Bringing justice to the person who was responsible for their death.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He huddled in the small space of the attic, looking out through the windows. In the distance, he could see the shore over the tops of the few buildings between here and there. He looked away. There were dark clouds overhead, and he couldn’t look anymore.
He rubbed his hands across his own shoulders and upper arms, almost embracing himself, trying to soothe away the shudders that wanted to overcome him. He slumped forward a little, allowing his forehead to rest on the wood of the desk, and closed his eyes briefly.
Like this, with his eyes closed and shut up high away from the world, he could almost forget. He could almost believe that he was safe.
But he wasn’t safe. He was never safe. He was never going to be safe, not until it was all over.
Even up here, they could get to him.
He tried to shut out everything else, the whole world, but he’d never found himself good at the meditative process of disappearing into his own mind. Even now he could hear a gentle sound from the room immediately below him. A steady, rhythmic beat—atap, tap, tap.
No, not a tap. His eyes flew open. It was adrip, drip, drip. The faucet in the bathroom sink.
He couldn’t just leave it like that. He had to make it stop.
He got up and rushed down the ladder into the main part of the house, then ran into the bathroom and grabbed the faucet quickly to turn it off. One last drop shook for a moment and then fell into the sink, running down the plughole and draining away. He took a deep and heavy breath, then glanced around for any sign that they were coming. He couldn’t risk missing a sign. This could easily be a trap to make him feel a false sense of security.
He breathed out and retreated, leaving the bathroom backwards, his eyes darting to every surface in case there was some hidden attacker ready to leap out when his defenses were down. He groped his way back to the ladder and climbed it quickly, sweat running in a trickle down his back until he was in front of his desk again.
He focused down on the book, tracing his fingers over the illustrations. This. This was what he needed to focus on. He needed to find his next victim. His next soul. There was no other way to make all of this stop.
He tapped the page thoughtfully and then moved the cover of the book, lifting it up to get at the folder underneath it. He pulled this out and started flipping through the photographs, thinking. Over time, he’d built up a good idea of the next one’s movements, and how they liked to spend their time. Where they might be at any given point of the week, so long as everything went how it normally did. He couldn’t trace phone conversations or hack emails, so he had to rely on luck somewhat. Or just observation. Making sure that he would know if their plans changed, and his plan wouldn’t work.
Adaptability. That was what he needed to survive. And he just needed to survive as long as it took to finish this. Then he would be safe.
He cast another look out at the gathering storm and then ducked his eyes back to the book, to the carvings. He had to finish this before they came for him again.
It was his life or the next one’s. And he wasn’t going to let it happen. He had to take action, take control.
Though the others who were saved would never thank him. That was what kept him going. It was unsavory, what he had to do, but he would do what needed to be done.
He would complete his work before they took him—he had no other choice.
CHAPTER NINE
Laura was staring out of the window at the gathering dark clouds in the sky, trying to work out when the storm would hit and whether they would make it through the rest of the day dry, when Nate interrupted her thoughts.
“Did you see anything?”
“What?” Laura asked, tearing her eyes from the sky and back toward him. He was focused on the road, his hands on the steering wheel, but she could feel his attention was still on her.
“You went to look at the clothes to see if you could trigger a vision, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Laura admitted. “I did see something.”
Nate glanced at her quickly and then back to the road. The GPS prompted him to take a right. “Well?”
“I don’t know.” Laura sighed. She wished yet again that she had something better to tell him. It always seemed to be that way with her visions lately. She wanted to keep quiet until she had something concrete, but with the vision about Zach and Chris, she’d got it wrong anyway. Maybe if she’d told Nate before, he could have played devil’s advocate and pointed out that she never actually saw Chris holding a knife. Maybe he could have talked her down from the paranoia that had probably cost her a relationship. “It was very dark and hard to make out. I mean the vision itself was dark, not the scene. But I was looking at an illustrated book on a table and maybe some kind of wooden carving.”
“Was that a vision of the killer or of the guy who died?” Nate asked.
Laura paused. That was something she hadn’t even begun to consider yet. Nate was right—it might not be a useful vision at all, but instead something from the past. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I couldn’t make out the details of the book or the carving. If I could, maybe it would make more sense.”
“Well, maybe you’ll have another one,” Nate said, flashing her a confident smile. “Right?”