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Chapters (45)
  1. I know you'll never forgive me...
  2. Part One - Your Father
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Part Two - Your Mother
  24. Chapter Twenty-One
  25. Chapter Twenty-Two
  26. Chapter Twenty-Three
  27. Chapter Twenty-Four
  28. Chapter Twenty-Five
  29. Chapter Twenty-Six
  30. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-One
  35. Chapter Thirty-Two
  36. Chapter Thirty-Three
  37. Chapter Thirty-Four
  38. Chapter Thirty-Five
  39. Chapter Thirty-Six
  40. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  41. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  42. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  43. Chapter Forty
  44. Chapter Forty-One
  45. About the Author

Erica waved us toward the stairs. “Be my guest.”

*

Jay didn’t have much in the way of personal possessions to bring to Norm’s house. His music, posters, books, and clothes had been squeezed into two moving boxes. Darrell took the first box and dumped the contents onto the boy’s bed.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Rebecca.” He was acting distant and professional with me, and I didn’t blame him after what I’d said. “A diary, maybe? Jay seems like the kind of kid who might keep one.”

“Is that really going to help us? I can’t see him confessing to his diary. ‘Tonight I had pizza for dinner. Also killed Dad.’ ”

Darrell shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

“I don’t think Jay killed him,” I said. “And neither do you.”

“That may be true, but the sheriff’s right. Jay is our only credible suspect right now, and the more we find out about his relationship with his father, the more everything points to him. Fingerprints where they shouldn’t be? Arguments and threats only a few days before Gordon was killed? No alibi? I may not be certain he’s guilty, but I’m no longer convinced he’s innocent.”

Darrell poked through the record albums and rolled-up posters, but there was nothing like a diary to be found. He dumped the next box, which was filled with books.

“Norm said Gordon thought Jay was spying on him,” I pointed out. “Maybe he was. If he was digging up dirt about Gordon or the litigation, that would explain why his fingerprints were in the office.”

“Yes, I thought about that.”

“Spying on his dad may be unethical, but it doesn’t make him a killer.”

“No,” he agreed. “No, it doesn’t. But this might.”

“What?”

Darrell pointed at a book on Jay’s bed, lying among the classics and the poetry collections that had been stacked in the boxes. I knew what the book was, because I had it on my own bookshelf. Everyone in Black Wolf County had read it.

The Ursulina Murders by Ben Malloy.

It was a blow-by-blow account of the deaths of Kip and Racer and what the beast had done to their bodies.

“For a copycat killer,” Darrell said, “this is a road map.”

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Jay sat behind one of the desks in an empty classroom at the high school. Norm Foltz sat next to him. I told you that gossip spreads faster than a telegram in Black Wolf County, so everyone already knew by the time we got to the school that Jay had become a suspect in his father’s murder. Norm had arrived to act as the boy’s lawyer while we talked to him.