Spitting Devil by Brian Freeman Read Free Book Online Page B

necessarily. It happens more often than you think. Homeless people will sometimes make a nest in an unused space and only come out when the family is away or asleep. The incidents you describe are consistent with that possibility.”
    “You think someone could live in my house for months, and I wouldn’t notice?”
    “It sounds like you did notice,” Maggie told him. “You just didn’t realize what it might mean. Has anything else happened that seems unusual?”
    Malville opened his mouth to protest again, then closed it as he remembered something. “My e-mails,” he said.
    “What about them?”
    “Someone hacked my home e-mails. They got into my wi-fi and gave e-mails to the plaintiffs in litigation against my company. The other parties claimed the information came from an anonymous source.”
    “Could someone do that from inside your house?” Stride asked.
    “Sure.”
    “If that’s true, it doesn’t sound like the kind of risk a homeless stranger would take,” Maggie said. “It sounds personal.”
    “Do you have any enemies?” Stride asked.
    “I run a business. When you do that, there are people who don’t like you.”
    “Is there anyone in particular?”
    “Take a number,” Malville replied. “I’ve had major layoffs because of the recession. People are suing me. Everybody’s got a grudge.”
    Stride shook his head. “This is more than a grudge, Mr. Malville. We’re talking about someone capable of several brutal murders. Someone willing to destroy you and your family. Do you know anyone like that?”
    Malville’s face, which was closed and confused, slowly came alive. A dark horror spread across his features. “There is one man.”
    “Who?”
    “His name is Carl Flaten,” Malville said. “He’s a software engineer. I fired him.”
    “Why?” Maggie asked.
    “Carl was brilliant but severely anti-social. A lot of the good ones are rain men, but they’re mostly harmless. Not Carl. He sabotaged equipment for co-workers he didn’t like, he used company technology to develop sick video games, he was abusive to our customers. I kept him around longer than I should have because he was a genius, but finally, I had to get rid of him. That was about three months ago.”
    Malville paused, shaking his head, and then he added, “He had something wrong with him, too.”
    “What do you mean?” Stride asked.
    “He was sick.”
*
     
    The cough rattled like the sound of death.
    Alison spun, illuminating the corner of the attic with the beam of her flashlight. There he was. The spitting devil living in their house was tall and bony, like a walking skeleton, and his clothes sagged on his frame. She recognized the black turtleneck and jeans he wore; they were Michael’s. The man’s face had a sunken, ghostly pallor. His dirty blond hair hung low on his forehead. He was young but looked old, except for glistening blue eyes that pierced her with a naked malevolence.
    Behind him, Alison saw old blankets shoved together on the floor; they’d been taken from their closet. Remnants of food stolen from their refrigerator and freezer sat on a wooden tray. She saw a laptop computer fed by wires that climbed the walls and disappeared toward an electrical conduit. The bare beams of the attic surrounded him, and he’d stuck dozens of paper photographs to the protruding roof nails. The pictures flapped in the air currents that blew through the space.
    She recognized close-up color images of herself. Naked, in and out of the shower. Pictures of her and Michael making love, from weeks ago, before she drove him out of their bedroom. Pictures of women with red hair, dressed in her clothes, dead from dozens of stab wounds.
    He coughed again, and sputum bubbled up from his lungs and dribbled onto his mouth. He wiped it with his sleeve.
    “You did it, didn’t you?” he rasped. “You turned him in to the cops. I knew you would.”
    “Who the hell are you?”
    “I’m Carl,” he told her. “Don’t you