by Tess Diamond
“Oh, God,” Gavin said. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how hard that must’ve been for her to deal with, all alone, with no support system.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Grace explained. “I’d had romantic experience only with boys my age—never a man who could damage my future if I stayed. I didn’t feel like I could go above him and report it. I didn’t want to ruin his life or mine, and I knew that both our reputations would be ruined if the affair came to light. So I decided the only way to make him stop was to get away. I applied to transfer to Georgetown. And that was the nail in the coffin. Right before I left, he put a present on my doorstep. A pair of diamond earrings.”
Gavin went cold as the connection hit him. Carthage tried to court her back then with diamonds.
And he was trying to court her now, with diamonds and murder.
“So he’s wooing you with bodies,” Gavin said.
“Or showing me what’s waiting for me,” Grace said bleakly. “I don’t know how he got from slightly unhinged to . . . this.” She pulled her hands from his, indicating all the papers around her. “But I figured it out,” she said.
“Figured out what?” Gavin asked gently, because her voice was trembling again.
“How he was choosing his victims. He made it so only I could figure out the connection, because they’re all tied to that first year at college. Janice was part of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority. So was my freshman roommate, who was the only person who knew about us and encouraged me to leave him. Mr. and Mrs. Anderson belonged to the same country club my parents have for thirty years. Nancy Bantam was Carthage’s wife’s divorce lawyer when she left him—because she found out about me.”
“And Raymond Nugent?” Gavin asked.
“He looks exactly like Carthage’s teaching assistant,” Grace said. “His TA was a friend of a friend. He was the one who introduced me to Carthage. He was doing me a favor. Until I had all the pieces laid out, I couldn’t see the patterns. But then Zooey sent me the sketch our artist did with the jeweler, and it fell together.”
“So he’s killed the surrogate for your roommate,” Gavin said. “The surrogate for your parents. The lawyer who he probably thinks destroyed his marriage. And the surrogate for a teaching assistant who introduced you.”
Grace nodded, her lips pressed together like she might be sick. He felt the same way. Now that the path was clear, the motives, the man . . . it was horrific. It was terrifying.
He couldn’t ask the question he knew he should, but once again, Grace voiced the hard truth with her typical fearlessness.
“The question is, are there more surrogates?” She looked over to him, her gray eyes like liquid silver. “Or am I next on his list?”
Chapter 23
In a way, telling Paul was harder than telling Gavin. The pressure was different. The relationship was different. Paul was her boss, her friend, her leader.
And Gavin . . .
She didn’t know what Gavin was. He was more. More than anything she’d ever had in her life. More than she’d ever let herself have. It was terrifying, but she kept coming back, flirting with the flame, daring it to burn her.
But what if it doesn’t? that traitorous voice inside her asked. What if he’s the one thing in your life that endures?
There was an acceptance with Gavin, a hurtful kind of healing as she told her story, revealed herself piece by raw piece. He’d held her; he’d trusted her.
He’d heard her.
But Paul . . . Her fingers twisted together nervously in her lap as she waited for him to say something. Gavin had wanted to come with her, but she’d insisted she tell him alone.
He was quiet for a long time after she finished, staring not at her but at the stack of files on his desk.
“Paul,” she prompted quietly.
His eyes finally lifted to hers, his face all concern. “Oh, Grace,” he said. “I am so sorry.”
Relief flooded her like a dam breaking.
“This is not your fault,” Paul continued.
No matter how many people said that, she couldn’t quite make herself believe it. She hated herself for the feeling. It was wrong. It was victim-blaming. She’d never allow anyone on her team to think like this about anyone.
But when it was her? Her adolescent, angry choices? The mistakes she made?
Apparently she was her own harshest critic. Her therapist was going to have a great time examining that revelation next session.
“I’ve dispatched agents to Carthage’s apartment and his office at the university,” Paul said.
“They won’t find him,” Grace said. She doubted he’d been at either place for weeks. How long had he been planning this? Months? Years?
Her stomach swooped sickeningly and she swallowed hard.
“We need to figure out how to approach this,” Paul started to say, but stopped when there was a knock at the door and his assistant, Amanda, peeked her head in.
“Agent Harrison, you have a call from upstairs. They said you asked them to flag any calls regarding Agent Sinclair? Well, they have one.”
Grace got to her feet. “It’s him,” she said. She was sure of it.
He’d waited until now, until he’d left her the final corpse, the final set of earrings. He gave her all the clues, all the steps in the game, and now he was calling to explain the rules.
Her face hardened, her lips forming a line. “Have them transfer the call to the north conference room,” she told Amanda. “And please have someone let Agent Walker and Zooey know they’re needed.”
Amanda hesitated, looking at Paul questioningly. He nodded his head.
“Do what she says,” he said.
Grace took a deep breath, trying to center herself as she and Paul walked toward the conference room.
“I can call in Maggie,” Paul said.
Grace shook her head. “He won’t talk to her. This is about me and him.”
“Which is why you shouldn’t be the one negotiating with him,” Paul said. “You’re one of the victims here, Grace. You’re a target.”
“I know how he works,” Grace said, opening the conference room door. Zooey was already inside, a computer to trace the call set up on the far end of the table.
“He’s been on hold for five minutes,” she said. “So far, I haven’t been able to pinpoint his location. He’s using some sort of bouncing algorithm. Unfortunately, there are hackers who whip up this sort of thing for the right price. It’s going to take me a while to get even one cell tower, let alone enough for a good triangulation.”
Gavin came jogging into the room. “I just heard,” he said. “He’s on the phone?”
“Grace is going to talk to him,” Paul said.
Gavin frowned. “Is that a good idea?”
“Yes,” Grace said pointedly. “Look, the longer we argue about this, the longer he’s on hold and the more likely he’ll get spooked and hang up. So, Gavin, Paul, quiet. Zooey, keep tracing. I can do this.”
Grace was anything but good to go, but she knew she had no choice. It was the moment of truth.
Be calm. Stay in control. Direct the conversation. She could hear Maggie’s tips for proper negotiation in her head, and they bolstered her.
Grace reached for the phone with a shaking hand, turning it on speaker. But when she spoke, her voice was steady, even though her heart was ramming against her rib cage like a drum. “Hello?”
“Hello, Clarice,” said a voice. Then a chuckle that sent icy daggers down her spine. “Just kidding.”
“Carthage,” she said, deliberately not calling him Doctor. She wasn’t going to play to his narcissism. Not yet. Not until she had a feel for this sick game he was playing. It was hard to hide the revulsion in her voice, but she knew she had to remain as neutral as possible. The second she got emotional, he had control.
“Oh, good,” he said, drawling the words out. “You do know. I was starting to think I overestimated your intelligence, Grace. That maybe you had peaked when you wer
e my student. I was afraid you wouldn’t figure it out.”
She gritted her teeth at his mocking. “Well, I did,” she said.
“Did you like my presents? I wrapped the last one specially, just for you.”
Her stomach clenched, the image of Raymond Nugent’s pale, dead face flashing through her mind. She steeled herself.
“We both know none of that was for me,” Grace said. “All of this is for you.”
There was a sigh, a classic professorial expression of disappointment. “All of this is for you, Grace. All of this is because of you.”
Grace swallowed, her throat scratchy. She needed water. “I never asked you to murder five people,” she said.
“You never asked for anything!” he shouted. The sudden shift in volume made her jump. Everyone in the room stared at her in surprise, and she gripped the edges of the table hard, her palm sweating. “You just took and took and took, Grace. Heedless of the consequences. Heedless of my needs. You must be punished for that. You left me.”
“I was eighteen years old,” Grace said calmly, feeling anything but. She could still remember that pit in her stomach from the day she broke it off. How he’d reached for her over the restaurant table, how she’d fled, leaving him behind with a bouquet of dying roses and a bottle of expensive wine. “You were almost twenty years older. You were my professor. You were the one who had the power. You knew better, Carthage. But that didn’t stop you.”
“It didn’t stop you either,” he hissed. “You little slut, you were gagging for it.”
Grace bit her tongue. She wanted so badly to yell. To scream. To accuse. To hang up. But when it came to crisis negotiation, she’d been trained by the best, and she wouldn’t put Maggie’s lessons to shame. Or endanger the case. She had to catch him, to stop this madness.
Zooey mouthed, The signal’s still bouncing, at her. Grace nodded. She would need to keep him on the line longer so they could pin it down.
She had to be the one in control.
“You left devastation in your wake,” Carthage muttered. “Hurricane Grace. Tearing through my life, turning everything upside down, making me crazy for you. Making me want you. Making Joann leave me.”
“I didn’t break up your marriage, Carthage,” Grace said. “You pursued me. Just like you pursued the girls before me and, I’m sure, the girls after me. I was just the final straw for Joann. She knew about the others.”
“I didn’t love the others!” he shouted.
Grace glanced at Gavin, who held up a pad of paper with the words He’s losing control scribbled on it.
Grace nodded. I have a plan, she mouthed back.
“But you loved me,” Grace said, and it was a statement, rather than a question. A sickening fact she knew Carthage believed 100 percent. His version of love was impossible for a normal person to contemplate . . . where mutilated bodies served as courting gifts and her fear was his idea of foreplay.
“You deserted me,” Carthage spat back. “You left me here to rot while you soared like some sort of avenging angel of justice. And I’ve had to watch it all. Your commendations. Your promotions. Your fucking bestsellers!”
The books. The books were the trigger. That’s all she could think as he breathed hard into the phone, his fury radiating through the line. They’d propelled her to celebrity status, so countless people knew her name. He couldn’t stand it. It made her less his, in his twisted, violent mind. It made him question his ownership of her. And that would’ve shaken his worldview to the core.
It would be enough to set him off on this sick game he was playing.
“I waited, Grace,” Carthage continued ranting. “I kept waiting for you to call, for you to acknowledge. But that call never came. And then I saw that you dedicated your new book to someone else—you called her your mentor. Your inspiration. How dare you do that to me?”
“You think you deserve that title?” Grace asked, and she couldn’t stop the disgusted skepticism in her voice. She winced, realizing it’d make him escalate further.
“I made you,” Carthage hissed. “I took one look at you, and I saw it—the raw potential. I molded you like a sculptor molds clay. You were almost perfect. With my continued influence, you would’ve been perfect. But you rejected me. You ran away like a little girl scared of love. Scared of a real man. We were so close, my pretty girl. So close to perfection. And you threw it all away.
“You’re not perfect now, bitch. You’ve undone all my hard work, stomped on the ashes. You need to acknowledge my hand in making you. You’re mine.”
Fear and anger, twined tightly together, rose inside her at his last words. She had spent her life being told what to do by her distant father, only to have him turn his back on her the first time she ever defied him. She’d grown up with lectures about the Sinclair name, holding it up, being an example. She’d been raised to be an idea of a person, her free will bent to the will of the Sinclair family. She was supposed to exist only to better the name.
She had left that behind. Her life was hers and only hers.
“I belong to no one,” Grace said, her voice ringing out clear and determined. “Especially not you.”
He laughed, an unhinged cackle that made goose bumps prickle across her skin in waves. “You’re always someone’s bitch, Grace. You were mine once, you’ll be mine again.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“Yes, we will,” Carthage said, the dark promise heavy in his words. “Tell me, sweet Grace, what is that little profiler mind of yours thinking? Is it busy putting together pieces of me, assembling a bunch of psych-speak to explain me? Profile me, sweetheart. Right now.”
Grace’s eyes narrowed. Oh, he wanted to play that game, did he? She bit back her vicious words, practically hearing Maggie’s voice begging her to stay calm and in control.
She had to be strong. Because she knew deep down that Carthage’s weakness was his greatest insecurity. She was going to exploit that.
She went in for the kill: “You think you’re a genius,” Grace said, her voice flat, almost professorial. “You got involved in academia because you thought your intelligence would be appreciated. Valued. But it didn’t quite work out that way, did it?”
Carthage let out a little huff of breath, loud enough for her to hear. She smiled triumphantly. She was getting into the cracks in his armor.
“No, it didn’t work out that way,” she repeated, starting to pace around the room. Filled with a frenetic sort of energy, she needed to burn it off as she revealed him to himself, layer by layer, digging down into that insecure core. “Suddenly, you were swimming with the big guys and you didn’t quite measure up the way you’d planned, did you? Instead of your colleagues bowing to your superiority, you found yourself surrounded by people who were more intelligent than you. More accomplished. Better published. Higher climbing. And you just got left behind, again and again. It made you bitter.”
“I am a brilliant scholar,” he said, but she could hear just the barest doubt in his voice, lurking there, hidden to everyone but her.
“You’re complacent,” Grace said, making another circle around the room. Zooey still hadn’t gotten a trace. Carthage must’ve spent a lot of money to scramble his signal like this. “You wanted things handed to you because you happened to be smarter than the nearest yokel in whatever podunk pond where you were the biggest fish. Since you couldn’t get your colleagues’ respect or admiration, you turned to your students. They became your proxies for success because you have so little of your own.”
“Teaching is a passion,” Carthage hissed back. “An honored and respected profession.”
“You know what they say about those who teach,” Grace sneered.
Zooey clapped her hand over her mouth, trying to suppress a laugh. Paul pressed his finger to his lips, shooting her a stern look.
Gavin didn’t take his eyes off Grace, his stance tense and protective. He was having a hell of a hard time holding his tongue, she could tell. She appreciated his
restraint, though. One wrong move, and this went south.
“You’re an angry man, Carthage,” Grace said. “But it’s not just your failure that makes you angry. No, what makes you really furious is the anonymity. More than anything, you hate that no one sees you. No one knows you. No one cares to. But I see you now, Henry. I see you crystal clear.”
“And what do you see, Grace?” There was a disturbing ache in his words, like he was some earnest schoolboy, eager for instruction. It made her stomach flip over violently, and she leaned against the conference room table, her legs quivering.
But there was no sign of wavering in her voice as she answered his question. “I see a man past his prime who can’t even seduce naive freshmen into his bed anymore. They’re too sophisticated for you now, those girls you want so desperately to look at you like you’ve got all the answers. So you decided to focus on me. The one who got away.”
“You’re the one who caused the most damage,” Carthage seethed. “You ruined my marriage.”
“I didn’t tell your wife,” Grace said. “You did.”
It was a guess, but now she was sure of the answer. He had told Joann himself. The question was why . . .
“Because I was going to leave her for you!”
Grace’s disgust was palpable in the room. Next to her, she could feel Zooey shuddering in womanly commiseration.
“You keep telling yourself that,” Grace said, knowing she sounded strong and sure, though feeling anything but. God, was he this delusional? That he willingly broke apart his marriage and then a decade later started killing people he deemed harmful to the institution? The hypocrisy was mind-boggling.
“I know what’s true,” Carthage said. “I know what’s right. What’s fair. You weren’t fair, Grace. Your entire life—I should’ve been there. At your side.”
