CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Laura sat in the passenger seat of the hired car, slumped down, not even sure what she was doing. What a stupid, juvenile thing to do – literally running away from Nate with no actual destination in mind.
But she was under so much pressure. The only thing she really wanted to do right now was go for a drink. That was why she’d made herself get into the passenger side and not behind the wheel – if she was there, it would be too easy to just turn the engine on and drive to a bar.
In fact, right now, she could slide over the central console and climb into place –
No, no, she couldn’t do that. Laura pressed her hands against her face and let out a muffled, frustrated scream, then flipped open the overhead mirror to examine her own face. She looked tired. Older than she remembered. There were fine lines around her blue eyes that just seemed to get deeper every time she checked, and she was only glad that the light-blonde tone of her natural hair hid the grays she was sure were absolutely peppered throughout it now. She felt old before her time. But then, years of alcohol abuse would do that to you.
Laura leaned back and sighed. She had to do something. She couldn’t just sit here. She needed to figure this case out.
She got back out of the car and walked into the precinct, tense the whole time at the thought of running into Nate. She wasn’t quite sure what she would do if she saw him. Run away again? Scowl and ignore him and give him the silent treatment? Apologize?
She passed through the corridor safely, to her relief, and then headed down the stairs into the basement, retracing their steps from last night. The same officer was behind the desk at the entrance to the evidence locker, and he nodded at her quickly as she grabbed the sign-in sheet and scrawled her name down. She flashed him a smile, hoping that he would think the obvious insincerity of it was down to the pressures of the case and not the fact she was experiencing a low she didn’t know how to get out of.
She walked right to the back of the room, feeling her way unerringly past all of the other exhibits and to the mannequins, crowded in together in the corner, three of them now instead of just two. The plastic wrapping on them made them look even more grotesque, somehow. Like they were prizes from a carnival. Wrapped up in plastic and just missing the big gaudy ribbon to mark them out as a gift, a human-sized mannequin instead of a goldfish.
She had tried with them before, and nothing had happened. She wasn’t going to strain herself and risk having that be the case again. She didn’t think she was mentally ready for that failure. Not a second time. But trying with something else… well, if she touched something else and it didn’t work, then she could tell herself that the item she’d chosen didn’t have a strong enough connection to the killer. It wouldn’t have to be that she had failed. It could be pure chance.
Even though she’d had visions in the past that were strong enough to come through when she touched the vibrations of a speaker that was playing a recording of the killer’s breath –
No. No, she couldn’t let herself think that way. She was going to make this work. She had to.
She had to.
Laura turned her attention to the other items sitting in the locker, all of them carefully wrapped to avoid contamination. One of them, looking so incongruous right there, was the bowl of popcorn. Wrapped or not, it wouldn’t be long before the popcorn itself went bad and any evidentiary value it had would be lost. And the killer had prepared it himself – he must have stood there and listened to all those pops in the microwave, waiting for them to slow down, pulling it out at just the right time so it didn’t end up burning. There was a strong connection in that.
Laura glanced over at the door to make sure that no one was watching her or coming into the locker, and then she quickly unzipped the evidence bag and thrust her hand into the middle of the bowl of popcorn.
For a moment there was nothing – only the slightly gross feeling of the day-old popcorn against her hand. And then –
She was standing in a big space – maybe a warehouse. It was dark, so dark she could barely see anything. There was, at first, only a sense of the vastness of the space and nothing else. She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t hear anything.
Then, like before, her gaze traveled down and she seemed to adjust to the darkness, slowly looking at the picture as it emerged before her. First, a face, emerging from the dim shadows only to the extent that she could make out the briefest shape of the features, not enough to see the details of the face. Then, once the initial shock of that subsided – and it was still a shock, even though she’d seen it before – there was another, close by the first and also staring right ahead, also unmoving.
Her breath caught in her throat once again as the full scale of the situation became clear to her. All of these men, standing and staring right at her or ahead, all of them standing perfectly in rank and file. And then…
Just like before, one of them broke rank and moved and looked right at her. She couldn’t see his face – not in the gloom of the huge space. But she could feel his intention. And when he started to move right towards her –
Laura opened her eyes with a small gasp, pulling her hand right out of the popcorn as quickly as she could. She hastily grabbed a few errant pieces that had escaped as she moved, shoving them back inside the evidence bag and then zipping it shut. She paused then for a moment, leaning on the shelving, breathing hard.
It hadn’t been a nightmare, last night.
She had dreamed a vision.
And this time, there had been no headache. What did that mean? Did it mean she was seeing the past? A future that was so distant the headache was all but unnoticeable?
A new quirk to her visions, coming at a time when she already had no understanding at all about how the rest of them worked?
She pressed the heel of her hand against her temple for a moment with her eyes squeezed shut, almost wishing that she had a headache after all. At least that would be something to focus on. Some real, tangible evidence that she’d had a vision at all.
She hadn’t just… fallen asleep standing up, or something, had she?
No – she was sure of one thing, and that was that she had been in a vision. It had all the hallmarks except the headache: the weird viewpoint that she had no control over, the length, the dark shadows swirling off into nothing at the sides of the vision. This was what she had been waiting for. Now, she just had to interpret it.
And that was going to be a lot easier if she had two heads instead of one.
Laura rushed out of the evidence locker, pausing only to slam the gate shut behind her, dialing Nate’s number on her phone as she went. She was calling him by the time she was halfway up the stairs and had reception again, and to her surprise, he answered within two rings.