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  Today was day four of the new diet and exercise plan.

  The actual lake in Lakehaven curved into inlets all along the shoreline, and in 1992 a track was paved around one of these inlets, with a quaint gray stone bridge stretching out over the lake itself. Inhabitants who lived close enough to the lake to pay the lake association fees used the track all spring, summer, and fall. They walked dogs and jogged and took romantic strolls. They played volleyball on the sandy shore just off the track. They pushed their babies in strollers and their el der ly in wheelchairs. And many, like Dorrie, power walked around the lake.

  Dorrie wore a T-shirt and sweat shorts. Self-consciously aware of the thin girls with their long streams of blonde hair tied up in ponytails, their muscles tightly propelling them laps ahead of her, Dorrie swung her arms and pumped her legs and felt her body groggily come to life. Her lungs burned, and her muscles started to hurt right away.

  A couple of teenage boys with shaggy hair, dark T-shirts and jeans—bony and awkwardly tall—watched her round the first curve, and she felt her whole insides tighten. Teenage boys usually meant stares and snickers. They meant nasty muttered name-calling that she could just catch as she breezed by. These boys didn’t say anything, but she felt heat in her cheeks all the same.

  Day four was a bitch.

  But once she was a good distance from the boys, she felt her breath loosen in her chest. A light breeze blew across the sweat that beaded on her skin and cooled her, and she had the notion that maybe she really could do it—lose the weight, tone up, slim down. She wanted to be faster. Sleeker. In control of her body as well as her mind. She wanted people to see the Dorrie she wanted to be. It just took time, was all. She’d known plenty of girls who lost a lot of weight right away, just to pack it back on a month or so later. She wanted it gone for good.

  Dorrie reached the halfway mark—a metal bike rack at the dirt path entrance to bike trails through the nearby woods. She felt a little better. Only half a mile left to go. She focused her gaze on the road ahead and, taking deeper breaths, plunged a little faster forward.

  Later, when she sat curled up under a blanket at home with a mug of hot tea, when she went over what happened in her head, she would think of that road before her, that stretch of path that mattered above all else. Her focus had been on the road. And she’d think that was why she didn’t notice something wrong sooner.

  She came out of that focus slowly, as she took in the last few landmarks indicating the home stretch—the fallen, twisted tree trunk, the stone park bench with “NIN” spray-painted in black letters. A gray cast of twilight had settled over everything, giving it a kind of pre-storm eeriness that in itself didn’t quite unsettle her. But as she rounded the last curve and headed into the last eighth of a mile, Dorrie noticed the people were gone. The track around the lake was very popu lar; people dotted the path when she got there and remained when she left. However, as she took in the periphery of the path, she saw she was alone. She slowed to a stroll, glancing around her, behind her, trying to peer through the sporadic trees to see someone on the path or shore of the far side of the lake.

  No one was there.

  She picked up the pace again, suddenly very uncomfortable at the thought of being alone on the path. The woods, full and dark in some places, presented endless possible hiding places for rapists and muggers. The growing shadows threw a sinister quality over rough surfaces of wood and stone. Alone. She was alone and yet…

  She wasn’t. A figure leaned against a tree several hundred feet ahead of her, arms folded over the broad chest, black hat pulled down low over the face. She hadn’t noticed him, maybe, because his clothes were so dark and parts of him blended with the pockets of oncoming night that had nestled into the spaces between trees. She frowned, slowing without really being aware of it, reluctant to get closer. Somehow, the figure’s presence was worse than when she thought she was alone.

  Because something…something wasn’t right about it.

  Dorrie was used to scanning faces, observing body language and expression for signs of derision, pity, even disgust, and she supposed her oversensitivity sometimes made her see those things even when they weren’t there. But even from the corners of her eyes, she noticed faces. The head tilted up to her, and that’s when it struck her what was wrong. The figure leaning against the tree seemed to have no face at all.

  She came to a dead stop. It waved. She glanced behind her, just a quick look, to gauge whether she should turn and run the other way. She’d have to backtrack almost a mile if she did, and she was already tired and covered with a thin, clammy sheen of sweat. It could overtake her, if it tried. She had little doubt of that.

  Day four was definitely turning out to be a bitch.

  “Dorrie….” The voice reminded her a little bit of wind chimes, many different timbres clinking together. It made goose bumps rise on her arms. The sound came from somewhere around the head, although she was sure now that the figure had no mouth. It was growing dark fast, and for every shade of night, the white head grew brighter. “Dorrie, you’re so close…so close to the end.”

  “Who are you? How do you know my name?” Her voice sounded thin and strained in her own ears.

  “I’m your new best friend, Dorrie. Where you go, I go. I want every inch of you. Dead. I want every inch of you dead.”

  Dorrie felt tears form in her eyes. “Please don’t hurt me. Just…don’t hurt me.”

  The head tilted thoughtfully as it stood straight. “But that’s the fun part, Dorrie. And you and I, we’re going to have a lot of fun.”

  It took a step toward her, and Dorrie cried out. She turned to run and tripped over a rock. She fell hard into the packed earth of the path, the impact forcing air from her lungs, her hands slamming painfully onto pebbles and sticks. She gasped for air, tears squeezed from her eyes as she blinked hard. She tried to crawl forward but found she couldn’t. She rolled over, heaving breaths, and her eyes grew wide.

  It was twilight, not dark, and two young men and a woman stood over her. She recognized them vaguely as other joggers she’d seen on the path before. She peered around their legs to the far tree where the faceless figure had been. It was gone.

  She started to cry.

  The bewildered joggers looked at each other and then back down at her.

  “You okay, miss?” One man reached a hand down to pull her to her feet, and she grabbed it, cringing internally when a second hand reached down to help lift her.

  She stood and dusted the dirt off her legs. Her face felt hot. Her breath came back slowly, and pain twinged in her chest.

  “You okay?” the jogger repeated. “You, uh, you want us to call someone?”

  Dorrie shook her head. “I’m okay. I’m…I’m okay. I’m just…I’m going home.”

  She gave the tree where she’d seen the faceless thing wide berth when she came upon it, wary eyes darting around the area for signs of a black hat, a glowing head. She saw nothing, and as she got in her car, she let go of a long, shuddery breath.

  And thought about day five.

  CHAPTER THREE

  With each ring of the telephone, Dave’s chest tightened a little. Maybe she wouldn’t be home. Maybe she was working. It was, after all, long past happy hour and well into any barfly’s night of drinking, and he knew that nowadays she had a pretty good gig tending bar in California at a nightclub called Constellation. Part of him was glad she wasn’t answering the phone. But another part of him, an achy part somewhere under his heart, just beneath where he was willing to admit he could feel, really missed the sound of her voice. The way her hair smelled. The softness of her shoulders. The shape of her mouth when she smiled. The way it felt when he slid into her.

  The phone bleated again, and he felt a crick in his chest.

  She answered on the seventh ring. Dave switched the receiver to his other ear to wipe the sweat off his palms.

  “Hi, Dave. How you holding up?”

  Dave shrugged, even though she couldn’t
see. “Hanging in there. I got your message—you know, returning my call.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dave, really I am.” Her voice on the other end of the phone was so soft, so far away.

  “Did…did the police tell you how it happened?”

  “They told me what they knew.”

  “What did they say?”

  Dave sat down on the sofa. What they’d said was just about too horrible to repeat. What they’d said was unthinkable. What they said without even knowing it was that he’d failed his sister. He’d let her die. That in spite of all his best efforts, in spite of all he’d done—all they had done, especially that night at Feinstein’s house—it hadn’t been enough. Her clock had been stopped for good.

  “They said she left her room, wandered across the quad, and…you know that white door, the one with the rusty hinges that’s always locked? Somehow she got it open and then got lost in the catacombs beneath Oak Hill. She fell through a part of the floor, I think. Broke her neck.”

  “Oh, Dave. God, I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  There was more—a word, smeared in her blood, a word that reminded him of a horrible monster in a black trench coat and a black hat. A single word: HOLLOW. But he wasn’t going to tell her about that. He’d do something finally worthwhile for her and leave her out of that completely.

  “Funeral’s tomorrow,” he said.

  “Wish I could be there.”

  Dave couldn’t tell if she genuinely meant it or if she was just being polite, and an ache in that place just beneath his heart made him close his eyes for a moment. “I wish you could, too, Cheryl.” A pause. “I miss you.”

  Silence from her end of the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be. I miss you, too, Dave. It’s just—”

  He knew what it was. His insecurities ignited broody bouts of jealousy. His fears made him quiet, cold, and distant. He’d thought he could be better, that he could shrug off the guys that hit on her constantly at the bar, that he could let her in and talk to her about Sally or about that night at the Feinstein house…

  “Dave?”

  “Sorry. Sorry, I was just…I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “You didn’t. Look, you know I’m here when you need me. Always. We’ve…been through a lot together. But…”

  She didn’t say it; he wanted to believe she didn’t because she wanted to give him hope, but he didn’t really dare think that. “But you and I can’t be together. I can’t be doing all the reassuring, all the communicating, and all the things that make it a relationship.” Fact was, whether she said it or not, it didn’t change the reality of it—the finality of it.

  Instead, she surprised him with, “It’s…not like before, is it? Sally’s death, I mean. It has nothing to do with…before, right?” The pleading in her voice, so earnest, so innocently hopeful, made him feel a little queasy.

  “It was a word, Mr. Kohlar. HOLLOW. Does that mean anything to you? Anything significant about that word?”

  “No,” he tried, and then cleared the lump from his throat. “No, nothing like that. Just an accident. You know, just…bad luck. Bad locks on the door and bad luck all around.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Although he couldn’t see her, he could imagine from the relieved breath on the end of the line that she had worked up a small smile. He was glad for that, glad to set her mind at ease. He couldn’t be what she deserved in a boyfriend, but he’d be damned if he couldn’t at the very least keep her from reliving the nightmare of seven months prior.

  “Cheryl, I should go.” A pause. “It was good talking to you.”

  “You too, Dave. Take care of yourself, okay?” She sounded thoughtful. Sad, maybe. Just a little. Maybe.

  “Will do.”

  “Call if you need me.”

  Dave stifled a long sigh. “I will. You take care of yourself out there, too, okay?”

  “Sure, hon.” Whether she’d slipped with the pet name or meant it with mild friendly affection, it still made him feel warm inside.

  When she hung up, though, the cool rush of loneliness came back.

  The scream from the jail cell jolted Steve from deep concentration. He looked up from the files he’d been studying and looked around the precinct. The busy chatter, the ringing of phones, the interrogation of witnesses continued as if no one had heard a thing. Steve frowned and turned back to his file. It was a missing persons case, a probable suicide by Steve’s estimation. Based on the evidence found, the missing person in question, one John Peters, had gotten up and by appearances had gotten ready for work, just as he did every morning. He’d put on a suit, however. One was missing from the closet, and friends remarked at the oddity, as John’s job at the warehouse was necessarily casual in dress. John had poured himself a bowl of Cheerios with milk and a cup of coffee, both of which he’d left unfinished on the kitchen table. And then he’d left the house in his red Toyota Celica and had never come back.

  They found a patter of blood left on the floor, thinned to the occasional drop out in the hallway, and also a partial print in blood—his—on the wall at the base of the stairs.

  Steve had noticed an uncanny parallel between that case and the death of Sally Kohlar. They’d found something on the second floor of the Peters residence. Spelled out with painstaking care on the bedroom carpet at the foot of the bed was part of a word: HOL. The tiny strips and chunks of flesh he’d used to spell it out in large Roman font were already dried and crusted to the carpet fibers.

  The scream from downstairs came again, louder this time. It had the quality of someone being hurt, of someone, Steve thought, feeling the slow turn of the knife. He panned the room, looking for verification, looking for another startled face or disrupted phone call or anything. No one in the precinct reacted to it at all.

  He rose slowly and headed for the door to the lower level, where the jail cells were. He passed Sharkey’s desk, and the detective looked up.

  “Told you Mendez’s coffee would go right through you, New Guy.”

  Steve gave him a distracted nod. “Yeah.” He continued on to the door, pulled it open, and slipped through. Pulling the door closed behind him cut off the sounds from the precinct. Cinder block walls sloped down to the basement. His feet slapped against the paint-chipped, pale green concrete stairs as he jogged down, the echoes bouncing all around him.

  Lakehaven didn’t have a high crime rate, and so Lake-haven Police Department’s jails were neither as large nor as packed as someplace like Rahway. They remained cool and relatively quiet, and rarely contained anyone wildly crazy or dangerous. The lower level of the police station featured a narrow hallway of the same pale, chipped concrete and five cells lining the left-hand side.

  There should have been prisoners in four of the cells: in cell one, a DUI sleeping it off, and cell two, a possession with intent to distribute. Cell three should have held two teenagers busted for boosting GPS systems and satellite radios from cars at the Lakehaven strip mall parking lot, and cell four should have contained a domestic battery.

  There should have been prisoners.

  But Steve’s heart sank to his gut as he passed cell after cell. Every single one was empty. Evidence of their occupants remained, things like baseball hats, a flannel shirt, and a watch. But the drunk, the dealer, the crooks, and the batterer—they were all gone.

  He tried rattling the cells and found them all locked. He gave one of the bars a good, sharp tug to see if it would open. It remained planted firmly in place. He peered in between the bars. The gloom inside was thick enough to shadow figures, but not so dark that they could hide. Steve could see without a doubt the cells were empty. On the floor by one of the cots, a shoe lay on its side in a sticky mess of something dark.

  Where could they have gone, and how? Could they have been through booking already? Processed and sent on their way? Not likely. Not without their shoes or their watches. The crooks had only been arreste
d two hours prior, and the DUI had only landed in the cell twenty minutes before Steve had heard the first scream. No, no, something wasn’t right, not at all.

  “Shit. Shit!” Steve threw up his hands and headed back toward the stairs. He had no idea how to explain this to anyone. Five prisoners utterly vanished from four cells? He’d look like an idiot. Great first impression. LPD Funny Guys 1, New Guy 0.

  He got as far as the bottom of the steps when he heard laughing, low, musical, soft, and terribly wrong in ways that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

  He turned slowly and made his way back, his footsteps thundering with his heart in his ears, his chest tightening as he turned his head to look into each penned-in dark. He expected someone behind one of the sets of bars, someone with crazy eyes, a foaming mouth, maybe, and rotten teeth. Someone who smeared words into walls with blood or stripped flesh off bones to write sinister messages that stank and dried like beef jerky and stuck to the rug. Someone who whispered over shoulders then vanished from a room full of cops.

  He found one cell after the other empty. Except cell five.

  A figure in a black trench sat with legs tented up on one of the cots. Light from the window slanted in just across the peaks of the knees and the black gloves that rested on them. A black hat, pulled low over the head, obscured the face from view.

  A chuckle came from beneath the hat, dripping menace.

  Steve clicked the safety off his gun and took a cautious step toward the bars.

  “You don’t need to do that, Steve,” the voice—voices, actually, woven together, male and female—told him. Just like at Oak Hill, in the catacombs.