There had to be someone like that in her past.
If she needed to, she would go through every single file she had ever worked on until she found them. But she was going to have to do it fast—because if the man in that room with Nate wasn’t the real killer, then he was still out there, and he was still going to strike again tonight.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Laura stared at her own record on the screen, and tried not to let utter despair completely take over.
How had Nate faced down this list before and not just given up? It was immense. The cases built up quickly when you were working one a week, maybe more. There were cases that she had had only secondary involvement in, such as providing backup to a larger team. Cases where she’d been a junior agent assisting someone else. Cases she’d covered on her own. Cases with Nate.
So many crimes, and so many criminals. Any one of them could have the potential to be a killer. Even the ones who were arrested for less violent crimes—as much as Laura hated to admit it, the justice system didn’t always put out reformed citizens back into the world. Sometimes they were hardened, more ruthless. Sometimes they got their first kill on the inside.
She pushed herself back from the computer screen, holding her hands to either side of her temples. Nate had been checking through everything one by one, and he’d only gotten through a few years before she intervened. She wasn’t about to waste time in the same way.
She had to think about this logically. This wasn’t just a random selection of an agent who happened to be helping on the case. This was someone whose life she had impacted in a very direct way.
So, who would be angry with her for her actions against them? Angry enough to trigger a rampage of killing?
She recalled a particular case. A guy who had battered his wife to death, then staged it to look like a break-in. The FBI had been called in after the local PD made no headway at all on the case. It was Laura, with her outsider’s perspective, who had managed to see that the man was guilty as hell. He’d gone to prison for life.
He could have been one of the potential suspects on her list, if it wasn’t for the fact that she knew he was still locked away. Maybe it was someone like that, someone who could directly point to her as the one single person responsible for their incarceration. But a few years in jail wasn’t really enough to justify murder, was it? And those who had gone to jail for life, well, they were still there.
A family member? She’d had that idea early on. She remembered one woman who had killed her own husband, shooting him right in the face. She had tried to use the battered woman defense, although there had not been enough evidence for it to stick. Laura had felt bad for her, partly believing her and partly not. She’d ultimately been convicted. Laura remembered how the woman’s teenage son had screamed in the courtroom, until he was taken out and forcibly restrained. Could it be him? Did he hate Laura enough to try to get his revenge in this way?
No. She couldn’t believe it. Grief and fear for a parent were not the same thing as killing intent. The tears that had streamed down his face told her that he was at least empathetic. These killings—they were cold. Ruthless. They weren’t the actions of someone who could feel that emotional pain.
A thought struck her. A memory from a courtroom, of a man who seemed to feel no remorse whatsoever for what he had done. In fact, he had tried to pretend that he was insane at the time of the kidnapping he was eventually sent down for. But that had all been a story.
Laura had been a junior agent then, nowhere near as experienced as she was now. She hadn’t been able to distinguish the truth in his eyes when he said he didn’t remember anything that had happened, that he had been in some kind of fugue state.
That was back in Brooklyn. Years ago. It was a missing persons case when she was brought in as an extra body to help with the hunt. She remembered long nights searching through the city, accompanied by police dogs and even local volunteers, all of them combing through abandoned buildings and back streets and looking for some kind of sign that would tell them where the young woman had gone.
She’d had a vision. One of the first times that a vision had actually led her to solve a case. She’d followed it right to where the woman was being held, passing it off as pure luck, and found them. The man who had kidnapped her, and his victim. He had been standing over her with a knife, ready to end it all. But Laura had pulled her gun, stopped him with the threat of death, and arrested him. She had saved the woman’s life.
In fact, it was the first time that she had earned the reputation of having such a lucky touch on these cases. The start of her lucky streak, something that was infamous enough within the agency for Nate to have known about it before they were partnered up. That was where it all began.
Laura had gone to court to see the kidnapper enter a plea of insanity, and that night at home she had had a terrible vision. She had seen this same man going on to murder several women, strangling the life out of them and then abandoning them in their own homes for their families to find. She had seen the vivid colors, felt the last exhalation of the women’s breath on her cheek, watched their eyes as the life drained out of them. She had awoken shaking, terrified that he was going to get away with it.
It was simple. If he was judged to be insane, he would be sent for mental treatment. Then, once he proved himself to be sane—which the physicians would think was a result of their treatment—he would be released. He would be free to kill again.
Laura couldn’t let that happen.
So she had gone into the courtroom and presented herself as an expert witness. She had spoken to the killer’s state of mind when she arrested him. She had embellished it a little here and there, just enough to make him sound absolutely sane and rational, to show that he had had every intention of killing the woman before she interrupted. That had put paid to his insanity plea. Even so, the fact that he had only kidnapped and tried to kill someone, rather than actually doing it, gave him a lighter sentence.
Attempted homicide. It didn’t exactly carry a short sentence. But he must have gotten out early, probably on good behavior. Some kind of reform program.
Laura didn’t have to look it up. There was no point. She knew now. She knew why the feeling of déjà vu had been so strong when she walked around the apartment in which Caroline Birchtree lost her life. She knew why she had looked at the body in the kitchen of Nadia and Paul Frost’s house, and felt that same tingling feeling. She knew now.
She had seen all of these victims before. Years ago, she had seen them in another vision. She had watched them die the first time. She just hadn’t been able to put it together until now, because of all of the awful things she had seen between now and then, both in person and in her mind. She had managed to partly block them out, believing that she had seen a future which no longer existed.
But it did exist. It was real. It was happening now. What she had seen wasn’t what would happen if the killer was released early because of an insanity plea. She had seen what was going to happen all along.
No, that wasn’t quite right, she realized. Horror shot through her veins, making her hair stand up on the back of her neck. No, if she had let him enter his insanity plea, he would never have needed to kill these women. He would probably not even have remembered Laura’s name, because she would not have personally testified against him. She would have just been the anonymous agent who caught him. It wasn’t as though they’d had time to introduce themselves to one another while she was arresting him.
She had been right all along. Her vision had been correct. But her actions taken to prevent it had actually been what caused it to come to pass. She wasn’t the hero who had saved a woman’s life.
She was the woman who had damned several more to death.
And they had the wrong guy in custody. Brent Dockhand had nothing to do with this. The killer was still out there.