But, glancing at the clock, Laura reminded herself that it was late fall. It was dark earlier now. There was a good chance that the man who lived here—Gregory Clifton—was still on his way home from work. Maybe still even working, if he had a late shift. The house was in poor repair, even in the dark: Laura could see weeds growing through the short driveway in front, and there was a piece of cardboard in place of one of the upstairs windows. It was the kind of place where someone might live if they were struggling to make it. Working graveyard shifts and even holding down more than one job—anything was plausible.
Laura got out of the car, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket against the cold air. She stepped forward hesitantly, her eyes straining. Her breath came out in a puff of white. She wanted to walk closer, but she was wary. It would mean stepping through the circle of the streetlight.
She made a decision and surged forward, her feet moving fast across the sidewalk. There wasn’t enough time left to hesitate. She didn’t have enough time to be wrong. She flashed through the light and past it, onto the weedy parking space out front of the house, her feet feeling the change from proper paved sidewalk to cracked concrete. There was no vehicle here, which reassured her somewhat. No one seemed to be here.
She moved forward, toward the front door. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she needed something. Anything. A hint of a sign.
Laura reached out and touched the door handle, not heavily enough to turn it or even make a sound, but she felt the spike through her head all the same. The night air was so quiet and still, only the sound of cars on the road back a few twists and turns away disturbing it. For a second it almost felt like none of this was real—
Laura was jolting along, stumbling on the uneven ground as she moved away from a car in a hurry. The door of the house was ahead of her. She was almost inside. She reached out a hand—his hand—she saw it in her peripheral vision—toward the door…
He brought the hand up to his face then, staring at it. It was covered in blood. He needed to clean it off before he touched anything—
Laura blinked her eyes open back on the same scene, almost disorientated by the door standing in the darkness in front of her both within the vision and now back in reality. But the hand that was stretched out toward it was her own. She blinked a few times to try and clear her head, settling back into her own body and reality with an uneasiness that she had rarely felt before. Coming here had been a risk, maybe a mistake. Putting herself into such close proximity with him, especially when her visions were already allowing her to see through his eyes.
But she would take it as a win, because now she knew something else. She was on the right track. It was him.
And he was still going to attack, and presumably kill, tonight. You didn’t get that much blood on your hands if you only grazed someone, or you failed to attack them at all.
Laura hesitated, tried touching the door again, the handle, even going to the window and trailing her hands along the wall. Nothing else came to her. Nothing that would help her see how to stop him. But at least now, she knew who she was looking for.
It was slim comfort, but if she didn’t manage to figure out where he was going, at least she would have the recourse of coming back here and maybe catching him literally red-handed.
Laura walked quickly back to her car, keenly aware of how exposed she was out here. Coming here without backup hadn’t been smart, but it had been her only option. The smart thing to do, even now, would be to call Nate and tell him what she’d discovered.
Or, at least, as much of it as she could to get him to back her up in her search for the killer. The killer who, she now knew, was Gregory Clifton. She had him in her sights, and she just needed to get over that finish line and find him before he attacked tonight.
But she couldn’t call Nate. Not yet. Not until she had actual evidence to show him. If she gave him just one more hunch, he would be furious with her. He would probably refuse to take her calls at all after that.
Laura sat behind the wheel, her hands gripping it at either side, trying to think. How could she figure this out? How could she find him now?
She knew he hadn’t been at work today, if he even held down a job anymore. He’d been at the café. If she had a warrant already she could bust into his house, see if there were any old receipts lying around or other clues that she could follow. But she had nothing, and no time to get one, and anything she did find by breaking in illegally would be utterly unusable in court. Never mind that she might save a life with it—if he was allowed to go free on a technicality, they would be back to square one, and he might have the chance to kill again.
Laura glanced around again to check there was no one nearby and picked up her cell phone, turning on the screen. The glow of it illuminated her face, made her visible to anyone who might be walking by or looking out of a window, but she needed some kind of lead and this was the only way she could think to get it. Her nerves felt like catgut, strung out for a bow. The trouble with her visions was that the timeline was always iffy. She’d felt a strong stab at the door, which suggested Clifton’s return home was imminent. But how imminent? Five minutes? An hour? Three hours?
She searched his name on social media, finally coming across a new social media profile by using an email address she’d pulled from his LinkedIn (a page that was miserably empty of connections and details, pointing again to his lack of employment, just as the ru
ndown house did).
It was an odd page. An Instagram account with hardly any pictures or information. In fact, the first post had only been made a week ago. A photograph of two small boys together, old and faded, set in a frame and clearly from years ago. The caption denoted that it was of “Me and my twin brother, when we were still cute.” No hashtags, no further identifying information or tags. The username was generic, MilwaukeeTwinGuy2. Nothing to really tell you who this person was.
And yet she knew it was him, because it was connected to his email address. Either he didn’t mind being found that way, or he’d forgotten to change his privacy settings after signing up.
Laura was trying to think, trying to see her way through all of this before it was too late. Why make a new profile and keep it anonymous, and yet still reference your brother with a picture from your own childhood?
So that people who were also twins would be more likely to accept follow requests and let him see their posts?
So he could stalk the people he wanted to kill?
The account’s followers were low, but it was following an even smaller number. Just twenty-four people. Laura opened them up, but in the same moment her eyes darted away from the screen, following another internal train of thought.
She’d already had the instinctive thought that reporting the missing twin to the police would be the best first step at deflecting suspicion from yourself. Knowing now that Gregory Clifton was a murderer, and that his identical twin brother was missing, it seemed almost inevitable that Clark Clifton was dead. And if he was dead, then it also seemed fairly certain that it had to have been Gregory himself who killed him, setting off this whole crusade against twins.
Crusade. And it did feel like that, didn’t it? Like he was on some unholy mission to wipe out all of the identical twins in the Milwaukee area. But there had to be a reason behind that. A reason that caused him to kill his brother in the first place. There was a chance, Laura supposed, that something had happened accidentally, causing a psychological break much like the one suffered by Brady Seabrooke. It was somewhat plausible, if you squinted, that an accidental death like that might push him to take away the siblings of all the other twins in the area, just as he had been deprived.
But he had killed both Ruby and Jade, and that didn’t seem to sit right. No—and neither did his actions after the fact. To go to the police and report it, to systematically move between twins on the same night, it all seemed premeditated. Like he’d thought about it carefully and decided what to do.
Like he had killed his brother on purpose and then set another course of events into motion. Which would mean that his first victims were not Ruby and Jade. His first victim was Clark Clifton, around a week ago.