“On the couch.” He gestured toward a beige sofa against the living room wall as he took his own protected seat in the hall, placing the gun in his left hand on the floor beside him. She tried to keep her eyes on his, but they automatically leapt to the glint of the silver blade on the knife in his right hand.
On another day, in a different context, the image should have scared her. But instead Ellie felt emboldened. He had been holding a police lieutenant hostage. Now he had a new captive, exchanging one source of unpredictability for another. If he was at all comfortable with guns, she would be looking down the barrel of one-either his own or the one he’d just taken from her.
Her instincts had been right. Only one of Kittrie’s victim had been shot-Darrell Washington-and, as Ken Garcia had said, whoever killed Washington had been a lousy marksman. He also used the same weapon Washington had wielded to rob Jordan and Stefanie, then left that gun at the scene. Kittrie’s current location in the hallway ruled out immediate access to any place where another gun might be hidden.
She knew now what Eckels had been trying to tell her-Kittrie didn’t have a gun. Kittrie had apparently managed to restrain her lieutenant before Eckels had established that critical fact. She wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to her. She was a good, strong fighter. If the only advantage Kittrie had on her was a knife and Rogan’s unloaded gun, she might just walk out of here alive.
She took a seat on the sofa as instructed and saw for the first time a pair of orange-handled sewing shears on a glass end table. Kittrie must have noted the movement of her glance, because he said, “Unhunh. Not yet. Later. I want to look at you here. Left hand into the cuffs.”
Only then did she notice a pair of handcuffs dangling from the same glass table where the scissors rested. One end was hooked through the table’s wrought iron base. The other hung open. Ellie slid across the sofa, crossing her left leg in front of her, and closed the cuffs around her left wrist.
“So I would ask you to tell me about your father, but I know how you feel about men who’ve watched Silence of the Lambs too many times. I don’t want to be a cliché.”
He was reciting from her Dateline interview. Ellie stared at him as if he were a lizard on display behind glass.
“Tell me about William Summer instead.”
“What about him?” she said.
“Why are you so convinced you would have found him earlier?”
“I found you, didn’t I?”
“I was waiting to be found.”
“So was William Summer,” Ellie said. “It’s another thing you two have in common.”
“Tell me more about that.”
“You both have an ability to control the pace of your killings more than most profilers believe is common. You both stopped when something else in your lives brought you satisfaction, a feeling of accomplishment. You both resurfaced when your lives started to feel weak again-him because a newspaper article made him sound like an irrelevant relic, and you because there’s cancer metastasized in your brain.”
“So would you say that I, like Summer, have an ‘insatiable ego’?”
“I don’t purport to know you, Mr. Kittrie.”
“Neither did Rachel Peck or Chelsea Hart. Go ahead and pick up those scissors.”
Ellie wiggled her restrained left arm.
“Cute, Detective, but I’m sure you can manage.”
She raised the scissors with her right hand.
“Your hair, Detective. Is it naturally blond?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. And is that the length you usually wear it?”
Ellie’s hair was well past her shoulders, longer than it had ever been since she became a cop five years ago. There had been no time for a haircut in the past two months. “No,” she said. “I cut it this short a few months ago.”
For reasons she would never be able to explain, she took comfort in the small lie.
“Please go ahead and cut the rest of it off for me now.”
“Excuse me?”
“You saw Chelsea Hart, I believe. Go ahead. Not too quickly,” he said, unbuttoning his pants. Ellie suppressed a gag reflex.
She tilted her head and held the scissors up to the lock of hair that fell forward, but could not force herself to bring the blades together.
“Would you like to put the scissors down and find another way to do this, Detective?”
She clenched her jaw and clamped the scissors shut. Six inches of her hair fell to the floor. She reached forward to pick it up, but he stopped her.
“Leave it wherever it falls. It looks good that way.” He was beginning to slowly pleasure himself. Ellie desperately wanted to avert her gaze, but knew that would disrupt the choreography. She opened the shears around another section and snipped again. Then a third section, and a fourth. She tried to stop thinking of the movement of his hand against himself.
She picked up the pace of her cutting and willed herself to look at Kittrie’s pinched face, starting to color. She told herself she had to do this. She had to do this for five girls who had suffered far worse.
She saw the muscles in Kittrie’s body begin to tense and she knew she would have only seconds to respond. She cut away another two clumps, feeling stronger with each lock that fell to the floor.
When Kittrie lurched forward, she was ready. She dropped the scissors and reached for the top of the left ankle boot crossed in front of her. She unsnapped her Kahr K9 and pulled the trigger softly to disengage the striker block and cock the weapon.
Kittrie opened his eyes and spun from his chair, dropping the knife as he reached for the Glock on the floor. She continued to press against the trigger, locking her elbow and tightening her forearm muscles to absorb the recoil.
She heard the blast of the pistol as her arm jerked against her will and searing pain tore through the wound in the back of her hand. A magenta stain slowly blossomed across the left sleeve of Kittrie’s white shirt. She had clipped him in the shoulder.
Kittrie winced as he moved his left hand to support the Glock. Even through the pain of the gunshot wound, he managed a slight smile as he looked down at Ellie, handcuffed on the sofa, and pulled the trigger. Realizing his mistake, his smug expression changed to one of confusion, then anger. He threw the gun at her and lunged for the knife he’d discarded next to his chair.
Ellie fired again, this time a pair of quick shots, compensation for the lack of control that came with one-handed shooting. One bullet through the screen of Kittrie’s television, one in his left side. Kittrie barreled toward her, the handle of his knife clenched in his fist.