CHAPTER NINETEEN
Laura pulled her gun out of its holster as Nate did the same, both of them quickly giving their weapons a visual check. Everything was silent, stealthy. They had to retain the element of surprise as much as possible. He couldn’t know they were coming.
There were two exits from the house – front door, back door. They couldn’t cover both, because both were locked. The only other way to get in would be for Nate to kick in the door, then rush all the way to the other side and let Laura in, potentially turning his back on their suspect and allowing him to get off a shot. No, they had to do this together. Safer.
Nate sized up the back door, nodded with grim determination, and then aimed one solid kick right below the door handle where the lock was holding it firm. The second kick blasted it open, leaving a broken mess in his wake, and Laura surged inside with him right behind as soon as he recovered from the momentum.
The first room was clear, they’d been able to see that from outside. In fact, almost the whole of the lower floor could be ignored. Laura kept her eyes open for extra doors: there was one under the stairs, but throwing it open revealed only a downstairs toilet.
There was a crashing noise from upstairs as if someone had stumbled into something, then a shout. A moment later it came again from the top of the stairs, much clearer.
“Hey! Who’s there? Get out of my house!”
“William James!” Nate thundered. “Get down on the ground with your hands where we can see them! This is the FBI!”
“Wh-what…?”
Laura could see him now as she circled around to the foot of the stairs, looking up at him and seeing no sign of a weapon. He was dressed in a pair of pajama pants and nothing else, his brown hair mussed up with sleep and his eyes wide open but his mouth hanging slack. He looked like someone who had been wrenched out of sleep and then put on high alert, in short, and his hands were hesitating halfway into the air at his sides.
“On the ground with your hands where we can see them,” Laura repeated, clearer and more calmly. “Now.”
James’s mouth opened and closed but then he complied, mumbling something as he lowered himself swiftly to the ground, putting his hands far out to either side of his body. Laura slowly advanced up the stairs, knowing Nate had his gun trained on the security guard’s head just in case he tried anything rash.
At the top of the stairs, Laura stopped, eyeing him. He would be pretty cold out there if they took him like this. Then again, he was a killer.
But then – again – if he wasn’t…
Laura glanced into the bedroom, the room he had quite clearly just come out of, and spotted a shirt lying haphazardly across the back of a chair. It looked like it matched the pajama bottoms he was wearing, probably part of a set. Laura moved past him, grabbed it, and threw it down on the floor in front of him.
“Put that on and then lay down again with your hands behind your back,” she said.
He swallowed and then slowly moved, as if he didn’t want to make any sudden movements that would startle her into shooting him. Laura dropped the muzzle of her gun to point at the floor. He was complying. There was no need to risk an incident with a twitch of her finger.
He slowly began to put the shirt on, pulling it over first one arm and then the other. He made a kind of shrugging movement to flip it up onto his shoulders, and then –
It happened far too fast. One moment he was there, slowly and calmly dressing, the next he was running. Laura only had the chance to dodge to the side out of instinct as he ran right at her, all of her weapons’ training becoming useless in the small space and the heat of the moment.
He whooshed past her with a wind that stirred her clothes, and then he was running back into his own bedroom, shirt flapping behind him like a cape as he jumped up onto the bed. Laura saw with horror that he was heading towards the window, probably about to enact some long-perfected escape from his childhood window, ready to run from them –
As his feet tangled in the messy duvet he had left on the bed, he flailed his arms in the air, and he went down flat on his face.
Laura surged forward, training her gun on him again. Nate was already there, having shot up the stairs when he saw their suspect rush past her, and he dove headlong into the room to tackle the young man. Laura started forward, trying to provide tactical support but not having any chance of a clear shot as they grappled on top of the bed, the security guard still trying to fight his way clear. They rolled off the bed with a heavy whoomph, and Laura rushed forward, gun trained on the floor until she could see them –
Nate was sitting on top of their suspect, grabbing a pair of handcuffs from his belt to cuff his hands behind his back, panting for breath but grinning with victory.
“Alright,” Nate said, grimacing as he clicked the final cuff into place and sat back on his heels. “William James, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder.”
Laura tuned him out as he read James his rights, turning to look around the room and take in what she could. It looked like a normal young man’s bedroom, in all honesty – an awkward combination between a teenager’s bedroom and the man that now inhabited it, old toys and figurines jumbled next to aftershave on the dresser and a selection of blue silk ties hanging from the side of the mirror.
“We’ll need backup to secure the scene before we go,” Laura said, trying to ignore how fast her heart was still pounding now that the adrenaline was starting to wear off. “His parents could come back and tamper with the evidence.”
Nate nodded, getting up and hauling James to his feet. “We’ll put him in the car,” he suggested. “You call Ortega now.”
Laura did as she was told, not because he was giving the orders but because it was a reasonable division of labor. She walked behind him as he took their suspect to the car, keeping her eyes open and focused, in case he tried to make a break for it again. She requested the backup and then they both leaned against the side of the car, with James silent and surly locked inside of it.
“We’ve got him,” Nate said. He didn’t quite lean over for a high five, but the gleam in his eye expressed the same message. “We did it.”
“Yeah,” Laura said, although she couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder and into the car. At this kid. Because he was just a kid, really. And, yes, she knew two obvious facts: one, that the older she got, the people she saw as kids encompassed a wider and wider age range; and two, the majority of serial killers did turn out to be young white males in their twenties when they started.