Without another word, Sloane pulled a thick file out of her bag. The Kyle murders. She flipped through the contents at hyperspeed, pulling photos and crime scene descriptions.
“I take it that’s Malcolm Lowell?” Celine asked, staring down at a series of photos, each a close-up of one of Malcolm’s knife wounds. I thought of the scars winding their way in and out of his shirt.
People assumed you stayed quiet for your grandson’s sake—and maybe that’s true. Maybe Mason helped Darren. Maybe he watched and smiled. But everything I knew about Malcolm Lowell told me that he was a proud man. You isolated your family. You tried to control them.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Sloane said, staring at the pictures. “The angle of entry, especially on the torso wounds…it doesn’t make sense.”
“So Malcolm Lowell wasn’t stabbed by a child?” Michael asked, attempting to translate.
“This wound,” Sloane said, zeroing in on one of the pictures. “The knife was wielded from Lowell’s right side, suggesting a left-handed attacker. But the wound is too neat, too clean, and the shape suggests that the knife was held with the blade facing toward the ceiling. It entered the body at an angle of roughly one hundred and seven degrees.”
“So Malcolm was stabbed by a child?” Michael tried again.
“No,” Sloane said. She closed her eyes, every muscle in her body taut.
“Sloane,” I said. “What is it?”
“I should have seen it.” Sloane’s words were barely audible. “I should have seen it before, but I wasn’t looking.”
“You weren’t looking for what?” Agent Sterling asked her gently.
“He wasn’t stabbed by a child,” Sloane said. “And he wasn’t stabbed by a left-handed adult.” She opened her eyes. “It’s there, if you’re looking. If you run all possible scenarios.”
“What’s there?” I asked her quietly.
Sloane sat down hard. “I’m ninety-eight percent sure that the old man stabbed himself.”
What kind of determination would it take to stab a blade into your flesh over and over again? What kind of person could kill his own flesh and blood and then calmly turn the knife on himself?
I pictured myself holding a bloodied knife, pictured myself turning it inward, pictured the light glistening off the blade.
“I’m afraid Mr. Lowell is unavailable.” The home health aide who answered Lowell’s front door couldn’t tell us much more than that. The old man had taken his leave shortly after Agent Sterling had interviewed him—and hadn’t told a soul where he was going.
As I paced Lowell’s house, looking for some shred of evidence, something to confirm Sloane’s theory that he’d killed his daughter and son-in-law, then turned the knife on himself to bar suspicion, I couldn’t help remembering the statement he’d given to Agent Sterling about the murdered animals.
You said that you believed that Mason had watched. I pictured the knife again, picture myself holding it. It must have pleased you to be able to say those words, knowing Agent Sterling wouldn’t see the truth behind them. You weren’t talking about the way Mason watched Darren Darby kill those animals. You were talking about what your grandson watched you do.
“What are you thinking?” Dean asked, slipping in beside me.
“I’m thinking that maybe Nightshade did see his parents murdered. Maybe he did watch.” I paused, knowing that my next words would hit home for Dean. “Maybe it was a lesson. Maybe when Kane arrived later, Nightshade threw suspicion on Darren because little Mason Kyle had learned that a boy who tortured animals wasn’t worthy of following.”
Dean was quiet then, the kind of quiet that told me he’d gone to a dark and cavernous place in his own memory the moment I’d said the word lesson. Eventually, he clawed himself out.
“My daughter was a disappointment.” When Dean spoke, it took me a moment to realize that he was speaking from Lowell’s perspective. “I tried to raise her right. I tried to raise her to be worthy of my name, but she ended up being just another whore—pregnant at sixteen, defiant. They lived with me, Anna and her pathetic husband and the boy.”
The boy. The one who would grow up to be Nightshade.
“You thought Mason was cut from your daughter’s cloth,” I said, picking up where Dean had left off. “And then he started sneaking out.” By Malcolm Lowell’s own admission, he had tried to cage his family. He’d tried to control them. I’d assumed that the proud old man would have considered Mason’s behavior an affront.
But what if you didn’t? Air entered and exited my lungs. I took a step forward, even though I didn’t know what I was walking toward. What if you considered Mason’s little pastime a sign?
“When the animals started turning up,” Dean mused, his voice sounding uncannily like his father’s, “I thought it might be the boy. Perhaps he had potential after all.”
“But it wasn’t Mason.” I pressed my lips together as I thought about Kane, broken and hollow. “It was Darren Darby.”
“A disappointment,” Dean said harshly. “A sign of weakness. One that required an object lesson for my grandson about who he was and where he came from. We are not followers. We do not watch.”
Dean’s words coated me like oil, bringing me back to my own encounter with Malcolm Lowell as a child.
You knew what it was like to feel the life go out of your victims. You knew the power. You wanted Mason to see you for what you really were, to know exactly whose blood ran in his veins.
Out loud, I let myself take that thought to its logical conclusion. “To kill his own family, to plan it out so coldly, to go as far as to calmly and brutally attack himself…By the time of the Kyle murders, Malcolm Lowell was already a killer.”
Dean waited a beat and then took my statement a step further. “Already a Master.”
A chill spread slowly down my spine, like the cracking of ice. You were tested. You were found worthy. You’d already killed your nine.
“The timing doesn’t add up,” I said, pushing down the urge to look over my shoulder, like the old man might be there, watching me the way he had when I was a child. “The poison Master who trained Nightshade—the one who chose him as an apprentice—didn’t become a Master himself until years after the Kyle murders.”