“You had enough to arrest?”

  “I was sure Larold would confess. Caught at the scene. Had the knife on him. But he stayed quiet. Wouldn’t say a damn thing. And I asked him hard. Real hard.”

  I felt a little less sorry for Blaylock’s injury knowing he was the type of cop who beat up suspects.

  Dirty cops gave good cops a bad name.

  I pressed on, interrogating without unnecessary force. “I found two newspaper articles. They said the witness disappeared.”

  “Rita. Almost definitely killed the wit. Probably ate him, too. Big guy. Tough. But she was big, too. He never showed for the deposition, we had to let Larold go. Next day, my station burned. Killed my deputy, my secretary, and a DUI in lockup. I survived. Most days wish I hadn’t.”

  He succumbed to a coughing fit. I waited.

  “No report on Larold? No prints?”

  “Nothing. No reports, no prints, no pictures. Then they both fled town. Spent years trying to track them down. Never could. But if you got photos of him and his wackadoodle sister, I can ID them. Even five decades later. I’ll never forget those two. Evil. Pure evil.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff. Larry says his sister vanished.”

  “I hope it’s true. She had a laugh. Like that cartoon, the one with the red-headed woodpecker. Still haunts me.”

  “I’ll get a picture of my neighbor and send you an email.”

  Blaylock’s body trembled. “If he’s living next to you, Lieutenant, do yourself a favor. Shoot him in his goddamn head. Or I’ll come visit you and do it myself.”

  Tonika swiveled the camera away. “Okay, Sheriff, you’re plenty riled up now. If you get a picture, Jack, you can email it to me.”

  She gave me her Gmail addy, and I thanked them both and wondered what to do next. Get a picture of Larry, obviously. But what if he actually was the same Larold that Blaylock knew? Could my neighbor really be the one responsible for over four hundred missing persons?

  Was he actually eating them?

  It seemed absurdly farfetched.

  “Morning, Mom.” Sam came into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. “Harry Junior is still asleep. Can we make pancakes?”

  “Sure. Can you walk Duffy out in front? I don’t want him in the backyard until Harry finishes checking it.”

  “Okay. Duffy! Want to go for a walk?”

  Duffy joined us in the kitchen. As Sam leashed him and took him out, I called after her, “Stay right in front! And don’t talk to anyone! Got it?”

  “Got it, Mom!”

  I hunted around for pancake mix, found a box, and got domestic on its ass.

  “Good news is, the foundation seems level.” Harry popped in through the patio door. “I don’t think your house will sink.”

  Very good news. “That’s a big relief. Thanks, Harry.”

  “I’m not done. Bad news is, there are big empty chambers underground in your backyard. So your lawn is almost definitely going to sink.”

  Very bad news. “What do we do?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. Fill it in with dirt? Make your whole backyard into a swimming pool? Just don’t go back there.” He pointed to his leg, and I saw dirt stains. “Tried to pull me in, up to my knee. Didn’t you hear me yelling?”

  “I didn’t. I was on a Zoom call.”

  As I mixed batter, I filled McGlade in. He whistled when I finished.

  “So maybe he is a CHUD after all. Want me to peek in his window, get some pics?”

  “I told you about his double barrel shotgun, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t retain information very well. Too many drugs. You got bacon with those pancakes?”

  “I’m sure I can find some.”

  “Groovypants. I’m going to shower. Want me to take some shelfies?”

  “Please refrain from that.”

  “Phin back yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “The kids?”

  “Your son is still asleep. Sam is out front with Duffy.”

  “You let her out front with a possible cannibal next door?”

  “I told her not to talk to anyone. Sam’s a good kid. She listens.”

  But she’d been out there for a while. Maybe I should go check on her. Even though I was 100% sure she wasn’t talking to anyone.

  SAM

  “I’m not supposed to talk to anyone.”

  Duffy refused to go poo, no matter where I walked him around the front yard, and Mr. Wintergarten had come out of his house and asked me the dog’s name.

  “Perfectly understandable,” he said. “Children shouldn’t talk to strangers. But I’m not a stranger. I’m your neighbor. I baked you cookies, remember? Did you like my cookies?”

  “They were good.”

  He walked a little closer, standing right on the line between his property and ours. “I can make you more cookies. Does your dog bite?”

  “No. He’s a good dog.”

  I took Duffy to the other side of the lawn, away from Mr. Wintergarten. I knew that was rude, but I’d rather be rude than disobedient. They key to getting more freedom was gaining trust, and Mom and Dad would only trust me if I did what they told me and kept my word.

  As Dad said all the time, a person is only as good as their word.

  Plus, I woke up feeling bad. My headache and stomach ache had gotten worse, and I had a tickle in my throat. Mom and Dad and Harry and Harry Junior had all been vaccinated against COVID-19, so according to science I shouldn’t be able to infect them. But I didn’t know if Mr. Wintergarten had gotten any shots, even though he was old enough to have been one of the first people eligible.

  “I noticed you have visitors. A man and a boy. Family?”

  Duffy finally pooped, so I pulled a plastic bag out of the case attached to the leash and focused on picking it up rather than answering, and that’s when Mom came out in sort of a rush.

  “Good morning, Jacqueline.”

  She stopped and stared at him, and I noticed her posture stiffen. “Good morning, Larry. Enjoying the spring morning?”

  “I am. Clear day. A bit cold for the season, but you’re probably used to that. I heard the Windy City gets cold.”

  Duffy pulled me over to Mom, and she bent down and patted his head, then put her hand on my shoulder. I stifled a cough, covering my mouth with my hand.

  Coughing wasn’t a good sign.

  “My husband mentioned you have a sister.”

  “Had. She passed. Food poisoning, if you can believe it. Make sure you get your meat up to the correct temperature.”

  Mom stood up again, walking over to Mr. Wintergarten, standing right in front of him, which was weird of her because she believed in social distancing.

  “I don’t recall mentioning we’re from Chicago,” Mom said.

  “Your husband must have told me. We chat sometimes, over the fence.”

  “I know. He said you followed the Grateful Dead.”

  Mr. Wintergarten chuckled, but it didn’t sound genuine. “Misspent youth. We had some memorable times.”

  “Quite a change of pace, from growing up Amish in Pennsylvania.”

  “Now that’s amusing. I don’t recall mentioning we’re from Pennsylvania.”

  “We?”

  They stared at each other, neither one talking. It reminded me of the ending of an old Western movie Dad liked to watch, where the good guy faced the bad guy.

  I didn’t like it. Neither did Duffy, whose hackles rose up on his back.

  Mr. Wintergarten eventually spoke. “Sometimes I feel like my sister never left. Have you ever lost someone close to you, Jacqueline?”

  Mom’s eyes got narrow, like they did when she got angry. “I haven’t. I’m very good at protecting those close to me.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “What did you say your sister’s name was?”

  “I prefer not to discuss her. Brings up some bad memories, I’m afraid. She was sick for a while.”

  “Sick with food poisoning?”

  Mr. Wintergarten smiled, then backed away, heading for his door. “I’m glad you’re cleaning up after your dog. The prior owners, Gregg and Sandy, and their delightful daughter, Bella, they had a dog. Spaniel, I think it was. They let him run around the neighborhood without a leash, doing his nasty business everywhere. They say this town has a Chupacabra. Eats animals that run around, unattended.”

  “We’ll keep an eye out for that. Have a good day, Larry.”

  “You too, Jacqueline. Bye, Samantha.”

  Mr. Wintergarten went into his house, and Mom walked back over to me. “Honey, I told you not to talk to anyone.”

  “He came out and started talking to me.”

  “Well, until we get to know Mr. Wintergarten better, treat him like he’s a stranger. If he starts to talk to you, just come inside.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t like how Mom was acting. I knew how tough she was. Not just because I lived with her, but because I read a lot about her on the web. Mom was strong. Mom was a hero.

  But as we went back into the house, I sensed something in Mom I’d never seen before.

  Mom seemed scared.

  LAROLD

  Oakland, California

  October 10, 1976

  Hippies. Yippies. Freaks. Stoners. Deadheads.

  The groupies were high most of the time. Many were homeless. Runaways. Rejects. Abandoned by their birth families.

  No one would ever miss them.

  It was like a free, never-ending, all-you-can-eat buffet. Most didn’t even put up a fight.

  After a while, Larold didn’t even mind the music.

  When Rita had fresh meat, she seemed almost normal. She’d still plunk out her hair. Still chew her fingers bloody. But with enough raw flesh, she coped.

  The illegal substances helped a bit, too.

  They tried every drug they could to staunch the Sickness. Some worked for a while. Some made it worse. After dropping acid the second time, Rita tore off her earlobes.

  Then she ate them.

  The narcotic that calmed her the most, that helped her sleep without thrashing, that even quelled her manic giggling, was Vitamin K.

  Ketamine.

  “Invented in 1962,” Corporal Bob told them. “Used it on the battlefield in the ‘Nam. Grunt could lose both legs, but you drop them down the k-hole and they were happy as a bug in a rug. Takes away the pain. Takes away the memories. Makes everything groovy, man. And I got the best Special K in the country. Military grade. When I mustered out, I took it all with me. Army didn’t miss it. Shit went FUBAR when Saigon fell.”

  “How much?” Larold asked.

  “Enough to get the whole world high, brother. The mother lode stash.”

  Corporal Bob hadn’t been exaggerating by much. When the two-day concert ended, and the wagon train began to pack up to follow the Dead to their next gig in Los Angeles, Larry and Rita had managed to get Corporal Bob alone in his custom van and tie him up nice and tight.

  They searched the van top to bottom, and couldn’t find where his mother lode stash of Vitamin K was hidden. And Corporal Bob didn’t want to tell them.

  He was a fighter. And a screamer. But he refused to talk.

  Even after Rita chewed off most of his right foot.

  But when she got to his more private areas, he blabbed like a brook.

  “It’s in the rocker panels!” he screeched. “Like in that French Connection flick!”

  Larold checked.

  The mother lode stash indeed. Over eighty pounds of powder. Enough for several lifetimes.

  They also found cash. Larry counted it later, and it totaled more than thirty-eight thousand dollars.

  “Please! Make the bitch stop!”

  Rita did not stop. But Larold showed mercy, and shared a few snorts of the Special K with Corporal Bob. The veteran died with a pleasant smile on his face, even as he bled out through his penile artery.

  They saved some of his bigger chunks for later meals, rolled the leftovers up in his custom van shag carpet, left his remains in a field, and took to the open road.

  “We’re going to find ourselves a home, Rita. We’re going to take this money and find ourselves a home.”

  JACK

  So apparently I’d picked a really bad spot for a home.

  Talking with Larry wasn’t just adversarial, it was downright creepy. I felt like I was back on the crime beat, dealing with predators.

  Except that my daughter was there, making it a hundred times worse.

  Larry had known I was from Chicago. He’d known that Jack was short for Jacqueline.

  My neighbor had been researching me.

  Maybe Larry wasn’t a serial killer, and I was overreacting. It’s the year 2020. We all Google each other.

  But I was the person who picked this house. If I picked one on top of a sinkhole, next door to a cannibal, then I shouldn’t be allowed to make any more important decisions for the rest of my life.

  While Harry showered, I prowled the Internet for diseases and disorders. Something Blaylock mentioned about Rita got me curious. I knew a little about people who self-harmed, but the hair-plucking and nail biting seemed to be something else.

  Trichotillomania, aka hair-pulling disorder, was an impulse control problem. But chewing your fingers bloody could have been related to Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, truly one of the most horrible diseases to ever plague humanity.

  It was a genetic disorder where the sufferer had mutations on the X chromosome, which resulted in a buildup of uric acid, which made the poor souls bite off their own lips, cheeks, and fingers.

  The only way to stop the behavior was to strap their hands down.

  Or to pull out all their teeth.

  That didn’t seem to match with Rita Goodall, though. Not only was Lesch-Nyhan syndrome almost exclusively a male disease—carrier mothers passing a recessive gene to their XY offspring—but it also came with severe nervous system impairment, so walking became impossible. And almost everyone with the syndrome died of kidney failure by their second decade of life.

  That didn’t sound like someone who could murder a witness and burn down a police station.

  But I followed the trail anyway, and my perseverance was rewarded with some of the most horrifying photographs I’ve ever seen on the world wide web. Things I couldn’t unsee. Things that would haunt me if I lived to be a hundred and thirty.

  I backed away from that topic, looking up compulsive giggling, and discovered Laughing Sickness. Also known as kuru.

  Kuru was the result of a prion infection, similar to mad cow disease.

  It had one known cause.

  “Cannibalism,” I said out loud.

  “Why are you reading about cannibals, Mom?”

  I yelped in surprise. I’d been so engrossed in being grossed-out that I hadn’t even noticed Sam come up behind me. She was damn good at sneaking around.

  I quickly set my phone down. “I clicked on something I shouldn’t have.”

  “Do you know more than fifteen hundred different species practice cannibalism?”

  “I didn’t know that. And it worries me that you do.”

  “In 1976, a primatologist named Jane Goodall, who is considered the world’s leading authority on chimpanzees, saw mother chimps eating their babies.”

  “That’s… awful.”

  “Hamsters, hippos, bears, pigs, hedgehogs, even prairie dogs will eat their own kind. So do praying mantis and black widows. We probably have black widows in the basement. That’s why I don’t like going down there.”

  “How about we make some pancakes before we decide to chow down on one another? Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  We finished stirring the pancake batter just as Harry Junior came in, still wearing his footie PJs. “Mornin’, Sam. Mornin’, Auntie Jack.”

  “Did you sleep well, Harry Junior?” I asked.

  “Slept like the bloody dead. I’d fancy a cuppa, I would. Did you make coffee, Auntie?”

  “Does your father let you drink coffee?” But as the words left my lips I knew the answer.

  “Papa does, as long as I keep it to under eight cups a day.”

  “It’s good that he looks out for you.”

  “Can I have coffee, Mom?”

  “Sure. There’s still some in the pot on the stove.”

  They both went to the stove and poured two mugs full, managing to only spill about half of it.

  Harry Junior took a big gulp. “Blimey. It’s bloody horrible.”

  “Your father made it.”

  “Mornin’, Papa. Did you try to make the worst coffee ever? Cuz you bloody well succeeded.”

  Harry wore a robe that clearly had HILTON written over the breast. “It’s Aunt Jack’s fault. Her house sank and her power went out, so I had to make it the old fashioned way.”

  “What’s the old fashioned way?” Harry Junior asked. “Making it like a knob-head wanker?”

  Sam thought that was hysterical. I was an adult, so I politely turned away before I started laughing.

  “Has anyone started the bacon?”

  “You can do it, Papa. Just don’t make it like a knob-head wanker.”

  “Knob-head wanker,” Sam repeated. “Is knob-head the same thing as dickhead, Mom?”

  “I’m not up on British slang, but that would be my guess.”

  “And a wanker is a man who masturbates?” Sam interpreted.

  Harry nodded. “In other words, all men.”

  “And bollocks is balls,” Harry Junior stated.

  McGlade patted his head. “Yes it is, son. Thanks for sharing that. I’ll make the bacon. Jackie… did you let my son have coffee? It makes him hyper.”

  “I… uh…”

  “I’m messing with you, he can drink coffee. Like anything could make him more hyper. Last week he actually ran around in circles until he keeled over.”