Safe Keeping. Barbara Taylor Sissel

a relief.”

      “Can he prove it?”

      “I don’t know. He didn’t say, and all the cops would tell me is that they wanted to question him, but not what it was about.”

      Lissa rested her head against the seatback. “Well, it could be anything. An unpaid speeding ticket. Lord knows he’s gotten a slew of those.”

      “Yeah,” Evan said, because, like her, he wanted it to be that simple. They both did. And maybe it was.

      “I wonder if he’s called Mom and Dad,” she said.

      “I don’t think so. He lost his cell phone.”

      “Figures. Is he getting another one?”

      “He says he’s busted.”

      “You didn’t give him any money.”

      “No, and to his credit, he didn’t ask.”

      “Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?” Lissa ran the tip of her finger along the lower curve of the steering wheel, biting her lip, trying not to cry.

      “Yeah,” Evan said, “but I can always go for hearing it again.”

      They decided Lissa wouldn’t call her parents until she knew something concrete. She was on her way to the office when her cell phone rang again. Glancing at the caller ID, she saw her own home phone number, the landline, and her heart faltered.

      “Tucker?” she said when she answered, because it could only be him.

      “That’s me,” he said.

      “What are you doing in my house?”

      “Hiding?” He laughed.

      Lissa didn’t. “Not funny. So not funny,” she repeated, and the breath she drew bumped over the renewal of tears, the hot mix of relief, aggravation and outright fury that jammed her throat. If Tucker were here, she would pull off the road, she thought, and kill him.

      “Can you come home?” he said. “We need to talk.”

      “What is it, Tuck?” Something in his voice deepened her sense of disquiet. Even when he answered that it was nothing to worry about, she wasn’t mollified. Instead, what rose in her mind was the image of the two of them from that long ago Easter Sunday in 1981, and this time it brought with it a colder, darker memory of how quickly life could change, just the way it had then, in the space of one single, terrifying afternoon.

      3

      THE I-45 INTERSTATE that bisected the heart of town wasn’t really an interstate at all given that the entire length of it, some 294 miles, fell inside Texas borders. It was anchored on its northern end by the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and on its southern end by the bay-front city of Galveston. The drive down to the beach wasn’t bad. If you started out early enough, it made a nice day trip. As children, Lissa and Tucker went with their parents, and when Lissa was older, high school age, she went with her girlfriends.

      The last time was twenty years ago, the weekend after her high school graduation. She wouldn’t ever forget it because it was the same weekend she realized Evan wasn’t just some guy who worked for her dad. That weekend she went with a girlfriend to a party in a bay-front condo where cocaine was heaped in a bowl on the coffee table. It scared the shit out of her, but her girlfriend was all over it.

      Lissa tried it, too, one tiny line—how could she not?—and then she freaked out. She was certain she was going to die of an overdose or become an addict. She felt wild, as if she had somehow crawled outside her own skin. In her mania, she went out to the beach to dance, alone, putting herself in even worse jeopardy as it turned out. She was fortunate, later, to escape behind the locked door of the bathroom, and when she spied the telephone hanging on the wall near the toilet, she did the only thing that seemed reasonable; she dialed her dad’s office number. Thankfully—it still gave her chills to remember her luck—it was Evan who answered, Evan who came to retrieve her. Who knew what her dad might have done? He might have brought a gun or the police or both. He might have killed her, given his temper. He didn’t often lose it, but he could, if the right trigger was pulled.

      Instead, it was Evan who walked her up and down the beach along the water’s edge, while she jabbered like a madwoman until the stuff left her system. He took her to an all-night café and bought her orange juice and a doughnut, too, and suggested she was probably not good drug-addict material, and then he drove her home. At some point before that, he called Tucker and alerted him. Lissa remembered now that it was Tucker who covered for her with their parents, who waited up for her.

      It was usually the other way around, Lissa taking care of Tucker.

      She sat at the I-45 intersection, waiting for the light to change, thinking of him waiting at her house to tell her God knew what. It wouldn’t be anything good, not if the police were looking for him. When she had called Evan back and told him she was headed home, that Tucker was there, he said he would come, but as much as she might long for his support, she told him no. It was bad enough that she was missing work. She thought of her foolish behavior all those years ago, how she could so easily have fallen into harm’s way and, instead, had fallen— She paused. Not in love with Evan, she thought, not at first. Something better, richer. It had been more like falling into deep and abiding friendship and gratitude. Love, the full-out passionate, can’t get enough of you lust—Lissa’s face warmed—that came later; it had been a slow, sweet progression, like the unfolding of a flower’s petals into a fuller bloom. That long-ago day in Galveston, she hadn’t had a clue about what she and Evan would come to mean to each other.

      She’d still been woozy when he handed her carefully through the door to her little brother. Tucker had been all of fourteen, or fifteen, maybe. Lissa could see him in her mind’s eye, hustling her up the stairs, leading her quietly by their folks’ bedroom. He’d been upset with her, that she’d been drunk and strung out with people—men—she didn’t know. Any one of whom might have been a psycho, he said. He brought her an aspirin and a glass of water, and because he wanted to make a point about the danger she’d put herself in, he gave her a folder full of newspaper clippings he’d been collecting about the girls from communities near Galveston who had been found dead around there. So many, dating as far back as the 1970s, that there were rumors of multiple serial killers working in the area.

      Lissa knew of Tucker’s interest in crime. During his short college career, he talked about studying criminology, but she didn’t know much about the I-45 serial killings, or his fascination with them before that summer night when he took out all the contents of his folder and spread them around her on the bed and on the floor at her feet. There were photos of the victims and of the crime scene locations, most of which were strung along a battered stretch of I-45 the locals called the Gulf Freeway, an approximately fifty-mile stretch of the interstate that connected the unraveling southern edge of Houston to the Galveston Causeway. The land the highway bisected was riddled with tree-clotted, snake-infested bayous and the skeletal remains of oilfield equipment that sat forgotten and rusting in the mean shadows of smog-choked refineries. There were roads, too, old service roads made of chipped asphalt covered over with hard-packed dirt. They crisscrossed the terrain, and when the night wind was right, the smoke from the nearby refineries drifted down their rutted tracks like ghosts.

      It was a murderer’s paradise, the perfect dumping ground, one that over the years became known collectively as the killing fields. And the four-lane stretch of interstate that roped the crime scenes together, the Gulf Freeway, was referred to in other less flattering terms as the Highway to Hell, or the Road to Perdition, or the Killing Corridor.

      Lissa remembered being spooked by Tucker’s stories that night. She remembered thinking that while his interest did seem a bit obsessive and a little unusual for a kid his age, it hadn’t struck her as weird. Not given his worry about her, that in her inebriated state she might have fallen prey to some monster killer. He told her he’d been reading up on the FBI, everything about criminal profiling he could find. John Douglas was his hero, he said, and when Lissa shrugged in ignorance,