Chapter Seventy-Seven
Quinn keeps the accelerator to the floor; he’s going over eighty and the car feels unsteady, but he doesn’t let up.
His thoughts are traveling at an even greater speed, the pieces aligning, the pixels coming together, the puzzle pieces interlocking—choose your cliché.
Mom uncovered something. Maybe the reports of the May Day Killer victims reminded her of the delivery schedule for the plant; victims killed on the very days deliveries were made to places in those towns.
Maybe that led to her thinking back on a girl named Megan Tucker, murdered when they were teenagers …
maybe made her look at old stories about Megan …
maybe that’s when she saw the photo of Megan wearing earrings that look distinctively like the ones Mom wore.
And maybe she left the plant that morning to confront him, or maybe to ask him to explain, and he bludgeoned her with a hammer and framed an easy patsy, her boyfriend Randy Calhoon.
Only one person fits in each of those scenarios: Uncle Pat.
Quinn squeezes the steering wheel so tight his hands are white as he races to Ashwell, Nebraska. To the place Pat took him as a boy, a trip to make him feel more connected to his father, the field with the abandoned World War II ammunition bunkers where his father used to hang out as a kid.
He calls Lucy’s mobile, but there’s no answer. Maybe the battery is dead. He doesn’t have Jack the FBI guy’s number and is going too fast to dig up Carrie’s number, so he’ll have to wait.
As he drives, he starts to question himself—this is crazy. He’s been hunting for a man named John Smith, focused on Megan Tucker’s murder, the connection to his mom’s murder. But now everything is interconnected to the May Day Killer. To one person, his Uncle Pat. It’s been right in front of him.
But how could he have taken Jules tonight? Pat was in the bar with the rest of them. Unless he slipped out. Restrained her somehow in his car, the trunk maybe, then came back inside. He remembers Pat saying he went to the restroom and saw Jules talking to a cop outside, something to throw them off.
How could Quinn be so blind for so long? How could Dad call this man his friend? And the most devastating question: How could Pat kill his own sister, Quinn’s mom?
He tears down the interstate until he careens off the exit onto the rural roads that lead to Ashwell. If it is Pat who has Jules, he doesn’t have much of a head start. Quinn is going to find him, stop him. And make him pay.