"That bitch," he said.

Mr. Zack glared at him. "Stop it. That's completely inappropriate."

"I know, I'm sorry, I just didn't think she'd actually do it."

"What exactly did she say?"

"She said she'd met this guy, she refused to tell me his name, and she said she was in love. I thought she was just pissed at me for some reason."

"Did you have a fight?"

"Not a serious one. Things weren't going as well as they used to, but I really thought she'd be here at the store when I came in this morning."

"Thank you for speaking with us, Mr. Floren."

"No problem."

"The last person to talk to Ms. Tomlinson, besides you, of course, was her mother, two nights ago. I don't mind telling you that she shared a somewhat different view of your relationship with her daughter."

"What do you mean?"

The cop, Detective Dormin, smiled, though it was only with the corners of his mouth. He looked about forty and Toby had disliked him immediately.

"Apparently Melissa told her that things were going extremely well. She was in love with you. Thought you might even be The One."

Toby chuckled without humor. "Just like a woman, huh? One day she's madly in love, the next day she's running off with some stranger."

"Interesting that she didn't tell her mom about this."

"Do you think something else happened to her?"

"No, we're not ready to call it foul play quite yet. A girl that age doesn't have her head screwed on completely straight. I did find it interesting to go back through some files and see your name attached to another disappearance. Two disappearances, actually. You know who I'm talking about, right?"

"Of course I do."

"Apparently they ran away, too. Were never heard from again. You didn't get along with them very well, did you?"

"You're right. Fifteen years ago I was questioned about two missing kids. Dear Lord, it's a killing spree!"

"Hey, watch the lip. If you think this is a joking matter you're going to be very disappointed when I slap some cuffs on you. It was more like fourteen years, and there's no statute of limitations on murder."

"If you're accusing me of murder, I'd like a lawyer."

"I'm not accusing you of anything yet. When I do, I'll have all my ducks in a row. I hope you do as well. Tell me, Toby, if I may be so informal as to call you Toby, did you hear any gunshots last night?"

"Yeah. A bunch of them. I hear gunshots all the time. That's what happens when you live in a rural area."

"Again with the lip."

"Am I free to go?"

"You are, but I'd recommend that you stick around and answer as many questions as I've got for you. And I've got a lot of them. You're what we like to call a 'person of interest,' and I've got something of an obsessive personality. You don't want to be my pet project."

"Fine. What do you want to know?"

"Start from the beginning again. Be detailed."

It's a huge, vast forest. They'll never find her.

Toby's story held up to close scrutiny. It had to. Nobody would know he was out in the woods with Melissa. He couldn't imagine that she would have told anybody about Owen beforehand. If she had, and somebody came forth, he'd worry about it then, but for now he was just going to assume that his secret was safe.

He wondered how Owen was doing.

How much blood had he lost? Was he okay? How did a wild animal tend to a bullet wound?

Was Owen as lonely as he was?

Was Owen even still alive?

He wanted to go out into the forest to see him, just a quick glimpse, just to satisfy his curiosity, but, of course, he couldn't. He couldn't go back into the woods until he knew for certain that the police were no longer watching.

Anyway, he hated Owen now, right?

"Hello, Mr. Floren, so sorry to drop in on you unexpectedly like this." Detective Dormin handed Toby a piece of paper. "This is a handy little search warrant. Judge Baird's number is on the top if you'd like to give him a call. I'll wait."

"That's okay."

"Great, I'm glad that you won't be giving us any problems. You've got some puffy eyes, Toby. Doing a lot of crying, have you? Guilt or sorrow? Maybe a little of both?"

"I lost somebody very close to me. I don't need you giving me crap about it."

"You're right. That was unkind of me. Nice place you've got here. I recommend that you find yourself a good book to read and a comfortable spot, because we're planning to be here for a while."

Toby threw up into the toilet. He couldn't keep any food down anymore.

Melissa. He missed her so much.

"Had yourself a nice little barbecue, did you?" Detective Dormin asked. "Seems kind of cold for that sort of thing, but I'm not one to judge. Fresh ashes in there. The lab boys, they said they don't really look like charcoal. They say, and you're going to think this is the strangest thing, that it's fabric. Isn't that odd? Why would somebody be burning fabric on their barbecue grill? I'm a smart fellow, and I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around that."

"Am I under arrest?"

"Do you think you deserve to be?"

"Don't treat me like I'm a kid."

Dormin leaned across the table. "Do you know what I hate most in the world, Toby? Liars. I hate liars more than I hate murderers and rapists. It's a little quirk in my personality, I guess. So I'm not that fond of you. The fact that you cooked your clothes, that's suspicious to me. Why does a man burn his clothes? It's just peculiar. Now, I'll be honest with you, my wife has threatened on several occasions to burn my favorite pair of socks, the ones I still wear even though they've got holes in them, but you're not married, are you? You don't even have a girlfriend anymore. Unfortunately for me, my hunch that you burned your clothes to hide evidence because you wore them when you were murdering Melissa Tomlinson isn't enough to arrest you. But it's enough for me to ensure that you have some long, uncomfortable days. So why did you kill her?"

"I didn't."

"Yep. Some long, uncomfortable days."

"In local news, Hector Smith, age seventy-eight, was found deceased in his backyard by his grandchildren last night. Smith had reportedly gone out to investigate a disturbance, and awoke several neighbors, who called 911 to report screaming. Smith was apparently savaged as if by some sort of large animal. Chief of Police Martin Rundberg had this to say: ' 'At this time we do not know exactly what kind of animal attacked Hector Smith. We urge local residents to use extreme caution when venturing outdoors, until this thing is captured. Though we had men on the scene minutes after the call was made, Hector Smith's head was torn from his body, so obviously we're very alarmed and concerned about the situation...'"

CHAPTER S SIXTEEN.

Toby trudged through the snow, miserably cold and-he had to admit-more than a little scared. There was a reason he rarely ventured out into the woods at night. The flashlight provided no real feeling of security, nor did the newly loaded gun in his pocket.

He had no plan of action. He didn't know if he was going to shoot Owen, given the chance, or just plead with him not to murder anybody else.

Kill anybody else. It wasn't murder when an animal did it. anybody else. It wasn't murder when an animal did it.

He knew it was a terrible risk to go out into the woods when that detective could be watching his every move, but he had to talk with Owen. He couldn't sit at home, watching TV, and let the monster kill people.

It was unbearably cold. He didn't remember it ever being this cold, or snowing this hard.

Melissa's body was out here. Frozen solid. He wondered how she would have looked at him if she'd been told that someday he'd leave her mutilated corpse out in a pile of snow. He tried to picture the look of betrayal and hurt but couldn't.

Then again, was it worse than a mortuary keeping a body in a freezer?

Uh...yeah.

By the time he reached the cave, his face felt like it was completely frostbitten. There were no tracks. No imprints where the falling snow might have covered them up. It didn't look as if Owen were here.

Instead of calling out or tossing a rock, he walked into the cave unannounced.

Empty.

He shone the flashlight around, searching for traces of blood that would indicate that Owen had been inside. There was nothing. Owen had abandoned his home.

Toby sat on the icy ground and waited for him to return.

Owen didn't come back, of course. It was ridiculous to think that he would have. There was no magical connection between the two of them, where Owen would just happen to sense Toby's presence in the cave and hurry back there to reunite with his friend. He'd probably gutted another human being while Toby sat there for hours, staring at the empty cave exit.

Toby's joints ached and he really just wanted to curl up and go to sleep, but he forced himself to get up and begin the long, cold trek home.

Toby wandered the streets all night, as he'd done for the past seven nights. Mr. Zack had given him paid leave "until things got sorted out," and he'd taken this opportunity to become nocturnal.

He didn't know what he was expecting to find. In a town of 25,000 people, he wasn't likely to just stumble upon Owen, hanging out in somebody's backyard. But it gave him a sense of purpose, feeble as it was.

Gave him something to do before Detective Dormin threw his ass in jail.

The next victim was a jogger, a young woman who'd just turned eighteen. Her parents had begged her not to go jogging alone, but she'd laughed them off, insisting that she'd be perfectly fine.

They didn't find much of her. Just enough to identify her by three of her fingerprints.

"I need to start drinking," Toby said, staring into the nearly empty refrigerator. That sounded like a fine idea. Guzzle some booze, get good and plastered, and forget his problems. Become the town drunk. And if he started babbling to complete strangers about his monster buddy in the woods, hey, nobody would believe him.

It was the best plan he'd concocted in his life. First thing tomorrow morning he'd go stock up on beer, or maybe whiskey, and get right into it. Drinking alone was supposedly a depressing activity, but it couldn't be more depressing than anything else in his life.

Something slammed against the kitchen window.