Jake made himself relax. “Thanks, but no.” He looked around the dirty kitchen. “Where’s Trey?”

Jolene knocked back her drink and slammed the empty glass down. “Trey! Get out here, boy, your brother’s here!”

Trey ambled into the kitchen a moment later, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans and his gaze cast downward. Trey was a handsome golden boy with dark blue eyes and tousled, longish blond hair that made him look like a displaced California surfer dude.

But something was very wrong here.

Trey displayed none of the abundant confidence described by both his mother and Stu Walker. He seemed fidgety, uncomfortable in his own skin.

Jake was dismayed to see that his mother’s concerns were justified. He’d been so certain her worries about Trey were unfounded. He seemed dazed or drugged, and Jake immediately wondered whether the new girlfriend had gotten him hooked on something. Couldn’t be meth, the preferred poison of white trash youth. The kid didn’t have that jittery, tweaker thing going on, thank God. But maybe it was heroin. Did they have that out here in the sticks? He had no clue, and so he tried to rein in that line of thinking. Jumping to conclusions was a bad idea. He needed to get Trey out of here, take him somewhere where he’d feel able to talk more freely.

“Hey man, why don’t we go get a pizza or something. My treat. We’ve got some major catching up to do.”

Trey shrugged, but didn’t lift his gaze from the floor. “Sure. Whatever.”

“Boy, can’t you at least look your brother in the eye?” Jake cringed. His mother’s voice was like nails on a chalkboard when she was this hammered. “He came a long ways just to see you, boy, takin’ time out of his busy schedule. You owe him some respect.”

The rebuke seemed to have some effect. Trey lifted his head, forced his mouth to form an expression that vaguely resembled a smile, and finally looked Jake in the eye. The effort clearly required a great force of will. “Sorry, Jake. I’m just-”

Then the kid’s eyes widened and his face contorted with terror.

Jake frowned.

What the-

Something crashed against the sliding glass door behind him, making the door rattle in its frame. Jolene was shrieking as Jake spun around and gaped at the site of a blood-soaked naked fat man pressed against the glass. The sheer strangeness of what he was seeing kept Jake from processing the horrific tableau for a long, elastic moment. Time seemed to slow down, to grind down to an almost complete stop. Then things clicked back into place, the mental gears started meshing smoothly again, and he realized the man at the door was his stepfather.

Jolene dashed to the door, flung it open, and drove the heel of a palm into the center of Hal’s chest, causing the man to stumble backward several steps before landing on his back in the tall grass beyond the patio.

“What the fuck are you doing out here, you goddamn son of a bitch!” Jolene’s voice achieved a level of shrillness that surpassed even the worst screaming fits Jake remembered from his childhood. “Get off your motherfuckin’ ass and get back in the goddamn shed before I cut your nuts off!”

Jake followed his mother into the backyard. Maintaining a cautious distance from her, he moved in a slow semicircle to his left. His stomach twisted when he was able to get a better view of Hal. Jolene kicked at him, driving a foot into his flabby belly again and again. Hal managed to shift his weight and flop onto his side. He cast an anguished gaze up at Jake, and Jake was astonished to find himself feeling actual pity for his stepfather. A series of revelations snapped into place in rapid succession. Primary among them was the brutally evident fact that his mother was insane. Most of the man’s fingers were gone. He saw knobs of ugly, cauterized scar tissue just below the knuckles. His genitals were a bloody mess. One of his ears was gone. His whole body was covered with scabbed-over wounds, places where he’d been sliced with a knife or other sharp instrument.

Jake felt dizzy, sick with fear and revulsion, but he couldn’t allow himself to be overcome. He wanted to run screaming in the opposite direction, anywhere away from there, but he made himself cling to an unfortunate reality-he was the only person here remotely capable of handling this thing the right way.

He moved closer to Jolene, who was still kicking her husband. Jake stepped over Hal’s much-abused body, seized his mother from behind by the elbows, and twisted his head toward the house. “Trey! Call 911!”

Trey stood in the open doorway, his eyes wide and his jaw hanging slack.

Jolene flailed against him, trying to twist out of his tight grip. “Let go of me, you fuckin’ asshole! He had it comin’! Let me go or I’ll fuckin’ kill you!”

“Trey, your mom needs help.” Jake glanced at Hal. “And so does your dad. Call 911 now!”

Trey blinked. He nodded and retreated into the kitchen. Within moments, Jake dimly heard his brother’s voice as he talked to the 911 operator.

Jolene threw her head back and released a wail that chilled Jake’s blood.

On the ground, Hal cried.

Jake held his breath and prayed for the ground to remain solid beneath his feet for just a little while longer.

Jordan was asleep on the sofa in her living room. Overwhelmed by exhaustion and anguish, she’d collapsed there moments after ejecting Bridget from her apartment. Her body twitched and her throat produced a series of mumbled words and moans. Noise from the apartment next door pushed through the wall of sleep, sounds of distress that complemented an already disturbing dream. The shrieks that came from Todd Monroe in the moments before his death changed the tenor of the dream. What had previously been just a disturbing bit of eroticism became a horror show, and Jordan’s moans of pleasure became frightened whimpers.

Jordan awoke with a scream. She sat up, gasping for breath, her heart racing, her mind awash in pornographic images. She put a hand to her chest, willing her heart to return to a calmer pace. Despite its awful ending, the dream had been powerfully erotic, and she felt a lingering arousal. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that Bridget Flanagan had played a starring role in the dream.

Jordan experienced a flare of self-disgust. But the erotic images were so vivid, so compelling, that the arousal refused to go away. Even now she could almost feel Bridget’s tongue on her clit. She toyed with the idea of masturbating, of indulging in a fantasy about Bridget. But the tide of self-loathing that rose up at this thought stifled the urge.

She sniffed. “I hate you sometimes, Jordan Harper.”

She was on the brink of a crying jag, the kind of pity party she had no tolerance for in others. What a dark day in her life this was. A brittle facade of strength had been smashed to bits. There was no way to put a positive spin on it. Her life was a mess. The rough road ahead of her, which she’d contemplated with such conviction before finding Bridget in her apartment, now seemed daunting.

Tears rolled down her cheeks and she made no effort to wipe them away. Her distress made her oblivious to the new sounds emanating from Todd’s apartment. At first. Then she began to perceive something. A blunt, flat sound, like some sort of heavy object striking something repeatedly. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Thunk. Thunk. THUNK.

God, it simply wouldn’t end.

Jordan frowned.

She’d looked after Todd’s cat, a brown tabby named Willow, once while he was away for a week over the Christmas holiday season. She spent hours at a time there, watching his DVDs and poking through his stuff. She felt some guilt over the snooping, but told herself it was harmless. It made her feel a bit naughty, and she sometimes liked doing things she wasn’t supposed to do. She discovered no deep, dark secrets. Todd had no secret cache of naked kid pictures, no drug stash, no telltale hint of secret lunacy, no bomb-making materials, or Far Right pamphlets. About the worst you could say about Todd was that he was terminally geeky. The guy had a massive comics collection, and what Jordan imagined must be the world’s largest collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer memorabilia.