Alton Gosnell was so ill that the nursing staff did not want to let Josie anywhere near him. She was not to be deterred. “I don’t care if he’s in the middle of a goddamn heart transplant. I want to talk to him,” she told the director of nursing at Rockview.

“Miss Quinn—”

Noah, who stood behind Josie, said, “It’s Chief Quinn. As in the chief of police.”

The director forced a weary smile. “Chief Quinn, Mr. Gosnell has an extremely high fever. His heart rate is up, and his blood pressure is down. As you are probably aware, he has a stoma and speaks using an artificial larynx. In his condition, any type of… interview would be extremely stressful. I simply cannot allow it.”

Josie put a hand on her hip. “I’ll be sure to pass along your recommendation to the families of the women he raped and killed. It’s not an interview. It’s an interrogation. If he’s about to die, then it’s especially urgent that I speak with him. There is still a girl missing in this town, and I’m damn well going to find her.”

“You can’t just walk in here and start making demands. You may be the chief of police, but you can’t just do whatever you want.”

Josie’s voice was low and tense, a wire pulled taut to its breaking point. “I’ve had just about all I can take of people getting in my way. This man left a mass grave on his property. Do you understand that? They’re unearthing the bodies of young women—ten so far—and they’re still going. Ground-penetrating radar shows there could be as many as sixty more buried up there. Mr. Gosnell may speak using an artificial larynx, but he can still speak. Those women don’t have that luxury anymore. I’m their voice now, and I have a lot of fucking questions. Now, you can get out of my way, or I can have you arrested and charged with obstruction of justice.”

“You can’t—”

“I can and I will. Don’t test me. Maybe it won’t hold up in court, but that’s not really my problem, now is it? That would be your attorney’s problem.”

Josie motioned toward the hallway behind the woman and stared her down, daring her to stand her ground. After a long, tense moment, the director stepped aside, wordlessly. At Josie’s back, she called, “He’s in room—”

“I know where he is,” Josie snapped without looking back at the woman.

Alton Gosnell was propped up in his bed, wearing a faded blue pajama top. The few strands of white hair left on his head floated upright. His skin flamed red. When he breathed, his stoma whistled. The sound of fluid in his lungs sounded like a coffee pot percolating. The room smelled of stale urine and sweat. His dark eyes followed Josie and Noah as they entered the room. Noah stood on one side of the bed, Josie on the other. Noah went through the motions of introducing them and reading him his rights. When Noah asked if he understood the rights as he had read them, Alton’s right hand lifted and pressed the artificial larynx to his throat. “You arresting me?” the robotic voice asked.

“We’re just here to talk, Mr. Gosnell,” Noah said. He waved a copy of the Miranda warning in the air. “I just have to read this before I talk to people about crimes.”

Alton nodded sagely. They had agreed beforehand that Noah would do most of the talking, since a misogynist like Alton would be more likely to talk to a man than a woman. That, and Josie wasn’t quite sure if she could trust herself to be professional.

“Mr. Gosnell, I’m sorry about the death of your son,” Noah began. Neither of them was sorry, but they had agreed that it was a place to start.

Alton shrugged. “He was weak. Stupid.”

Noah and Josie exchanged a look. Noah dove in. “Stupid? It seems he was running quite a successful business up there on your property. From what we can tell, he was doing it for decades.”

The gnarled hand pressed the larynx into his throat. “Got caught though, didn’t he?” Alton eyed Josie. She refused to feel uncomfortable beneath his leering gaze, almost identical to his son’s. He was old and infirm. He couldn’t even walk. He could leer all he wanted, but he couldn’t hurt her. “They never caught me.”

“Your son implicated you in his crimes,” Josie said.

The man laughed silently. Then he pressed his device against his throat again. “You can’t arrest me now. I’m too old, too sick.”

Josie didn’t care if the guy disintegrated when they slapped the cuffs on him, he was going down. She opened her mouth to say so, but Noah jumped in. “What was the difference? Between you and Nick. Why didn’t you ever get caught?”

Gosnell’s eyes traveled back toward Noah. “I didn’t bring nobody else up there. It was just me. I didn’t sell ’em, and I sure as shit didn’t keep ’em around. When I was done with ’em, I put ’em down.”

“Put them down?” Noah prompted.

Alton said nothing. Noah tried a different tack. “What did you do with them after you put them down?”

“Plenty of land up there,” Alton said. “Especially after I bought the property behind us.”

“Where did you take them from? Why didn’t people notice?”

Alton shook his head. “Never took one from the same place twice. Drove as far as I could, picked one I didn’t think would be missed, waited till no one was around and I took her. Back then we didn’t have cell phones and goddamn cameras everywhere. It was easier back then, and I sure as shit never took as many as my boy.”

“How many do you think are out there?” Noah asked.

“Don’t know. Never counted ’em.”

“Do you remember the first time you, uh, put one of them down?” Noah asked.

Alton stared straight ahead. If his breathing wasn’t so labored, Josie might have thought he was dead. Noah said, “Mr. Gosnell?”

Perhaps he was remembering. His eyes glazed over, and a look that could only be described as euphoric came over his crimson face. Josie felt sick. He was, she realized, a genuine serial killer. He had operated for decades unchecked, unfettered, with enough private land to hide his crimes for all that time. Not only was he completely without remorse, but he had enjoyed his crimes. Josie knew from the resurrected town lore about the Gosnell family that Alton’s wife had supposedly run off when her son was only nine, which meant that Nick had been raised almost solely by his father, who had shaped him in his image. Two generations of serial killers. Like father, like son.

Lisette’s voice, fierce and tremulous, sounded from the door. “You tell them the truth, Alton.”

Startled, Noah and Josie looked at her. She stood leaning on her walker, her tiny frame seeming to fill up the entire doorway. Her eyes were aflame, and they were trained on Alton Gosnell with a savage intensity. Josie had never seen that look on her grandmother’s face before. Her sweet, loving grandmother.

“Gram?” Josie said.

Lisette thrust her walker into the room, wielding it like a weapon. She banged into Gosnell’s bed, jarring it. Gosnell’s euphoric reverie gave way to annoyance. He flicked her a dirty look. Pressing his artificial larynx into his throat again, he said, “Shut up, Lisette.”

She shook a finger at him. Her entire body shook with rage. “You think I don’t know what you did? I figured it out. I know it was you. I know what you did to my… my…. Ramona. Now you tell the truth, you sick bastard.”

At the name Ramona, Josie felt all the color drain from her face. “Gram?” she said again, her voice weakening as she looked over at a woman she barely recognized. This woman was not her grandmother. This was a different woman. A woman with hate in her eyes and vengeance quivering through her body. The only thing that seemed to stop her wrapping her fingers around Gosnell’s throat was her walker.

Gosnell laughed noiselessly again. Then he looked at Lisette and pressed his device into his throat. “She was perfect. You did a good job making her, Lisette. I hated putting her down. I would have kept her forever.”

Tears streamed down Lisette’s cheeks but she refused to acknowledge them, letting them fall to her shirt. She said nothing.

“You think I didn’t know?” he said to her.

Still, she remained silent.

“It was that army boy, wasn’t it? The one who boarded with your family for the summer? I saw you in the woods with him once. Gave it to you good, he did.”

Lisette gasped. Noah remained completely silent and still, letting the whole thing play out. Josie’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Gram, what is he talking about?”

Lisette kept her eyes on Gosnell. “I was a girl,” she said. “Only thirteen. My parents rented out a room in our house to make extra money. One summer we had a soldier on his way from one place to another. He stayed a few months. He wasn’t that much older than me. I thought I loved him. After he left I realized I was pregnant.”

“What? Dad was your only child.”

“He was, as far as anyone knows. My mother told everyone that she was pregnant. As soon as I started to show, they kept me home. Told everyone I was sick. I gave birth at home to a beautiful baby girl. My mother passed her off as her own. My sister. Little Ramona.”

Gosnell mouthed her words. Little Ramona.

Josie’s voice trembled. “How long did she… did she live?”

“She was eight years old. I was hanging wash at the side of the house and she was playing there in the yard. Running around, chasing butterflies. Then she was gone. Just like that.” She glared at Gosnell. “He took her.”

“Wild animals ate her,” Gosnell said.

“The only animal that got her was you,” Lisette shot back.

More silent laughter shook his body.

Lisette said, “I searched the woods for her. My father searched with me. For days. We had the law up there looking too. Then, after about a week, we found her clothes there in the woods. Torn up. Police said she must have been attacked by a bear, or coyotes. They probably dragged her off. They tried to find her body for a few weeks but couldn’t. We buried an empty coffin.” Her voice choked in her throat. In a whisper she added, “An empty little coffin.” She took a moment then to wipe her tear-streaked face with the back of one of her sleeves. “My mother was happy to brush the whole thing under the carpet. I never believed a wild animal got her, but what else could have happened to her? Back then we didn’t have Megan’s list and all those things. People didn’t talk about sex crimes or child molesters. I just knew in my heart something bad happened to her, and it wasn’t an animal that did it. I was in those woods my whole life and never even saw a coyote. When you told me about Nick and about the women, I knew. I knew the kind of man Alton is—you don’t hear the things he says to the ladies here. It wasn’t a stretch that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

Like father, like son.

Goosebumps rose along Josie’s arms.

Lisette jarred the bed again with her walker. “What did you do to her, you son of a bitch?”

Gosnell looked away from her. His smirk disappeared. He had an almost pained look on his face. “She was my first,” he said. “I wanted to keep her, but after a few days of people searching for her, I realized I couldn’t. So I put her down. Kept her somewhere no one would find her and left the clothes so everyone would think a bear got her. I thought for sure they would come for me. I waited.”

“Did you hurt her? Did you touch her?”

His eyes glazed over again. “Not the way you think,” he said. “There was no time. My wife—she was still alive. My boy was there always asking questions. I couldn’t risk it. Every time I went to see her, one of them ruined it.”

Josie moved over to Lisette and put a hand over her grandmother’s forearm. “Gram,” she said.

“But she was the first one I took,” Gosnell went on. His eyes lit up. “And I never got caught. Then I knew I could do it.”

I knew I could do it.

Josie knew from the bodies being unearthed on the Gosnell property and the videos that all of the Gosnell victims were teenagers or older. If Alton’s appetites ran along the same lines as his son’s then eight-year-old Ramona would have been a victim of convenience, not necessarily chosen based on his sexual desire. He knew she was illegitimate, and she was easily plucked from the neighbor’s yard. The perfect test subject.

“How long?” Josie asked. “How long were you thinking about taking a girl before you took Ramona?”

“A long time,” he said. “Since I was a teenager. I wanted to do more things, but that came later with the others. I kept the name alive for my son. That first perfect kill. I told him he needed to find his own Ramona, and he did, but then he perverted the whole thing. Couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I told you he was stupid.”

So that’s where it had come from. Nick had simply appropriated the name for his little business venture even though it disappointed Alton. Perverted was an interesting choice of word. Josie tried to imagine Alton as a young man, nursing abduction and rape fantasies for at least a decade. What a thrill it must have been for him just to take the girl. To finally take a step toward making his sick fantasies a reality. That he had gotten away with it likely opened the floodgates for more of his twisted urges to come alive. Then he had killed his wife and started teaching his son how to rape and murder women and dispose of their bodies.

“Where is she?” Lisette asked. “Where is my daughter?”

“She’s up there,” Alton said. “She’s up there on the mountain with the rest of them.”