Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (red white royal blue TXT) 📗

Having something to do never hurts. So . . . who’s Douglas Adam Prinker? Really?”

“I really don’t know. One of the witnesses in Valerie mentioned him. I’m just covering some bases for Kez.”

He looks at me carefully, searchingly. I see the real concern in his eyes. “But you’re being careful. Right? This isn’t a good time to be risky.”

“I know. This is the last of it, and then we can focus on our own problems tomorrow.” I feel a grin emerge. It feels sharp. “And boy, our mystery mailer is going to be sorry he ever took us on.”

“Amen,” he says, and kisses my forehead. “Come on. I need to show you something.”

For a hot half second, I think he means that playfully, but that isn’t the case. He closes the office door and goes to his laptop, boots it up, and navigates. I lean over his shoulder, and then I find myself drawing back when I see where he’s going as the banner flares on the screen.

The Lost Angels website.

“Sam . . .” I say it as a caution, but he shakes his head. I feel my stomach muscles tighten, like I’m bracing for a punch. I hate this website, partly because I know how much damage it generates, but also because I know it represents a part of his past that’s so complicated and difficult for him. He helped form the Lost Angels—the core of it being the families and friends of Melvin’s victims. He and the mother of one of those victims fueled and refined a lot of the rage those poor people felt . . . and aimed it straight at me and the kids.

But Sam walked away from them. To me. And he’s told me his credentials for the site were canceled . . . but now he’s logging in, and the private message boards are opening, and I don’t know what to think.

“I was going to tell you,” he says, and I hear the regret in his voice. “Should have. I wanted to dig around and see what crawled out of the woodwork.”

“You went back?”

“Not as myself. It’s a new account. Anonymous. I took precautions.” He pauses for a significant second. “I did it a while ago. I just wanted to . . . keep tabs. Try to spot trouble before it exploded, maybe defuse it a little.”

That’s not how we agreed it was going to be, but it’s not the time to fight about it either. “Sam, did you know about the flyers?” I sound sharp. I feel sharp, like I’m shaped into a knife and ready to cut. “Somebody must have updated them.”

“Somebody did,” he says. “And I missed it. He wasn’t on the usual threads. He was over in a general forum, and he was pretty clever about it. I found him while you were out today. He posts under the name MalusNavis.” Same handle as the posts I found on other sites. Sam pulls up the message board in question and does a name search. “I didn’t find it because he never explicitly mentions your name. Just asks about wanted-poster templates. Someone gladly provided him with a copy of the original.” The one that Sam designed. “Everything else he did before yesterday was about other cases. Nothing to do with you.”

“Wait, he was on the LA board before yesterday? What other cases?” He shows me the full list of MalusNavis posts. It’s pretty sizable. There’s nothing overtly violent about any of them; they’re all more clinical, more investigative, like he’s an armchair detective, not a troll. He’s asking about odd cases . . . unsolved murders, mostly. Disappearances. As Sam’s scrolling down, my eyes fix on a name, and I instantly put a hand on his shoulder. “Hold on. Open that one.” I point.

“Okay.” He does.

It’s a discussion about Tammy Maguire, one of the aliases for Penny Carlson / Sheryl Lansdowne that I turned up for Kez. That cannot be a coincidence. I feel my focus sharpen as I read what MalusNavis has posted. He was inquiring whether there had been any forward motion on the case. Someone broke it down and copied in the link to the felony warrant for her arrest. He didn’t comment after that. Not directly, not about Tammy Maguire.

But he did post a general question, never answered, about someone else: Hannah Wheeler. I grab a pencil and write it down. I open my own laptop, log in to the office’s mainframe, and do a name search. Lots of Hannah Wheelers, but one’s listed as a missing person suspected in defrauding the elderly. I get a link to a story from a regional newspaper out of Georgia. It’s a few years old, but there’s a photo attached, a smiling candid picture of a young woman. She’s got short brown hair in this picture, carefully shaped eyebrows, dramatic makeup, but I recognize her anyway. “Sheryl Lansdowne,” I say. “AKA Penny Carlson. AKA Tammy Maguire. He was looking into her.”

“You think he found her?”

“I think he did more than that,” I say, and push back from my desk to face him. “Sam. Why would he switch from tracking her to focusing on us?”

He’s silent for a few seconds, thinking, and then he shakes his head. He doesn’t know. Neither do I.

And then I do, with breathtaking clarity. He saw me at the pond. He knows I’m looking into the case.

This? This is all my fault.

I can’t say that out loud, but down in my bones I feel that it’s true. Irrational, maybe. Paranoid, certainly. But true.

Sam says, “I might know a guy who can shed some light. He’s . . . I can’t even call him problematic because that’s an understatement. But if anybody knows this MalusNavis guy, I’ll bet he does. But I need to talk to him face-to-face. He won’t do it on the phone, or any electronic device. And I can’t do it here, for obvious reasons.”

“He’s from the Lost Angels boards?”

He clearly doesn’t like telling me. “He’s a serious troll. I—let’s just say we had a business relationship