“Maybe it didn’t occur to him,” Laura said. She figured that Ross could only be talking about one thing. About Stephanie. How they’d found her body. “That the police would be able to use it to track her down.”
“He must have known,” Ross said, squinting his eyes. He looked up at Laura like he was looking into the sun, and it was blinding him. It didn’t give her the feeling that she was a bright object. More like he was just too far down
in the dark. “Did he want us to find her?”
The words sent something of a chill down Laura’s spine. It was fairly common for people to speculate on what had happened to their loved ones. To spend hours, days, weeks, even years trying to put it together in their heads. It was only natural. Wanting to know the answers.
But something about the way he said it… it wasn’t only the utter grief that was weighing him down. It was the horror of it. Of a sadistic killer, deliberately setting things up so that someone would find the awful game he had set up. A woman left to hang in an abandoned gas station. A clock around her neck. A timer stopped for midnight.
Twelve.
Like there was some horrible meaning behind it all, some riddle. It was the kind of thing that Hollywood scriptwriters dreamed up, not real people. Not the kind of thing that really happened.
“Did Stephanie talk about anything weird happening in the last week or so?” Nate asked, breaking Laura’s thoughts. “Did she seem worried, or tense? Any different than usual?”
“No,” Ross said, his voice croaking and cracking. “Everything was fine. She was happy. Nothing ever happened to us. Not like this.”
“She didn’t have any feuds at work or in the neighborhood?” Nate pressed. “No ex-boyfriends, anything like that?”
“She was friends with her exes,” Ross said. A ghost of a smile passed over his face, and only left it cracked wider open in its wake, a raw wound. “It used to drive me mad. And she got on with everyone. She had this hippy-dippy thing. I always thought she let people take advantage of her. Just so she could be nice.”
The man was obviously in a great deal of pain, but at least he was talking now. Making sense. Laura moved a step closer to the coffee table, looking at the photographs spread out there, thinking of her next question.
She saw one that made her reach out, almost without thinking. She would never normally pick up something belonging to the victim’s family, not without permission, but…
She grabbed it, and was rewarded with a flash of pain through her temple. A headache. She’d been right to go for it. The framed photograph was of three people – Ross and Stephanie Marchall, and another man, a man standing with his back to the camera and pointing over his shoulder at the number on his baseball uniform –
Laura was looking at a clock. It was an old analog clock, the kind that used to hang on kitchen walls. Old-fashioned. Probably didn’t work unless you wound it. You’d have to wind it often.
He was winding it now.
He was setting it to twelve noon. Twelve, again. Laura watched those fingers move the clock face. She strained for any detail, any that would help her make sense of it. The clock was slightly different than the one she had seen before. There was a mark, a mark on the clock face itself, like a stain or maybe even a burn mark. As if someone had pressed a cigarette against it.
It was a different clock.
Two clocks, two timers.
Today? Tomorrow?
Both?
He was going to kill again. Laura felt her panic rising, even inside the vision, felt the fear of it. He was going to kill twice more. At least. One of them could be standing on a platform now, struggling to get free. And if they didn’t save her, another would be next, would be right on her heels. If they didn’t find enough information to stop him…
Laura blinked and she was still holding it, her hand lingering on the glass of the frame. Lingering over the number on the baseball uniform.
The number twelve.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. She touched a picture of this man, and there the vision was. And the number. Twelve.
It had to mean it was him.
“Who is this?” she blurted abruptly, too shocked by the discovery to temper her words into something more gentle and respectful.
Ross looked up at her, startled. Something in her own speed and abruptness seemed to flip a switch in him, as though it had woken him up. Or maybe startled him into reacting, before he could think instead. “That’s Brad,” he said. “Brad Milford.”
“He’s a friend of yours?” Laura asked, placing the photograph back on the table now she’d had a good look at it. Ross’s eyes followed it, like he needed the prompt.
“Kind of,” Ross said. He swallowed. “Stephy’s friend. He… they dated. He was one of those exes. But they stayed friends.”