the knob to the defroster to clear the condensation off the pickup’s cracked windshield. The combination of his watery eyes and the low skirting fog made it hard to see. His gaze returned to the road and he shook his head.
It couldn’t be.
A girl was waving frantically from the center of the road just at the Banner Jump.
Jesus! You dumb shit! I’m going to kill you!
His eyes riveted to the figure in the roadway, Mikey slammed on the brakes.
Get. Out. Of. My. Way!
The Silverado’s nearly bald tires laid a smelly patch of rubber and slid toward the shoulder. Gravel spit out from under its tires, and in that instant Mikey thought that he was going to meet his Maker. Not in the way that he’d imagined lately. Not in the flash of an explosion in the toolshed where he converted the raw materials—the very flammable raw household materials—that turned a toxic brew of chemicals into money. Making meth was part chemistry class flunkout and part short-order cook. Mikey had assumed that if he died young, it would be in a blaze of glory.
A literal blaze.
As he skidded to avoid the girl in the road, Mikey did what he hadn’t done in a long time. He said a silent prayer.
The sound of branches scraped the side of his cab. The sparkle of broken glass glittered in the wet road like a busted snow globe. All came at him in the strangeness of slow motion. All came at him in the instant that he would later say was the beginning of a turning point.
The girl in the center of the road rushed at him. She was pulling at the handle of his door and he sat still and scared.
“We need help. Our friend’s hurt. My sister might be hurt, too.”
She was a teenager. Pretty. Scared. Very scared. Her words pelted him between big gulps of air. Mikey thought he detected the odor of beer, but he wasn’t sure if he’d smelled himself or the remnants of a can of Bud that had ricocheted from the drink caddy on the floorboard to the passenger seat. Reflexively, he reached down and tucked the beer under the seat. His priorities were warped by trouble, which followed him like a shadow. Trouble had been his soul mate. Personal disaster, his closest companion.
Mikey didn’t need another dose. He didn’t need a DUI.
The girl pulled open the driver’s-side door and lunged at him. She was blond with ice blue eyes. Everything about her was stunning—the kind of girl who got noticed in a crowd. The kind of girl he might have asked out on a date if he hadn’t ruined his life. A splash of blood trickled down from her temple, but otherwise she looked fine.
Scared, but oh-so-fine.
Mikey pulled back, but the seat belt held him in her grasp.
“What are you doing?”
“We need help! You have to help us.”
The young man pushed himself from behind the pickup’s steering wheel. He swung his legs to the ground.
His vision was fuzzy and he wiped his eyes with his palms as the girl dragged him to a silver ’92 Taurus on its side. Steam or smoke poured from the car’s crunched engine block. It was an instance in which there was no color. Shades of gray, black, silver. The girl’s black shirt was wet and he looked closer at it.
Was it water? Blood?
More steam erupted from the stomped-beer-can Taurus.
“This is gonna blow!” he said. “We got to get out of here.”
“Not without my sister, we’re not,” the girl said.
“Hey, I don’t care about your sister. I care about being blown to bits.”
“We need an ambulance. The sheriff!”
Mikey loathed the concept of wanting the sheriff in any proximity whatsoever. He had been arrested twice before and, despite the numbing haze of his addiction, he did not want to join the “Third Time’s the Charm” club of tweakers and drunks.
He pulled back, but the panicked girl grabbed his wrist.
“Over here,” she said. It was nothing short of a command. “Hurry! What’s the matter with you?”
He looked over and rubbed his eyes as the second girl, hunched over a body, looked up. He shook his head. The second girl locked her eyes on his. He rubbed his eyes. Even in the dim glow of a broken headlight, it was apparent that she was a dead ringer for the first girl.
Was he seeing double?
“Get moving! You have to help!”
What he saw next, he’d never forget. And never speak about.
Who would believe a tweaker like him?
One of the twins leaned closer to another figure on the roadside, a teenage boy.
“Help,” he said. “Help me, please.”
Fifteen years later, Detective Kendall Stark looked at the e-mail that she’d printed out on the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department laser printer. It was brief, puzzling, and, the detective had to admit to herself, a little concerning.
THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.
It was e-mailed to the Class of ’95 reunion website.
“That e-mail you forwarded was interesting,” she said, when she got Adam Canfield on the phone. Adam’s various responsibilities with the reunion committee included managing the website.
“You mean the truth one from the Bible?”
“Yes. Any idea who sent it?”
“Nope. It came from a Kinko’s copy center. Some loser from our class must work there.”
“All right. See you at the next meeting.”
She hung up and put the e-mail away. She wondered which one of their classmates had sent it and, more important, just what truth the writer had in mind.
Kendall had no idea that she was on the edge of a whirlpool, about to be sucked in.
CHAPTER ONE
Tacoma, Washington
It was close to midnight and Darius Fulton couldn’t sleep. He found himself on the couch watching TV. He wasn’t sure if it was the somewhat suspicious aioli he slathered on leftover crab cakes or the general malaise of his life. He was queasy and uneasy. He scrolled through the satellite guide. Hundreds of channels were listed there, but nothing was on. Nothing good, anyway. It was a cool spring night, the kind that made the inside of a historic North End Tacoma home chill down. Fast. Sometimes it felt like the walls were more colanderlike than solid. Outside, gusts shook the feathery tops of bright green pampas grass in front of his North Junett Street house, partially blocking the neighbors’ view.
Oh, yes, the neighbors.
Darius had heard them arguing earlier in the evening. Since they’d moved in a year and a half ago, they seemed to never miss the opportunity to seize the attention of everyone within earshot and eyesight. New car. New landscaping. New this. New that. Darius had been divorced for more than a year and knew that his days of keeping up with anyone were long gone. At fifty-five, Darius was going to have to make do with the residual trappings of the life he’d once known. Before the jerk with the Porsche scooped up his wife and left him in the dust.
He hoisted himself up and went to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of wine, dropping an ice cube into the slightly amber liquid. He didn’t care if ice cubes in wine was some grand faux pas. Hell, it was Chablis out of a box. He returned to the couch and restlessly flipped through the channels before settling on an Oprah broadcast that celebrated all the things he’d need to do to have his “best life.”
My best life was five, no, ten years ago, he thought.
Another