“Twelve hours at least.”

She groaned at his answer.

“It says forty hours on your map, but that’s regular car speed, kid. This truck doesn’t go that fast.”

“Forty-two hours,” Vee corrected, then slumped against the bench seat. By the time they’d reach their destination, Tim Steinway wouldn’t even remember her. Virginia who?

She didn’t want to imagine some cool, dark-haired girl hanging off his arm when she finally got back home. Needing a distraction, she tossed the map printout onto the bench seat between them and gave her father a sidelong glance. “So, what did the guy you’re going to write about do?”

Her dad frowned at the steering wheel. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, but Vee wasn’t about to give him a choice. If she had to endure the possibility of losing Tim, had to deal with eight weeks of pure exile, she deserved to know what kind of a criminal was at the root of ruining her life.

6

KEEPING THE SUBJECTS of Lucas’s books a secret when Jeanie was younger had been easy, but the older she got, the more questions she had. Caroline used to tell her that Daddy wrote about monsters and ghosts. It was as accurate a description as any little girl would need. But Jeanie wasn’t so little anymore. Monsters and ghosts only repelled kids who were afraid of the dark, and Jeanie had proven that she liked the nighttime far more than she enjoyed the daylight.

“Did your mother bring that up?” It was the first thing that came to mind.

Caroline had always been good about not mentioning the specifics of his projects. Hell, she was the one who demanded he never breathe a word about his topics anywhere near their kid. Lucas had made a point of not keeping galley pages of his work anywhere in the house where Jeanie could find them. Any time he received a fresh shipment of new releases, he’d mail them out to friends and longtime readers. The leftovers ended up in the trunk, driven out to local libraries and cafés, all to spare his kid an accidental discovery. The copies he kept for himself were locked in a gun safe in the back of a bedroom closet. But now, with things between him and Caroline the way they were, it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover she had brought up Jeffrey Halcomb while packing up Jeanie’s things, if only to make his life more difficult than it was already going to be.

“I’m not an idiot,” Jeanie muttered. “I know what kind of things you write about. Killers and stuff.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s called Google,” Jeanie said flatly. Lucas held back a self-satisfied smirk. He had once asked Caroline what she thought would happen when Jeanie decided to look him up on the Internet. She had waved a dismissive hand above her head, as though the thought of their daughter taking the time to research her own father was ludicrous.

“Anyway, I looked up your books on Amazon, and then I looked up the guys in your books on Wikipedia. They’re all, like, ax murderers. You didn’t think I’d ever find out?”

“Of course I knew you’d find out,” he said. “You’re a smart kid.”

It had been plain stupid of Caroline to think they could protect their daughter from the darkness of his interests forever. But before he could dwell on the fact that his little girl knew he made a living off of other people’s pain, his thoughts twisted toward an even scarier thought: if Jeanie had googled him, what else was she looking up?

“I’m hardly a kid, Dad.”

He kept his attention on the road, but he could hear the eye roll in her voice.

“So, who is this guy you’re writing about? What did he do?” She pushed her hair behind her ears, waiting for the story while Lucas squinted at the highway.

Even when talking about his projects with Caroline, it had always been awkward. She’d been just as into The Cult and Dead Can Dance as he had, but she’d always found Lucas’s fascination with the dark and dangerous to be a bit too all encompassing. Like maybe he was harboring an inner psychopath that was itching to get out—a dark passenger à la Dexter Morgan.

His own parents considered his work deplorable, not that they had said as much, but Lucas knew it just the same. When he had started college, he had done so with the hope of becoming a criminal profiler. But his love for the written word had overridden his interest in police work. When he told his parents he wanted to be a writer in the middle of his sophomore year, Barbara and Harold Graham hit the roof. A writer? his dad had barked. More like a piss-poor teacher getting shot at by his own ghetto students. Now that’s a future! Lucas moved out several weeks later, finally tired of taking shit from them about what he wanted to do with his life. That had been nearly twenty years ago, but his pop still muttered contentions beneath his breath during every family gathering.

Writing about tragedy like that, his father had stated the last time they had gotten together. It’s no wonder your career is on the rocks. People don’t want to remember the folks that make our world ugly. They want to forget, and that’s why they aren’t buying your damn books.

“Don’t you think I deserve to know?” Jeanie asked. “He’s the reason you’re moving, right? The reason you’re dragging me out here with you?”

“Dragging you?” Lucas didn’t like what that implied, as though she was his captive and he was the worst father in the world.

She shrugged, said nothing.

If he didn’t tell her, she’d only hate him more.

“Okay,” he said, squaring his shoulders and pushing back against his seat. “But not a word, all right? Your mother will kill me.”

“Like I even talk to her,” Jeanie murmured.

“Well, you should talk to her.”

“Whatever.” She dismissed the suggestion with a glance out the window. “You know she doesn’t even like me, right? I don’t know why she bothered having a kid.”

“That isn’t true.” The defense came tumbling out of him without so much as a beat of hesitation; his tone, sterner than he had intended. “Your mother loves you.”

“Oh yeah, then why . . .” Jeanie’s words trailed off. Rather than finishing her statement, she coiled her arms across her chest, pulled into herself, and went quiet.

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Then why would she run off with another guy? If she loved me, loved us, why would she be doing this? It was the very question he wanted to find the answer to, but dwelling on it would only make things worse. Lucas tightened his grip on the steering wheel and sucked in air. Change the subject, he thought. Don’t talk about Caroline. You’ll end up saying something you’ll regret.

“Jeffrey Halcomb, he’s the bad guy,” Lucas began. “He’s the one I need to see.”

“You’re seeing him?” Jeanie perked beside him, her silence abandoned. “You mean he’s not dead?”

“Nope, he’s in prison. He manipulated people into following what he said, and in the end, he convinced them all to kill themselves. This guy has a special ability: the power of persuasion. He can make certain people do or believe almost anything.”

“But not all people?”

“No, not all people. You know how we all have different personalities?”

Jeanie nodded. “Some people are more gullible than others,” she said.

“That’s exactly right. Sometimes people are so vulnerable they’re willing to do or believe anything. All the person telling them to do or believe that thing has to do is promise them something they want.”

“Like money?”

“Well . . . more like love or companionship or a place to belong. He would look for people who were pretty desperate—runaways who didn’t have a place to live, loners from broken families who were eager to have a friend. He . . . collected them. It took him years. And the longer these people stayed with him, the more they saw him as the key to their own happiness. They believed whatever he told them so that he wouldn’t abandon them, and eventually they began to seriously believe in the things he told them.”