Jon Merritt lay in the rickety, creaking bed.
He squinted as the sun blasted through the torn curtain of the motel window and ignited a thousand dust motes that were parading slowly in the still air.
The Bulleit bottle had left a mark on his side, as he’d slept partially atop it. This put him in mind of his father, who on more than one occasion had fallen asleep with a bottle propped up next to him in his green Naugahyde armchair while watching sports. He would return home, announce, “Time to fire the sunset gun,” and pour his first of the night. Once, he woke in the morning, still in the chair, enraged that the bottle had emptied its contents into his lap. This somehow was Jon’s fault. Out came the belt.
Rolling upright, then out of bed, Merritt now struggled to the bathroom.
Puking? He waited.
No.
Thank you...
He showered then dressed, slipped his gun into one windbreaker pocket, loose shells into another and gathered up the half ofAllison’s papers and notes that he hadn’t reviewed last night and stuffed them into the backpack.
He stepped outside into the tidal wave of sun.
At the convenience store Merritt bought a breakfast burrito and a black coffee and walked to the small park overlooking the river. Well, not so fragrant here, but it was good to be outside.
Merritt ate his breakfast. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. No nausea now. He sipped the coffee and then eased back and closed his eyes, bathed with a warmth that went beyond the excited electrons of the sunlight bearing down on him.
He allowed himself this sensation for only a few minutes, though.
Back to the task at hand.
He pulled out his phone, replenished the minutes, and went to the internet. He scanned once more for Allison’s and Hannah’s names on social media and found nothing active.
Slipping the phone away, he turned to the documents from his ex’s house. On top were Hannah’s assignments, poetry and selfies. Another Post-it about Kyle. Some with dates and initials. He flipped through the photos. Were one or two taken at an inn, a campground, a friend’s house they might have fled to? No. Just moody pictures taken by a moody adolescent. He read through her poems until he realized there was nothing helpful there either.
He turned to the stack of Allison’s papers. After five minutes he found something that snagged his attention.
It was an envelope addressed to Allison, postmarked a month ago. It bore a return address he didn’t recognize. Inside was a greeting card. On the front was a watercolor of two butterflies hovering over a daisy. He read the inked message inside.
Ah, good, the detective within him thought. Very good.
He slipped this into his windbreaker pocket, rose and adjusted the gun on his hip. He then started back to his motel room.
He found himself thinking of the picture on the front of the cardthe woman had sent Allison, the delicate watercolor. The flitting insects.
Merritt remembered, long ago, seeing a TV special about butterflies. The commentator had said that, yes, they were beautiful, they possessed the navigation skills of GPS, they had the energy and wherewithal to migrate hundreds of miles.
There was another fact about the creatures that few people knew, and that Jon Merritt had found amusing: in addition to those nearly miraculous skills, butterflies were also ruthless and aggressive cannibals.
38
Colter Shaw sat in an armchair upholstered sometime in a prior decade, if not century. Comfortable, though, he had to admit.
He was in a small room, in a small motel, not far from the Kenoah. This was the address that Mack McKenzie had uncovered for him.
The view was of a parking lot. Two homeless—men, he believed—slept against a warehouse wall. A woman in the sex trade smoked and eyed passersby.
Shaw thought of the Street Cleaner, the serial killer. These would be prime targets.
Did the man feel that it was less immoral to kill the marginalized?
Or did morality not enter into the equation at all? Maybe he killed for amusement or lust or out of boredom.
Shaw turned his attention back to the place, noting evidence of a weapon.