Aberration

by Lisa Regan

  “Nice,” Isaac said, referring to my choice of words.

  I waved him off. “Lexie went and pretended to be me, but he didn’t know the difference. I always thought it was odd that he never tried to talk to me once he got out.”

  “Did it go badly with Lexie?” Isaac asked.

  I shook my head. “No. She said it was awkward, but that mostly she felt really bad for him. I mean she fully expected him to approach me when he came back to school. But he acted like we didn’t exist. A year later, he stabbed his parents to death. While he was in jail awaiting trial, he asked to see me again.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “No. My father blew a gasket when he found out that Foster wanted to see me. Lexie tried to convince him to let one of us visit Blake, but my father didn’t want us anywhere near him.”

  I reached over and fished another slice of pizza out of the box. I hesitated before closing the box again and took two slices.

  “You know that pizza isn’t going anywhere, right?” Isaac chuckled.

  I rolled my eyes. For a few moments, there was only the sound of me eating with the speed and vigor of a starved dog. Then Isaac said, “But this guy was convicted. Isn’t he in prison?”

  “He was tried as a juvenile. I’m pretty sure he was released when he was eighteen.”

  Isaac munched on a pizza crust, his brow crinkling. “I always hated that rule.”

  I nodded. “My dad was so upset about it. He’d been to the crime scene. I don’t think he ever really got over it.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, he was Chief of Police. Retired last year.”

  I came up for air. I took a long gulp of water and eyed the pizza box again. Pizza never tasted this good. I should have ordered two. He watched me with a wry smile, one eyebrow raised. “Tapeworm?” he asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “Finish it. I had plenty.”

  I took the last slice of pizza from the box and took a sizeable bite.

  “You have to go to the task force with this,” Isaac said. “Today.”

  “I know.”

  I polished off the slice of pizza and retrieved my phone from my purse. Holding it in my hand, I thought of Jory, a deep ache throbbing at my center. The phone no longer rang every two hours. I missed his relentless courtship.

  Isaac stared at me. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “Okay.” I said and dialed TK.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  KASSIDY

  November 22nd

  “Linnea, can’t you come just for the weekend?” I pleaded into the phone. “Thanksgiving is less than a week away.”

  I heard her laugh softly. “I can’t. I’m in the middle of something up here. I told you, I’m taking a leave of absence after the baby comes.”

  I pouted, though she couldn’t see me.

  “Don’t pout,” Linnea said. “I know you’re pouting.”

  “It’s been a month. A whole month at home. I’m bored out of my skull. All I do is eat. My body hurts. I have heartburn twenty-four hours a day, not to mention a heavy discharge which is apparently normal—oh, and occasional crippling crotch pain. I’m rapidly expanding.”

  This time Linnea laughed loudly. “Are you visibly pregnant now?”

  I slipped a hand over my bulge. “It sure feels like it, although I’ve managed to hide it well with baggy clothes. Not that I’ve been able to leave the house.”

  “What about Dale? Hasn’t he been over to check on you?”

  “He’s busy with work. He comes over when he can, but he’s not home much lately. I haven’t discussed the superstalker with him. I don’t want to freak him out.”

  “What about your new boyfriend?” Linnea asked. “I thought he was there all the time. What’s his name again?”

  I rolled my eyes, pacing the kitchen. The burning in my chest worsened. “Isaac McCaffrey is not my boyfriend, but yeah, he’s been here every day for a month, and come to think of it, I don’t even think he’s noticed my bump.”

  “Does he stay long?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  More laughter. “I’m serious. What do the two of you talk about?”

  I shrugged. “Well, we’ve been going to the range almost every day even though the baby doesn’t seem to like the noise. I don’t think I’ve shot my gun this much since the academy. I don’t know. We talk about the case. My childhood. The UNSUB. Past events that I have no memory of. I think he’s only here to deter the stalker. Or he is the stalker.”

  “He must like you,” Linnea said, echoing TK.

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I replied irritably.

  The truth was I looked forward to Isaac’s daily visits. I still grieved for Jory, and my nights were spent weeping into the furry necks of one of my dogs and pacing the house, unable to sleep. Remy Caldwell had come up with the list of car owners I had asked for. No one Jory knew owned a blue foreign-model car. The list of blue Hyundai and Honda owners in the city of Portland had turned up nothing. Jory’s wallet was still missing. When I wasn’t thinking about the For You killer, I was making myself crazy trying to piece together the events leading to Jory’s death, trying to figure out what could have possibly happened out there on that road.

  Even though my discussions with Isaac centered around the For You case, they were a welcome relief.

  Linnea changed the subject. “Have you looked at baby stuff yet? Maybe if you started the nursery, it would occupy your time.”

  “Well, I cleared out the guestroom and put a coat of primer up. I’m waiting for the next ultrasound to pick out the paint,” I said. I bit my lip. The entire time I was priming, all I could think about was how I was going to protect my child from the For You killer.

  “I will be there for that,” Linnea said. “They’ll tell you the sex of the baby then?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I could go shopping though.”

  One of the advantages of being nearly thirty-seven, single and a workaholic was that I had quite a few thousand dollars saved up for a rainy day. Or a baby.

  “Have you told your mother?” Linnea asked.

  I sighed. “No. No, I have not.”

  I was rewarded with a loud tongue cluck. “Girl, you better call her before you do anything else. She’s missing everything. You know she’ll be upset if you don’t tell her soon. You should go home for Thanksgiving. You know your folks would love that.”

  Before I could answer, my dogs sprung up and raced to the front door sniffing and whining excitedly. I went into my living room and looked out the window.

  “Linnea, I gotta go. McCaffrey’s here. He’s picking me up for a meeting with TK and Talia.”

  As he got out of the car, I opened my front door. The dogs rushed out to greet him. I left the door ajar and returned to my kitchen. I put the phone back on its base and fluffed my oversized sweatshirt to hide my growing bump. I don’t know why I was trying to hide it from him except that I didn’t feel like having the whole who’s-the-father discussion, which would lead to the I-slept-with-a-married-man discussion, and then I would have to talk about how Jory was dead. I could hardly stand the reality of it, let alone having to rehash it again.

  Isaac appeared in the kitchen doorway, a box of doughnuts in his hand. My three dogs pawed his legs, looking for attention and probably hoping for doughnuts too. An image of Jory standing in the same doorway almost five months earlier sprung into my mind, and just as suddenly, tears burned my eyes. My throat felt thick. I turned away from Isaac and wiped my eyes. “Thanks,” I said.

  Isaac set the doughnuts on the table. He took off his jacket and sat down. “It’s been a month already and none of my officers have seen anything suspicious around your house. I even stepped up patrols to four times
a day, and nothing,” he said.

  “The Bureau has a couple of agents swing by at different times of the day,” I said. “They’re hoping they’ll catch the UNSUB spying on me.”

  Isaac laughed and pulled a glazed doughnut from the box. He ate it in two bites. I was already on my second. “You Feds aren’t exactly subtle. The UNSUB would spot those guys a mile away. That’s why I’ve had my guys coming by, but they haven’t seen anything. Whoever this guy is—he’s invisible.”

  I felt a little shiver and glanced out the kitchen window, half-expecting to find the grown-up Blake Foster staring back at me with a grotesque smile. “No shit,” I said. “He’s been stalking me for years and I never caught on.” I rubbed my arms, suddenly cold. “The whole thing gives me the creeps.”

  I had had an entire month to think about my stalker. I found it ironic that, in spite of my heightened wariness after the Nico Sala attack, I hadn’t noticed anyone spying on me. While I paced the house at night, I searched my memory for any detail I might have missed—someone walking their dog past my house, someone following me, a stranger doing a kind deed, anything unusual that should have been a red flag. I went over my entire life—the parts I could remember—with a fine-toothed comb, seeing it in a new light, watching it play out before a one-person audience I’d never known was there.

  I felt violated. I felt so violated that what Nico Sala had done to me began to seem small. Sala had destroyed my life in a single, terrifying night. What the For You killer was doing had been going on for two decades, and it was far more underhanded and insidious.

  “Stop thinking about it,” Isaac said. “You’ll make yourself crazy. Are you ready?”

  I frowned at him and stuffed another doughnut in my mouth, eating the entire thing in one bite.

  “Classy,” Isaac said.

  “Let me change,” I said. I could still squeeze into one of my skirt suits. Damned if I was going to meet with my colleagues wearing a sweat suit that was three sizes too big. The suit jacket was big and covered my bump quite well. On my way back to the kitchen, I got my coat from the hall closet.

  “Should I bring the rest of these doughnuts?” Isaac asked as he came to the front door.

  “We’re meeting at a diner, right?” I said. I slipped my Glock into the holster I kept clipped to the back waistband of my skirt. It felt unusually heavy, pulling the material of the skirt tight against my burgeoning belly.

  Isaac nodded.

  “They’ll have food there,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  WYATT

  November 22nd

  Wyatt sat in a corner booth at a diner in Manassas. He wore a Washington Nationals baseball cap with the brim pulled down low over his brow and a thick, baggy sweatshirt with old jeans. So as not to draw attention to himself sitting alone, he had brought a backpack full of textbooks, two of which he spread before him on the table. He was just a grad student trying to study. He put his iPod on the table next to one of the books and plugged his headphones into it. He wore them in his ears, although no music played. This way no one would be tempted to talk to him while he eavesdropped on Kassidy’s meeting with her FBI colleagues. He had been monitoring her for the last month. She hadn’t done shit but spend damn near every day with her new best friend, a local police officer named McCaffrey. He had hacked into her email several times before finally finding an email from TK Bennett scheduling this meeting with her and their supervisor, Talia Crossen.

  His back was turned to the door, but he need only look to his left at the strip of mirrors running the length of the wall behind the counter to see who was coming and going. Bennett and Crossen were already there, seated side by side two booths behind him. The place was only about half-full, but Wyatt could still hear them from where he sat. He heard the swoosh of the door open and glanced furtively at the mirror. Kassidy was there—and McCaffrey was with her.

  Dammit.

  They slid into the booth across from Bennett and Crossen. Then Bennett’s voice, an edge of excitement to it. “We’ve confirmed that Blake Foster is the For You killer.”

  Wyatt suppressed his gasp. They knew. He wasn’t even halfway through his list, and they knew. He wondered if he had left something at the Gerst scene that gave him away. Then he realized it didn’t matter. They’d never know that he was Blake Foster.

  “How?” Kassidy and McCaffrey said, almost in unison.

  Crossen replied, “His prints match up with the prints we found at Megan Wilkins’ home in Portland and in the Bittlers’ home here in Manassas.”

  “You got his prints?” Kassidy said. She sounded just as surprised as Wyatt felt.

  “You were right about his records,” TK said. “They’ve been expunged. Everything should have been destroyed, but someone in your hometown kept all the evidence from the original investigation, and they kept it damn well preserved.”

  Wyatt leaned over the table, squeezing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Pain pulsed over his eyes. He was pretty sure he knew exactly who had kept his case file preserved. Damn that stupid Chief of Police. Still, he had used so many aliases since then, he was certain he could never be traced. He watched the four investigators in the mirror. McCaffrey kept glancing out the window, eyes searching the parking lot. The waitress brought them all coffee. Kassidy curled both hands around her mug as Crossen slid a folder across the table.

  “Our problem now is that Blake Foster is a ghost,” she said.

  Kassidy flipped open the folder and stared at its contents. Wyatt wished he could see what she was looking at, but the mirror did not afford a good angle.

  “I can’t believe you found this,” Kassidy said.

  Bennett took a sip of coffee and smoothed his tie over. “He was released from a juvenile detention center in Erie, Pennsylvania one week after his eighteenth birthday. He showed up in a halfway house in Philadelphia a month later, and that’s it. He stopped existing after that. He’s clearly changed identities—otherwise there’s been no activity on his name or social security number for almost twenty years.”

  Wyatt smiled to himself and turned a page in one of the textbooks, pretending to read. The waitress came over and refilled his coffee cup. She smiled but, thankfully, did not try to engage him in conversation. He nodded his thanks and glanced back at the mirror. Kassidy picked up the folder and held it aloft, as if testing its weight. “This is awfully thin,” she said. “He certainly is off the radar.”

  McCaffrey was still occupied with looking out the window. He took a sip of coffee, his arm brushing Kassidy’s. Wyatt felt his gut tighten. “He’s off the radar, but he’s probably out there right now, watching us,” McCaffrey said.

  Both Kassidy and Crossen looked out the window. Bennett sighed. “We’ve done an age progression.” He pulled what looked like a large photograph out of the file. “This is what he might look like now, although you know these things are just approximations.”

  “Are you going to release the age progression?” McCaffrey asked.

  Wyatt stretched in his seat, craning his neck, trying to see what they were looking at, but he was too far away.

  “In the cities where he’s killed for now. Maybe someone saw something,” Crossen said.

  TK looked at Kassidy. “Does it look like anyone you’ve seen?”

  She studied the photo, but no spark of recognition lit up her face. After a moment, she passed it back to TK and shook her head. The corners of her mouth drew down—halfway between a frown and a grimace. “I don’t recognize him.”

  “He has a sister,” Bennett said.

  Wyatt’s hand trembled as he turned another page in his textbook. Sarah. They would track her down and talk to her. But even she could not tell them where to find him.

  “A sister? I forgot all about her,” Kassidy said.

  “Sarah
Foster. She still lives in Sunderlin,” Talia said.

  “I’m driving there tomorrow to interview her,” TK said.

  “She might be in contact with him,” Talia pointed out.

  “I was thinking of going home for Thanksgiving,” Kassidy said.

  “Well, let me know,” TK said. “I’ll stop in if you’re there.”

  Talia looked at her watch. “We’ve got to go. Let’s keep in touch.”

  They stood and put their coats on. TK left money on the table. He squeezed Kassidy’s shoulder before he left. “Be safe,” he said.

  Wyatt watched them go. He turned his gaze back to Kassidy and McCaffrey, sitting side by side, looking quite at ease with one another. He half-expected her to rest her head on McCaffrey’s shoulder. Just seeing her so close to the man, so familiar with him, made Wyatt’s stomach roil.

  Kassidy sighed. “Well that was anti-climactic.”

  “So we have confirmation—we know for sure who it is,” Isaac said, looking out the window. “But he could be anyone.”

  Wyatt took a last sip of his coffee, his hand finally steady. He smiled into the cup. That’s right, I could be anyone. He started gathering his things. Neither of them even glanced his way.

  A shudder ran through Kassidy’s body as she stood. “I have to pee,” she said. “If I’m not back in five minutes you better come in after me.”

  Isaac smiled at her, blue eyes twinkling. “You got it,” he told her. The tension in Kassidy’s shoulders seemed to lessen. Wyatt knew what he had to do. He turned away from her quickly as she strode past him, headed toward the restrooms. He left a few bills on the table and walked out, past McCaffrey, whose gaze remained on the parking lot. In his car, Wyatt took a prepaid cell phone from his glove compartment and dialed the number for the Prince William County Police Department.