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“Whoa,” Nora says. “We won’t catch him if we’re dead or in a ditch.”
Ryan slows the van. He positions the rearview mirror so he can see Nora, who sits in the row immediately behind the bus’s single driver’s seat. She’s studying her phone, following the dot that tracks her AirTag.
“He’s on the move again,” she says, not looking up. They’ve tracked the blue dot to a place not too far from their B and B. The car stopped there for a few minutes, so they thought they had him. But he’s back on the road.
“Which way?”
Nora taps on her phone, like she’s trying to identify any landmarks in the direction The Monster is heading.
“Which way?” Ryan says again, more impatiently than he should.
“Stay on this road until we get to the roundabout. He’s on the A1. We’re a few miles away.”
Ryan steps on the gas and the van wobbles as it accelerates.
A raindrop splats the windshield, then another. He fumbles with the gauges until he finds the switch for the wipers, his main focus on the chase.
“What happened up there?” Nora finally asks.
Ryan’s mind is still racing, processing. Then he tells her: “He said she’s alive.”
“Wait, what?”
“And that she’s in danger.” Ryan fills her in on the rest. He keeps his eyes on the road but can feel the shock, or maybe skepticism, emanating off her.
Nora says, “And before he told you what’s going on, Pinky Man got a call and just took off?” She’s taken to calling him Pinky Man, which Ryan thinks fits. He wasn’t a monster. He’s just a man, a scared little man.
Ryan nods, as he takes the roundabout’s first exit onto Via Traversa Valdichiana.
It’s raining hard now, difficult to see. He’s always hated the rain since that night on Lovers’ Lane. He used to love the smell of an imminent rain, the clean feeling after heavy showers washed away the grime on the streets, the pollution in the air. He loved going for a run during a downpour. Ali called it le pétrichor, French for the pleasant smell after a rain. But now whenever it rains, he thinks of Ali’s matted hair, her makeup smeared, her milky white skin when she removed her shirt. Then her scream. And those monstrous hands with the missing pinky fingers yanking him out of the car.
Nora directs him to merge onto the A1, her eyes still on her phone tracking Pinky Man’s blue dot. “I think I know where he’s going.”
“Where?”
“The airport.”
27
LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS
By late afternoon, Poppy’s standing at the door of a well-maintained home in Maywood, a nice neighborhood in Kansas City.
The door opens and a kid examines her for a moment. He’s eleven or twelve with olive skin and dark hair that touches his shoulders. The message pinned this address for the podcaster’s studio, but this is someone’s house. Maybe the studio is in the basement.
“Hi, is your dad home?”
The kid scrunches his face. “I don’t have a dad.”
Poppy is taken aback. She glances at the numbers on the exterior of the house to make sure she’s at the right place: This is it. Maybe it was a crank tip after all. “I’m sorry, I’m looking for Ziggy de la Cruz.”
“That’s me.”
Oh. “You’re the host of the Treehouse podcast?”
He nods.
“I’m with the sheriff’s office. You sent a note to our tip line…”