“Did you tell him another woman was dead?”
“Yeah. He looked shocked. I bought it.”
“Okay. I was going to talk to him, too, but I’ll leave him to ruminate on his nonexistent enemies for a few more hours. Now go home. Go to bed.”
Wednesday, February 24, 5:15 a.m.
He was clean now, the smell of smoke gone, the clothes he’d worn tonight already decomposing in the pit. Carefully he placed Rachel Ward’s shoes next to the men’s Nikes he’d placed there earlier that evening. He adjusted Rachel’s left shoe, making sure it was completely straight, then tilted the round spectacles he’d placed inside one of the Nikes so that it better caught the light. That’s better. He liked things… precise.
They were already at Rachel’s house, the cops. They’d find nothing there that he didn’t intend for them to find. He’d been precise in his execution of Rachel.
He’d thought it all through and concluded that other than speeding up his timeline, nothing terrible had really occurred tonight. The Hats knew about Shadowland. They knew about the participant list. Neither of those things gets them even close to me.
However, Eve’s knowing about Rachel was getting too close. It didn’t matter though. His sixth of the six would be a dark horse. Not on anyone’s list. Not on anyone’s radar.
Still, Eve’s involvement had sped things up too quickly. The press hadn’t caught up to what the police knew, and importantly, what the police did not know. There had not been enough time for the headlines to roil, for police failures and public frustration to mount. The Hat Squad wasn’t close to being ruined. He’d have to let them spin their wheels for a few days. Give the reporters time to close the gap.
In the meantime, he needed to rest. Although he was in good shape, he wasn’t as young as he once was. Pulling this off twenty years ago would have been a piece of cake. Now… Well, he’d need to pace himself. Cut back on the physical and ramp up the mental. Focus on Eve. She was indeed a challenge. He did enjoy a good challenge.
He opened the drawer where he kept the cell phones he took from his victims. It was quite a little walk through the past, amusing to see how far cell phone technology had progressed in the last decade. At the bottom of the drawer were the beepers, positively archaic now. But on the very top of the pile was the cell he was looking for.
He slipped it in his pocket. To make the call from here would be stupid, indeed. It was easier back in the beeper days, he thought. No pesky GPS to give the cops a technological advantage. He’d place this call from a place that would have the cops chasing their tails. A threat and a red herring. A veritable twofer.
Wednesday, February 24, 6:00 a.m.
Eve jerked awake and blearily lifted her head. She’d fallen asleep at her kitchen table, facedown on the stack of usage logs and graphs. Then she muttered a curse. She’d also knocked over the damn mug of cocoa, spilling what was left all over one of the stacks she hadn’t reviewed yet.
There wasn’t much cocoa to clean up, most of it having soaked through the paper. Luckily it was all stored on her hard drive. She’d print this batch again. Quickly she thumbed through the graphs until she came to a page unblemished by brown cocoa stains.
And lowered herself onto a chair. It was a graph showing steady play, upward of sixteen hours a day, and then… nothing. The graph was three weeks old.
Dread cold in her gut, Eve opened her laptop to the list. Subject 036 was Amy Millhouse, an ultra-user. A Google brought the results Eve expected, still her stomach turned over as she clicked the article open and read. Amy Millhouse of West Calhoun was found dead on Sunday, February 7. She had…
“Hung herself,” Eve read aloud. She closed her eyes. “Of course she did.”
Wearily she found her cell phone and hit dial. Noah’s cell was the last call she’d made. The last five calls she’d made. “It’s Eve. I need to talk to you.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“No, you don’t- Wait.” But he’d hung up. She closed her phone, somehow unsurprised at the knock at her door, not five seconds later. He stood on her welcome mat, hat in one hand, cell in the other. Looking like… everything I ever wanted.
“I’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes, trying to decide if I should knock or not,” he said, then one corner of his mouth lifted. “Sure you don’t believe in fate?”
She opened the door wider. “No. Come in.”
He did, putting his hat on her bookshelf. “No, you do, or no you don’t?”
She stared up at him, her head aching. “What was the question?”
He cupped her face in his palm and she wanted to weep. “What’s wrong?”
She didn’t want to utter the words. Not yet. Instead she turned her face into his palm and drew a breath, then drew back, new horror registering. “Rachel was afraid of fire.”
He nodded, his eyes full of pain. “Yes.”
“By how much were we too late?”
“An hour. Maybe two.”
She took a step back. “So while we were eating sandwiches and looking at logs and worrying about Kurt Buckland and trying to find her right address…”
He nodded again. Swallowed hard. “Yes.”
Too late she realized he’d already put himself through this. He’d discovered Rachel, experienced the horror firsthand. She was just adding to his pain. “I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t sure who moved first, but she was in his arms and he was holding her much too tightly. Except she held on just as tightly, fists pressed into his back. He was hard, he was hurting. And he was here. “Why did you come back?” she whispered.
He drew a deep breath that pressed her breasts into his chest. “I went home first,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear. “But there wasn’t anything for me there.”
Oh, Noah. Eve held on for another moment, then pulled away. The words stuck in her throat. She forced them out. “There isn’t anything for you here either. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said fiercely.
She shook her head, wearily. “Believe what you want. Doesn’t make it any less true.”
He closed his eyes. “Why did you call me then?”
Her chest hurt. “I think I found another one. Her name is Amy Millhouse.”
He opened his eyes and they were blank, like all those times at Sal’s. “Show me.”
He followed her into the kitchen and looked at the graph, at the obituary, and his shoulders sagged. “MPD would have responded to this suicide. I must have read this report. I didn’t find any scenes remotely resembling Martha and Samantha’s.” He went too still and she could see he’d thought of something he didn’t like.
“But?” she asked.
“But Jack read half of them. I couldn’t find him tonight. Rachel was a mile from his house and he didn’t answer. Said he didn’t get my calls. Said he’d fallen asleep.”
“Sunday night, at Sal’s, he checked his phone three times before you came.”
“I know. Brock told me.”
“Will you report him?”
His shoulders sagged further. “I already did. I had to.”
“I’m sorry.”
He jerked his head around to glare at her. “Stop saying that.” I hurt him.
I never wanted to hurt him. “Sit down, Noah. I need to explain something to you.”
The kitchen chair creaked under his weight. She sat, folded her hands.
“Well?” he said sharply.
“I’m trying to figure out what to say,” she snapped back. “I could say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ but you won’t buy that. I tried ‘I’m broken,’ but you didn’t accept that either. You read about what happened to me, with Winters.”
“Yes.” He bit the word. “And if a con hadn’t killed him in prison, I’d be tempted to.”
“You’d have to stand in line, I think. He was a very bad man. But very handsome. He had… charisma. Most people in his hometown liked him. He was a cop.”