The Surviving Girls

by Katee Robert

  Clarke followed her gaze and then refocused on Lei and then Emma. “A lot of sociopaths think they’re smarter than everyone else in the room—some of them are even right—and Travis sure as hell falls into the latter category. His IQ is 167, and from all accounts, prison hasn’t broken him. What we need to know is if he’d encourage a fan to take these steps.”

  “Of course he would. He’s a fucking psycho,” Emma snarled.

  “What do you think?” Clarke was looking at Lei.

  Because, why not? Even now, cops thought Lei had some kind of inside track to the way Travis’s mind worked. She’d dated him for months, had slept with him countless times, and so she must have some insider knowledge to explain how the golden boy went so very, very wrong.

  She hadn’t been able to give them a satisfactory answer then. She didn’t have one now, either, but she could try. “Travis liked to be the smartest person in the room, mostly because he liked the attention. I could see him being amused by this fan, but if it gets to the point where he feels like he’s been upstaged, that could change on a dime.”

  Dante nodded as if she’d confirmed something he expected. “I know this is painful, but we need you to walk us through what you remember of that night.”

  “Why?” Emma slid down onto the chair next to Lei, wedging herself in until they were pressed tightly together from knee to shoulder. This close, the tiny shakes she’d been hiding until now came out, and Prince shifted closer to lay himself over Emma’s feet. But she wasn’t done. “You have the case files. You have the new murders. Why do you need us?”

  Lei clasped her friend’s hand. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want any of this. They’d come here to be left alone, to do some good in the world to balance out Lei’s karmic debt and to help with Emma’s crippling anxiety. Nothing in the plan involved being forced to confront those horrific twenty-four hours that had changed everything. She squeezed Emma’s hand. “Because we’re the only ones who survived.”

  Watching the women interact was fascinating on a level Dante wasn’t prepared for. He’d known Lei and Emma lived together, but he hadn’t had the opportunity to take a step back and consider the implications of that arrangement. Emma teetered on the edge of a breakdown and used Lei to pull herself back from the ledge . . . everything made a lot more sense.

  They’d formed a symbiotic relationship, of sorts.

  There wasn’t much data concerning situations like this one, mostly because they rarely arose, and each case was too individual to tie together with nice, easy studies. It stood to reason, though, that coming out of that sorority house as the only two survivors would send these women into one of two futures. In one, they never saw each other and pretended the other didn’t exist rather than be faced with the perpetual reminder of what they’d gone through.

  In the other, they realized that no one would ever know what they’d gone through as intimately as the other person who’d survived—so they leaned on each other as a result.

  Lei was the one who finally met his gaze, and hell if her inky-dark eyes didn’t take his breath away despite the circumstances. Clarke had pulled both women’s photos on the way over there, but they were old—from their sorority days. Both beautiful in their own way, though they were a study in opposites. Emma had the sweet southern thing going for her, all blonde hair, big innocent blue eyes, and curves that suggested southern cooking. He couldn’t tell if her soft tone was practiced or natural, but it pricked at him every time she spoke.

  Lei . . . She was something else altogether. She was petite in a way that should have read frail but reminded him of a blade waiting to be unsheathed. There were muscles beneath her light-brown skin, and he guessed that she’d have no problem keeping up with the monster dog at her feet during a search. Her straight black hair was pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail, which left her features in stark relief. Beautiful, but doesn’t like to draw attention to it. Might as well have tried to hide the sky.

  Fuck, get it together. You’re here to interview them, not to lose your damn mind over Lei Zhang.

  Yes, she was beautiful, but he’d dealt with beautiful women before without jeopardizing his professional persona. Dante didn’t know what it was about this woman that called to something in him, but he had to shelve it.

  He couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  Lei clasped Emma’s hand but turned her body to face him more fully. “The night of the murders, I let Travis Berkley into the Omega Delta Lambda house. We’d been dating four months, and he told me he had a surprise.” Her lips twisted. “It was against the rules, but girls broke the rules all the time.”

  Dante noted her knuckles whitening where she held Emma’s hand, but her voice maintained its steady tone. “We had sex. Approximately an hour later, something changed. I still have problems putting it into words. Travis just . . . shifted. It was like he’d taken off a mask and I didn’t recognize the man beneath. He hit me. A few times.” She absentmindedly touched the little hooked scar on her cheekbone. From Travis’s ring. “I passed out. When I woke up, he’d barricaded my door shut and I could hear their screams.”

  Lei’s breath hitched, and it was almost as if she inhaled and Emma exhaled. The blonde lifted her chin. “I was in the basement studying when it started. Finals were coming up, and I was struggling in history and needed the extra study time. The first sign of something wrong was Travis hauling Sarah—” She cut herself off and flinched. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to say their names, even now.”

  Clarke huffed out a breath. “You don’t have to name every single girl he killed. We know their names. We know their stories. We just want to hear how it all went down from your perspective.”

  They wouldn’t find anything new here. Dante knew it, and he suspected Clarke knew it, too. These two women had told their stories countless times over the years, and if there was information they hadn’t shared before now, he highly doubted this would be the time it’d magically come out.

  Hearing the story through their own voices was a whole hell of a lot more jarring than reading it in the file, however.

  Emma took them through it. How Travis Berkley brought the entire house of girls into that basement, how he was charming and terrifying and told them that he’d let them go one by one . . . if they did exactly as he asked. It wasn’t until the night was over and no one had come to save them that the remaining girls realized what was happening, and even then, they were too afraid to try to overpower him.

  Herd mentality. Travis had to have known he could manipulate the whole group as long as he got them scared and in a single place. They believed the pretty lie because the truth was impossible to wrap their minds around.

  Emma’s voice shook. “There were still . . . ten of us left when I realized I wasn’t getting out of that house alive—that none of the girls had gotten out alive like he’d promised. When he took the next girl, I hid under the couch.”

  “None of those girls saw you hide?” Clarke frowned. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t . . .” She dropped her gaze as if she couldn’t bear to hold up her head any longer. “We were in shock at that point—just sitting there, lost in ourselves. We didn’t talk. We didn’t even look at each other. We just sat there and . . . contemplated the fact we were going to die. I don’t know if they even noticed I was gone. I hid until every single one of them was gone. And he just . . . walked out.”

  “He came for me. I guess it was then.” Lei didn’t shrink in on herself. She seemed to grow taller, sit straighter. “I heard him removing the barricade, and I panicked. After listening to that all night . . .” She shook her head. “I knew what would happen if he got back into my room, so I climbed out the window.”

  Clarke went still. “I saw the list of your injuries. You had a broken arm, your knee was so fucking swollen you shouldn’t have been able to walk, and you had several head wounds and a handful of broken ribs on top of that. How the hell did you climb out a windo
w?”

  Lei shrugged one shoulder. “He would kill me if I didn’t. I figured falling to my death was preferable to letting Travis have me, so I took my chances.”

  It was only sheer dumb luck that it was late enough in the morning that a student jogging past saw Lei. By the time he’d come back with help, Lei was unconscious in the flower bed, and Travis was gone.

  Dante sat back, going over the story again in his head. As he suspected, there was no new information, but they’d be remiss if they didn’t go over it one more time. He exchanged a look with Clarke. The killings in Seattle held some key differences. He didn’t think any of the girls had willingly let the unsub in, and he had carved his message into their bodies when he was through.

  A message that may or may not have been meant for Travis Berkley. Hard to believe that someone who’d gone through the trouble of researching the murders would get the killer’s name wrong, but the alternative was that the girls’ deaths were meant as a tribute to someone else. Both possibilities stretched the realm of belief and didn’t make a damn bit of sense.

  The tension in the room grew like it was a living thing, coiling and snapping among the four of them. Once Dante and Clarke left, things would move quickly. They had to talk to Berkley. They had to head back to Seattle to go over things again with Detective Smith and the ME. They had to track down this bastard before he continued with whatever plan he’d begun with those girls’ deaths.

  Dante, at least, would have the comfort of motion to keep him distracted from the scenes that he’d witnessed. Lei and Emma wouldn’t have even that. He leaned forward, catching Lei’s attention. “We can assign a protection detail. I don’t think you’re in any immediate danger, but if it would help ease your mind, I’ll make some calls.”

  Lei’s lips quirked up at the edges, but the smile never came close to reaching her eyes. “Dante—Agent Young—we were in immediate danger the second that asshole singled Travis out as someone he wanted to emulate. We’re more than capable of taking care of ourselves.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There wasn’t much to say after that. The agents took the evidence and left. Lei was only slightly sorry to see them go. Maybe in a different situation, she would have liked to have spent a little more time with them. With Dante. It didn’t matter. Too much had happened in too short a time, and she felt like she’d just been told the monster lurking beneath the bed was real—and coming for her.

  She had more important things to worry about than how well Dante Young’s shoulders filled out his suit. If I’m attracted to him, it means he’s got some horrible skeletons in his closet. She hadn’t been a saint for the last twelve years, but there was something fundamentally wrong with her, because the only guys she seemed to be attracted to had something wrong with them. Her mother liked to theorize that her sad attempts at dating were just as self-defeating as Emma’s diets. None of them came close to replicating Travis, but they ranged from being a generic asshole to a narcissist with abusive tendencies. So she’d stopped trying.

  Maybe I’d try again for the right man . . .

  She shook her head and moved to the window to watch the agents’ car disappear down the driveway. Now that the strangers were gone—and the potential danger with them—Saul gave her a sniff and headed for the kitchen and his lunch, Prince following close behind. As the taillights disappeared through the trees, Lei transferred her attention to the trees themselves. She and Emma had the best security money could buy set up around the house and the outlying property. No one should be able to approach without their knowing it.

  Should left a lot of room for error, though. Plenty of terrible things in this world happened despite the fact that they shouldn’t. Fear tried to flare, but she muscled it down, beating it back into place with cold, hard facts. She took a deep breath and ran through the worst-case scenario again.

  Even if someone did approach their house, they only lived fifteen minutes from town, and Lei was confident in her abilities to hold off a threat until the police arrived. If, for some reason, they couldn’t get a call out, they had enough guns to staff a small armory and a secondary phone line, which was connected to two safe rooms with a router that couldn’t be cut from the outside.

  Paranoid? Yes, extremely. Her and Emma’s safety precautions might teeter toward doomsday prepping, but if it meant they walked out of a conflict alive, it was more than worth it. No one could really guarantee safety, but they’d come as close as humanly possible.

  She tapped her finger on the glass—reinforced so that it would crack instead of shatter, one degree down from actually being bulletproof. She knew there was no one standing just inside the tree line. Watching. But that didn’t stop the small hairs from rising along the nape of her neck. Someone could be out there, and she’d never know.

  Except for the cameras.

  The motion-sensor cameras were more a pain in the ass than helpful this time of year. They didn’t pick up animals smaller than forty-five pounds, but this area was thick with deer, and they set off the sensors often enough that Lei regretted installing the damn things.

  But the cameras around the house were reliable.

  And the fact that I do regular circuits with Saul. If someone was hiding just out of sight, he’d know.

  Though he wasn’t as good with live scents as he was with decomposition. If someone knew that—and knew how to use the wind against them—Saul might not be able to sound the alarm until it was too late.

  Stop that.

  She blew out a breath. This was what the killer wanted—for them to feel hunted again, scared and helpless and waiting for the next blow to fall. To be frozen, ears pressed to the door, listening for the creaky floorboard down the hall, because we knew what it meant . . .

  Emma came to stand next to her, the brush of her shoulder banishing the ghost of memory holding Lei hostage. Emma sighed. “We’re going to help, aren’t we?”

  “We don’t have a choice. We’re in this. He brought us into it.” Whoever this person was, it wasn’t Travis, but the situation had that prick’s fingerprints all over it. The Feds might not be able to prove that he’d written the killer with the intent to resurrect the nightmare, but he was responsible. She knew it in her very soul. “Whoever this guy is, he isn’t going to be content with us staying on the bench. The Feds might think they can keep us out of it, but eventually he’ll force their hand. I’d rather take the offensive than let him have control.”

  “I thought you might say that.” A tremor worked its way through Emma, so small that Lei barely felt it where their shoulders touched.

  Lei turned and leaned against the wall next to the window. All the color had leached from Emma’s already sun-starved skin, leaving her looking more wraith than human. Fear. They reacted to it differently—they always had—but that didn’t stop Lei from wanting to wrap her up and ship her off to somewhere safe to ride this out. “If you don’t want to—”

  “That’s not it. I just . . . We have a life that we’ve worked really hard for. The house. The dogs. The business.” She stirred, some color returning to her cheeks. Emma motioned at everything and nothing. “I know it’s probably giving the killer too much credit, but it feels like he waited until we finally felt safe to strike.”

  “You’re safe. We’re safe.” She didn’t believe it any more than Emma did. They’d both worked hard to get past what had happened to them—what Lei had opened the door for—and now they were being dragged back in. It didn’t matter how much therapy they had, how many steps they’d taken to feel in control. In the course of twenty-four hours, their illusion of safety had been ripped away as if it’d never existed.

  Well, fuck that. She was taking control back in the only way she knew how.

  Emma took a deep breath and pulled the curtains shut. She went to each window on the ground floor and repeated the action, blocking the view of their nonexistent watcher. Lei wasn’t about to admit how spooked she was, not with Emma showing burrowing tendencies. The last thing h
er friend needed was Lei tipping her into a full-blown panic attack.

  The closed curtains should have left the house feeling claustrophobic, but although Emma was agoraphobic, she hated to feel closed in. She’d done extensive research when they were renovating this house, and they’d settled on a floor plan that passed as open, but still had enough rooms separated that they could retreat from each other as necessary. They spent an entire week painting all the walls in soothing blue-and-cream tones that made the rooms feel larger than they were. Combined with the cozy furniture and careful lighting choices, the house could be closed up completely and still feel open and welcoming.

  Lei shadowed Emma’s path, double-checking each lock on both the windows and doors. They hadn’t done a full sweep like this in a long time, and it comforted her even as she mourned the necessity. He knows where we are. It wouldn’t have taken a tech whiz to figure it out. They weren’t exactly hiding, but though they were downright notorious in California, up in Washington with the years padding people’s memories, they’d become Lei and Emma, cadaver-dog search team and researcher extraordinaire first, and victims second.

  That was about to change.

  It wouldn’t be long before the murders of three pretty sorority girls started making headlines, and then it was just a matter of some ambitious and creative reporter connecting the dots and realizing that this case shared shockingly similar details with one twelve years ago in California. The Internet was forever, and a search of Emma’s and Lei’s names would bring up their history and their current business.

  Maybe they should have tried to hide more. New names, a state farther away—hell, a new country. Something to make it a little more challenging for some sick sociopath to hunt them down.