“Is that why he isn’t on the field?” Laura asked, nodding towards the other players. They already knew he was here, somewhere. Unless he’d left his car behind as evidence that he’d gone where he was supposed to, then walked away. Would he do that?
“He’s in the locker room,” the coach said, turning and pointing back in the direction he had come from. “We told him he could go home if he wanted, but he said he just needed a little break and then he’d come back out. I don’t blame him. Playing can take the mind off things, but it’s hard to let go in the first place, you know?”
Privately, Laura thought: no. Neither of us probably know. How could we know what goes on in the head of a killer?
“Thank you,” Laura said, nodding at him. “We’ll take it from here.”
The coach, or whoever he was, seemed hesitant. Like he didn’t want them to go back there. But he didn’t say anything, letting them pass by.
They were probably lucky. Someone with more authority on the team might have put up an argument. Something about how non-team personnel weren’t supposed to go back there, or especially how women weren’t supposed to be in the men’s locker room. But they had a killer to catch. That went beyond the normal rules of who was and wasn’t supposed to be in a particular place.
Passing inside the building, a scent immediately hit Laura: something like old socks and body odor. She wrinkled her nose, glancing at Nate, who only laughed.
“You get used to it,” he said. “The gym I go to smells like this, too.”
Laura shook her head and rolled her eyes. “I don’t think I would like to get used to it. You should come to my gym. They actually clean it.”
“They clean mine,” Nate protested. “It’s just we take working out seriously. The scent builds up again, you know?”
Laura shook her head again, pointing to a sign on the wall that indicated the direction of the locker rooms. They passed along a narrow hall with Lino floors, smooth and polished, and the scent only got stronger. “I think what you’re trying to tell me is that boys smell.”
“I think you could have worked that out a long time before now,” Nate laughed. It was a strange sound to hear just then. Considering how long it had been since they’d been relaxed enough to laugh together, it was odd for it to happen right when they were approaching a suspect. But Laura felt it, too. The adrenaline. Being close to your quarry was a rush. Knowing you might have to be prepared for anything – but in this case, there was less fear, because they had no indication that the killer would be armed at all. It wasn’t as though they were investigating gunshot wounds or stabbings. For all they knew, he didn’t use any weapons at all in claiming his victims.
Just rope and gravity.
They stepped through an opening that led down a twisting hall and back on itself, a kind of privacy feature that left the locker rooms somewhat open while also preventing anyone from seeing in from the hall. Laura let Nate go first, figuring that if she was about to get an eyeful of something unexpected, at least Nate’s frame would block the view until the guy had had a moment to scramble for something to cover himself with.
But as she emerged behind him and took in the scene in front of them, she couldn’t see anyone at all.
The room was set out almost exactly as she’d imagined it: rows of lockers all around the outside, then benches in front of and between them so that players could sit down to change, most of them already strewn with discarded bits of clothing. A rack divided the center of the room, hung with all kinds of coats and jackets, no doubt left there by the players who’d come dressed for winter. It concealed the back half of the locker from their view, but as Nate looked around it –
He gave a shout, distracting Laura from her glance around the rest of the room. Before she could even react, he took off running, and Laura had no choice but to follow him. She didn’t know what he’d seen, but she knew what she would bet on: Bradley Milford, running for it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As far as Laura was concerned, the locker room was a series of tripping hazards, one after the other. There was a bench set at an angle, maybe left there messily or maybe nudged deliberately before Milford ran, and Laura caught one of her shins on the very edge of it as she attempted to take the shortest route she could across the back of the room. There was another of those winding corridors on the other side, leading to a shower room – thankfully, with none of them turned on, there was no steam obstructing their vision. Nate ran past but Laura hesitated for a moment, checking the large communal shower space was empty, not knowing if he still had Bradley in his sights or not.
It was only a moment’s pause, but when Laura chased after him, Nate was already fully around the next bend. When she’d turned it, he was there in front of her again, his large and tall frame filling up the corridor enough that she couldn’t see around him. She cursed herself in her head, wondering why she hadn’t stopped to grab something in the locker room. If she’d been able to get a vision of where Bradley was going…
She threw herself down the hall as fast as she could, aware that she was little help right now. Nate was closer, and there was no way past him anyway. But she had to keep up. If the path diverged at all, it would be important for them both to be close. To be able to chase him down, no matter where he went.
Nate shot out of a doorway ahead, and when Laura followed, it again took her a moment to get her bearings in the new setting. There were corridors branching off in all directions, doors everywhere, from a wider hallway that was more decorative: plants at set intervals in pots, a noticeboard with things pinned to it, labels on the doors describing whose office they were… The sound of her own shoes squeaking on the polished floor echoed back to her, obscuring any clue of the footsteps ahead.
Laura raced ahead, putting on a surge of energy to get up to Nate again, then realizing it was only because he had slowed slightly. He was looking around, and Laura knew then that he had no idea where their suspect had gone.
“Left,” Laura panted out, darting in that direction down the hall that split off to the side. She didn’t wait for his reply, but she heard him running onwards, towards the rest of the halls and wherever they led.
Laura was lost quickly. She had no idea where she was. It felt like they had gone downwards on a slope after leaving the field, and by the turns they had taken since, she guessed they were underneath it now. Or at least, she was. Nate could have been in Kansas by now, given how far and sprawling the corridors seemed.
There was light up ahead. Laura put on another burst of speed, feeling that if she were on the run, she’d want to move towards the outside as soon as possible. Get back to her car. Be gone before anyone could figure out that she was no longer on foot.
Laura stumbled upwards into the daylight again, a strange contrast to the yellow lights of the underground halls that made her head hurt. The players were still on the field, carrying on like normal. But a few of them, those closest, had turned and were looking up. Looking…
Looking at the stands, where Laura could now make out the figure of Bradley Milford running, zigzagging across rows and leaping over chairs to get higher, with Nate running behind him.
They must have emerged from another doorway, somewhere nearer to where she’d left Nate, right into the stands. Laura was below them now, picking up speed again after a momentary pause, tracking them along the flat surface of the field. There were no impediments in her way like they had, nothing stopping her from getting up to full speed. She looked ahead, calculating, trying to strain to make out the unfamiliar layout of the field.
The stands – there were openings at the tops of each side, no doubt leading to staircases. People would file up those stairs with their tickets and their snacks when they were coming in from the outside. That must be where Bradley was heading – to get down the stairs and out to the parking lot through the visitor entrance, hoping to use his knowledge of the stadium and his fitness to outpace them!