“Are you?” He was so angry. So petrified. They’d finally found each other and … this?
“As much as I can be. Besides, he's what fifty? Sixty years old?”
That didn't comfort Sebastian.
Maggie tried again, her tone soft even if her words weren’t. “He's been at this for decades. He has to be older now.”
“If he started young, he might only be in his forties,” Sebastian argued back as though those facts might sway her.
“Okay,” Maggie countered. “Let’s say he's in his forties. That might make him strong and fit, but I'm ready for him.”
“He struck again six months ago.” Sebastian was breathing heavily, failing an argument that was too important to lose. He stopped there, thinking she would catch on. But then he decided it wasn't worth it to let her draw different conclusions. “Six months ago, he was strong enough to overpower someone. This time—” Maggie finally gave some ground, looking down and then to the side, but Sebastian didn't let up. “—you might be ready, you might have your baseball bat. But what if he has drugs? What if you don't see him coming?”
“I know what he looks like!”
“He knows ways into this house that we don't!”
She shrugged as though to say what was she going to do? and Sebastian thought what she should do is stop telling people about the page they’d found, stop spreading rumors that she had something he would want. Sebastian was opening his mouth to throw his next stone, but Maggie beat him to it.
“What else are we going to do?” She'd said it before as though it were rhetorical, but now she seemed to want an answer.
The good news was he had one. “We're going to lay low and we're going to let the police and the FBI find him.”
“We are?” she demanded. “They haven't found him yet despite all the evidence we’ve given them. You and I are damn confident it's Merrit Geller, but he hasn't even been arrested yet. He's been active for over twenty years and they haven't found him. They're going to have to catch him in the act. Better me than someone else.”
He wouldn't have thought he could get any more petrified, but that had done it. All he could think was anybody but Maggie. He was shaking his head ‘no,’ but she wasn’t budging. “We just spent the last two weeks loading up the FBI and the police with new evidence, they're going to get him this time.”
“It's been two weeks, Sebastian.” She stood there in her suit and heels, looking professional and yet somehow angry. She’d pulled the clip from her hair, letting it fall down. Maggie was a sea siren now, one who would argue him to his death.
“Give them time.” He was begging.
“How much time can we give them?” Her words were soft. She was actually asking him, but she had her own answer, too. “I'm losing clients. I’ve canceled them for FBI searches of my home. I haven’t slept enough to figure out how to advertise. You aren't working at all.” This time her hand waved at him. “How much longer can you sustain that, Sebastian?”
“I have savings,” he told her.
“Good, but this isn't what they're for.”
“Actually,” he countered, finally having a point. “This is exactly what they’re for.”
Maggie nodded, conceding, but she played another card. “How many more shifts can you cancel before you don't have a job anymore?”
He didn't know the answer to that, but it wasn’t many. He was a firefighter. Redemption was his hometown, A-shift was his shift. He would likely have to move to take a job somewhere else, because the chances of one opening up here were slim. It was part of what he liked about working here: No one was going anywhere.
“Sebastian,” she told him, at least looking a little regretful now. “He's going to come back. He’s already proven that we can’t stop him. Our only hope is to control it.”
But Sebastian was confident they couldn’t.
Chapter Fifty-One
Maggie was frustrated. Sebastian didn't like her plan and she didn't like her alternatives.
It had been three more days and nothing had happened, but there wasn't much she could do. She’d already told people about the paper behind the brick. Her hope was that word would get around town, somehow Merrit Geller would hear about it, and come back.
She wasn't sleeping well either. If she’d thought that every creak and moan of the old house disturbed her sleep when she first moved in, now it was ten times worse. Now, she knew someone had come into her home and that person was a serial predator of the worst kind.
She'd been messaging Marina daily, but aside from confirming that the fingerprints they’d found in her house all matched prints found at the scene of La Vista Rapist cases and none matched the Blue River Killer evidence, there was no new evidence.
Once again, she'd had only one client this morning. She needed to average almost three per day for a healthy schedule.
Sebastian’s arguments didn’t sway her. The La Vista Rapist was going to come back to her home. She could either try to control the situation or let it surprise her. But she also understood that she couldn't just argue her way through a relationship, and she didn’t want to lose Sebastian.
Last night over dinner, he’d asked her casually, “Can you sell the house?”
She’d thought of this already. “Can I? Like, can I get a real estate agent and list it? Yes, I already considered it. But who would buy it?”
“It would make a great BnB.” He had that answer at the ready, she noticed. But that wasn’t what she’d meant.
“Well, the town already has one. I don't think Redemption can support two. Once word gets out that there's a serial predator swinging by occasionally, no one's going to come.”
He nodded.
She could sell the house, but she thought about it and she'd never be able to live with herself if anything happened. She wasn't sure how someone would list something like this anyway. Spacious interior, hardwood floors, serial rapist has a key.
And this was Abbie’s legacy. Maggie hadn’t felt it was truly hers until she had to defend it. But now? She had to defend Aunt Abbie’s memory and her own sanity.
“Move in with me for a while.”
That one she'd considered more carefully. He was already staying over, in her bed, each night, though he actually managed to get some sleep. He was used to waking up for an alarm and being ready to go, so he was practiced at catching his sleep where he could. She was not.
“This is my office,” she said. “If we leave, we give him free range. He could come back, steal whatever he wants. If there's any more evidence here, he can get it, take it, and no one will ever know.”
“I need you safe,” he said as though finally arriving at the crux of the argument.
That part she understood. Reaching out, she laced her fingers through his. “I'm going to be as safe as I can. And I need you to be safe, too. I can’t have anything happen to you, either. But I can't sit here and hide while he's out in the world. You're right, he struck almost six months ago. So, I would expect him to strike again anytime now, or maybe he already has. How can I hide when I may have the means to stop him? The upside is he's not a killer.”
She'd watched as Sebastian's eyes bounced from the ceiling to the floor, to the other side of that comment as he desperately tried to process what she was proposing. He took a harsh breath. “He leaves his victims alive, yes, but he's destroyed their lives, Maggie. You don’t want to be one of his victims. It’s … awful.”
“I know, and that's why I can't do nothing. I'm not better than any of those other women.” She felt for them, for all his past victims and all his future ones. For Aunt Abbie. “They deserve safety too, and all the other women he's going to target? I can’t sit here and let him do that.”
Sebastian at least agreed with that, but he had his own contingencies. “I’m not leaving you alone until he's caught.”
She nodded. “I can cut the cable bill, shave expenses here and there. If I can keep getting some clients, we can keep eating.”
&n
bsp; Here she was making plans into the extended future with a man that she hadn't quite agreed to live with.
“If I teach you how to shoot, can you do it?” There was only a dead serious gaze in his eyes. “Can you pull the trigger on a human?”
“I know how to shoot,” Maggie said, and watched as he grinned almost as though he'd expected her to say that. “But the practice wouldn't hurt. It's been a while. And the answer is yes, I can kill him. The good news is, I know Merrit Geller's face, and I don't think I'll have any trouble pulling the trigger. You?”
He nodded. It felt good to finally have Sebastian on her side on this. But the good feeling was short lived.
Her phone rang. Seeing that it was Marina Balero finally reaching out to her for once, Maggie snatched it up. “Hello?”
There were no pleasantries, just the words, “I have bad news.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Maggie didn't sleep for the next three nights. Marina’s news that the Blue River Killer had struck again was petrifying. Another woman was dead, maybe because Maggie and Sebastian hadn’t been able to act fast enough.
Though she knew it wasn’t truly her fault— the guilt was relentless.
She could still hear Marina’s voice in her head. “She was blonde, like all the others. Late twenties.” Maggie knew he struck younger or younger-appearing people—late twenties to even early forties. “She'd been out at one of the clubs.”
The way Marina said it, with an air of resignation, told Maggie that whatever they'd been doing or however they had educated the public had not been enough. The Blue River Killer hadn’t even had to change his MO.
She’d vented to Sebastian. “It’s been a week since we found the paper behind the brick. It was a hit list with his fingerprints all over it! How hard is it to get Merrit Geller’s fingerprints?”
Sebastian had sighed at her. “Not hard. But legally it can be a nightmare.” He’d then raised an eyebrow at her as though she should have known that.
She did. She usually appreciated the order of the system, and she understood that it was just that, a system. But it was failing her now. And it had failed that young woman who’s name Maggie hadn’t yet learned.
“If her name’s not released yet, that means they haven’t told her family,” she’d lamented to Sebastian before yet another sleepless night.
When she’d woken up—not rested—she’d rolled over to find Sebastian coming awake himself. She finally convinced him to go back to work. He’d protested. Hard.
“The La Vista Rapist isn’t coming here. He doesn’t care about the paper. Hasn’t he proven that? Nothing has happened except you aren’t getting paid and you are getting closer to losing your job.
She’d watched as his jaw clenched. She wasn’t wrong, and she knew it. Still, he’d argued back. “You’re more important than the job.”
“I appreciate that, but what happens if you have to move to get a new position? This isn’t tenable!”
“He's waiting for us to let our guard down.” The deep sigh moved his bare chest, a sight she could appreciate even as he disagreed with her.
“Well then, it's time to look like we've let our guard down.”
“What?”
“That doesn't mean actually letting our guard down.”
They'd gone back and forth this way. Maggie wondered if the relationship could withstand the pressure of a serial predator bearing down on them. In the end, Sebastian told her he hated that she thought she could get away with it, but he backed down. He conceded that she was an adult, and he had to let her make her own decisions.
She’d raised her eyebrows at him. “I haven’t heard that since I was a teenager and my dad thought I would learn my lesson.”
“I’m sorry.” He’d huffed the words out at her but didn’t push more. “Please understand that I don’t like the feeling in my gut about this.”
She’d left it at that, hoping the residual anger would eventually fade, and Sebastian told the chief he’d show up for his next shift. She’d compromised on letting someone stay with her overnight when he was gone. It was a good idea, she wasn’t stupid, and it made him feel better when he was clearly fighting trusting her decisions.
So he asked Jory Buckland from B, who readily agreed. Jory and Sebastian had gone to the academy together. The way he said this made Maggie think of her law school friends, though she was relatively certain the two trainings were very different.
That night Maggie had slept with Jory in Sebastian's old room across the hallway. She hadn't slept any more soundly than she did when Sebastian was here, but it was certainly better than if she'd been alone.
Three days later, Sebastian announced, “Jory can’t make it tomorrow night. Now what?”
Maggie had made a bold move. “Did you meet the new neighbor? Two houses down.” When she’d been with Rex, she’d fit right in with his friends. Now she had Sebastian’s friends. She needed her own. So she’d made an effort to cultivate a friendship with the woman who had just moved in. “I liked her right away.”
She didn’t tell Sebastian that she’d been shitty about sticking to small talk and that she’d wound up talking about the Blue River Killer with her new friend. Instead, she figured she’d save Sebastian and the firehouse the trouble and said, “I’ll see if I can line up my own bodyguard.”
She’d headed over two doors and knocked on the front door of the pretty Victorian. Not as big as hers, it was certainly in better shape.
“Coming!” the voice had called out. Then Seline opened the door, wearing a lab coat and clear goggles around her neck. A triangular flask of equally clear liquid sloshed in one hand. “Maggie!”
“Oh! You’re in the middle of something. I was going to see if you wanted to come to lunch. I have a question for you, so lunch is on me.”
“I’m almost finished. Can it wait twenty minutes?” Her soft french accent tilted the letters even as she spoke them. Seline motioned Maggie into the house, and Maggie soaked up all the information she could. The layout was much like her own, only without the massive number of rooms. Seline’s back room was larger than Maggie’s, though. It had been recently converted to a lab, with a black top island that looked as if it had been built in. A sink was set into one end, and a raised bar featured an interesting array of outlets.
At the far end was a bunsen burner and Maggie watched as Seline set her goggles back into place and swirled the liquid. “You should stay on that side of the room. I don’t think there are any fumes, but I don’t have a hood in here yet.”
Maggie looked up, and wondered how the woman would accomplish that. But the built-in chem lab was cute, even if Seline herself was very serious.
“I have to observe it for ten minutes.” She swirled it again and made notes in her lab book.
Very scientific, Maggie thought, but stayed quiet.
“Where did you want to go for lunch?” Seline asked, though she didn’t move her eyes. Apparently, she didn’t need silence.
“I thought you might know?”
Seline laughed. “I’m sorry, I’ve only lived here for two weeks. I don't know the town very well at all.”
Maggie had thought that Seline had come from somewhere else in Redemption. That must have been wrong. “Where did you move from?”
“Lincoln. I teach at the university. But I’m up for tenure and my schedule has changed so I only teach twice a week. The size of the house here and the yard is worth commuting for classes.” She looked up and smiled. “It gave me the funds to convert this room to a laboratory.”
“The house is gorgeous.” She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t a little jealous.
“Yours is bigger.” Despite the accent, her grammar was close to flawless.
So Maggie explained about Abbie and the boarding house and then she suggested pizza for lunch.
“Oh! I love American Pizza, that sounds wonderful.”
A few minutes later, Seline had peeled the lab coat to reveal jeans and a short-sleeved
blouse, and they headed out the door. They sat at one of the sidewalk tables and ordered too much food, and eventually Seline had worked her way around to, “What was the question you wanted to ask me?”
“Oh, it doesn't matter. I thought you grew up in Redemption and knew everyone.”
“But you bought me lunch. So what was the question anyway?”
As she bit into another gooey slice, Maggie told Seline more about their serial predator. She mentioned the paper found hidden in her fireplace and the need to find someone to stay overnight with her. “I had hoped you might know someone that I could ask.”
Seline’s eyes had gotten wider and wider as Maggie talked. But, at the end, her expression snapped to serious. “I can stay with you.”
Surprised Maggie asked, “You're volunteering? I appreciate it. But …”
But the idea quickly took root. Having a second person on scene would be smart and Seline was clearly intelligent and able to think on her feet. And then the other woman surprised her.
“I am an excellent marksman. My father was in the COS—French military, special forces. I have my own nine-millimeter … pistol.” She’d seemed to search for the last word, but she grabbed another slice of pizza as though this were an ordinary conversation and continued. “What do you think is the likelihood this man will show up tomorrow night?”
“Slim to none.” Maggie sighed. “He hasn’t shown up for weeks. We’ve changed all the locks and bolted the cellar door shut. He seems to have no interest in the last bit of evidence we found. But my boyfriend—” damn, that sounded good, “—is a firefighter. He works twenty-four hour shifts and won’t go to work if I’m alone.”
Seline smiled, a wide grin that reached her clear blue eyes. It seemed every emotion she felt played across her features. “I will bring a bag over tonight. Then tomorrow I can come through the back gate. No one will know I’m there!”
Seline was baiting the monster even more than Maggie had ever intended to. But damn if the fantasy of the two of them shooting him when he broke in wasn’t tempting. Maggie knew that wasn’t how it worked: Seline would be an extra set of ears and eyes for an incredibly boring evening.
Crash and Burn (Wildfire Hearts Book 1) Page 19
