that why you’re here?” the girl asked.
Maggie was honest. “Partly. But mostly because I wanted to know how you were doing.”
Sarah nodded. “Are you the one trying to find him?”
“Me and others,” Maggie said. “Mostly me right now. Until we process the evidence, we don’t really have anything on him yet. But once we do get evidence, a lot of people will be after him. We’ll find him then for sure.”
“You don’t know my father,” Sarah said. She pulled her knees tightly to her body like she always did when she was trying to disappear inside herself.
“What do you mean?” Maggie asked.
“He always gets what he wants,” she whispered.
“Can you help me stop him?” Maggie asked. “Can you think of anything that might tell me where he is?”
And in that endlessly ironic way of the universe, it was at that very instant—as Maggie asked where Alan Hayes was—that I saw him. The lawn next door was enormous and dwarfed the brick ranch house in its center. The occupants were obviously not home, there was no car in the driveway, but I distinctly saw a figure step out from behind one of the corners of the house and walk briskly toward a stand of overgrown bushes that anchored the center of the yard. The bushes were over six feet tall and grew entangled across an overhead trellis, so there was plenty of room for a man like Hayes to hide inside. He would have a perfect view of the backyard next door.
I did not know what to do: to go or to stay.
“Can you remember anything about what he was like when he would return from being away at night?” Maggie was asking Sarah.
The young girl thought about it. “He was always sweating,” she offered. “And he seemed tired, as if he had been exercising.”
Maggie’s face did not move. She did not want Sarah to guess at the thoughts that I could quite clearly read: torture was hard work.
As Maggie asked more probing questions, a familiar feeling of impending doom crept over me, an insistent breeze of evil that sprang forth from the tangled copse of bushes next door. I imagined Hayes, hidden in the cool shadows beneath the hanging branches, watching as Maggie took his daughter from him just as Bobby Daniels had dared to take Alissa from him. I imagined the hate he would feel for Maggie, and I needed to know where that hate might lead him. I had to know what he was planning.
And then I did not have to imagine his fury. I was there, along the edges of his hiding place, peering inside—and I could feel it. The hatred that emanated from him had the power of scalding water. I did not want it on me. He sat completely immobile, almost in a parody of his daughter, his legs bent and his knees folded precisely up against his chest, his hands clutching his legs to him as he simmered in his hatred for Maggie and all she represented to him.
I did not want to crawl inside that hiding place with Hayes. I was filled with a mixture of despair and fear. I stayed outside, needing the sanity of the sun, but I could see his vantage point from where I stood: Maggie and Sarah, side by side, heads pressed together, whispering, forming a bond that threatened the hold Hayes had forced on his daughter.
Then, like a ray of the sun, focused by the lens of a magnifying glass until it turned into a laser beam of heat, Hayes turned his full hatred on Maggie. He had eyes only for her. He had room in his mind only for her. I felt blistering fury wash over him as a single thought took hold—he would destroy her. His mind flickered through the ways he might humiliate Maggie, the ways he might rip her flesh away and make her scream in agony while he stood, gloating, staring down at her, letting her know that he held the power of her life and her death in his hands. It was as if I were being forced to watch a film despicable to decent people but with a pornographic allure to others. Hayes loved his imaginings, I realized. He enjoyed feeding his wrath because he felt more and more alive the more his hatred swelled within him.
And then an even more terrible thought took hold of him. I could not quite touch it; it was there and it was evil,