Roger didn't look at the badge closely. It looked bright and shiny. He believed the guy really was a cop. "Okay," he said.

"So, seen anything unusual out here?"

"I don't think so."

"You must be cold," the cop said. "Do you want to talk inside your house?"

"I'm not cold."

"You sure? We can just step inside."

"No. Not without a warrant."

The man looked surprised. He raised his eyebrows, and Roger wished he hadn't said what he had said. But he hadn't been able to stop himself. He didn't want the man in the house, and that's what they said on TV when cops wanted to come into the house and they weren't welcome.

"Okay," the man said. "But you're not in any trouble. I just thought you might have been more comfortable."

"I'm fine."

The man nodded. He leaned back, tilting his head so he could examine the windows upstairs.

"You live here alone?"

"Yes."

"Always?"

"Since my parents died."

The man turned toward the side of the house, the area he was walking toward when Roger came out and called him.

"How far back does your land go?"

"Far," Roger said. "Way back there's some farmland, and maybe some new houses after that. But it's all a long way back. I don't really go back there."

The cop stared into the distance at the trees for a moment. He appeared to be thinking of something, but Roger had no idea what. Maybe he was wondering if Roger was lying or maybe he wondered what was out there in the woods, back beyond the trees where the last girl was buried and the bones of the other girls lay scattered. Roger didn't know.

The man shrugged. "Okay," he said. He reached into his inside pocket again, the same place where he kept his badge, and brought out a business card. "If you see or hear anything unusual around here, give me a call. There's a chance we'll be back to search this area anyway."

Roger took the crisp, white card. "Sure, I'll keep my eyes open."

The man nodded. And Roger knew he was doing the same thing that so many others did. He was deciding that Roger was different. Strange. Special. But for once Roger didn't mind as long as it got the man the h.e.l.l out of the yard.

"Okay. Have a good day."

The cop started back to his truck, and Roger felt a profound sense of relief, as though someone had removed a heavy burden from his shoulders. But just as the cop placed his hand on the truck door handle, something shattered above Roger's head. It sounded like breaking gla.s.s, and indeed a shower of gla.s.s fragments came down from the top of the house and fell on top of Roger and around his feet. Both he and the cop looked up.

"What the h.e.l.l was that?" the cop said.

"I don't know."

"I thought you lived alone."

"I do."

And that fast, the cop was past him and into the house, leaving Roger behind in his bare feet and pajamas like he didn't even matter.

Roger froze for just a moment. Among the gla.s.s shards that shone in the yard like diamonds in the morning sun, he stood still while the cop-the cop!-ran past him and into the house, and Roger could imagine him going up the stairs and finding the girl in the bedroom.

Roger dropped the business card and started to move. He followed the cop, lumbering up the stairs as fast as he could go, and when he entered the bedroom he saw the cop standing over the girl on the far side of the bed, his gun drawn, and the girl whimpering and squirming halfway on the bed and halfway off. Her feet were bleeding, and the window was smashed. Somehow she had managed to work her legs free and swing them at the window, connecting with enough force to break the gla.s.s and alert the cop.

"Get down! Get on the floor! Now! Down!"

It took Roger a moment to realize that the cop meant him, that he was yelling at him to get down and get on the floor because the cop saw the girl and a.s.sumed all the things that he feared people would a.s.sume.

"Get down! Get down!"

Roger eased down, his hands raised in the air. It wasn't a simple matter for him to flatten himself against the floor, so he moved slow, and as he did, he never took his eyes off the barrel of the gun that the cop kept pointed at him, an angry-looking little black hole designed to bring about his death.

Roger made it to his knees. But he paused there.

The cop kept the gun on him, and Roger thought he saw it shaking just a bit, a slight tremor in the cop's hands that moved the barrel back and forth. He's scared, too, Roger thought. He's scared, and he's going to shoot me.

The girl continued to whimper behind the tape, and Roger decided he had only one real choice. He took his hands from their position on either side of his head and made a quick, thrusting motion forward against the side of the bed, driving the bed frame into the knees of the cop. The force of the blow knocked the cop off balance, causing him to fall forward against the bed, and when he did, the gun fired, sending a bullet over Roger's head and into the wall behind him.

The girl's whimpering increased in volume.

Roger got to his feet. The cop scrambled to regain his balance, but before he could, Roger was on him, gripping him around the neck in a headlock and pulling back with such force that the cop began to yell and Roger could feel the tendons in his own neck and the muscles in his arms straining until he thought they were going to snap like rubber bands.

But Roger kept going. He kept exerting pressure.

The cop flailed and brought his arms around, the gun still clutched in his right hand, and he appeared to be trying to aim it back at Roger, who saw the menacing black hole hovering in the air like a poisonous snake preparing to strike. Roger knew he had to do something else.

He summoned his strength for one more move. He planted his feet and made a quick pivot to the right, lifting the cop off his feet and bringing him down as hard as he could against the hardwood floor of the bedroom. When they hit the floor, the cop yelled in pain, and the gun fell to the floor. Roger tried to get up and get after it, but his right arm was pinned to the floor by the cop's body weight. Roger pulled, then pushed against the cop's body, releasing his arm and standing up. He expected the cop to scramble up as well, but he was still on the floor, moaning and trying to get his bearings after the body slam. Roger stepped over him and picked up the gun.

It was a new pistol, black and shiny, and the textured, perfectly manufactured grip felt strange in his hand after years of handling the old and well-worn shotgun. He pointed the gun at the cop, giving him a taste of his own medicine.

The cop shook his head and blinked his eyes. It took a moment for him to focus, but he eventually zeroed in on Roger.

"Don't," he said, his breathing heavy.

Roger just stared at him. Something welled up inside Roger at that moment. The man on the floor before him-the cop-had come and tried to take the girl away. Away from Roger. And things were always being taken away from Roger. His mom and dad. The last girl. Maybe someday they'd come and try to take the house and the land from him. The clearing, too. But they weren't going to take the girl, not this girl. He had taken her. She was his wife.

"Don't do it," the cop said, his voice more level. "I'm a police officer. Just put it down."

The girl continued to make her noises from behind the tape. He could tell she was trying to scream, but the tape m.u.f.fled the noise. Roger looked at her, then back at the cop.

"No," Roger said. "No, you can't come in here and take what belongs to me."

"I'm not taking anything," the cop said. "But the girl, Jacqueline, she belongs back with her family and friends."

"No," Roger said. "She belongs here. With me. She's my wife."

The cop looked puzzled by Roger's words. Maybe even bothered by them. He shook his head. "She's not your wife, buddy. She's a college student."

"No! She's with me. She's mine. She belongs to me. I took her. I took her in the clearing and that means she's mine."

"Okay," the cop said. "Why don't we ask her? I'll just the take the tape off her mouth and we'll ask her, and if she wants to stay, she can stay. But if she wants to go, I'll take her back into town with me and we'll sort the whole thing out."

He sounded so reasonable, so calm. So sure of himself. It made sense in a way. Ask the girl. See what she wants to do. Why not?

The cop started to get to his feet. He held his hands out in front of him, palms forward, as if to say he didn't mean Roger any harm. And he didn't seem to mean him any harm, which is why Roger almost fell for it.

But he stopped it in time, before the cop got all the way to his feet. Roger knew what the girl would say. He knew she'd beg to go. She just hadn't been there long enough. They hadn't fallen into their routine yet. But they would, as long as n.o.body took her away.

"Stop!" Roger said.

The cop kept going. "I'm just going to ask her, like we said."

"No." His voice sounded calmer to his own ears. "Stop."

"We had an agreement, right? Just ask the girl."

The cop didn't think Roger could shoot him. That's what he was thinking. He was thinking Roger didn't have it in him to pull the trigger.

"No, she's going to stay."

"Let's just ask her, buddy. She's uncomfortable. She's bleeding. Look."

Roger looked. He saw the blood. He forgot that the girl had cut herself. What if she bled to death, right there on the bedroom floor? It could happen, he knew. Someone could cut a vessel or an artery in their foot and bleed all the blood inside them right out onto the floor. Maybe that's why the girl whimpered. Maybe she was bleeding to death and needed help.

Roger kept the gun level. He didn't know what to do. He thought it was a trap. A trick.

The cop started for the girl, his hands still up in the air on either side of his face.

"Stop," Roger said, trying to sound tough.

"Easy," the cop said. Roger knew he wanted to lull him off guard with the rea.s.suring tone of his voice.

"Stop," Roger said again.

But the cop kept going. He had almost reached the girl when the gun kicked in Roger's hand. The first time he missed and hit the wall, but the second one took the cop in the neck. The cop's mouth opened, showing all of his teeth, as if he were smiling for a moment, before he brought his hand up to cover the hole where the bullet had gone in. But then the cop made a choking noise. It sounded like he was trying to swallow broken gla.s.s. Blood leaked through his fingers and down his hand. He tried but couldn't speak.

The cop folded in half, crumpling to the floor as if he were made out of paper. Roger moved closer. When he glanced at the girl, her eyes were wider than ever, the pupils darting back and forth like pinb.a.l.l.s. She stopped making any noise.

Roger moved across the room and stood over the cop. His eyes were still open and blinking. He was still alive, but blood ran out of the hole in his neck in a steady stream. It made Roger think of the tiny creek that ran through the woods. And the cop's skin was pale, the color of bone.

Roger moved the gun in close. He had to finish the job now. He had to keep his wife.

He pulled the trigger, sending the cop's brains and skull against the white wall of the bedroom.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

Roger had a lot of work to do.

He had to get rid of the cop's body and his truck, and then he had to clean off the walls and the floors where he shot the cop and made what had been inside his head come outside. But he couldn't yet think about all of those things. He had to take care of the girl.

Her feet were bleeding from the cuts, and she rolled around on the bed in a panic, which only smeared and stained the sheets and the floor. He knew firing the gun so close to her scared her, and he wished he hadn't had to do it. But it came down to the cop's life or his own. He knew the cop would take the girl away, and then he'd take Roger away and they'd never see each other again. Roger thought it was bad to live alone in the house. He didn't want to think about the way he'd live if the cops took him away.

He ran to the bathroom and came back with several towels and a tube of antibiotic cream. His mother always used antibiotic cream when he had a cut, and the tube in the bathroom closet must have been sitting in there for years. But it beat not doing anything to help the girl. Roger knew an infection meant big trouble. He wouldn't be able to cure that himself, just as he hadn't been able to help the last girl when she got sick.

The girl refused to sit still. She kicked and bucked while Roger tried to apply the towel to her wounds, and finally he sat on her legs, pinning them to the mattress, and told her to knock it off if she wanted to live. The girl stopped resisting.

Roger dabbed at her wounds with the towel, and while he did, his eye caught the body of the cop at the foot of the bed. A part of his bald head was gone, revealing the b.l.o.o.d.y mess inside, and his eyes stared forward, like he'd been frozen while concentrating on something fascinating. A light trickle of blood still leaked out of the hole in his neck, and Roger felt a wave of nausea rumble through his stomach as he looked at him. He turned his head away and concentrated on the task at hand.

He managed to wipe the blood off in a few minutes and saw that the cuts weren't very deep or wide. One gash just above the anklebone did most of the bleeding. Roger pressed the towel against it, and even though the girl took in a quick breath of air through her nose as though it hurt when he touched her, he maintained the pressure. He knew he could and should stop the bleeding before doing anything else. When he had it stopped and looked at it more closely, he decided it didn't need st.i.tches. She'd be fine, but just to be safe he opened the tube of ointment and, as gently as possible, applied some to her cuts. The girl squirmed a little but let him finish. He threw the things aside and tried to decide what to do next. He felt overwhelmed.

He turned to the girl first. If he intended to clean the mess up, he had to have the girl out of the way, so he took the ropes and re-tied her feet to the bed, making sure the knots were extra tight, limiting her wiggle room to almost nothing. She grunted behind the tape, but Roger ignored her. If she needed to go to the bathroom, she could pee in her pants. For now, wet sheets were the least of his concerns.

He turned and faced the body of the cop. The guy was big, but not so heavy Roger couldn't carry him. He knew it was a huge deal for a cop to die. He saw it on TV all the time. When somebody killed a cop, there was h.e.l.l to pay. The other cops all came together and did whatever it took to bring the killer to justice.

Roger tripped over that word.

Killer.

He wasn't a killer. Not at all. He hadn't killed the last girl, and he didn't want to kill this one. And he'd only killed the cop out of self-defense. It was justified or justifiable, whichever they said on the TV. It meant he needed to do it for his own survival. If he hadn't killed the cop, then the cop would have killed him, or at least made his life miserable.

But none of that mattered now. What mattered was what he'd done. That was all. n.o.body would care about anything else. And when this cop didn't show up at his house or his job or wherever else he was meant to be, they were all going to come looking for him. It was going to be bad.

Roger sat on the edge of the bed and let his shoulders slump.

He thought about running away. He could get in the van-his van-and go, maybe take the girl with him and leave the cop's body in the house. They would know it was him, but by the time they figured it out, he'd be long gone. Off to some other part of the country or even the world, maybe Canada or Mexico. That's where people always went in the movies when they were in trouble. But right away Roger knew that wasn't going to work. It took money to run away, and he didn't have enough to get far. And he didn't know where to go. Once, when he was twelve, his dad took him to a baseball game in Cincinnati, but Roger wouldn't know how to find a place like Cincinnati, let alone Canada or Mexico. And since he didn't know anybody there, he'd be on his own, truly on his own, and he knew he wouldn't last more than a few days, even if the girl helped. And he knew she wouldn't. She'd try to run or fight or yell or scream, and she'd probably get away. So he had to stay in his house.

And besides, he liked being near the clearing. More than the house and more than the girl, the clearing made him feel safe, like he was at home and in the place where he belonged. When Roger went there, he felt capable of doing anything, solving any problem, and if he left such a place behind just because he was in a little trouble, then he'd have to consider himself a fool of the highest order.

He understood then what he had to do. It only made sense, and he should have known the answer from the very beginning.

He had to take the cop's body and bury it in the clearing.