by Katee Robert
Dante and Tucker both had carefully blank expressions on their faces, but she wasn’t naive enough to think they hadn’t filed away what had just happened. At least they didn’t pity her or Emma. “Your questions?”
Tucker exchanged a look with Dante and leaned forward. “There’s one thing about this whole case that just doesn’t make sense to me.”
She braced for whatever he was about to say. It was her fault. It had to be somehow. No matter how irrational it seemed, it was her fault all the way down the line to when she’d let Travis through that window and released him on a houseful of unsuspecting women.
And that was it. Her deepest, darkest fear.
That she’d somehow released this killer as well.
Tucker continued, his blue gaze jumping from her to Emma and back again. “All that stuff happened in California. If we’re following Britton’s theory about there being another person in that house—which is a solid theory, though we can’t discount that Berkley worked alone—then his hunting grounds were in California. And yet you’re in Washington now, and he’s managed to stay ahead of this entire investigation from the beginning, and he’s jumping all over the place between here and Seattle as if he’s familiar with the area.”
Emma shrugged lethargically. “Twelve years is a long time. Maybe he is familiar with the area.”
“That’s precisely my point.” His sunny smile was completely at odds with his stillness. “When did you ladies move up here?”
Lei frowned. “Um . . . eight years ago?”
“It was eight years ago,” Emma confirmed.
The trial had been drawn out, and then they’d both chosen to stay at UCLA to finish their degrees. Through those years, it had been as if she’d had her neck on the block and was waiting for the sword to fall and finish everything. Emma was so heavily medicated, she’d almost needed a keeper just to get through her day, and Lei’s aggression was off the charts because she expected an attack to come from every corner.
Eventually they’d realized that they couldn’t continue on in that way. Their families didn’t understand. Emma’s mother wanted to jam her back into the mold of the person she’d been before that night, and when Emma didn’t—couldn’t—comply, she’d punished her with cold silences and, eventually, those fucking cards. Lei’s parents would have had her committed if they thought for a second an institution could hold her. Her mother’s favorite hobby became diagnosing her with new disorders until Lei had been forced to cut off all but the smallest amount of contact.
They had no friends left except each other. There was nothing to do but leave town—leave the entire state.
Tucker nodded as if they’d said more than they had. “And why did you pick Stillwater?”
Lei opened her mouth but stopped. She didn’t know. They’d been looking at a couple of different options before Emma found this house, but there were other houses in other states. Tennessee and upstate New York had topped the list, both meeting the requirements and giving them plenty of space to pursue the cadaver-dog angle Lei had chosen for her future. “I’m not sure.”
“There was a price drop on the house.” Emma shifted deeper into her cocoon of blanket, pulling it tightly around her. “We had almost settled on the New York house, but the owners of this one dropped the price by twenty thousand, which meant we could settle in and make all the required changes in one fell swoop.”
Yes, that was it. Lei nodded. “We had—have—money, but we donated a large amount to a victims’ advocacy group after the trial. The rest we tied up in investments and whatever—a trust. It left enough to buy a house, but not much more.” Still plenty of money. It had seemed a great stroke of luck that the housing market was doing poorly enough to require that kind of price drop, but neither she nor Emma had questioned it overmuch. Why would they?
Now, considering the direction of Tucker’s questions, she wondered. “You think that was him.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
Dante was nodding, a bemused look on his face. “So he herded them here and then waited for the right time to spring his plan.” He caught Lei’s look and shrugged. “It’s not out of the realm of possibilities any more than our other theories are at this point. If we operate under the assumption that the simplest explanation is most likely the truth—which is simpler? That he guided your choice to live in a place of his choosing and was already set up to watch you before you arrived? Or that he has somehow stumbled or hacked his way into your systems after having recently found you?”
When he put it like that, it did make more sense for the killer to have herded them to Washington. The thought left her cold down to her very bones. All these years, she’d been living in as close to blissful happiness as she was capable of, thinking that the only things she had to fear were her memories. But, if Dante and Tucker were right, the killer had been there all along. She shuddered. “Stillwater isn’t a large community. If there was a stranger there, everyone would be talking about it.”
“There are a lot of far-flung houses situated in the forest. We checked the property records for all of them, but with money or the right connections, that sort of thing could be faked.” Emma spoke as if in a dream. “If he bought the house with an LLC and went a town or two over to shop—or ordered online . . . People would gossip, but they wouldn’t gossip to us.” She gave a strange laugh. “Or to you. They don’t say much of anything at all to me.”
Because Emma never left the house.
Lei shoved to her feet. “I need . . . Give me a minute. I just need a minute.” She rushed out of the room, her breath coming too fast, her thoughts a frenzied buzz inside her head. He’d been here all along, and for all her smug feelings of superiority and being a survivor who called people on their bullshit, she hadn’t known it. She hadn’t sensed it. She’d been just as blind now as she had been twelve years before.
Oh, God, I’m destined to repeat history over and over again.
“Lei.”
Dante’s steady tone brought her up short, every muscle in her body shaking from the effort to keep from sprinting out of the house and into the night. She needed something to feel in control again, but she’d never had control. It was all a lie. “I just need . . .”
“A minute. I know.” He didn’t touch her, just waited for her to face him. “This doesn’t negate all the good you two have done in the last eight years. It changes nothing.”
She wished she could believe him. “It changes everything.” They’d been living on borrowed time all these years, and the devil was finally calling due on that debt.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dante let Lei walk away. She obviously needed time to come to terms with the potential bombshell Tucker had just dropped, and he wasn’t going to help by following her around like a dog nipping at her heels. He headed back into the office. “Can I get you something, Emma?”
“I’m going to check on Lei.” She stood, weaving a little, and left the room.
Tucker shook his head. “I’m cursed.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He shot Dante a look. “Exactly what I just said. In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never known you to get twisted up over anyone related to an active case. You’re the pillar of strength and calm and whatever the hell you want to call it. That woman”—he jerked his thumb toward the ceiling, where the sound of a shower being turned on reached them—“has you twisted up in knots.”
Denying it was pointless, so he shrugged. “It isn’t affecting how I do my job.”
Tucker wandered over to the papers spread across the desk next to Emma’s, and Dante followed suit. It was a list of names, some crossed off, some highlighted. He flipped through the pages, and it was only then that he noticed the second column, with titles like UCLA football and Physics class. “They’re tracking Berkley’s known associates.”
Tucker raised his eyebrows. “Lot of people.”
“The guy was popular and rich—telling combo.”
He wasn’t the only killer to have those traits, but he’d been a beloved member of both the college and Westside LA society. The kind of guy who knew everyone and was generally well liked. In nearly every character-witness testimony, they’d all uniformly said that he had the world at his feet and a bright future ahead of him.
“You know what else I don’t get? Travis Berkley.” Tucker set the papers down in the exact spots they’d been. “You know how Britton said there were two distinct styles of killing going on in that house?”
“Yeah. Stabbing, and the strangling with rape. Both are intimate ways to kill a person, but different flavors.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Tucker moved to look at the monitors. “Did you notice that Berkley himself seems to fit two profiles?”
Dante shrugged. “He’s a sociopath. He likes to play games, and that means he takes on different roles depending on the situation.” He eyed Tucker and shifted gears. “Britton thinks there was a partner. I’m inclined to agree with him at this point, because the unsub being a fan doesn’t fit any longer.”
“The partner theory, I get. What I don’t get is why sometimes Berkley was coming across as an alpha predator, and sometimes he comes across as a submissive version of that.”
“It could all be to play the game, but he’s in prison. Even if he has something to do with what was happening now, there was no reason to play the submissive partner. If anything, his ego should be clamoring for him to take credit, even where credit isn’t due.” They hadn’t really taken the possibility of a partner into account until recently, and that meant he and Clarke hadn’t had a chance to question Berkley about it when they spoke with him.
Clarke.
For a second he’d been so caught up in theorizing with Tucker, he’d almost forgotten that she was in danger. He pressed a fist to his chest. They’d find her. He had to believe that. In the meantime, he would do his damnedest to find the unsub before that bastard hurt another woman.
Before he hurt Lei.
Because that’s where this was headed, where it had always been headed. Emma was also part of the endgame, but Lei was Berkley’s way into the house that night, and she was the one he’d targeted for weeks leading up to the night of the massacre. She was the one Berkley had information about in his jail cell, about her job and about the general location where she lived. She was also the one he’d set the series of hoops to jump through with the missing dead girls.
Yeah, Lei was the main fixation. Emma was secondary. If the unsub was able to get into the house at any time, he could have killed Emma before anyone could stop him. He hadn’t. He’d terrified her enough that she’d called Lei to run home to rescue her, keeping the focus on her friend and on the fact that he’d tainted a place she considered safe.
He shook his head and forced himself to focus. “You think it’s all part of a bigger picture?”
“I don’t know what to think. Seems like every time we nail one of these profiles down, a new kind of monster comes along and makes us doubt everything we thought was true.”
“Berkley isn’t a new kind of monster. He’s textbook.” But that was part of the problem. If he followed the profile Britton had put together as closely as everyone claimed, he should have reacted differently to Clarke and Dante when they met him in prison. He’d been almost lackluster and bored, rather than agitated and delighted to fence verbally with them. If prison was one thing for a guy like Berkley, it was boring. Any new stimulation was something to be coveted and played with. He hadn’t done either. He’d sounded like he was reading from a script provided by someone else, which had lent credence to Dante’s question about him possibly being the submissive partner.
But that would mean Britton’s profile was wrong, and so was everything in Berkley’s life leading up to the point when he committed those murders. The other option would be that he was drugged, but the prison would have told them if that was a possibility.
No, something else was going on.
And he had a feeling only one person really knew the full score. Dante sighed. “We’re going to have to go back to California.”
“I’m coming with you.”
He looked up to find Lei standing in the doorway, her hair still wet from the shower. She’d changed into a pair of jeans and a plain gray T-shirt, and she looked ready for anything. Maybe she even was. That didn’t change the fact that he’d spare her from this if he could.
That was the problem, though—her presence at that interview might mean the difference between more girls turning up dead and stopping this guy once and for all right now.
Lei couldn’t believe what she’d just offered. She desperately, desperately did not want to see Travis again. The thought of sitting down across the table from him made her skin crawl. Even worse was the suspicion that this had been his plan all along.
It would be different facing him like that than it had been in the courtroom. More intimate. More dangerous, though she didn’t truly believe that he’d try to physically hurt her. Even if he could with the shackles. It wasn’t about physical pain—that would have been preferable to the games Travis played.
“Lei, no,” Emma whispered.
“Yes.” The word came out more like a question than a statement, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m going. You’ll get more out of him if he thinks he’s winning, and that’s what it will feel like if I’m the one to show up.” She didn’t have a choice. Her mental well-being didn’t balance out against the potential for more deaths. For Clarke’s death.
The more time passed since Clarke disappeared, the surer Lei became that her disappearance was connected with the killer. It was too damn coincidental that there were two monsters hunting in the area. As they’d just talked about, the simplest explanation was the most logical, and the simplest explanation was that the killer had somehow gotten to Clarke. How was a mystery, but there were a whole hell of a lot of mysteries right then.
Tucker studied her. “You’ll have to run it by Britton, of course. He can get you clearance to attend that meeting, but if he says no, that’s it. You can’t go around him.”
She wanted to argue, but it would just be another mark against her. “Let’s call him, then.”
Tucker glanced at his watch. “He should have landed by now, so that works.”
Landed. She frowned. “I thought he didn’t go into the field that much these days.”
“Only when a case is fucked-up beyond all reason.” Tucker grimaced. “There seem to be a lot of those lately. One of his people is missing, so he’s bringing in the cavalry. He takes this kind of thing personally.”
That, she got.
If Britton was here, she could almost believe that everything would be okay. Dante might have a soothing personality that made her feel safe, but Britton’s ability to put people at ease was almost supernatural. She’d bet it came from a lifetime of learning how best to manipulate people and situations, rather than some kind of voodoo, but that didn’t make it less effective. “Let’s call him.”
Emma cleared her throat. “Lei, can I speak with you a moment in the hallway?”
There was no getting around this. If Emma freaked over her going for a run, she wasn’t going to be excited at the thought of Lei heading back to see the man who’d set their lives on their current nightmarish course. That was just too damn bad, though. Lei couldn’t hide out here until this all blew over or he finally got tired of playing around and came for them directly. It wasn’t her nature, and if one more person died while she sat on her hands in helpless frustration, she’d start chewing through the walls. Emma might thrive within these four walls, but they felt like a tomb to Lei.
She glanced at the agents. “Go ahead and call Britton to fill him in. I’ll be a few minutes.” She walked out of the office and shut the door behind her. They could hash it out right there in the hallway, but it didn’t feel right. This conversation meant something, no matter how frustrating she found it. Lei skirted Emma and headed for the kitchen. It was sh
aping up to be a long evening and an even longer night, so Lei went through the familiar motions of putting on a new pot of coffee.
“You can’t go see him.”
She focused on counting the scoops. “I’ll do whatever it takes to put an end to this, up to and including sitting across from him and telling him whatever he needs to hear to give us the information we need.”
“He won’t, Lei. You know he won’t. He’s too smart to give up something unless he already planned to do it, and this is what he’s wanted all along.”
It wasn’t anything she hadn’t thought to herself, but somehow hearing it out of Emma’s mouth irritated the hell out of her. Lei slammed the coffeemaker lid shut and stabbed the button to get it brewing. “You think I don’t know that? I’m the one who’s had to field request after request to see him or talk to him or answer his fucking letters. I know the only reason he wants me there is to play out some sick little game he’s been fantasizing about since we got him locked up. I know, Em. I can’t change any of that.”
“Then why are you going?” Emma looked about ready to burst into tears, her full lower lip quivering, her blue eyes a little too shiny beneath the harsh overhead light. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t have a choice.” Maybe she’d never had a choice. It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but seeing this through. She’d deal with the fallout once the immediate danger had passed and the dust had settled. “Please don’t make this harder for me than it’s already going to be.”
Emma opened her mouth like she was going to keep arguing, but deflated. “I’m scared, Lei. I’m so scared. Every time I think I’m as scared as I can possibly be, the bottom drops out, and a new wave of terror rolls over me, and I don’t know how we’re going to manage to walk away from this alive.”
“Don’t do that.” She crossed to her friend and gripped her shoulders. “Look at me, Em. Look at me.” She waited for Emma to obey. “He’s playing a sick game, and it might not be the same as last time, but he doesn’t get to win now any more than he won then. We will stop him. We will put this sick son of bitch behind bars just like we did to Travis.”
