“Blimey,” Harry Jr. said.

  I guess that made as much sense as anything else.

  “He had to get a metal plate in his head,” McGlade tapped his temple. “Set off the detectors at O’Hare.”

  “Dad pointed at me, screamed that I was a terrorist. They took me in a room and stuck a finger up my bum.”

  “Important lesson,” McGlade said. “Don’t trust anyone.”

  “Made me poo on the floor,” Harry Junior said.

  I smiled, knowing it was a rehearsed joke.

  Probably.

  Hopefully.

  Both Harrys pet the dog. “Hiya, Duffy. What have you been eating? Sugar from the bag? Your dog got fat, Jack.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “It looks like he devoured three other fat dogs.”

  “We’re putting him on a diet.”

  “What’s the diet?” Harry Junior added. “Sticks of butter dipped in hot fudge?”

  Quite the chip off the old blockhead.

  “At least it’s good you still don’t have that psycho cat,” Harry said. “That was the meanest thing to ever walk the earth.”

  “We still have Mr. Friskers,” Sam told them.

  “Seriously? How old is that beast? Thirty? Do cats live that long?”

  “He’s too mean to die. And put away your thermometer,” I warned. “The cat hates guns.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice.” McGlade tucked the gadget into his pocket.

  “Want to play GameMaster 2?” Sam asked Harry Junior.

  “Ya got Gunface Death Warrior 3?”

  “Yep.”

  “OK.”

  The kids ran inside, and I invited McGlade in.

  “Hey, Harry.” My husband reached out, shaking McGlade’s robotic hand. Harry lost the appendage many years ago, and had been getting yearly upgrades. The latest looked practically identical to his real one. “New prosthesis seems awesome.”

  “Want to see me crush beer bottles?”

  “Hell yes.”

  “Can you be a pal and grab our bags out of the rental? Most of it is stuff for you guys, anyway.”

  Phin walked off, and McGlade headed straight for the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Business Class was brutal. They were out of 12 year old Macallan sherry oak. I had to drink a blend.”

  I sat at the counter. “You poor thing. Will you ever recover emotionally?”

  “This will help.” He pulled out three Sam Adams Cherry Wheat beers. “How you doing? Any more sinkholes?”

  “So far so good. Want to see it?”

  “We can wait until morning. Jet lag.”

  “From a two hour flight?”

  “There’s still a time zone change. My body has a very sensitive internal clock. It’s either that or those five glasses of cheap scotch.”

  “You drove drunk?”

  Harry snorted while taking off his hat and coat. “Of course not. Harry Junior drove.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. He was fine. He talks cockney, but he remembered to stay on the right side of the road.”

  There was a lot to unpack there, which I simply ignored.

  Harry pried off a bottle cap with his fake hand, and passed it to me. From the living room, I heard the machine-gun fire and civilian screams of Gunface Death Warrior 3. Harry opened his own beer and we clinked longnecks and drank.

  “So your weird neighbor, Larry Wintergarten,” Harry began. “He has quite the history…”

  LAROLD

  Pretense, Pennsylvania

  February 12, 1973

  Larold didn’t know anything about committing murder.

  But he knew about privacy.

  Growing up in a community where watchful eyes were everywhere, it was difficult to indulge in certain activities without being seen.

  But in certain circumstances, anything goes.

  Larold learned that if one wanted to do something privately, there were three questions that needed to be answered.

  Where? Find someplace people don’t often go.

  When? Pick a time people are least likely to see you.

  How? Do it without leaving any evidence.

  All three rules had unique challenges. Especially when the Sickness was involved.

  Later, after Larold became Larry and killing became routine, a fourth question and rule would creep in: Who?

  But in February of 1973, Larold knew who he wanted to murder.

  The junkie who violated Rita.

  Clarsen.

  Where, when, and how required careful thought. Premeditation.

  If one treated murder like science, that meant the first step was to observe.

  Larold followed Clarsen for three very cold, very snowy, very miserable days, and discovered the man’s daily routine.

  After waking up in the shelter, Clarsen would panhandle. During the morning hours, he begged outside of grocery stores. At lunch time, fast food restaurants. Evenings, bars and liquor stores. He did pretty good, too. Though Larold kept his distance and couldn’t see every dime dropped into Clarsen’s hat, he judged that the man made at least ten dollars a day.

  It all went to the heroin dealer.

  Clarsen bought his smack from a pusher in a red Cadillac who cruised the downtown streets of Pretense. After Clarsen obtained his nightly balloon of drugs, Larold followed him past the city limits, into a wooded area by a creek. Larold kept his distance so Clarsen didn’t see him, and got lucky with bright moons and starry nights. Clarsen also smoked, so it wasn’t difficult to follow the orange glow through the winding, twisting deer trails.

  Clarsen’s regular destination was a culvert; a large drainage pipe belonging to a shuttered logging mill. Sitting in the concrete tube, next to a makeshift campfire, Clarsen injected his drugs and zoned out for several hours.

  After coming down, he’d stumble back to the shelter, crash for the remainder of the night, and repeat the process the following day.

  On the fourth night, Larold brought Rita with him to the culvert. His sister was in terrible shape. Thin, frail, shaking, barely able to make it through the woods without Larold holding her up.

  Shivering in the wet snow, holding each other for warmth, they spied on Clarsen as he got wasted.

  The boning knife was one of the few personal items Larold had taken when he left the Goodall farm. He’d used it to slaughter and butcher countless chickens, lambs, and pigs since Papa taught him how at age eight.

  Clarsen’s neck opened up, soft as a pork belly.

  Larold jumped away from the blood, watching as Clarsen’s eyes widened, the drugs not enough to quell the panic and the pain, his hands futilely trying to close a wound so wide it could swallow a fist. Clarsen thrashed, but didn’t get up, and he quickly exsanguinated into the culvert, dark blood pooling on shiny ice.

  They waited until Clarsen’s movements ceased, until no more breath steamed out the gaping hole in his neck, and then Larold hesitated.

  “Where do we start?” Rita asked.

  Larold considered it. When Rita devoured raw pig, she gorged on the shoulder or belly first.

  Except for tearing a bite out of Deacon Wormstrum’s upper arm after Sunday worship services—the act that got Rita shunned—she’d never eaten a fresh person before. The Sickness had previously been sated by digging up the graves of the recently deceased.

  According to Rita, young girls tasted best. They were the least stringy.

  “We can try the thigh,” Larold suggested. “A lot of meat there.”

  Rita nodded. In the moonlight, Larold saw a silvery line of drool on her chin.

  He put on a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves and a butcher’s apron they’d found at a Salvation Army store. Then he squatted next to the body and made two slices down Clarsen’s right leg, peeling off his pants.

  Making sure to keep his feet out of the growing pool of blood, Larold fileted a meaty cutlet from the dead man’s thigh.

  “Skin on or off?”

  “Off, please.”

  When Larold had finished, the result looked no different than a lamb shank with the bone out.

  “Put your gloves on,” he told his sister. “The police can detect blood under your fingernails.”

  Rita quickly tugged on the rubber mitts, then reached for the steak.

  Larold turned away. He was fine with the killing. He was fine with the butchering. But watching Rita eat made his stomach queasy. Instead he stared into Clarsen’s dead eyes.

  Rather than remorse or regret, Larold felt an odd sense of peace. He had no clue if his satisfaction resulted from feeding Rita’s Sickness, or from ending a life. Then he wondered if it mattered.

  “How is it?” he asked above her smacking and slurping.

  “Good.” She swallowed. “But chewy.”

  Larold considered different ways to tenderize her meal.

  “I love you, Larold.”

  The sentiment from Rita surprised him. They’d never spoken those words growing up. Papa had never shown any affection to either of them. Every once in a while, a handshake. But nothing affectionate.

  “I love you, Rita.”

  Rita began to gag, and Larold thought she was going to vomit.

  But instead of throwing up, his sister said, “More. Give me more.”

  PHIN

  I brought in McGlade’s sixth suitcase, setting it in the kitchen and taking another pull off the beer he opened for me. I’d only caught bits and pieces of his conversation with Jack, but I think I’d heard enough to get the gist.

  “So Larry Wintergarten is a model citizen,” I summed up.

  McGlade thumbed open another beer for himself, the bottle cab snapping to the ceiling and sticking into the plaster. Pretty damn cool.

  “On the surface, yes, model citizen. Good credit, has had the same checking account for forty years, no arrests, pays his taxes, votes in federal, state, and local elections, no court records, not so much as a speeding ticket, going all the way back to 1978, when he bought the house next door.”

  “So we have nothing to worry about.” Jack eyed the bottle cap stuck in the ceiling, and didn’t appear to find it as badass as I did.

  “I didn’t say that. After 1973, Wintergarten is so clean he squeaks. But what’s interesting is what happened before 1973.”

  McGlade waited, obviously relishing the suspense. Jack broke before I did.

  “So what happened before 1973, Harry?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “That’s your big reveal?” I asked. “Nothing?”

  “What’s revealing is there is nothing to reveal. His date of birth is 1951, according to his Colorado driver’s license. He was issued a social security number in Pennsylvania in 1973, because the first three numbers of your SS are the area number, assigned to locations where the application was received, and the middle two numbers are batch numbers, released by date. But I can’t find his birth certificate. I can’t find any hospital records. I can’t find any proof he exists.”

  “He told me he was Amish.” Jack drank more beer. “Don’t they have a religious exemption?”

  McGlade nodded. “Absolutelypants. That’s what got me thinking. If he didn’t have a birth certificate, how did he get a social security card? Dude is Amish, has to get new ID, that starts with a birth certificate. So where is it? There’s nothing. At least, no one named Wintergarten.”

  “How can you search every Amish community in the country?” I asked. “Especially if they don’t keep records?”

  Harry smiled, wide as a zebra’s ass. “I didn’t. I did a deep dive on the surname Wintergarten. All the way to the year 1557. Thanks to society’s current fascination with DNA matches and reconnecting with lost relatives, all of those ancestry and genealogy websites have records going back a thousand years. Wintergarten is a German word, meaning sunroom. It’s not a common name. I traced every Wintergarten who came to the US. None matched. There are no pockets of Amish Wintergartens in Pennsylvania, or Colorado, or anywhere that I could find.”

  “How sure are you?” I asked.

  “I sicced the best hackers from 8kun on it. And I followed up with a mutual friend of ours with a backdoor into the NSA.”

  Jack said, “Fleming?“

  Harry nodded. “Yeah. She can pretty much access anything ever put on a server, and nothing came up. Which led me to my next revelation.”

  “He changed his name,” Jack stated.

  “Correctpants. Your neighbor’s name isn’t Wintergarten. I think he made that name up when he applied for his social security card. It was a lot easier to get fake important documents back in the 70s. Hell, he could have applied for it at a post office with a person claiming to know him, and a hand-written birth certificate, and they would have plugged him into the system. Then he got a driver’s license with his social security card and an electric bill. But that begs the question.”

  “Why did he change his name?” I asked.

  “Exactomundopants. It’s like you guys have sleuthed before.”

  “He said his sister was shunned.” Jack rubbed her chin. “I doubt he was trying to hide from his family. They likely weren’t looking for him.”

  “But maybe the police were.” Harry frowned. “But I couldn’t find anything. After my search for Wintergarten dead-ended, I figured there was a chance he changed his name, but kept his age the same. So I scoured police records for boys born in 1950 named Larry or Laurence, with a few different spellings, starting in Pennsylvania. And I found… nothingpants.”

  “Did you widen the search for news?” I asked. “Maybe something in the local newspaper police blotter?”

  “I tried. Nada. But I did look into disappearances in your area. Your mom’s tea was right. Over four hundred missing persons in Destiny and the four neighboring zip codes going back to the 70s. Ten times the national average. Even more circumstantial evidence that your neighbor is a serial killer.”

  “Anything on the Peeper?” Jack asked.

  “Nothing solid.”

  Jack grinned and smacked his shoulder. “The Peeper isn’t solid?”

  McGlade laughed. Must have been an inside joke.

  “I didn’t find anything in the news. But I found some references on an urban legend site. Your quaint little town has a few local boogeymen. The Peeper, who peeks in windows and steals pictures. The Destiny Drac, who roams the hospitals at night and sucks the blood from patients’ IVs. You even have a Chupacabra. Eats people’s pets. Who needs another beer?”

  The vote was unanimous. I grabbed more, while Jack eyed Harry’s luggage.

  “So all of this is the GPR?” she asked.

  “Hell no. One suitcase for the radar. Two for my delicates and sundries. The other three are housewarming gifts. Feel free to dig in.”

  I wheeled the nearest suitcase over. “This?”

  “That’s either for you, or my collection of vibrating butt plugs.”

  I tested the weight. “It’s heavy.”

  “Probably the butt plugs, then.”

  Assuming McGlade was kidding, I opened the suitcase.

  “You weren’t kidding.”

  I’d never seen so many butt plugs in one place. Actually, I’d never seen a butt plug before.

  Bigger than I would have thought. Jack rubbed her eyes, barely containing her laughter.

  “Don’t touch any,” McGlade warned. “I don’t want you getting your filthy hands all over them.”

  “Good thing you told me. I was going to start juggling.”

  “I thought you were staying for two days,” Jack said. “How many butt plugs do you need?”

  “I know, right? It killed me to leave some of my favorites at home.”

  I was still convinced this was just an elaborate McGlade joke, which he probably did just to fuck with TSA. But I refrained from juggling just to be on the safe side. I zipped the plugs back up and checked the next suitcase.

  “Hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes,” I marveled. “About fifty pounds of them.”

  “For the butt plugs?” Jack asked.

  “Those are for you. You’re welcome. Next one is all toilet paper.”

  “For the butt plugs?” I asked.

  “Also for you. When did you guys get so jovial? Normally you’re the Downbeat Duo, taking everything so goddamn serious. I’m not used to you joking around.”

  “I can’t speak for Jack, but with so much going on, I’ve decided to try and approach life with a sense of humor.”

  “And what’s your deal, Jackie? You’re actually laughing at my jokes.”

  Jack became deadly serious. “I’m guessing it’s a brain tumor.”

  Then we all began giggling our asses off. We killed our beers, McGlade found a bottle of Macallan 18 in his suitcase, and we drank the best whiskey I’d ever had in my life.

  Yeah, we had a sinkhole. Yeah, we were in a pandemic that showed no signs of ending. Yeah, our neighbor might be a homicidal maniac.

  But it felt great to just cut loose and have some fun.

  Just as the party was getting started, McGlade opted out. “Sorry. Exhausted. Where am I sleeping? In between you guys?”

  “Sofa bed.” Jack pointed to the living room.

  “You were serious about that? They still make sofa beds? Or is this one you bought at a thrift shop? Something from the 1980s that still has Smurf-Berry Crunch stuck in the cushion cracks?”

  “Dibs on that if you find any. I loved Smurf-Berry Crunch.”

  “Seriously, Phin? I would have pegged you more as a Wheaties guy. Jackie, what was your favorite breakfast cereal growing up?”

  “Crazy Cow. No one remembers it. Had a powder coating, turned the milk into a strawberry shake.”

  “Sounds healthy.”

  “I miss that. And Marathon candy bars.”

  Harry grinned and snapped the fingers of his good hand. “I remember those! The braided caramel that had a ruler on the back, showing it was twelve inches long.”

  “I have underwear like that,” I said.

  Laughs all around, a final pull on our beers, and then Jack got up to send the kids to bed in Sam’s room, and I pulled out the sofa bed and got blankets and pillows from the linen closet. McGlade staggered out of the bathroom in a red and blue footed pajama onesie with a Superman S on the chest.