She had died because of him.
His lips twisted into a smile with the knowledge. With the power. He refocused his binoculars. With calming crystals of ice pressing against his face, he observed Jenna Hughes’s house from his hiding spot.
Nina had been the first to die. He’d tried to tamp down his feelings of triumphant exhilaration when he realized that he had the power of death over life. He’d attempted sadness. He’d tried guilt. But, both emotions had worn thin quickly.
He’d told himself he would never love again.
And then he’d seen Jenna Hughes.
In that split second when he’d first gazed upon her, he’d known.
She was the one.
From that moment forward, every other woman in his life seemed insignificant. Including Nina. Poor, trusting little Nina.
Beautiful.
Like the others.
He reached into his pocket and fingered the glove he’d stolen…a small, black leather glove, one of the two that Jenna, as Anne Parks, had worn in Resurrection. He closed his eyes and remembered the scene where Anne, dressed in a slick black bra, high-cut panties, this very glove, and a choker around her neck, had advanced upon her lover. Lying spread-eagle upon his bed, the lover was expecting a coy sex game and had ended up experiencing erotic death.
Perfect.
He let his binoculars dangle and closed his eyes as the cold kiss of the wind touched the back of his neck. Slowly he opened his fly. He thought of Jenna. He thought of the icy, grasping waters of the lake. He let the first needles of sleet run down his upturned face.
Slowly he slipped the glove over his cock.
Then he pretended Jenna Hughes was kneeling before him.
CHAPTER 24
It had been a long day. Hell, it’d been a long week. Carter’s wipers slapped at the snow falling from the night sky and his headlights cut through the darkness to reflect on the sheet of snow and ice covering the road.
On one side of the road, hundred-year-old fir trees loomed upward into the starless night, tall, foreboding, catching snowflakes in their immense branches; on the other side, the Columbia, churning with floes of ice, moved steadily westward. Snow and ice gathered on the corners of his windshield and the defroster lagged behind the condensation that fogged the glass.
His cell phone rang as he crossed a narrow bridge that spanned Pious Creek. He noticed that the creek appeared frozen solid.
“Carter,” he barked.
“It’s Sparks.”
“I hope you have good news.”
“It looks that way. Not only do we have a composite sketch of the woman found up at Catwalk Point, but we might have an ID.”
Shane’s hands tightened over the wheel.
“We think the missing woman might be Mavis Gette.”
The name rang no bells with Carter, but it w
as something.
Mavis Gette.
No longer Jane Doe.
Maybe.