Page 83 of Heartbreak Bay

I take a swig of water to moisten my suddenly dry mouth. “The top search result for the place is about an abduction and murder,” I say. “About ten years ago. An eleven-year-old girl named Clara Watson was abducted, and her older brother, Jonathan, was badly hurt, almost killed. He suffered severe injuries. Her body was found months after out in the salt marsh.”

“Jesus,” she whispers. “Did they find him?”

“The killer?” I scroll through entries, then click a link and read results. “Not according to the last update. The brother struggled with the abductor, who hit him with some kind of pipe. All the kid could remember after he woke up was that the man drove a van. Case unsolved.”

“That has to mean something,” she says. “Is the brother still alive?”

“I think so. The parents aren’t. Mother died a year after the girl, and the father committed suicide a year after that. The boy was about seventeen when this happened. There’s a mention that he recovered. Nothing else.”

But I’m wrong, I realize. Putting in Jonathan Watson plus Salah Point gives me a later article. A profile piece. The mention of his sister’s murder is one line, described as a “tragedy.” The family owned a large cannery on Heartbreak Bay that shut down in the late 1990s. Losing a child and having another one seriously injured wasn’t enough for thisfamily; death and suicide weren’t enough. They also lost everything in the fishing industry crash that took down a lot of businesses in this area.

The article, though, uses that as a setup for a miracle, because Jonathan Bruce Watson bought a lottery ticket in 2015, on the anniversary of his sister’s death.

“What?” Kez asks. I realize I’ve been silent too long. “What’s that look?”

“He won the Powerball multistate lottery,” I say. “He lost everything, Kez, and then he won the goddamn lottery. Seven hundred fifty million dollars.” I feel the hair raise on the back of my neck.What someone could do with that kind of money, if they were single-minded ...I can’t imagine what Melvin would have done with it.

No, I actually can. He’d have become another Israel Keyes, burying murder kits in strategic locations all over the country, killing at his pleasure and disappearing without a trace. Israel Keyes called themvacations. It’s impossible to know the ghastly toll he really took; he traveled constantly, and admitted to only a few of the apparently unrelated deaths. A serial killer with massive funds, free time, focus ... could doanything.

And then I blow up the photo that goes with the story as large as the small screen will handle. It’s not great. A man of medium height accepting an oversize check, looking not delighted but oddly unemotional. A baseball cap on his head.

I feel the knowledge go through me like a sudden, heart-stopping lightning strike.

Leonard Bay.That’s a photo of the man I tackled running from the mailing store. Bay, as in Heartbreak Bay.

The injury that flattened the side of his head.

I frantically google one more thing.Malus Navis.

A navigational beacon.

Leonard Bay had an address on Beacon Street, according to his license. Which had looked real enough, but $750 million will buy quality fakes.

Kez is asking me questions, but I’m not listening. I do another search, and I find another article about the abduction of little Clara Watson.

Jonathan Bruce Watson sufferedsevere head injuries. I remember the shocking sight of Len’s head as his hat rolled away. It isn’t visible in the Powerball photo, but there’s no mistake. Len is Jonathan Bruce Watson. Jonathan Bruce Watson is MalusNavis.

I had him.I had him.And I let him go. I hear a high, thin buzzing in my ears, and that dreadful weight on me again. Panic attack incoming.

No. I refuse. No.

I close my eyes, lean my head back, and breathe through it, ride the twisting waves of panic and sickness until the flood subsides, and when I finally am able to look again, the car is stopped. Kezia is staring at me. We’re in the breakdown lane of the freeway, cars and trucks whizzing past without a thought for the way the world has just changed.

I tell her the truth. All of it. MalusNavis’s targeted attacks on me. Jonathan Watson’s flattened skull. His unlimited resources to fuck with our lives.

She takes it in silently. I can read her expression by the dashboard lights. Then she says, “If he hadn’t wanted you to find out, he wouldn’t have given you a smartphone. He wants us to come prepared. Know what we’re getting into.”

I look up the number for the FBI and start to dial it. Kez takes the phone away.

“If you’re thinking about calling in the cavalry, I already thought of that,” she says. “Gwen ... we don’thaveanything. Prester died of a goddamn heart attack. Everything else we have can’t be traced to JonathanWatson, not fast and not directly. We’ve got threats, sure. But every one of them is vague. He’s made sure of it.”

“We’ve got video of him at the gas station,” I say.

“Pumping gas. It’s not a smoking gun, even if he’s with Sheryl. He could claim she was a hitchhiker and he let her off ten miles down the road, and there’s no way to prove otherwise unless Sheryl’s alive to tell her side of the story.”

I feel sick now. “You don’t think she is?”

“This man’s got a purpose,” she says. “He saw his sister get taken. Hefailed her. You said Sam looked into other cases MalusNavis was into. What do those have in common with Sheryl?”

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