“Enough,” Nate said, standing up from where he leaned on the desk as though he was tired of all of this. “Where were you last night?”
“I was…” Barton looked up, hope flaring in his eyes. “I was with my new girlfriend. I took her out on a date, to a restaurant, and we were there until late. Then I went back to her place. You can ask her!”
“Name and contact details,” Nate grunted, taking out a notebook. “We’ll need to talk to her.”
“Yeah, of course,” Barton said, almost stumbling over himself in his rush to jump out of the chair and dig his phone out of his pocket to recite her number.
It was almost certain, Laura thought, that his alibi would check out. He was far too confident about it. And his hands—they were wrong, the wrong color. She’d seen the man in her vision that they were after. Just because he was going after a man, didn’t mean it wasn’t the same killer. There were killers who had crossed gender lines. They tended to be rare—most of them went after one type of person and one type only—but they existed.
Laura reached into her pocket and found Ruby’s cell phone nestled in there. She opened the screen absentmindedly while Nate took down the woman’s details, scrolling onto the dating app. He was in there somewhere, she could feel it. Somewhere in this code, in all these matches…
A headache stabbed her in the temple, and her eyes shot over the screen quickly, trying to see what had triggered it. The messages she was looking at were different from the ones that had triggered the last vision. Different men. Maybe she could—
She was walking behind him again, studying him closely. He went into a café ahead, and Laura watched him—no, the man she was carried along by watched him—as he walked up to the counter, keeping an eye on him through the window.
He moved comfortably alongside the café, staring inside. Laura stared hard at the one they were following, trying to make out his features. He shared a laugh with the barista, throwing his head back, glancing outside and then flashing her a wide grin. A charming grin.
The same grin she’d seen in the vision earlier.
Bu, wait—this was all wrong. It was the same man, yes, but he was different. Different location. Different clothes. Even his hair was styled slightly differently, as if he’d been for a shower and then dried it off and put it back in not quite the same place.
Was that what had happened? He’d been for a shower? Changed his clothes? Maybe after finishing work? Laura tried to make sense of what she was seeing, running through the possibilities even as the vision played on. He was picking up his coffee now, moving toward the door.
It might have been later on in the same day. The killer had stalked him all day long, even as he returned home to change his clothes, before coming back outside dressed differently.
It could have been a different day. The headaches were strong, but Laura had no precise way of timing things out. Maybe it was happening a few hours from now. Maybe it was happening tomorrow and her headaches were just getting worse, or compounding on top of one another from the vision earlier.
It could have been that the future had changed. Laura had seen it plenty of times before. Had made it happen herself. The visions showed only a possible future. If something happened to affect the outcome, then everything could change. Had the guy woken up differently than expected? Bumped into someone who spilled something on his shirt and made him need to go home and change?
Or…
He moved outside, and Laura noticed there was something subtly different in the way he moved as he began to walk down the street again. Something off from the rhythm she’d observed before. It was so slight, but it was there.
It hit her like a slap in the face.
Twins.
She was watching the killer stalk another pair of identical twins.
Laura blinked her eyes, closing them on a crowded street where a young man walked with a coffee in his hands and opening them on Ruby Patrickson’s cell phone in her hand. Nate was just taking down the last digit of the phone number. No time at all had passed here, no matter how long the vision had felt.
Laura straightened up, her mind racing.
Another set of twins was going to die. Male twins.
How the hell was she going to convince Nate to follow her gut and investigate that?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He walked along behind him, studying the way he drank from his
coffee cup. Such a little thing, but that was where we gave ourselves away: in the little things. Those tiny mannerisms we couldn’t quite control. They were the things that pointed to the heart inside.
He’d spent a lot of time studying this. He’d had to. It was the only way to know what he was dealing with. He had to get to know a person, understand who they were, just from observing them. Sure, people made broad strokes sometimes. They would torment a homeless man, or pass him by blindly, or stop to give him their spare change. But a lot of that could be down to social pressure, to wanting to appear good, not to actually being good.
And it was important to know whether someone was good or bad. It really was. If you were going to remove them from this world, he thought, you ought to first do the due diligence of knowing as much about them as you could.
It had been a long day, tailing first one and then the other. Making notes and comparisons. Seeing the differences between them that only those close to them would notice. That one of them walked this way, the other slightly more this way. The way they interacted with strangers, with friends and colleagues. The speed of their movements, the toss of their heads, the way their eyes squinted to catch something in the distance.