Where the hell can Emma and Cooper be? There aren’t any more abandoned mental institutions. Best I can think of is Adrian is holed up in the house of another victim. I close the back door in case Adrian is planning on coming back. Hope that he’s going to return is all I have. After everything I’m still back at square one with no idea in the world where Emma Green is being held.

I think about what Buttons said, about the twin boys being evil. There was no doubt in his mind the Twins carried on hurting people, probably even killing some. I start looking around the house not exactly sure what I’m looking for, but I go through everything. Maybe there’ll be a scrapbook or something. I switch on the computer. I read through emails. I check the attic access in the ceiling to see if anything is hidden up there, I check beneath the carpet in the bedrooms in the corners, and an hour into the search I check the closets for loose floorboards and my search pays off. Beneath the house is a cardboard box. I open it up. I lay the contents on the floor side by side. Nine wallets in total, each of them with credit cards and driver’s licenses and photos of children or wives, none of them with any cash. Three of the names I recognize from my last few years on the job—names of people who dropped off the face of the earth. Another one I think I recognize but can’t be sure.

The computer is still switched on. I spend twenty minutes running the rest of the names through the news database online, along with the ones I remember. Nine names and each of them comes back with a story. Nine men all gone missing dating back to the time Buttons said the Twins left Grover Hills. Nine men who were never found. A different range of men, family men, single men, a lawyer, a plumber, a couple of unemployed men, the youngest nineteen years old, the oldest forty-five. Each of them sharing in common a very bad fate according to the cardboard box hidden beneath the floorboards in the closet.

Buttons said the Twins got their first taste of what they could do when that man approached them wanting revenge. Since then they spent years at Grover Hills using the Scream Room as an outlet. Then one day they just up and left. They built a Scream Room of their own. Had to have. But where? Certainly not here. Not in this part of the city. None of the rooms here would stop a scream from traveling outside, and in a neighborhood like this somebody would have called the police.

So where? Where in the hell is their torture chamber? And if it’s in a house, why not live there? Why bring the souvenirs back here?

Because this is their home. Maybe this is closer to where they work. And they needed the souvenirs here for when they’re not visiting their other place.

I go back through everything. I go through their address book. I stop on a name I recognize. Edward Hunter. It was his father who was stabbed in jail. Edward was in jail too, but not till a few days after that. Edward was sentenced for killing two men. His father Jack was sentenced twenty years ago for killing eleven prostitutes. Are they related to Ellis and Murray? Is there a family trait that makes these men want to hurt people?

I go through the rest of the address book. I head out to the car in the garage and check for a GPS unit in case there’s a location plotted on it, but there’s only a map and the map doesn’t have any circles or crosses scrawled across it. I go through files and boxes of bills. I find tax statements but only for this address. If they own property somewhere else there’s no record of it here. If they’re paying for power for another house, the bills are getting sent to that address.

There’s a Scream Room somewhere, it could be a cabin in the woods, it could be a house with a soundproof basement, but nothing in this house tells me where.

It has to be somewhere. It’s who they are. A Scream Room is what makes them tick.

And I’m wondering if Edward Hunter might have an idea where that is.

I’m suddenly hit by a wall of exhaustion. It’s almost six-thirty and it’s daylight by the time I leave the Hunter house. It’s a slow drive home, not because of traffic—the roads are empty—but because fatigue is trying to convince me that nothing would feel better right now than driving into a lamppost and falling asleep.

There are patrol cars and crime scene tape outside of my house and I completely forgot that I wasn’t supposed to return. I switch cars, getting back into the rental, then drive to the nearest motel I can find, a place that looks okay in the dim early-morning light, and I figure since only two of the neon letters in the word vacancy are busted it can’t be that bad a place. The clerk behind the desk is asleep when I step through the doors but he snaps to attention pretty quick. He swipes my credit card and five minutes later I’m in a room that smells of furniture polish. I phone home and check my messages, of which there are four. One from my parents, the other three from Donovan Green. He tells me he’s been trying to get hold of me all night but the cell phone he gave me is switched off. I figure Schroder is asleep, so rather than waking him on his cell phone, I call the police station and leave a message for him. I give him the Hunter address and a brief rundown of what he’ll find. I also tell him to send somebody to check on Jesse Cartman. I don’t call Donovan Green.

I set my alarm for eight o’clock, which is a little over an hour away. I don’t bother getting undressed. I just take off my shoes and lie down and stare at the ceiling and think about what Emma Green is doing right now.

chapter fifty-two

The sunrise is something he’d like to see again. Hopefully next time it won’t be when he’s in so much pain. He napped a little during it, and a lot before it, the previous hours disappearing into a haze of dreams in which he saw his mother and his other mother, in which he even saw his father before his father disappeared from his life when Adrian was still in primary school, walking out on the family the way some men do when they’re offered simpler lives with their secretary.

He saw the good part of the sunrise. The sky lightened and for a while the sun seemed to refuse to appear, something holding it back, some entity wanting this day born into darkness. Then the tip of it broke the horizon, coming up out of the fields that trailed out as far as he could see, pouring golden light into the morning, an instant warmth, the world waking up around it. It slipped quickly into view then, the thing holding it earlier now shoving it forward, then it was angling upward, creating long shadows through the trees. He napped again a little afterward but never really fell asleep, his itching leg keeping him from drifting off completely.

The sun is up over the trees and the shadows are shorter but not by much when he goes back inside, his leg still sore to walk on but better since he rubbed the cream into it. The piece of medical padding he held over it has stuck to the wound and when he tugs at it there’s a tearing sound and a lot of pain to go along with it, so he stops tugging. Somehow he’s going to have to remove it and re-dress it and somehow it needs to heal. He can’t lose his leg. He rummages back around in the medicine cabinet hoping he’ll find something in the daylight that hid from him in the dark, but there’s nothing. He doesn’t understand what half of it is for, and there’s a pair of false teeth on one of the shelves that looks very creepy with dots of mold and fuzz around the gums. He guesses he’ll have to drive into town at some point today and pick up some supplies. There’s some food in the fridge, some from his mother, some from the Twins, but not enough to get them all through the next few days, but it’s fantastic having a fridge with power. There’s a reality slowly kicking in, and that reality tells him he can’t afford to keep too many parts of the collection at the same time. He’ll have to take care of Cooper’s mum and the girl today too. And it’s not such a bad thing he wasn’t able to get Theodore Tate.