“Why do I feel like he’s just getting started?” Donny asks as we get in the SUV.
“Why doesn’t Kyle Davenport have the same surname as his father?” I ask.
He pulls up his iPad, reading something on it. “Says Jane Davenport was the mother. The sheriff didn’t know Kyle even existed until Jane showed up in town one day with Kyle in tow, and she handed over custody.”
My eyebrows go up. “What?”
He shakes his head, whistling low. “Hadley dug all this up somehow. Kyle is one sick fuck. Started torturing and killing animals at the ripe age of five. By seven, his mother decided she couldn’t handle him. He had a tantrum and cut her with a knife. She took him to the sheriff, who was all too happy to take away all her custodial rights, and she stayed in town, watching her son grow up from a distance. I bet her life was a living hell.”
“Where is she now?”
His brow furrows. “Dead. She died ten years ago, shortly after the trial for Robert Evans started.”
“Why do I feel like that’s not a coincidence?” I groan.
“Because everything in this godforsaken town is tied to that nightmare somehow.”
Just as I crank the car, I look up, seeing a flash of red. Quickly, I get back out, and I climb onto the hood of the SUV, reading the tops of the buildings in the distance. It’s the town hall I see from here.
Written in red on the side of the roof is one message: It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Donny climbs up beside me, and he sucks in a long breath.
“First he quotes the bible and now Voltaire? What’s the purpose?”
“No clue,” I tell him as I hop down. “Even though I think it’s pretty clear what the messages separate mean.”
Just then, my head snaps to the speaker on the pole, because music starts filtering through it. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Momma’s gonna buy you a mocking bird. And if that mocking bird don’t sing, Momma’s gonna buy you a diamond ring…”
“That’s not creepy at all,” Donny says with a shudder as the nursery song plays on in a woman’s voice.
Everyone in the street turns to stare at the speaker closest to them, all of them paling.
“You think he’s going to cleanse the town?”
I tighten my lips. “He’s showing a lot of control. I don’t think he wants to cleanse, but I think he wants them to confess. He’s here because we are. Otherwise, he’d have killed the last name on the list that isn’t in this town. He came when we did.”
“But why?”
“When I find out, I’ll let you know,” I tell him, driving away from the house that dropped a bomb on us I wasn’t prepared for.
Chapter 2
To the wicked, everything serves as a pretext.
—Voltaire
LANA
“How’s your dad?” I ask Jake as he walks around the room, hooking up a final monitor.
“He’s taking the meds again. You know as well as I do how hurt his ego is that he’s sick. But it’s handled. Now we can focus on this.”
I watch the look on Logan’s face as he steps out of Diana’s house, and I know she told him all she knew.
“I’ll watch Diana’s house, in case they make their move,” Jake tells me, brushing my shoulder with his as he sits down beside me, his eyes flicking to the numerous monitors he has spread out on the walls of the old hunter’s cabin.
The FBI came through, did a sweep of all these, and then Jake set up our temporary headquarters in his father’s cabin that has been empty for years.