When she finished telling them, Karen asked, “Does that mean there’s another maniac on the loose? Could he have followed you here?”

“He’s not following us,” I said. Although I really didn’t know. I didn’t know anything for sure. “If he was following us around, he would have been here already. And you have different last names than we do, so how could he associate you with us?”

“It’s not hard to do,” Bill said. “You look someone up on the Internet, and you see all the people they’re connected to. He could do that.”

Bill sounded so practical. Just like his daughter. I’d hoped for words that would bring greater peace of mind. But those words weren’t coming.

“Okay,” I said with less confidence, “but he hasn’t yet. And the police are on their way.”

“Maybe we should go to a hotel,” Bill said. “We could take Amanda and Henry there, get them out of harm’s way. If the cops want to talk to them, they’ll have to call me, and I can tell them where we are.”

“Ryan,” Karen said, “why would this man want to come after you this way? Do you have any idea?”

Three sets of eyes turned to me. Had Henry been awake and bouncing in his seat, waiting for his next meal, his likely would have joined them.

“I really don’t know. I can’t think of who this man is.”

“Could it be someone from work?” Bill asked. “Someone you fired or someone who feels they got cheated out of something?”

The same thing had started racing through my mind when Amanda gave me the news out in the car, and it continued to run beneath my conscious thoughts like an underground stream. Given a moment to sit and think about it, even with my wife and in-laws present before me, I brought those thoughts to the surface of my mind. I scanned through the catalog of recent events at work and at the Pig, hoping, really, that something would jump out. A disgruntled employee or client I could blame. A vendor who had walked away from work feeling cheated or misused.

Dawn Steiner with a male friend?

“I can’t think of anything obvious. I work in PR, and I own a stake in a bar. The most anger I encounter or hear about there is someone thinking we charge too much for beer.”

Bill leaned forward, scratching his cheek thoughtfully. “But this guy who came to your house, the one who banged on the door and tried to get in after Amanda and Henry—he mentioned you and your friend Blake. The one you were talking about earlier. Is there someone who could have a beef with both of you?”

“Big enough that he wanted to come to the house and act that way,” Amanda said, her voice low. “Like a maniac.”