feet each.
She walked around the blue cottage and looked in the windows. They all had shades pulled down, so that was terrifically unhelpful. She knocked on the door, no answer. She knocked again and heard nothing from inside.
She went around to the back, put her elbow through a pane of glass in the back door, reached through, undid the lock, and opened the door. She expected to perhaps hear the beep of an alarm system about to start shrieking, but there was only silence.
She closed the door behind her and looked around. This was obviously the kitchen. It was scrupulously neat and clean, with everything stacked and placed just so. In addition to maybe being a serial killer, Danvers could possibly be OCD, she thought.
She cleared the rooms downstairs and then headed up the steps to the second floor.
There were three bedrooms up here, and the last one was set up as a home office.
The bedrooms held nothing of interest.
The office was different. In a file cabinet there was a treasure trove. An old Stetson hat, and a stringy white wig. And even more incriminating, photos of Frankie Gomez, Hanna Rebane, Beth Clemmons, and Layne Gillespie.
Pine sat down at the wooden desk set against one wall and stared down at the pictures of the dead people.
She ran her gaze around the room wondering if she was looking at the living quarters of a serial killer who had killed at least four people and perhaps more.
Her gaze found and held on the edge of a wire that was snaking under the bed. It was almost invisible, but the light was coming in at just the right angle to reveal it. She bent down to look at where it was going. She saw the red light.
The next moment she leapt up, pulled the mattress off the bed, ran for the bathroom while dragging the mattress behind her, slammed the door, and threw herself into the bathtub with the mattress covering her.
An instant later the bomb she had seen under the bed detonated.
Chapter 69
LEE, LEE, COME IN HERE right now. Get off that tree. You’ll fall and hurt yourself.”
“Momma, don’t be mad at her. She’s just being Lee. She likes to climb things. She’ll figure out how to get down.”
Pine looked first at her mother and then her sister. Both stood on the saggy porch of their house. Julia Pine looked mad at her tomboy daughter, while Mercy Pine looked pleased that her sister was, well, just being herself.
That was the way it had always been with them: Lee doing what she loved and often getting into trouble because of it, and her sister defending her to the last.
The swirls of mist in front of her eyes deepened as the two most important people in her life vanished.
The next moment Pine sat up, a rush of air coming out of her compressed chest with such force that she thought she had also expelled both her lungs in the process. It was like she had just surfaced from a long dive. She pushed the mattress off her and coughed and spit up vile things from her mouth. The bathroom was in shambles, the mattress covered with debris.
But I’m still alive.
Yet she could smell smoke and the fire that was causing it, so she wasn’t out of the woods yet. She rolled out of the bathtub and rose on unsteady legs, her ears still ringing with the sound of the explosion. The bathroom door had been blown off its hinges and all she could see outside was a wall of fire.
She turned to the only escape route she had: a single window over the tub. She didn’t have to break the glass because it had already been shattered by the explosion. She cleaned out the remaining shards using a towel, climbed through the opening and out onto the roof.
She slid down to the end of the shingles, swung her legs over the side while holding on to the edge of the gutter, and hung there for a few moments while looking down and judging the distance she was going to fall.
She let go, hit the dirt, rolled, and came up running.
The fire must have hit a gas line somewhere in the house because the next thing she knew there was a second, far larger explosion, and a concussive wave hit her from behind and propelled her through the air for a good ten feet. She tumbled another dozen feet before coming to a stop, breathing