Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (books to read in your 20s female TXT) 📕

setup for a miracle, because Jonathan Bruce Watson bought a lottery ticket in 2015, on the anniversary of his sister’s death.

“What?” Kez asks. I realize I’ve been silent too long. “What’s that look?”

“He won the Powerball multistate lottery,” I say. “He lost everything, Kez, and then he won the goddamn lottery. Seven hundred fifty million dollars.” I feel the hair raise on the back of my neck. What someone could do with that kind of money, if they were single-minded . . . I can’t imagine what Melvin would have done with it.

No, I actually can. He’d have become another Israel Keyes, burying murder kits in strategic locations all over the country, killing at his pleasure and disappearing without a trace. Israel Keyes called them vacations. It’s impossible to know the ghastly toll he really took; he traveled constantly, and admitted to only a few of the apparently unrelated deaths. A serial killer with massive funds, free time, focus . . . could do anything.

And then I blow up the photo that goes with the story as large as the small screen will handle. It’s not great. A man of medium height accepting an oversize check, looking not delighted but oddly unemotional. A baseball cap on his head.

I feel the knowledge go through me like a sudden, heart-stopping lightning strike.

Leonard Bay. That’s a photo of the man I tackled running from the mailing store. Bay, as in Heartbreak Bay.

The injury that flattened the side of his head.

I frantically google one more thing. Malus Navis.

A navigational beacon.

Leonard Bay had an address on Beacon Street, according to his license. Which had looked real enough, but $750 million will buy quality fakes.

Kez is asking me questions, but I’m not listening. I do another search, and I find another article about the abduction of little Clara Watson.

Jonathan Bruce Watson suffered severe head injuries. I remember the shocking sight of Len’s head as his hat rolled away. It isn’t visible in the Powerball photo, but there’s no mistake. Len is Jonathan Bruce Watson. Jonathan Bruce Watson is MalusNavis.

I had him. I had him. And I let him go. I hear a high, thin buzzing in my ears, and that dreadful weight on me again. Panic attack incoming.

No. I refuse. No.

I close my eyes, lean my head back, and breathe through it, ride the twisting waves of panic and sickness until the flood subsides, and when I finally am able to look again, the car is stopped. Kezia is staring at me. We’re in the breakdown lane of the freeway, cars and trucks whizzing past without a thought for the way the world has just changed.

I tell her the truth. All of it. MalusNavis’s targeted attacks on me. Jonathan Watson’s flattened skull. His unlimited resources to fuck with our lives.

She takes it in silently. I can read her expression by the dashboard lights. Then she says, “If he hadn’t wanted you to find out, he wouldn’t have given you a smartphone. He wants us to come prepared. Know what we’re getting into.”

I look up the number for the FBI and start to dial it. Kez takes the phone away.

“If you’re thinking about calling in the cavalry, I already thought of that,” she says. “Gwen . . . we don’t have anything. Prester died of a goddamn heart attack. Everything else we have can’t be traced to Jonathan Watson, not fast and not directly. We’ve got threats, sure. But every one of them is vague. He’s made sure of it.”

“We’ve got video of him at the gas station,” I say.

“Pumping gas. It’s not a smoking gun, even if he’s with Sheryl. He could claim she was a hitchhiker and he let her off ten miles down the road, and there’s no way to prove otherwise unless Sheryl’s alive to tell her side of the story.”

I feel sick now. “You don’t think she is?”

“This man’s got a purpose,” she says. “He saw his sister get taken. He failed her. You said Sam looked into other cases MalusNavis was into. What do those have in common with Sheryl?”

I don’t like where she’s going, but it feels right. “They were all suspected of murder at some point. At least on the Lost Angels boards.”

“Like I said, he’s got a type.”

“Like me,” I say. “Melvin’s little helper.”

She reaches over and takes my hand. “Not like you,” she says. “Not at all. We need to make a decision, now that we know this. Forward, or back? Your choice, Gwen. But this is higher stakes than we bargained for. If you want to call in the feds, the state police . . . we can do that. I just . . . I feel like he’s walled himself off for anything like fast action. He’ll have time to deal with us. Hurt us. And if he’s still got lottery money left, he can disappear without a trace, fast.”

“Nothing’s really changed,” I say. “The stakes are exactly the same. If I don’t go to him, he comes for my family. The only difference is that now we know he can actually destroy them without breaking a sweat.” I have to swallow bile to do it, but I say, “Forward. He says he wants to judge me. Let him do that.”

“I saw the photo,” she says. “His head. That man’s got brain damage. You can’t put your life in his hands, expecting him to be fair.”

My life is already in his hands, in all the ways that matter. I just shake my head. “I don’t trust him,” I say. “But I trust us. If we’ve got to fight on enemy ground, what do we need?”

“A goddamn army.”

“Knowledge,” I say. I hold up the phone. “And he’s given us the keys to the library.”

Kez glances at the clock in the dash. “If we’re going, we need to make time,” she says. “Miles to cover. A lot of them. And Gwen? If he’s as smart as you think he is, he’s cloned that phone. He’s watching everything you do. And tracking calls. If you do call anyone—TBI,