Page 96 of Heartbreak Bay

“My name is Jonathan Bruce Watson,” he says. “Go to your computer. Do it now. I sent you a link. Please click it.”

I go to the office, and as I come around my desk, I see that my laptop’s awake, and there’s a text message alert. I click it, and the link appears.

“Don’t do it,” Connor says. He’s come out of nowhere, and he looks angry. Anxious. Afraid. “Dad,don’t.”

The voice on the phone says, “You know who I am, Sam. You know you need to click that link.”

It hits, then. The voice. Tyler. MalusNavis. The puppet master. He sounds different, though. Maybe this is the real voice at last.

“Where’s Gwen?” I ask him. “I know you’re behind all this, Tyler.”

“You can see her if you click the link,” he says. “We’re going to play a game. It’s calledWould You Rather. Do you know it?”

“I’m not playing.” I cover the speaker on the phone and whisper to Connor, “Go. Now. Get Lanny.Go.”

He doesn’t want to, but he obeys. I’m alone with the voice on the phone, the link steady and waiting on the laptop screen.

“You don’t have to play,” Tyler agrees. “That’s a choice. Everybody makes choices.”

“So tell me what happens if I don’t click the link. I can’t play if I don’t understand the stakes.”

“If you don’t, Gwen won’t come home alive to her children.”

I knew that was coming. My muscles tense until my pulse throbs in my temples. “And what if I click it? What then?”

“Then you’re participating in the game, Sam,” he says. “Everything has consequences. Gwen’s guilty of killing people, after all. She killed her ex-husband.”

“She had to.”

“She helped him kill others.”

“She didn’t.”

“I’ve seen that she can do terrible things, Sam. When I gave her the option of killing someone kindly, or leaving them dying in pain, can you guess which one she chose?”

I can’t answer. My skin crawls. My right hand clenches the mouse, and the cursor is hanging right over the link. All I have to do is click.

“She’d rather think of herself as a hero,” the voice says. “So let’s find out if she really is. Are you playing, Sam? For her life?”

Lanny and Connor are at the door, breathless and scared. I put the cell phone on mute and say, “Lanny, go call TBI Detective Randall Heidt and tell him that I have a man on the phone who says he has your mother, and he’s threatening her life. Tell him to trace the call. I’m going to keep him talking.Go.”

She gapes at me for a second, then spins and runs down the hall. Connor is left standing alone, paler than ever. “Connor. Go call J.B. Hall. Tell her the same thing.” I unmute the phone when I feel like I’m ready to keep going. “Tyler, we talked. I believe we really, really talked.I helped you.I believed you. Come on, man, I thought we connected. When you were on that bridge ... I know you really felt something. Something real.”

He’s silent for a long few seconds. Good.Keep thinking, keep the line open ...“Everything I said to you was true. I didn’t want to lie to you. You’re not guilty of anything.”

“If you didn’t lie, that means you called me because you thought about jumping.”

“I think about it a lot. It’s hard, doing this work. Do you understand that?”

“No, Tyler. I don’t. But I do know one thing ... You’re not like this. Or at least, you don’t have to be like this. You can change.”

“Someone has to find them,” he says. “These people need to be stopped. They need to be punished. And if the rest of you won’t do it, then I have to.”

I’m losing him. He’s looped back to his crusade again. “Tyler,pleasethink for a second about your sister. I said we’d talk about her. Tell me about her. Tell me what she was like.”

“I don’t want to talk about her. You told me you felt like this once. That someone had to pay. You do understand, Sam, it isn’t achoice. I have to do this to make things right.”

I don’t know how to save Gwen. I don’t know how to stop an obsession like his; I couldn’t stop mine, not without time and real work and understanding. And Tyler ... Tyler isn’t like me. I thought he was. That was my mistake.

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