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Anahera flinched.
But Vincent wasn’t finished. “She didn’t die, not straightaway. She kept on trying to talk even though I’d smashed one of her eyes almost out, and only half her mouth was moving. I sat beside her for a long time, stroking her hair, and telling her it would be all right. My mother used to stroke my hair and tell me it would be all right.” A dreamy look to him. “After.”
“After what?”
A sly smile. “After my father tucked me in at bedtime like a good dad. A picture-perfect dad.”
Nauseated, Anahera said, “Did he—”
“Talking about them is boring.” Plastic smile, unwavering aim. “My hobby’s the interesting thing. After the hiker started gurgling blood, I picked up my rock and smashed her and smashed her and smashed her until her face was pulp.” He shrugged. “I know, not very sophisticated, but in my defense, I was only fourteen.”
“Why were you so angry at your mother that day?” Anahera whispered, realizing that though he chose victims who reminded him of his horrific first sexual experience with a woman, his rage came from a far different source. “What did she do?” Or not do.
“I don’t remember. And I told you”—he looked straight down his arm at her with eyes that held nothing—“talking about the bastard and his bitch is boring.”
Anahera changed tack. “What happened to the hiker’s body?”
“I finally realized I’d been an idiot.” Vincent made a face. “I hadn’t taken any precautions or made any plans. Dumb teenage lack of impulse control.” He smiled, asking her to smile with him. “Eventually, I dragged her off the path and covered her up with leaves. I figured she’d be found, but my pretty, smiley girl hadn’t logged her hike with anyone, was still there the next day when I came back with a shovel and an axe and a tarp. Do you know how hard it is to chop up a body? Blood and viscera everywhere.”
“You didn’t.” It came out a rough whisper.
“Scout’s honor.” Vincent grinned. “I took off all my clothes before I started, put them in a plastic bag; and I brought water to wash in. It took me hours to carry the pieces out in my daypack.”
“Where is she?”
“Buried in the bush behind the house. Cadaver dogs never came that far when they finally did a search.”
“Is that why you decided to target more hikers? Because they were less likely to be missed at once?”
He nodded. “I met the second one on the trail and she came with me when I said I could show her a secret local waterfall. I managed to get her close enough to my burial ground to keep all of her—and I didn’t use a rock that time. No broken bones.”
And Anahera knew. “The skeleton Shane found.”
“I dug her up after my dear departed parents weren’t around to spy on me, then spent weeks cleaning up her bones. I kept her in my basement workroom that Jemima knows never to go into.” Another one of those lopsided grins. “But that first summer, I was still a kid, took the third one too soon in the same area. After I saw how the cops swarmed, I decided I’d have to be clever, not hunt so close to my home ground.”
Anahera frowned. “Did you put the bracelet in our cave on purpose?”
“Yes. Showing off to my friends.” His smile faded. “I was sorry later, when none of you wanted to go back there to hang out.” Voice quiet, poignant with sadness. “I was happy in that cave.”
“I don’t understand one thing,” Anahera said, wondering if she’d imagined the flash of movement in the trees behind Vincent’s shoulder.
“What?”
“You must’ve had other victims between that summer and your first trip abroad on your own.” After killing three times in a single summer, Vincent couldn’t have gone dormant until he began traveling internationally. “And you pointed it out yourself—we live in a small country. Why did no one make the connection between all the victims?”
“I’ve never been stupid, Ana, you know that.” It was a chiding statement. “I sat down and thought about what made me happy and realized I didn’t have a racial preference. MÄori, Tongan, Italian, Indian, I found pictures of women with the right look and imagined… playing with them. The joy, the release of tension I felt was the same.”
Anahera curled her fingers into her palms, flexed her feet.
“I favor nicer girls and spend the most time with them”—Vincent’s eyes skimmed her body with a chilling kind of warmth—“but the right whore will do to plug the gap, especially if she’s young and relatively unspoiled.” Roughness in his voice there, before it smoothed out to calm control again. “Age can vary from nineteen to a young-looking thirty-five or so. I did kill younger teenagers, but that was when I was a kid myself. You’d be surprised how many nice girls will meet a good-looking rich boy for a secret date.”
He shrugged. “Once I understood all that, it was easy to vary things up so I was satisfied, but no one would see a pattern. Take a good churchgoing girl, follow it up with a cheating soccer mom in another town, throw in a hell-raising runaway—no pattern, nothing to see.”
“Except you,” Anahera pointed out. “Someone should’ve noticed a boy whose name kept turning up again and again.”
“I told you I got clever,” he replied. “I did my research before each kill, had a place to dispose of the body.” Pride now, iridescent beneath the golden smile. “The churchgoing girl went into a fenced-off geothermal pool so hot she’s probably sludge by now. I drove the soccer mom’s SUV into a lake—it wasn’t found for years. Runaway’s buried in the woods on a friend’s farm. We met in town and I convinced her we’d smoke dope together if she snuck into the barn after lights-out.”
Vincent had been smart, scarily so. No signature, no attempts to play with the police. For him, the hunt wasn’t an act of blinding rage. Neither was the body dump. No, the rage came in between, after he had the women under his control.
A man like that could hide his crimes for decades.
But his intelligent choices had left him with no way to tell the world what he’d achieved. Anahera, however, was a captive audience he planned to silence.
Fuck him.
She’d use his arrogance to save herself. The arm with which he held the stun gun had to be getting tired. All she needed was a second’s inattention as he readjusted position and she’d take her chances. It had to be harder to hit a moving target than a stationary one, especially if that moving target was weaving and dodging in an unpredictable way.
“How many?” she asked, not looking in the direction where she’d seen movement. If someone was out there, she wasn’t going to give them away to Vincent.
“You know,” he said after a long pause, “I’ve never counted, but I think it must be something like twenty-seven.”
He was lying.
Whether it was the low number for a man who’d killed three times in a single blistering summer, or that he hadn’t counted, there was a lie in there somewhere. But then again, Vincent was a psychopath who’d successfully fooled people his entire lifetime. Lying was part of his oeuvre.