Epilogue
Three months later
Port Angeles, Washington
Isit in my car at the end of the street with the newspaper open across the steering wheel. The article runs on an inside page. Small now. A story shrinks once it stops being news.
The search of Lake Washington has been suspended. The vehicle was recovered. Neither occupant was found. After several weeks, the county has moved them from missing to presumed dead.
Presumed dead.
I read the words twice, until they stop looking like news and start looking like the world moving on. Then I fold the paper and set it on the passenger seat. The envelope waits beside it.
Robert Lane
141 Harbor Ridge Road
Port Angeles, Washington
I check the address against the house at the end of the street, and I get out of the car.
November has come in off the strait, gray and wet. The street is empty. I make myself walk like someone with nowhere to be.
The house is small and well kept, the cedar siding gone dark with rain. It has a narrow porch, and a short strip of lawn. It’s a house you pass without remembering.
I check the number on the mailbox.
141
Then I go up the path and knock.
The man who answers is in his mid-forties, silver at the temples, a dish towel over one shoulder.
"Can I help you?"
"Sorry to bother you," I say. "This came to my place by mistake. I just moved in down the road. A hundred and fourteen. Yours is a hundred and forty-one. Yeah. They must have got them mixed up." I hold out the envelope. "I've been meaning to walk it down all week."
He takes it, reads the name, and his face warms.
"I appreciate that." He looks past me at the wet street, then back. "I've got coffee on. Can I give you a cup before you head back out in that?"
"Oh, I shouldn't. I've taken up enough of your afternoon." I take a small step back, like I mean to go.
His shoulders loosen. Just a little.
"Please, let me repay the kindness." He steps back and opens the door wider. "You walked all the way down here. It's quiet at this end of the road. I don't see many people. I could use the company, honestly."
I let myself hesitate.
Then I nod. "All right. Thank you. That would be nice."
The kitchen is narrow and clean, with a window over the sink and a small table pushed against the wall. He sets the envelope on the counter and takes two cups from a cabinet.
"Milk? Sugar?"
"Black is fine."
He pours one cup, then the other. Steam lifts between us. He sets them on the table, his closer to the chair by the window, mine near the end.
A landline phone rings somewhere beyond the kitchen.
He turns his head. "Excuse me."
By the time he turns back, I have both hands around my cup.
“They hung up. Probably the cable company," he says, and sits. "They've been hounding me for weeks to sign up.”
He lifts his cup and drinks.
"So…what do you do for a living?" he asks.
"I help put animals down." I set my cup down.
He gives me a look, half a smile, almost surprised, waiting for the rest.
"That came out wrong," I say. “Sorry. I’m training to be a vet. I work at a clinic a few days a week. It’s difficult. The end is the part nobody wants. You know, when there's nothing left to do for the animal."
"That takes a certain person."
I nod.
We talk a while longer. He asks if I have always lived in this state.
"No," I say. “I’m originally from Oregon."
He pauses. "Oregon. Huh."
Then he glances down at the envelope, as if remembering himself. “Where are my manners. I forgot to introduce myself. Though I suppose you already know, seeing as you brought my mail here." He puts out a hand. "Robert Lane. And you are?"
"Sophie." I take it. His hand is warm and dry.
"So, Sophie." He settles back. "The part where you put them down. Does it get to you?"
"Less than it should."
"Takes a strong stomach," he says.
"My father had one," I say, holding his gaze. "He's the one who taught me."
He looks curiously at me over his cup.
"He died," I say. "Not long ago."
"I'm sorry," he says, and means it, which is worse than if he didn't.
We talk a while more. Nothing important. The rain. The street. The ferry schedule. Then, in the middle of a sentence about the ferry, he stops with the cup halfway to his mouth.
He blinks.
He puts a hand on the table, as if the room has shifted under it.
"Sorry," he says. "That's odd."
"Are you all right?" I ask.
"Just tired all of a sudden." He tries to laugh.
He goes to set the cup down and misjudges it. The cup tips, hits the table, and coffee spreads dark across the wood before running over the edge onto the floor.
“Sorry, I’ll get something for that.”
He stands, sways, catches the back of his chair, then reaches for the counter and makes it to the sink. He comes back with a paper towel and bends toward the spill, but his knees go loose under him.
"Here. Let me."
I take his arm and get him back into the chair, then take the towel out of his hand.
I wipe up the coffee myself.
He watches the spill without seeming to see it. Then he looks at me, and he tries to smile, but his face won't hold it.
"What is happening," he says. It isn't quite a question. "I don't feel well."
"I don't imagine you do." I fold the towel over. "I expect it's how the others felt. The ones in Oregon who were drugged."
He stares at me, his eyes barely holding focus.
"But you'd know all about that."
I take a plastic bag from my pocket. I put the cup in it, then the wet towel, and seal it.
"For a while I thought you might have drowned," I say.
"I even hoped you had. But that’s the thing about men like you.
You can't stop. You can bury the old name.
You can pick a quiet street at the end of nowhere.
You can sit in a little house with a dish towel over your shoulder and pretend you're someone else. But sooner or later, the urge is too much.”
He gets a hand on the table and tries to push himself up. The room goes sideways on him, and he comes down into the chair harder than he means to.
I don't hurry. I keep the table between us.
At the clinic, they teach you to keep something solid between yourself and an animal that is frightened and cornered, in case it has one bad lunge left in it.
"You know it took hours," I say. “Weeks of searching.
I checked property records and listings after unsolved deaths.
You'd be surprised how many there are." I let that sit.
"Then a couple turned up dead across town last month, and their house went on the market before they were in the ground.
Same pattern as Oregon. Port Angeles lit up like a flare in the dark. "
He stares at me.
"In Oregon, you were patient," I say. "Lately, you've gotten sloppy. Rushing things."
His eyes move over my face, slow and unfocused.
"It was in the coffee," I say. My voice stays level. I am surprised, from somewhere far off, at how level. "A sedative. The kind I use on animals a good deal smaller than you. Of course, I gave you more than I would ever give one of them."
"Who are you?" he says. It comes out slurred.
"Nobody you'd remember." I keep the table between us. "That was the whole point of me showing up."
His mouth moves.
"But I imagine you remember my father."
He watches me.
"David Grant,” I say.
He knows the name. I watch him place it, then place me, the daughter he never once knew to look for.
"But how?" he says. "How did you find me?"
"That's right," I say. "Nobody in law enforcement put it together. Nobody could." I let the quiet stretch. "But somebody did."
His eyes move past me, toward the doorway.
"It helps," I say, "to have someone who knows how they found you the first time."
The boards in the hall creak once.
A woman steps into the doorway. She’s thinner than the photographs the papers ran. There is a pale scar through one eyebrow that was not there before.
"You should have made sure the lake kept me," she says.
The man stares at her. "No. You drowned."
"Almost." She steps forward. "You can imagine my surprise when I woke up on shore.
" She doesn't hurry. She stops across the table from him, where he can see her.
She glances at the envelope on the counter, the wrong address.
"I imagine Henry Westburn got harder to wear after they pulled your car out of the lake. "
He stares at her like he's seeing a ghost.
"You asked how we found you," she says. "Beyond the recent murder with the same pattern, it was you, Henry." She pauses. "I remembered something you said."
He watches her, the drug pulling his eyes half shut.
"In the café you told me the Cascade Killer was a ghost. I told you he wasn't. I said a man like that would make a mistake somewhere.
That they always do." A thin smile. "Later, you told me he made mistakes early, before he got good.
You couldn't help yourself telling me that. You were so proud of getting good."
His jaw works. Nothing comes.
"So I went back to the start. The break-ins, the ones before the murders. The ones that turned violent but left people alive. A few survivors remembered you saying a name. Most people wrote it off as terror in the dark." She lets it sit. "I knew the name mattered."
Henry's eyes look even heavier.
"Claire," she says. "They heard you say, 'I hate you, Claire.'"
Something goes out of his face.
"Why would you hate her? You told me Claire was your sister.
Murdered, twelve years ago. The wound that made you care about the others.
" She shakes her head, slow. "Claire wasn't your sister, was she, Henry?
She was the one who left. An ex-fiancée.
And your first victim. Her, and the man she chose to marry instead of you. "
He has stopped trying to stand.
“I found her,” Mallory says. “Claire Doyle, born Claire Lane. And then I found where you’d gone, because you did the one thing you could never stop doing. You went back to her.”
She glances at the walls around them, the small clean house.
"This was her father's house. Her childhood home. After he died, the listing went through one of your agencies. Different name on the door, same chain behind it. The same chain that handled Eleanor's. You could change your name, Henry. You could change your town. But you never changed the trail."
Her voice stays level.
"You knew the cops wouldn't look. They didn't the first time. You never thought I'd look. You thought I was at the bottom of a lake."
He doesn't deny it.
She picks up the envelope and taps it against the air, then sets it back down.
"A simple mistake, right?" she says softly. "We all make them."
His hands are on the table now. "Where," he says. The word drags. "Where have you been? All these months."
"That's the thing about a crash like that," she says. "Memory can disappear. Whole stretches of it. The doctors even have a name for it." Her voice stays flat. "So if anyone ever asks where I've been these last few months, I couldn't tell them even if I tried."
He understands then. All of it.
For one terrifying second, panic overpowers the drug.
He comes up out of the chair with a guttural, frantic noise.
The table between us is no barrier at all.
He throws himself across it and catches me before I can get clear.
His weight drives us both hard into the counter, driving the air out of my lungs.
My cup goes off the table and shatters. All I see is venom in his eyes as he uses his weight to slam me back.
My head bounces off the kitchen cabinet, and the room flashes blindingly white.
His hands are thick and hot around my neck, squeezing with a desperation that ignores the sedative in his veins.
I gag, my fingernails digging uselessly into his wrists. For three horrifying seconds, I understand how badly we underestimated him.
Then Mallory hits him.
She doesn't just shove him. She drives her whole weight into his ribs with a sharp, desperate shout. It breaks his hold on my throat just enough for me to bring a palm up into his jaw.
The sudden impact breaks his balance. The sedative takes hold again, stripping away his coordination all at once. His feet skid in the spilled coffee. He grabs for the counter, for anything that might hold him up, but his fingers slide off the edge.
He goes down like lead.
The sound of his head meeting the sharp corner of the counter is heavy and final.
Then the kitchen goes dead silent, save for my ragged gasping.
Blood spreads from his head, thick and dark, finding the low seam in the linoleum. Neither of us moves toward him. There was never a plan to save him.
Mallory looks down at his unmoving body, then up at me, her chest heaving. "I told myself I'd stop you if you tried," she says, her voice trembling slightly before settling into something solid.
"You couldn't have," I say, rubbing the raw, red skin on my neck.
"I know," she says quietly. "You were going to find him with or without my help. I just wasn't going to let you go it alone."
I look down at Henry, then pull myself up straight.
His cup and the towel are already sealed in my bag.
I gather the broken pieces of my cup off the floor and pack those too, then wipe the table, counter, the floor, and the door frame where our hands have been.
It takes less than five minutes. When I'm done, there is nothing obvious to say we were ever here.
Mallory had wanted to turn him in. I came to stop him.
The rest will happen without us. A man found dead on his kitchen floor with a dangerous amount of sedative in his blood is not a man who simply had a bad fall.
They'll treat it as a homicide. When they look into Robert Lane, they'll find a ghost, a fake identity barely a year old, with no roots and no past.
That's what will make them dig. They'll want to know who he really was, and what killed him. So they'll run his DNA, and they'll get their answer. The unsolved assaults in Oregon. The single DNA profile that ran through ten years of terror and never matched a name.
Then they'll know. Robert Lane was Henry Westburn. Henry Westburn didn't drown in Lake Washington. And the woman who went into that water with him may not have either.
Let them wonder. Wondering isn't proof, and there's nothing obvious left in this room to tell them we were here. By the time they understand who died on this floor, he won't be a man anyone mourns. He'll be the man they can finally tie to twenty-eight murders in Oregon.
And David's name will be cleared, too late to give it back to him.
But cleared, nonetheless.
Mallory looks down at the black band around her wrist, at the little bead that got her out of the lake. She touches it once with her thumb. "For Julia," she says.
"My father taught me there's a mercy in it," I say, looking down at Henry's body. "Knowing when the suffering has gone far enough."
Mallory doesn't answer. She doesn't need to. She reaches out and turns off the kitchen light.
We step out into the rain and leave him where he fell. At the curb, I look back once. The house sits dark and ordinary, already becoming what he made of so many others.
Another murder house, waiting for a sign.