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Back Never Look Back Save as PDF
Chapters (51)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-One
  24. Twenty-Two
  25. Twenty-Three
  26. Twenty-Four
  27. Twenty-Five
  28. Twenty-Six
  29. Twenty-Seven
  30. Twenty-Eight
  31. Twenty-Nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-One
  34. Thirty-Two
  35. Thirty-Three
  36. Thirty-Four
  37. Thirty-Five
  38. Thirty-Six
  39. Thirty-Seven
  40. Thirty-Eight
  41. Thirty-Nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-One
  44. Forty-Two
  45. Forty-Three
  46. Acknowledgments
  47. P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
  48. About the Author
  49. About the Book
  50. Also by Alison Gaylin
  51. About the Publisher

“Jesus,” the elderly man whispered. “What a nut.”

“Sorry,” Quentin said to the clerk, though it hardly seemed enough. It’s not me, he wanted to say. Because this wasn’t him. He wasn’t like this. Something was happening to him here on the East Coast. Something dark inside him, surfacing.

Without a word, the clerk held up a FedEx package, his name and the address of the hotel scrawled on the front in Summer’s impatient handwriting. “Thank you,” Quentin said, remembering it now—Summer telling him over the phone about overnighting him reading material. “I was just . . . I went to a funeral today . . .” he said. “I’m a little out of sorts.”

The clerk didn’t respond, and Quentin didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t have. He headed for the elevator, his face wet and burning, guests whispering behind his back.

Once he got back into his room, Quentin put the package aside, opened the desk drawer, removed a piece of stationery, and wrote a long letter to Reg Sharkey. He put it into an envelope and found Reg’s address in the contacts on his phone. He took it downstairs and left it with the desk clerk, giving him enough money to send it first class, plus an extra twenty for “putting up with me being such an asshole,” which finally earned him some eye contact and a smile. “No worries,” the guy said.

Only then, when he was back in his room, did he think about opening the package Summer had sent.

Inside was an old paperback book, accompanied by a note from Summer that simply read: FOUND IT! Quentin looked at the book. The cover had bursts all over it: A special from the editors of The Asteroid! The true story of the Killer Lovers! Soon to be a Movie of the Week! And in the midst of them all, the title: The Inland Empire Killers: ’Til Death Do Us Part.

“God, you’re so good, Summer,” Quentin whispered.

He opened the book and read, losing himself in the lurid prose, the carefully chosen details. Gabriel LeRoy’s lisp, how it had made him subject to bullying as a kid; the long walks a fourteen-year-old April Cooper liked to take, pushing her baby sister, Jenny, in a stroller, in a bid to escape her stern, somber home. The bloodlust that had consumed April and Gabriel both, making them forget their weaknesses as individuals and turning them into a single, murderous entity, “a two-headed monster, fueled by rage.”