Already Gone (A Laura Frost FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1)

by Blake Pierce

  She could have done with a drink. Something to take the edge off. But that was stupid. Apart from all of the other many, many reasons why she couldn’t have a drink right now, it would have deadened the vision, too.

  Laura’s mind drifted to her meetings, to Garth. He was right that she hadn’t been back in a long time. The meetings were too much. Having to admit that she had failed yet again, month after month. Feeling judged, even though the whole point of AA was supposed to be that you could get better without judgment. All that religious crap, drilled into you whether you believed in God or not.

  Did Laura believe in God? Probably not, she thought. Right now, God was letting an innocent woman die because He couldn’t see His way clear to show her another vision. Not even when she’d tried to clear the way for Him.

  But then again, where did the visions even come from? And if there was something out there, or someone, then it couldn’t hurt, could it? She was desperate, and Laura had no idea how to get through this on her own. She needed help, from any quarter she could get it.

  So she allowed her eyes to slide closed again, and she prayed. Please, God, or whoever, she thought, imagining her brain waves beaming out into space, penetrating the ether, reaching the ear of someone or something powerful. Please don’t let this woman die because of me. Please help me save her.

  She kept her eyes closed, hanging onto that last thought. It was a little reassuring, she had to admit. The idea that if something all-powerful was out there, it might be looking out for her. It might hear her call and help, after all.

  She floated on a thin stream of calm for the first time all day, resting only in the moment. For just that moment, nothing was wrong. It was all going to work out. She was going to sort this out, and—

  A sharp stab of pain hit her right in the center of her forehead, so powerful she almost cried out. Her hand flattened sharply on the phone book, gripping onto the center of the page as if it could keep her grounded, her eyes opening blearily on a too-bright room, her head almost ricocheting with the pain—

  She was floating in the air above a room, an empty living room where a comfortable couch rested in front of a television. It was switched on, playing some evening comedy show. She was looking down on the flickering lights, the only illumination in the dark room. They played over the legs and feet of someone sitting in an armchair, facing the television.

  Laura tried to focus, to see what she was looking at. Who she was looking at. From above, it was hard to know much about them. A slim body, no way to tell their height, only the top of the head carpeted with short-cropped hair.

  A slim, straight body with no curves—short cropped hair. Laura put the pieces together. It was a man. She was looking down on a man. Was he the killer? After a moment, she heard him laugh at something on the screen and then saw him raise a beer bottle to his mouth, taking a quick swig.

  Beer. Her mind, her thoughts, zeroed in on that bottle. On the way it would feel to let that liquid pour down her own neck. On the way it would ease off all her cares—

  Laura’s attention snapped back to the room. Something was different. Something subtle, but it sent a chill down her neck. Someone else was there.

  The vision was infuriating. She could see only what it showed her, unable to cast her view beyond the dark and flickering edges. Like she was looking into a TV screen herself. But she knew that the atmosphere had changed, even if the man in the chair didn’t seem to sense it.

  She focused on him, on what he was doing. His attention was fully on the television, no sign that he had noticed anyone else around him. Then again, perhaps it was simply a housemate of his. But she had a different feeling. A feeling that this person, whoever they were, was not supposed to be there.

  Her eyes darted across the scene over and over as she waited for something to happen. She was shown this for a reason. Something bad was coming, and she knew it.

  Without any warning, a pair of hands shot into her view. They were holding something , something she at first could not recognize. Then, as it slipped over and around the neck of the man in the chair, she thought she recognized it. A tie, a simple necktie with a dark blue stripe running across a light blue background. It was pulled tight around the man’s throat, yanking him back in the chair, making him tilt his head back and claw at his own neck.

  Laura looked at his face. He was young. Younger than her. Not even thirty, she thought. His eyes were wide with panic, his mouth contorting as he fought for breath and struggled to get out from under the tie. His eyes were looking right up into those of the killer. If she could just get closer—if she could see the reflection in those eyes—she might see that it was Ed Bronston—

  Laura opened her eyes with a start, wrenched away from the vision too soon. At least she hadn’t had to finish watching this one die, she thought.

  But there was something that gnawed at her as she replayed what she had seen in her mind, searching for clues. A man. The victim had been a man. She was sure of it. This wasn’t just an androgynous woman; he was male, completely.

  And he was dying in the same way as the others.

  It was definitely their killer. Which meant he was changing his method. Going for a man instead of a woman. Trying to throw them off the scent.

  And, like a bucket of ice water down her spine, Laura realized something else.

  Everything they were doing right now was a waste of time.

  Alex—whoever he was—would never hear their warning.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Laura didn’t have time to think of a clever strategy to tell them how she knew. She didn’t have any time at all. She needed to get them to change their tactics now, right now, or the man she had seen—Alex—he was going to be dead before they got to him.

  She had no idea who he really was. What his last name was, where in the city he lived. She knew that he was watching a certain show on television, but how would that help her in a city where people were probably all watching that show at the same time? How would they even get that information to track down who was watching?

  No, they had to do it with the phone book. It was the only way.

  “Nate,” Laura hissed urgently, calling his attention before he picked up the phone to dial a new number. He hesitated, his hand hovering over the receiver. “We’re doing this wrong. We need to be looking for a man.”

  “What?” Nate glanced around the room and lowered his voice, trying not to disturb the other officers who were still on calls. “Did you find something?”

  “No,” Laura said, cursing the fact that she couldn’t tell him what she’d seen. “But I’m sure of it. The next victim will be a man, not a woman. Thirty-five or younger, listed in the phone book, and probably living alone. Called Alex. We have to—”

  “Wait a second,” Nate interrupted, shaking his head. He was leaning out across the desk toward her, stretched out, giving her the impression of a resting panther. “Where is this coming from?”

  Laura bit her tongue. What was she supposed to say? “It makes sense,” she said. “Alex—my dad was a man. Why would the target not be a man?”

  Nate shook his head again, rubbing one hand over his eye. “Laura, we talked about this. We already agreed. The killer has been going after women all this time. Why would he suddenly change his MO and go after a man? It doesn’t make sense. We agreed.”

  “I know we did,” Laura said, hesitating. “But… Nate, I just know. This isn’t right. We’re never going to find him like this. He’s going to die. We have to switch over to men.”

  Nate narrowed his eyes, sighing. “Laura… I know you’re anxious about letting another one slip through the cracks. But we’re already up against it on time trying to reach all of these women. If we add men into the mix as well, we’ll never get through everyone, not with a hundred volunteers. Even if we only focus on men—it’s not getting any earlier. We’ve come this far. We have to push on.”

  “Not all men,” Laura protested. “The parameters are much more p
recise. We’ll be able to get through them quicker. Nate, I can’t explain it, but I have this feeling—”

  “And what if that feeling is wrong?” Nate paused and cast a glance around the room before continuing, as if to make sure no one had overheard how irrational she was being. “We made this choice based on data. All of the signs we have currently point to the killer going after another woman. We’ve asked all of these people to work long and hard at these calls, tracking down the next victim, and they’re doing it on faith that is already stretched thin. Now you want to change that when we’re not even halfway through. I’m sorry, but… unless you can give me evidence or even some kind of hint that a man could be at risk, we have to carry on focusing on women.”

  Laura stared at him, her mouth hanging open. What was she supposed to say?

  She didn’t have any evidence. Not even a hint. All she had was her vision, and even if she could come clean about that to Nate and expect him to believe her, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t exactly admissible in court. Nor would it convince the sheriff—and Nate was right. They were asking him to take a lot of this on faith already.

  He had never doubted her before. She’d never given him a reason to. But she knew what he was saying made sense. Without proof, there was no reason to change their methods.

  He’d trusted her this far. Gone along with everything she said. It stung deep in her chest that he couldn’t do the same now, but she couldn’t argue.

  He was right.

  Laura closed her mouth and turned back to her phone book, as though she was accepting what Nate had said and getting back to work. She heard more than saw him turn away and do the same, starting a new call. But her mind was racing. She couldn’t just carry on pretending to make the calls. There was no point. She knew now that they wouldn’t reach the one person they needed to. And there was no way she could get through enough names in the phone book on her own to have any shot at warning him herself.

  She was going to have to do this alone—and she wasn’t going to achieve anything sitting at a desk with a phone in her hand.

  She got up, grabbing her coat from the back of her chair, putting her cell into her pocket. “I need a break,” she muttered into the general air above Nate’s head, making him glance up at her. He couldn’t do anything else. He was midway through a call.

  He couldn’t stop her as she walked right out of the precinct toward the parking lot, car keys in hand.

  ***

  Laura was driving through the streets of Albany, taking random turns and exits, covering whole blocks just to take a corner or two and go right back in the opposite direction. It was a kind of grid search, except without a fully logical plan, letting her foot on the gas and her hands on the wheel lead her by instinct.

  Somewhere out there, Ed Bronston was moving closer and closer to his victim. Somewhere, a victim sitting in his house, or maybe still making his way back home. If she could somehow get onto the right track, start moving in the same direction so that she was on a collision course with one of them, maybe she could force a vision to come.

  Laura rested her head against her hand, one elbow propped on the side door, as she pulled up toward a red light. She was getting nowhere. On the one night that she desperately needed to get somewhere, she felt like she was just driving around in circles.

  She looked up, the red of the traffic light seeming to burn right into her brain. It was so bright. So bright that it seemed to be making her head pulse with pain. No wonder, after she had had so many visions, forced herself to see so many things. But this pain seemed so insistent, so harsh—

  Laura found herself looking down at the same head she had seen before, the same cap of hair. The man, the one who was going to die. It was him. But this time he was not sitting in front of her television. He was walking, heading to a refrigerator , moving across a shabby kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of beer, cold enough that he pressed it to his forehead with an audible sigh of relief. He was still wearing his coat. He must only just have come in from work.

  A phone rang out, loud and startling. Laura felt the noise ricocheting around inside her skull, reminding her yet again that pain was the price of seeing the future. Even here, she could not avoid it. She watched as Alex, or whoever he was, headed toward the landline, frowning at it as he picked it up. It was on a low table.

  “Hello?” he said.

  Laura could not hear what came next on the other end of the line, could only see Alex frowning. The table, she could see, was scattered with envelopes. Unopened mail. One of them was stamped with a red “URGENT.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Why?… What? I just told you, yes. This is he. What are you talking about? Hello? … Hello?”

  And then he hung up, putting the phone back on the receiver with an audible sound of disgust.

  Laura strained to look at the envelopes, to try to read more. There was a set of keys sitting on top of the pile, car keys and house keys. They had landed right on the clear window of the topmost envelope, obscuring almost everything. Almost everything, but she thought she could read the name… Thomas…?

  The man paused for a moment, looking at the phone as if expecting it to tell him more—but then he shook his head to himself and moved away, back through the same house. Jettisoning his coat as he went, he switched on the television and settled into an armchair with a thump, groaning as he worked his back into a comfortable position against the cushions. He relaxed, flicking through channels until he chose something funny, turning it up loud enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear anything else. And then he reached for his beer…

  A car horn behind her startled Laura out of her vision, making her blink her eyes and try to focus. The light was green above her. It must have just been turning when the vision started, and even though she had only been gone for seconds, it was enough to make the driver behind her impatient. She started the car again and pulled forward, trying to think.

  She had seen something. She knew she had, even if it didn’t make sense to her. Her visions never lied, though there was always the possibility that they showed something that would not actually come to pass. Still, this didn’t seem like one of those times. Not if she didn’t get there in time to stop the killer.

  But how was she going to find the next victim in time, if the killer was going after someone random?

  Because that was the only thing she could think of that made sense. The only reason why there might have been the name Thomas on the envelope that she had seen. Thomas was not Alex, and though she had not seen the full last name, she thought she had seen the very edge of a letter. A straight line, not a diagonal. Not an A. This wasn’t some clever ruse where the man’s name was Thomas Alex.

  But if this victim’s name was Thomas, then he was categorically not Alex. Not the same name as Laura’s father. There was the possibility that he had recently moved, or was getting mail that had come to the wrong address, but that wouldn’t help her. She could pass it off as that and move on, but ignoring anything she had seen in a vision was always a massive risk. She had seen it for a reason. She had to cling on to that.

  So, Thomas. But what connection could there be between Thomas and Alex? Or, for that matter, between Thomas and herself? There was no one in her family with that name, at least as far as she knew. It didn’t ring any bells at all.

  Bronston was going after a man now, changing his method. Did that mean he was changing everything? Changing even the reasoning behind picking his victims? Was he done with Laura and now moving on to victimize someone else who he thought was behind his incarceration?

  If that was the case, she had literally no hope of tracking him down.

  But then, she still really had no idea if this vision had been of the killer she was looking for. The pain throbbing behind her eyes told her it was something that would happen imminently, but the location and the killer were still hidden to her. She hadn’t actually seen Ed. He didn’t have any kind of marking on his forearms that w
ould give him away. She had noticed his hands in the other visions, of course, but in the one where she’d seen Thomas being killed, the arms had not been clear enough to her. Just out of shot, dark and muddled, hidden behind Thomas’s head as it tilted back. His hands covered with gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, meaning she had nothing to go on there.

  She carried on driving in circles, looking in vain for somewhere to pull over. What she really needed now was a dark parking lot where she could stop the car and give in to despair. Maybe one that adjoined a liquor store—that would have been ideal. But the brightness of the streetlights boring into her eyes from above seemed to have her trapped on the city streets like a fly under a magnifying glass.

  A link to someone else… who would it be? Laura racked her mind, trying to think back to that case. The DA? The defense attorney who hadn’t done a good enough job at getting his client off the hook? She didn’t know them well enough to know anything about them that would help.

  It was all so long ago, and not that long ago at all in other ways. Laura had been through so many cases since then. How was she supposed to remember tangential details from a case that had been just one of many, in the end? Yes, she had stepped in—but even the visions had faded enough in her memory to avoid triggering an instant revelation when she saw them again. The fact that she’d spent a lot of the intervening years blackout drunk probably had something to do with that.

  She remembered how she had been at the time. Her father had already been dead, of course. And her mom—

  Her father had been dead. Did that mean something?