She’d expected doubt to set in by now. Instead she feels the opposite. Her confidence builds with every step they take toward the computer lab, a double-sided row of private carrels in the middle of a shelf-filled book room, which, to her relief, is almost devoid of other people.
Luke allows her to take a seat at a carrel on the end, then pulls a chair up behind her.
If he’s losing patience with her silence, he’s managed not to show it.
The chat room welcomes her with a bare-bones layout; yellow bands on each side and dialogue flowing in languages she doesn’t recognize. Most of them Eastern European, she’s sure. She clicks on the tab that allows her to set up an instant free profile.
“Go in hot,” Luke whispers. “Remember?”
“Burning Girl isn’t exactly anonymous,” she whispers back. “Especially given current circumstances.”
“I agree. But I figure whatever name you pick, it’s gotta stand out. This thing has private messaging, right? I don’t figure he’s gonna want to hash this out in the main chat room.”
“Nah, he probably won’t.”
In the entry blank for her username she types, flamingmanureguylover.
Luke’s attempt to control his laughter turns into a little eruption of huffing breaths.
“It’s hot and it’s partly about him,” she whispers, “so I figure’ll it get his attention.”
Second later, an invite to a private chat pops up from msstocktonpresents666.
“Ms. Stockton?” Luke whispers. “What does that mean?”
“Our European history teacher. Remember? We talked about it back at your place.”
“Wow. He really was listening to everything.”
She accepts the invite, and a private chat room opens.
U have a good memory, Bailey writes.
She lifts her fingers to the keyboard.
It was a pretty good joke. Looks like you’ve graduated to bigger stuff now, she types.
Next to her, Luke gives off the energy of a coiled snake.
Big bro with you?
Yes, she types.
Tell him I’m sorry.
She lets these words sit on the screen.
Tell him he should have taken Rohm’s deal. Tell him there was never anything he could have given feds on me. I wouldn’t have put him in that position.
The breath leaves Luke so quickly she’s afraid it’s the first sign of a groan that might draw the attention of the librarian at the nearby information desk. He growls under his breath, runs his hands back through his hair.
“Tell him to go to hell,” he whispers.
“Really?” she asks.
“No.”
Guess that didn’t go over well, comes the response.
“Ask him if he’s somewhere safe,” Luke whispers.
She complies.
Yes, comes the response, very far away, safer for you if you don’t know where.
“Tell him that’s the truth because when I see him again, I’m gonna wring his neck,” Luke says.
“Really?”
“He’s better with that kind of thing than actual concern. Actual concern makes him feel . . . confined.”
Charlotte types in the response exactly as Luke worded it.
The response comes without a pause. ; )
“See?” Luke asks.
What’s your story, Burning Girl? Sounds like you’re in big trouble, too.
A minute later, her hands are still resting on her lap, and she hasn’t typed anything in response.
“Charley?” Luke whispers. “Are you going to tell him?”
??? appears on-screen a few seconds later.
Still here, she types, just give me a sec.
“He won’t believe me,” she finally says.
“I believed you.”
“You could see me. He can’t. He can’t look into my eyes and know I’m telling the truth.”
And you still haven’t seen it in action, she thinks. So you don’t really understand, either.
“Is that really it?” Luke asks.
She looks back at him, takes advantage of the connection she has with him that she can’t establish with his brother. “Not entirely, no,” she whispers. “Even if I ask him not to, he’ll probably go after them, won’t he?”
“Given his history, yeah.”
“I don’t want that. Not yet.”
“Even if he just gets information?”
“They’re expecting that. Kayla’s already run some kind of background check on Dylan, and he knows about it somehow. And there was something else he said . . .”
“What, Charley?”
“He said there was no way for me to surprise him,” she says, “now that they can see everything I’m doing.”
“Sounds about right,” Luke responds, and for the first time since she asked for silence on the drive there, she hears doubt creeping back into his voice.
“It isn’t right, though.” The words give her the confidence to lift her hands to the keyboard again. “It’s wrong. I know exactly how to surprise him.”
Still need you to find someone, she types.
Listening, comes the response.
“If they’re gonna make me do this, whoever they are,” she whispers, “I’m doing it on my terms.”
I need you to find the Mask Maker, she types.
25
“Whoa,” Luke whispers.
The serial killer in LA? Bailey answers.
“Whoa, Charley.”
She holds up a hand to silence him, then types, Yes.
She braces herself for a flood of questions about her motives, her plan.
On it, comes the response.
And that’s it.
“Wait,” she says.
“Yeah, yeah,” Luke whispers, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone is watching them. “That sounds right. Let’s wait a minute here and just—”
Again, she holds up one hand to silence him, then types, You can find him?
I can do my best. I’ll be in touch.
That’s it???
A few seconds later, Bailey’s response: I’m like the Secret Service. I don’t discuss procedure. Better for everyone that way. Take care of my brother, i.e., don’t take any of his shit.
After a minute of radio silence, she types a string of question marks, gets nothing in response. Behind her Luke’s gathering anger takes the form of heavy breathing and the occasional unnecessary throat clearing.
Bailey’s gone. For now.
“Let’s talk,” Luke says.
“You say that like we’ve haven’t been talking all day.”
“Seriously, Charley.”
“Outside.”
His footsteps are so heavy she can hear them scraping the soft carpeting behind her. Is he that pissed, or has a rush of adrenaline made her hypersensitive to his close pursuit, to the glances from the librarians they walk past at the information desk? Is it from the nagging fear that some trace of her chat with Bailey might actually be left on that computer back there, even though she closed out every screen and Bailey picked the chat room because nothing about it was permanent?
Once they’re on the sidewalk and a good distance from the library entrance, Luke grabs her by one shoulder. A mistake, he seems to realize too late. By then their eyes have locked, and he remembers everything she told him on the ride there and holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“Look, I gave you an out,” she says.
“A serial killer?” Luke hisses. “You’re actually going to go after a serial killer?”
“‘The world is full of bad men, Charlotte. Go find some. Show them what you can do.’ That’s what Dylan just said to me. Your brother locates criminals, so I’m just asking him to do what he’s good at. That’s all.”
“I’m not worried about my brother. I’m worried about you.”
“I appreciate that, but it was your advice, remember?”
“Go after a serial killer with a drug you d
on’t understand? When did I give that advice?”
“I made the choice in the middle.”
“How is that—I mean, what are you even talking about? Charley, you have to go to the authorities.”
“I’m sorry. What authorities? Do you have a direct line to the president I don’t know about? Twenty-five billion dollars a year. Aerial surveillance technology. Private security contractors that take out dictators. That’s what I’m up against, Luke, and the only thing that can stop people like that is a thermonuclear warhead or the threat of one. You have any lying around?”
“You’re not a killer, Charley. Trina Pierce was not a killer. Everyone knew it no matter what they said. No matter what I said. Don’t do something crazy just ’cause you think you still have to prove that to the world.”
“The world? I don’t want the world to know about any of this. I want the world to leave me alone for the first time in my life. To stop treating me like my mother being raped and murdered by those monsters makes me special. Because when the world does that, they make Abigail Banning feel special. Jesus Christ, Luke. My entire life I’ve been forced to indulge sick freaks on the Internet who want to turn that woman into their own Hannibal Lecter, and the minute I finally got free of them, Dylan Fucking Thorpe shows up and throws me headfirst into this nightmare. So if I’m really stuck here, I’m doing things my way.”
“I appreciate your anger, Charley. You—”
“Oh, don’t patronize me. You don’t—”
“Then stop talking about your damn feelings and start talking about the facts. I spend my weekends reading about this guy. For starters, they don’t know if he is just one guy. But he’s on his way to being one of the most proficient, if not the most proficient, serial killer in American history. I mean, do you even know the first thing about him? What this guy does requires months of planning on top of some sort of medical expertise. And he’s managed to abduct both his victims from public places without popping up on a single security camera.”
“That’s not true. They’ve got him in Santa Monica last week.”
“Because he wanted them to. He’s never been caught on camera when he didn’t want to be, Charley. The guy makes the Bannings look like amateurs.”
“The Bannings killed for nine years before a deliveryman recognized me from an age-progression photo. They were not amateurs, Luke.”
“His abductions are not on camera. They haven’t even pinpointed the abduction sites. Do you realize the kind of skill and patience that takes in this day and age?”
“Ten bucks says they’ve got him on tape, and we just don’t know about it because they’re holding it back so they can eliminate false confessions. The cops did the same thing with five different pieces of evidence in the Banning case.”
“Oh my God. Is that what you just sent Bailey to do? Hack LAPD and the FBI?”
“Well, you could ask your brother, but he doesn’t discuss procedure, remember?”
“This is insane,” Luke whispers.
“You’re right, and it’s been insane for forty-eight hours, and I gave you an out, and I didn’t have to tell you about any of it, so screw you for judging how I’m handling it.”
“I’m not judging you. I’m trying to keep you from destroying what life you have left.”
“I made the choice in the middle. Just like you said. And when I’m done, there’s a very good chance the Mask Maker won’t be killing women anymore.”
“You are . . .” Luke begins, shaking his head. But instead of finishing he pulls out his phone. “Nuts,” he says as he starts dialing. “You are completely nuts, Charley. And I wouldn’t be doing right by you if I let you . . . I mean, this just . . . this has to stop right now.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m calling Mona, and I’m telling her everything. We’ll figure something out. We’ll get you some kind of help. Aerial surveillance technology, my ass. Dylan Psychofuck is probably a lying psychopath who’s following us in a truck with some binoculars. He could be lying about everything.”
“Put the phone away, Luke.”
Instead he turns his back on her and puts several feet of distance between them.
She closes her eyes, grits her teeth, tries once more to turn anger into a trigger event. She won’t crush his face. Just his phone, and then hopefully, by proxy, some of his massive crusader’s ego. But it doesn’t work. Anger’s not enough. Rage is not enough. She needs stark terror.
Should she attack him right now? Make him fight back in a way that will trigger her? But is that worth the risk? If he does go through with this call, she can just deny everything and make Luke look like the crazy one. A betrayal, sure, but isn’t that what he’s doing to her right now?
And then the light changes and the traffic starts streaming past the library, and she sees a giant refrigerator truck with the cheerful logo of some produce company on its side round the distant corner. The driver accelerates when he sees a green light waiting for him a half block ahead.
“Hey, Phil, is Mona on duty?” Luke says into the phone.
Charlotte walks to the edge of the curb.
“Tell her it’s urgent. Is she on her cell? . . . How far? . . . No, I mean how long has it been going to voice mail?”
The truck approaches, engine bellowing, huffing exhaust.
This time it will work. Because this time it’s not a car being driven by a loved one who’s practically family. This time it’s a truck driven by a stranger. A huge truck. And maybe the driver’s late for a delivery or a pickup or a hot date or who knows what else; what she knows is he’s sitting about seven or eight feet off the ground and won’t see her if she steps in front of him at just the right moment.
The truck’s only a few yards away now. And as she studies that grill, visualizes herself stepping in front of it, she feels the tingling in her hands, the slowly accelerating drumbeat of bone music. The onset of terror.
Maybe she’ll need to break a bone. Maybe the truck will have to tear into her before the Zypraxon in her system blooms. But surely an attack from a giant, moving wall of metal will be perceived the same way an attack from a rageful human would.
Why would the terror be any different, any less effective? And maybe she’ll find out what kind of miracles Zypraxon can work on a freshly broken femur.
“Tell her I need to talk to her right away,” Luke says. “She needs to call me on my—”
“Luke!”
He spins, looks her in the eye.
“Watch this!”
She steps off the curb and thrusts one arm out in front of her.
Luke’s terrified shouts and the truck’s squealing brakes deafen her.
Despite her best efforts to keep them open, she screws her eyes shut. She’s rocked back on her heels as if from a sudden, strong wind and in the same moment it feels as if her arm has exploded into flame. Then she tilts forward onto the balls of her feet again, and her lips kiss the steel grill.
The truck didn’t stop just in time.
She stopped the truck just in time. With one arm.
When she opens her eyes again, she’s dwarfed by the truck’s grill, and her arm’s buried deep inside it, in a fresh gash that looks custom designed just for her. The pain, in its Zypraxon-muffled form, ricochets up her forearm, sings through her shoulder, then arcs across her upper back before it leaves behind a dull, throbbing ache she’d normally associate with lifting something heavy. The entire process feels as if the pain searched for a place in her body where it could perform its expected, agonizing work, but it kept getting denied entry, so it decided to give up and evaporate altogether.
The truck shudders, as if its very carriage is coming to terms with the miraculous strength that just brought it to a halt, a force that was not just sudden and powerful enough to stop it but impossibly precise.
Slowly, she removes her arm from the hole.
She’s bleeding from a dozen different scratches. The bruising is fierce and terrible
. In her fist, she holds on to a chunk of metal from the grill. She passes it to her left hand, then twiddles all of the fingers on her right. They work perfectly. No additional spike of pain shoots up her arm. Nothing’s broken. The skin’s a mess, but the bones are intact.
With her left hand, she slowly crushes the chunk of metal and lets it drop to the concrete.
Then, a few feet away, Luke makes a sound like a bird that doesn’t know if it’s dawn, dusk, or feeding time. She’s never seen someone who literally looked as if he were about to jump out of his skin before, but that’s how Luke looks. He’s in a half crouch, his arms spread on either side of him, as if preparing to dive through the air to knock her out of the truck’s path. He’s frozen in midcrouch, his mouth agape and his eyes wide. Without meaning to, he tossed his phone. It lies on the pavement a few feet away.
The driver’s screams come to a sudden, choked halt when he sees her. Reflexively, she hides her not-injured-enough arm against her chest and covers it with the other. “I’m OK,” she cries. “I’m OK.”
Just as the truck driver drops from his cab to the sidewalk, she hops up onto the pavement as if the entire event were nothing more than a brief stumble. At the sight of this, the driver lets out a moan so full of relief it sounds almost sexual. He clasps one hand to his chest, forcing breath back into his lungs.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s not your fault. You totally stopped in time. I’m such an idiot. I’m so sorry. Thank you. We were just . . . my husband and I, we were fighting, you see, and I got distracted because he was being such a huge dick.”
The driver stares at her in a daze, whispering words under his breath, too quietly for her to make them out, but she’s willing to bet every other one is profane. Hands braced on his knees, he bends forward, mouth agape. His baseball cap falls to the sidewalk, revealing his sweat-soaked rat’s nest of wiry black hair.
She bends down and picks up Luke’s cell phone, slides it into her pocket with a sliver of the force she’d normally use for such a task.
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