Cover

The Bad Man

When Helen finally awoke and left the dream world, the lazy feeling remained. She did not immediately think of the past week’s events, or the doctor’s words; in fact, she hovered for several long minutes in that state between sleep and full awareness. When she finally opened her eyes, she did it with a deep sense of regret

The clock beside the bed read nine thirty-two.

She had the profound and irrefutable idea that someone was watching her.

Feeling her heart begin to pound heavily in her chest, she sat straight up in bed, pulling the sheets close around her body.

Jessica stood in the doorway, holding Johnny Bear loosely with one hand. She looked tiny and lost, dwarfed by the doorframe. Helen let out a great sigh of relief.

“You scared me, honey.” She smiled, and began to climb out of bed. Her daughter’s words stopped her short.

“He’s coming for us, Mommy,” she said. “The bad man is here.”

Epigraph

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol’n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

—William Shakespeare, Richard III

PROLOGUE

BLOOD

Winter’s frozen fingers caressed Joe Thibideau’s face, his breath twisting in great clouds of steam to ice his eyelashes. The moon was bright as he moved as quickly as possible across the three inches of fresh snow that softened the ground. Little eight-year-old Melissa had been reported missing yesterday afternoon, and that was a long time in this weather. The night was brutally cold, and she was almost surely frozen stiff by now, a ghostly statue in the blue-white moonlight.

He immediately tried to wipe the image from his mind, but it kept coming back again, and chilled him more than the cold ever could. As the deputy sheriff in the small town of St. Boudin, Thibideau had never had to search for death until yesterday. Anyone dead was right out in plain sight, in the middle of a nasty car wreck, or perhaps a logging accident.

But this was different than anything he had faced before. This time, they had a killer in their midst.

The first victim, a local farmer named Eddie Brosseau, had been discovered yesterday morning about three miles away, stuffed inside the front end of an abandoned truck out in his field. He was missing his head, a right arm and part of a shoulder. The reason for this gruesome dismemberment was anybody’s guess; Thibideau figured that whoever killed the old man had trouble fitting the whole body into that little import’s engine cavity. Maybe there were other reasons, but he preferred not to think about it any more than was absolutely necessary.