He dragged something cold and sharp against her skin, starting at her neck, making a line across her throat with what she realized was the point of a knife. He pushed deep enough to make her squirm but not enough to break the skin. The knife explored her like a curious animal. It made a circle around her breasts, and then her aureoles, and then punctured one nipple in the very center, a pinprick that made her shudder and drew a wet, warm drop of blood.
Unbidden, tears streamed down her face.
The knife moved lower, scraping through her navel, detouring to her thighs, pushing up under the bones of her knees, running up the balls of her feet, climbing back up and zeroing in between her legs. He turned the knife and laid the cold flat of the blade along her mound. She tensed and hunted for the faraway place, the nothingness room, but it was lost in her brain, and she didn't know where to find it.
"I should sign my work," he said. "That way, when Stride finds you, he'll know who it was."
She threw her head back and forth violently, ignoring the pain in her skull, and thrust her body up off the bed at him. Another scream died in the wet cotton in her mouth. He waited until her resistance ran out of force, and she collapsed backward, spent, dizzy.
His big hand found the flat square of her stomach and pushed down, expelling air through her nose. He stretched the skin between his fingers until it was taut, like a canvas.
"No!" she wailed, but there was no sound coming from her, just the storm outside. The protest, the begging, the pleading, were only in her mind.
The knifepoint penetrated her. Tissue separated cell by cell. Blood oozed. He began to carve.
Somewhere in the middle, she passed out. When she awoke again, her stomach was cold and hot, stinging and frozen, all at the same time. The blood had become ice, hard like sugar candy. The storm raged on behind the wall. The smells and sounds were the same, but something was different, and she realized that the rag stuffed into her mouth was gone. She could work the muscles of her jaw and breathe stale air.
Serena screamed, and she discovered she was in a small place, because the noise rattled back and forth between the walls, unbearably loud and tinny. Outside, though, it was a murmur held up against the roar of the wind. She kept screaming until her throat was hoarse and sore, and when she stopped, nothing at all happened. No one ran to find her. The blizzard paid no attention.
"Scream if you want, but no one will hear you," he said.
She didn't answer.
"Go two feet outside, and you can't hear anything. Believe me, you don't want to go outside now. You wouldn't last thirty seconds."
It sounded like thirty seconds of paradise to her. Thirty seconds of exposure, and then she could be warm and asleep and out of pain.
"Why me?" she asked.
"You were the one I wanted all along," he said.
"Why?" she repeated.
"Haven't you guessed?"
Something in the way he said it made her realize for the first time that this wasn't random. She hadn't crossed paths with a stalker and accidentally wound up in his sights. This was about her and him and always had been. Personal.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"I think you know."
He was right. She did know him. When she thought about it like that, she realized that there was something familiar about him, something in his voice that stirred memories. She searched her past, but there were so many names. It was like that when you were a cop-the names blurred together. Most of the time it didn't matter, because how many perps cared about being collared by a fat cop in his fifties? But when you were a woman, when you were beautiful, when you were from Las Vegas, the past somehow hung on and never let go.
Her bad luck.
Right then and there, she knew. Bad luck. Tommy Luck.
Tommy Luck, who scarred his girlfriend with the point of his knife. Tommy Luck, who kept that ugly wall in his apartment with dozens of secret photographs of Serena-tortured photographs with missing eyes, slashes across her neck, red paint splashed on her body, holes where he had stabbed the images repeatedly with an ice pick. Oh, God, oh, God, why hadn't she kept track? He was in for twenty years, but the more they piled people into prisons, the more they let others out.
He was out. He was back. Tommy Luck. She should have done what she thought about doing years ago, when he first got out of prison. Followed him. Killed him. She could have erased him and erased all the pain for everyone else who wound up in his path. Maggie. Tanjy. Eric. All the others.
Her fault. She should have killed him back when she had the chance.
"You know, don't you?" he asked her.
She was silent.
"I want you to see me for what comes next. I want you to look into my eyes. I'll tape them open if I need to. You're going to watch what I do to you."
She felt the knife again, on her face this time, bruising her cheekbone as he cut away the blindfold. She couldn't help herself-she opened her eyes even when her mind told her to keep them shut. There was only a single bulb lighting up the space, but it was bright anyway after so much darkness, and she squinted and turned her head. He loomed over her, huge and strong, coming between her and the light, a silhouette of evil.
50
They went through his apartment door with battering rams at two in the morning, but Stride knew he wouldn't be there, and he wasn't.
He was using the name William Deed, and the people who knew him called him Billy. Mitchell Brandt and Sonia Bezac both confirmed that Billy Deed was the Byte Patrol tech who worked on their computers, and the store owner who was now seated in front of the computer in Deed's apartment checked his records and told Stride that Deed had handled the setup and firewall for Tanjy Powell.
There was no record of William Deed in the state's criminal justice database, and the social security number he had provided on his employment application was false.
Stride ran both hands through his wavy hair and tried to hold himself in check. His adrenaline raced, coursing through his bloodstream as if he had swallowed down half a dozen cups of strong coffee. His heart was skipping beats; he could feel it stutter every minute. Along with the adrenaline was a coiled fist of dread in his stomach, churning up acid that burned a backward path up his throat. He couldn't think about Serena now. If he did, he would go crazy. He could only think about William Deed and how to find him.
Max Guppo emerged from Deed's bedroom. He was a flatulent, three hundred pound detective, fifty years old, with the worst comb-over in the upper Midwest, and he was also Stride's best evidence technician. They had worked together since Stride joined the force. No one wanted to be locked up in a van with Guppo on a stakeout, but the man was a wizard with latent prints and evidence maps and knew his way around computers as well as anyone from Byte Patrol.
"Plenty of prints," Guppo told Stride. He had a line of perspiration on his upper lip. "I raised the best of them. I'm on my way to City Hall to scan them in."
"Call the duty officer at BCA in Saint Paul, and get someone in the lab to check the database for us right now. If there's no state match, have them send it on it to the feebs and put a rush on it."
"Already done," Guppo replied. "I woke up my buddy who's the top guy in the BCA lab, and he's on his way downtown. He said he'll handle it personally."
"You're beautiful."
"Don't worry, sir, I'll get back to you in less than an hour even if I have to wake up the special agent in charge."
Guppo hustled from the apartment, and when Guppo hustled, the floor shook. Stride knew that Guppo and the rest of the team were working double-time all night on this case. They'd do it on any abduction, but this one was personal. Their loyalty was the one comfort he had right now.