All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(107)
“You’re not making any sense. River Lang? The River who came into Bighorn Burger? The one who Mr. Big Empty killed?”
On the bed, Becca laid out everything from the duffel bag: the revolver; a man’s plaid shirt, stained with blood; a pair of jeans with the same rust-colored spatters as the shirt; a butterfly cameo; a pipe with the bowl carved like an enormous pair of butt cheeks and the stem chewed almost to splinters; and a framed picture, with a starburst of shattered glass in the lower corner. The picture, in a dollar-store tortoiseshell plastic frame, showed an older man and a much younger woman, arms around each other, as they stood on a porch with bowed and sagging boards. At their feet knelt a toddler with straw-colored hair. The little boy held the leash of an ancient bulldog that slept on one of the porch steps, one of its paws dangling off the edge. On the closest porch support, someone had carved the initials WM and DL, with a lopsided heart surrounding them.
“River Lang, I think, wasn’t at all who he said he was,” Becca said, producing a sheaf of printed pages. “This is what I could find short notice.”
“You found all this,” I thumbed the stack of pages, “with nothing but a gun, some bloody clothes, and a picture?”
Becca grinned, and her silver eyeshadow—although a bit worn on the second day—sparkled. “I had a little more than that.” Lifting the back of the tortoiseshell frame, she pointed to the blue ballpoint scribble: David and Willa Lang, 1999. “When I put in David and Willa Lang, they were the first result. Because of the murder, you see? They were pretty big news when it happened. It even went national. A loving couple murdered, no suspect, and their eleven-year-old son vanished.”
I shook my head. “This is impossible. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.” But in the back of my mind, I heard Frankie’s voice: Every town he goes into, he’s looking for the prettiest girl he can find, and that leads to a fight, and River is always handy with that knife . . . he likes a hot piece, sure, but what he really likes is stirring up hell with the biggest paddle he can find. “But River’s dead.”
“We’ll get to that in a moment.” Becca fanned the papers across the bed. “The media thought the story was pretty hot at first. Like I said, loving couple, missing son, blah, blah. But it got even hotter when the dirt on David Lang started coming out. He drank. A lot, apparently. Enough that he lost his job at the mill—they were in a small town in Delaware, believe it or not—and then he started showing up at Willa’s job and managed to get her fired too. And nobody would say it on record, but the reporters picked up enough bits and pieces—an unnamed co-worker who remembered Willa with a black eye, a neighbor who heard screaming and the next day saw their little boy with his arm in a cast, the bruises, the scrapes, all of it.”
“You’re saying River killed them because his dad hit him?” In the back of my mind, I heard Dad’s rasping breaths, I saw his glassy eyes, I felt—
—the belt—
—the wave of satisfaction, knowing that I’d hurt him.
“Investigators eventually decided it was a murder-suicide. The wounds, superficially at least, made it plausible. Willa was shot in the back while she was hemming an old pair of Levi Strauss for River to wear. She died in her chair. David Lang died on the front porch.” Becca licked her silver lips. “He’d been shot once in the chest, but that wasn’t what killed him. Not according to the new reports, at least. His throat had been cut in three places.”
My eyes went to that old bulldog, its paws dangling off the step.
“There’s more,” Becca said. “Police never found the murder weapon. Weapons, I guess I should say. No gun. No knife. Sound familiar? And they were convinced that River had been killed too. They assumed that River’s death is what triggered the murder-suicide. They had cadaver dogs and search parties out in the woods for days. Delaware isn’t big, but I guess it can be big enough when you’re trying to hide a corpse. Except, of course, that River wasn’t dead. I don’t know where he went. He was fifteen when the murder happened in 2012. He’s twenty now. Five years, Vie. He’s been out there for five years doing God knows what.”
He likes a hot piece, sure, but what he really likes is stirring up hell with the biggest paddle he can find.
Fanning the pages across the bed, Becca pulled two more pages out of the stack. “The revolver matches the description of the only handgun registered to David Lang. Nobody knew that, not five years ago. They just did a cold-case follow up last month, though, and that was one of the new bits of information. Police said the gunshot wounds matched the weapon registered to Lang, and here it is, Vie.”
“No,” I said. Then, more firmly, “No. River’s dead. We saw him—”
“In a dream. But we never found the body. No one did. And you said it yourself. Mr. Big Empty wanted us to see that. That was the whole point.”
“He wanted us to see it so that we’d start looking for him—” I paused at the look in Becca’s eyes. “He wanted us to see it so that we’d cross paths with River. Oh my God. He didn’t need to send River to kill us. Mr. Big Empty knew if we tracked River long enough, River would take care of us himself. He just had to make us start looking for him.”
Becca nodded.
My mind raced. “But the only way all of it makes sense is if he is working with Mr. Big Empty. He killed Salerno and saved me. He would only do that if Mr. Big Empty wanted him to, because he wanted me to watch the people I care about die. But Frankie. God, Frankie makes sense. He killed Frankie because Frankie told me too much about him. And he killed DeHaven because DeHaven knew the truth about River. He must have recognized another killer.” The room had shrunk. I ran my arm across my forehead and was surprised not to find any sweat; I felt like I was burning up. “But why does he care about me? Why did he show up in Vehpese at all? What could Mr. Big Empty offer him?”