He’s going to kill you, and he wanted you to know who he is first. The thought came in clear and sharp. She watched him take a hammer out of the bag, set it neatly on the table. He glanced at her, and then kept working. Another hammer, and then another, and he was organizing them. Not by size: he took out a small hammer painted entirely gold and set it next to a silver one with a black handle. He was lining them up like a collection. It felt like there was an anchor in her intestines: the drop and pull hurt. Oh my God, he’s going to make you suffer...

The sweat beaded at her hairline and trickled down the side of her face.

Derek’s face had paled when she’d asked him how his mother passed. She’d sworn she could see his heart pounding beneath the polyester of his shirt and had immediately regretted asking. She’d expected him to say cancer; that had been a hopeful thought on Rainy’s part, wishing for Sara to have died of something...normal? Cancer seemed safer than what he’d said; she could understand cancer.

“It was a homicide,” he’d mumbled. “They’ve never found her killer.”

This is what she’d known in her gut ever since he’d told her Sara had died. But she’d thought right away that it was Taured. He’d killed her mother; why not Derek’s?

Until she got back to the hotel in Vegas and had opened the Ziploc bag—the floppy disk, the photos, the driver’s licenses, both her mother’s and Feena’s dad’s—and she’d put it all together. Taured was a killer, but his insanity had created other killers. The one standing before her was working his way through the floppy disk, punishing the women Taured had already punished by taking those photos in the first place. But why?

“Isn’t it enough that I—that Sara—had to live through that place? That he drugged teenage girls and photographed them naked to blackmail them and their parents? That he destroyed our lives? Now you want to hunt us down and kill us?” Spittle flew out of her mouth, clinging to her chin. She’d screamed the last part and now Ginger was red with outrage. But he seemed to collect himself, and in the next minute he was smiling again. God, she wished he hadn’t shaved his beard. What he said next made the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention.

“Don’t be stupid. I never had to hunt Sara. She was a lamb. I just took her while she was visiting that cactus you girls used to love. Do you remember how you’d get all horny for that cactus?”