkily and gets an angle on the driveway as the vehicle pulls beneath the carport at the end. It’s dark under the canopy. Brake lights flash, then go dark, and when the door opens, the video zooms forward and jumps around before fixing on the person getting out of the driver’s side.