She wrenched herself backward with a cry. Nate had reached out and put his hands on her shoulders. The cold feeling of death washed over her in a wave, almost bringing her to her knees with despair.
“Jesus, Laura…” Nate stepped back and gave her space, shaking his head. “Sit down. Please. You need to rest for a minute, get your breath back. You’re on edge.”
Laura did as she was told, trying to swallow on her dry throat. She was, but he didn’t know why. She couldn’t tell him all the things that were flying around in her head. The killer. His death. Amy. Her own daughter. The burning need for a drink. The killer. Round and round in a circle, over and over again. All of them needed her attention right now. None of them could wait.
“All right, just take a deep breath in,” Nate said, drawing in his own breath with an exaggerated noise as he waved a hand encouragingly in her peripheral vision. “That’s it. And now let it out… Good, Laura. Let’s breathe in again, nice and slow.”
Laura followed his guidance, against her own will. There were tears pricking the backs of her eyelids. She needed this—to calm down, to think, to breathe. But she didn’t have the time. She couldn’t spare it. People were going to die and get hurt if she slowed down. People she cared about. Strangers, too. It didn’t matter. They all deserved to be saved.
But she followed Nate’s calm and soothing voice, breathing in when he told her to and breathing out only when he commanded it. Slowly, Laura found herself coming back down to earth.
She blinked and looked up at him, realizing that his face was full of worry and fear. He obviously thought she was losing it. She didn’t blame him.
“I’m all right,” she said, finding her voice steady and quiet again. “Just… we need to get back to it. Figure out who the next victim is. Alex something, it has to be.”
“Just wait a minute,” Nate said, shaking his head. “We need to think this through. I get that it’s a big coincidence. It’s really strange. Laura and Carrie is weird, Frost is even weirder. But I just don’t get how the rest of the pieces fit together.”
“What pieces?” Laura asked, frowning.
“Well, Albany, for one. Have you ever been to Albany before?” Nate sat up a little straighter, gesturing toward the local map they had pinned up on one wall, red pushpins indicating murder scenes. One more still needed to be added.
“No,” Laura admitted.
“So, if someone is targeting you somehow, why would they do it here in upstate New York? Why not closer to home—DC, or where you grew up?”
Nate’s voice was reasonable. Too reasonable, actually. If he would scream and shout at her, Laura would at least feel justified in arguing back.
“I don’t know,” she said, blowing out a heavy breath. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”
“And why would someone want to target you like this?” Nate asked, gentle but relentless. “Laura, if someone had a grudge against you, wouldn’t they just want to kill you? To hurt your family directly? Going after random strangers like this—does that make sense to you?”
“No.” Laura paused, then shook her head fiercely. “But, Nate, I’ve made dozens of arrests. And each of them had family members, people who might bear a grudge for taking them away. There are even family members of victims I didn’t manage to save in time, murders none of us were able to solve. There are probably hundreds of people who have a reason to dislike me.”
“We’re not talking about dislike,” Nate said, half-laughing on the word, but there was no humor in it. “Laura—killing three strangers. That’s not dislike. The only thing that could motivate that would be pure and unrestrained hatred. Do you really think someone out there feels that strongly about you? I mean, just you. Not a partner of yours or a judge or a local cop who did the groundwork before you arrived. Why would there be anyone out there who would hate just you, and you alone, that much?”
Laura paused, studying her hands. Everything he was saying made total sense. She couldn’t think of an answer.
“Look, it’s late,” Nate said. “Or early, maybe. I’m too tired to work it out. And you didn’t even get any rest at all. We need to head back to the motel, get some sleep.”
Laura opened her mouth to object. “But—”
“No, please. We aren’t going to get any further on this tonight—especially not sleep-deprived.” Nate only paused for a moment before continuing, not leaving her enough room to argue again. “We have to wait until morning for the forensic report, anyway. What else could we possibly be doing right now? We’ve spoken to the husband, and we can ask the sheriff to carry out all the background checks to make sure there’s no link between the three women. Forcing yourself to stay awake now doesn’t make any sense.”
“I could be going through my old cases,” Laura said stubbornly. “I could check through all of them and try to see if there’s someone who would hold that kind of grudge. That would be worthwhile.”
Nate sighed, buried his head in his hand for a moment, and then looked at her again. “Okay, fine. I had a couple of hours’ sleep earlier, so I’ll make a deal with you. You go get some rest, and I’ll start going through your previous case files. I’ll go through them with a fine-toothed comb, look for anyone who had any reason at all to be mad at you and crosscheck it against recent prison releases, see if we can make a shortlist of candidates who it could be.”
“I’m not going all the way back to the motel,” Laura said immediately. “I want to be here in case something happens.”
Nate growled under his breath. “Goddammit, woman. Fine. We’ll find you a room with a sofa somewhere, okay? But you are going to go to sleep.”
Laura hesitated, but at the look on his face, she finally nodded her head. “All right. Just for a few hours.” She didn’t want to agree to it at all, but she knew two things.
One, that he wasn’t going to take her theory seriously while he thought she was so tired she wasn’t thinking straight. Especially if she refused to take the reasonable course of action and get some rest.
And two, that she was so exhausted she really did feel like she was going to fall over on the spot. Which meant she was in no real condition to be helping anyone.
“Just for a few hours,” Laura repeated to herself under her breath, already trying to calculate whether there was some way she could reduce the time even further before she could come back to it and figure out who this killer with a grudge was.