Seth saw Jason halt.

He wasn’t close enough.

Jason set the bucket down in front of his feet and held his gun out to his father, the handle first. Leo reached for the weapon. Jason moved a step closer and soccer-kicked the bucket, sending the bucket and water flying over Leo’s legs.

Leo yelled and Seth leaped into the doorway, weapon aimed at Leo’s center mass.

“Drop it!” Seth yelled at Leo.

Leo’s gun swung in Seth’s direction. “Never!” Two black holes stared at Seth from the muzzle of the shotgun. Leo’s crazy eyes challenged him from the far end of the weapon.

Seth fired.

Leo’s left shoulder and upper arm vanished in a red mist. His body slammed against the wall, and he slid down to the floor. Jason fell to his knees next to his father, his hands scrambling to stop the bleeding.

Seth heard screaming. Trinity had her black hands over her eyes as she screamed from a crouch on the floor. Victoria bent over her, her good arm wrapped around the girl, her wide gaze locked with Seth’s.

The sirens grew louder.

Weak-kneed, Seth sat down heavily on the shed’s step. He looked at Leo. His shot had caught part of Leo’s neck. Seth’s shotgun clattered to the floor of the shed.

He no longer needed it.

Three days later

Seth held tight to her hand as they walked between the firs. Her left hand and wrist were in a brace, her scaphoid and radius broken from her fall. At least she wasn’t left-handed, but she might as well be. She couldn’t do anything—cut a steak, shampoo her hair, or type efficiently on her keyboard. She felt like an invalid with Seth as her caretaker. Sure, having him shampoo her hair was fun, but dictating her reports to him was simply frustrating.

He hadn’t complained once.

After Leo’s grisly death, she’d been focused on comforting Trinity and Jason. Nothing Victoria could do could erase that memory from Jason’s sight. His mother had appeared from Idaho the next day, packed him up, and taken him home to her new husband and young sons. Trinity said he’d texted a few times, complaining that his toddler half brothers were pests, but Victoria suspected he’d quickly grow accustomed to a caring family.

The shed had revealed a history of horrors. The investigators didn’t know how many bloodstains from different victims they were going to find in the mattress. Unlocking the lockbox had opened a Pandora’s box of death. Old square black-and-white photos and fading Polaroids revealed women in various states of bondage and death. No current color photos graced the box. It was theorized that Cesare had gotten too old to act as an angel of death in recent years. The newest items in the shed were in a plastic grocery bag. Investigators found six pairs of women’s shoes, six cell phones, and a few purses.

Cesare had created a small graveyard under the firs. A hundred yards from the house, they’d found the first of the graves. This one had been recently disturbed, the woman’s skull missing.

“I bet that’s the skull that Leo threw through my window,” Victoria had said to Callahan. “I figured out yesterday that it didn’t match the photos or X-rays I’d taken of the missing skulls.”

“So that tells me Leo was aware of the graveyard, too. I wonder if Cesare knew his son had discovered his dark side,” said Callahan.

“From what I heard that night, Cesare was oblivious to anything about Leo,” added Victoria.

Police and investigators had been at the cabin nonstop since the first fire truck had arrived late that night, expecting to help pull a car out of the water. Instead the first responders had been led by Seth to the cabin, where they tried to revive Cesare Abbadelli, who’d consumed an estimated thousand milligrams of phenobarbital. The old man had been unresponsive and his body had shut down within hours, following the identical path of the young women killed by Leo. His autopsy had revealed a body riddled with cancer; Seth estimated he wouldn’t have lived another six months.

Leo was dead at the scene. There was nothing the first responders could do for him.

Investigators had found eleven graves. So far. Victoria had been unable to join the team unearthing the graves. Part of her wanted to be here, making certain every little detail was handled appropriately. The rest of her wanted to never set foot near the cabin. Ever.

The graves exposed young woman after young woman. So far there’d been two exceptions. One young man and an older woman. According to Jason, Abbadelli’s older son and wife had “left town” years ago. DNA comparisons had been requested to see if these two sets of remains showed a genetic connection to Leo.

The rest of the Pacific Northwest police departments were digging into every cold case of missing young women, flooding the Oregon medical examiner’s office with requests. With all the publicity, Victoria had strong hopes that the last two women from the old circle would be identified. Esther Cavallo had pointed out that in the sixties and seventies the church had been known for its outreach program for runaways and women in “difficult” circumstances, receiving referrals from agencies in downtown Portland where women went to seek shelter. Possibly Cesare Abbadelli had used this program to search for women who fit his “type.” Women who wouldn’t be missed, women who needed a strong shoulder to cry on.

He must have stockpiled victims in his shed before creating the white circle in Forest Park. Could he have managed it alone? Callahan hadn’t been certain. He could have drugged the women into compliance. Or he could have had an accomplice. Scratch marks in the corners and around the doorframe of the shed spoke of the terrors of the women locked in his hellhole. The shed had been through extensive strengthening at one point, with heavy-duty boards nailed and glued into impenetrability. It was a prison cell.