“I don’t know. I need to find some connection between
you and a killer.”
“Oh God,” Girard said, the panic returning to his
eyes. “My wife and boys.”
“The plainclothes detectives are still watching your
house. Your family is safe.” Noah left holding, finding Abbott standing in the
hall outside, frowning. And waiting.
“I had to talk to him,” Noah said. “Had to find out
what he knows.”
“And?”
“He says he doesn’t know anything. I’m inclined to
believe him. Well, that he doesn’t know he knows, anyway. He’s a squeaky clean
guy who couldn’t have made it from the crime scene back to his house before we
had him dragged from his bed.”
“Did you tell him another woman was dead?”
“Yeah. He looked shocked. I bought it.”
“Okay. I was going to talk to him, too, but I’ll leave
him to ruminate on his nonexistent enemies for a few more hours. Now go home.
Go to bed.”
Wednesday, February 24, 5:15 a.m.
He was clean now, the smell of smoke gone, the clothes
he’d worn tonight already decomposing in the pit. Carefully he placed Rachel
Ward’s shoes next to the men’s Nikes he’d placed there earlier that evening. He
adjusted Rachel’s left shoe, making sure it was completely straight, then
tilted the round spectacles he’d placed inside one of the Nikes so that it
better caught the light.
That’s better
. He liked things… precise.
They were already at Rachel’s house, the cops. They’d
find nothing there that he didn’t intend for them to find. He’d been precise in
his execution of Rachel.
He’d thought it all through and concluded that other
than speeding up his timeline, nothing terrible had really occurred tonight.
The Hats knew about Shadowland. They knew about the participant list.
Neither
of those things gets them even close to me.
However, Eve’s knowing about Rachel was getting too
close. It didn’t matter though. His sixth of the six would be a dark horse. Not
on anyone’s list. Not on anyone’s radar.
Still, Eve’s involvement had sped things up too
quickly. The press hadn’t caught up to what the police knew, and importantly,
what the police did not know. There had not been enough time for the headlines
to roil, for police failures and public frustration to mount. The Hat Squad
wasn’t close to being ruined. He’d have to let them spin their wheels for a few
days. Give the reporters time to close the gap.
In the meantime, he needed to rest. Although he was in
good shape, he wasn’t as young as he once was. Pulling this off twenty years
ago would have been a piece of cake. Now… Well, he’d need to pace himself. Cut
back on the physical and ramp up the mental. Focus on Eve. She was indeed a
challenge. He did enjoy a good challenge.
He opened the drawer where he kept the cell phones he
took from his victims. It was quite a little walk through the past, amusing to
see how far cell phone technology had progressed in the last decade. At the
bottom of the drawer were the beepers, positively archaic now. But on the very
top of the pile was the cell he was looking for.
He slipped it in his pocket. To make the call from
here would be stupid, indeed. It was easier back in the beeper days, he
thought. No pesky GPS to give the cops a technological advantage. He’d place this
call from a place that would have the cops chasing their tails. A threat and a
red herring. A veritable twofer.
Wednesday, February 24, 6:00 a.m.
Eve jerked awake and blearily lifted her head. She’d
fallen asleep at her kitchen table, facedown on the stack of usage logs and
graphs. Then she muttered a curse. She’d also knocked over the damn mug of
cocoa, spilling what was left all over one of the stacks she hadn’t reviewed
yet.
There wasn’t much cocoa to clean up, most of it having
soaked through the paper. Luckily it was all stored on her hard drive. She’d
print this batch again. Quickly she thumbed through the graphs until she came
to a page unblemished by brown cocoa stains.
And lowered herself onto a chair. It was a graph
showing steady play, upward of sixteen hours a day, and then… nothing. The
graph was three weeks old.
Dread cold in her gut, Eve opened her laptop to the
list. Subject 036 was Amy Millhouse, an ultra-user. A Google brought the
results Eve expected, still her stomach turned over as she clicked the article
open and read.
Amy Millhouse of West Calhoun was found dead on Sunday,
February 7. She had…
“Hung herself,” Eve read aloud. She closed her eyes.
“Of course she did.”
Wearily she found her cell phone and hit dial. Noah’s
cell was the last call she’d made. The last five calls she’d made. “It’s Eve. I
need to talk to you.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“No, you don’t—
Wait
.” But he’d hung up. She
closed her phone, somehow unsurprised at the knock at her door, not five
seconds later. He stood on her welcome mat, hat in one hand, cell in the other.
Looking like…
everything I ever wanted
.
“I’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes, trying
to decide if I should knock or not,” he said, then one corner of his mouth
lifted. “Sure you don’t believe in fate?”
She opened the door wider. “No. Come in.”
He did, putting his hat on her bookshelf. “No, you do,
or no you don’t?”
She stared up at him, her head aching. “What was the
question?”
He cupped her face in his palm and she wanted to weep.
“What’s wrong?”
She didn’t want to utter the words. Not yet. Instead
she turned her face into his palm and drew a breath, then drew back, new horror
registering. “Rachel was afraid of fire.”
He nodded, his eyes full of pain. “Yes.”
“By how much were we too late?”
“An hour. Maybe two.”
She took a step back. “So while we were eating
sandwiches and looking at logs and worrying about Kurt Buckland and trying to
find her right address…”
He nodded again. Swallowed hard. “Yes.”
Too late she realized he’d already put himself through
this. He’d discovered Rachel, experienced the horror firsthand. She was just
adding to his pain. “I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t sure who moved first, but she was in his
arms and he was holding her much too tightly. Except she held on just as
tightly, fists pressed into his back. He was hard, he was hurting. And he was
here. “Why did you come back?” she whispered.
He drew a deep breath that pressed her breasts into
his chest. “I went home first,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear.
“But there wasn’t anything for me there.”
Oh, Noah
.
Eve held on for another moment, then pulled away. The words stuck in her
throat. She forced them out. “There isn’t anything for you here either. I’m
sorry.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said fiercely.
She shook her head, wearily. “Believe what you want.
Doesn’t make it any less true.”
He closed his eyes. “Why did you call me then?”
Her chest hurt. “I think I found another one. Her name
is Amy Millhouse.”
He opened his eyes and they were blank, like all those
times at Sal’s. “Show me.”
He followed her into the kitchen and looked at the
graph, at the obituary, and his shoulders sagged. “MPD would have responded to
this suicide. I must have read this report. I didn’t find any scenes remotely
resembling Martha and Samantha’s.” He went too still and she could see he’d
thought of something he didn’t like.
“But?” she asked.
“But Jack read half of them. I couldn’t find him
tonight. Rachel was a mile from his house and he didn’t answer. Said he didn’t
get my calls. Said he’d fallen asleep.”
“Sunday night, at Sal’s, he checked his phone three
times before you came.”
“I know. Brock told me.”
“Will you report him?”
His shoulders sagged further. “I already did. I had
to.”
“I’m sorry.”
He jerked his head around to glare at her. “Stop
saying that.”
I hurt him.
I never wanted to hurt him
. “Sit down, Noah. I need to explain something to
you.”
The kitchen chair creaked under his weight. She sat,
folded her hands.
“Well?” he said sharply.
“I’m trying to figure out what to say,” she snapped
back. “I could say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ but you won’t buy that. I tried
‘I’m broken,’ but you didn’t accept that either. You read about what happened
to me, with Winters.”
“Yes.” He bit the word. “And if a con hadn’t killed
him in prison, I’d be tempted to.”
“You’d have to stand in line, I think. He was a very
bad man. But very handsome. He had… charisma. Most people in his hometown liked
him. He was a cop.”
“I know. I read that. You said he was looking for his
wife and son.”
“Caroline and Tom. They’d escaped, started a new life.
Tom and I became friends and he was never supposed to tell anyone what happened
to him, but he had to talk to someone. He told me everything, every slap, every
burn… Tom hated him.”
“I can understand that.”
“They ran away, came to Chicago. Dana, my guardian,
helped women like Caroline start over.” She hesitated, then shrugged. “Dana
faked IDs, procured Socials.”
His brows lifted. “She really put herself out there.
And Hunter?”
“Knew it all. Never participated in any of the
borderline illegal stuff, but he did his part, odd jobs. Kept the shelter
physically functional.”
“Fixed the roof?”
She smiled sadly. “Yeah. But that was long after
Caroline first came. By the time I met her, Caro had her GED, a job at a
university, was working on her degree. I worked for her, in the history
department’s office. She always made me feel like I belonged.”
“Then?”
“Our old boss died and David’s brother, Max, came in
to replace him.”
Noah was frowning. “Max Hunter. I know that name.”
“Played for the Lakers, eons ago. Tall, handsome,
tortured soul.”
Like you
, she thought, but kept that to herself. “Max
was in an accident that ended his sports career. He went back to school, became
a professor, and years later, our department chair. And I did what any normal
red-blooded eighteen-year-old girl would have done.”
“Fell for him?”
“Like a rock. But Max only had eyes for Caroline. When
I realized that, I said some things I really shouldn’t have to both of them,
things that with anyone else would have burned my bridges to the ground. But
Caroline loved me.” Eve had to clear her throat.
“What we didn’t know was that Caro’s ex had found her.
He wanted Tom back and he wanted Caroline to pay. I’d gone to Caro’s to
apologize for the things I said, and Winters was there, searching for Tom. Tom
was gone for the weekend. Camping trip, as I recall. Winters sized me up, saw I
was young, stupid, and very vulnerable. He pretended to be a maintenance guy
named Mike. He pretended to have sympathy for my
faux pas
with Max. He
pretended to think I was attractive.”
“You were,” Noah said fiercely. “You are.”
“I was. He asked me out, got me drunk. No, he bought
the beer. I willingly drank every drop he poured in my glass. I was so not
legal and so didn’t care. I willingly took him home and… willingly entertained
him.”
A muscle twitched in Noah’s cheek, but he said
nothing.
“Next morning he tried to go. I tried to keep him with
me, tried to get him to want me again.” She closed her eyes, this part as clear
as if it were happening right now. “I put on his coat, danced a little, and a
picture fell out of his pocket. A baby picture of Tom. I knew Caro had left
Tom’s baby pictures behind when she’d run years before.”
“And then you knew,” he said quietly, and she opened
her eyes to see he’d paled.
“And then I knew. The rest you know. Stab, stab,
slice, slice, strangle with twine, and left me for dead. I did die. Twice. I’m
damn lucky to be here.”
He tried to speak, pursed his lips. “Eve…”
“It’s all right, Noah. It’s past. But I need you to
understand. No one can live through something like that and not be changed.
Hell, I was screwed up enough before I ended up in Dana’s shelter. My mother
was an addict, would sell her soul for a hit.”
“And her daughter, too?” Noah asked, hoarse.
“No. Because I ran. Got caught, stuck in foster. Ran
again, different foster. Ran again and made it to Chicago. I would have had a
hard enough time forming attachments, having a normal relationship with any
man, but now… It’s just not possible.”
He met her eyes. “Why? I still don’t understand.”
Her cheeks heated. “Fine. After Winters, I had a
hysterectomy. Everything’s gone.”
He exhaled. “That’s it?”
She glared at him. He looked immensely relieved. “No,
that’s not
it
. But it’s enough.”