Don't Breathe: A Gripping Serial Killer Thriller (Darkwater Cove Psychological Thriller Book 6)
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Contents
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CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
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CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, September 8th
9:20 p.m.
Sticks crunch beneath Sasha’s flip-flops while she slides between two bushes and wades deeper into the trees. The bathing suit beneath her shorts drips from swimming, a little slimy from the pond, and now her thighs are chafing, a red heat that burns with each stride and makes her wish she didn’t need to walk so far to go to the bathroom. But that’s part of being a civilized human. It’s okay to party naked with your friends and skinny dip if you forgot your suit. But nature’s call is a private matter, one she won’t share with her camping buddies.
The sky holds a minefield of stars, but the light doesn’t penetrate the canopy. She hasn’t seen the moon since she ducked inside the forest. And as she trips over a tree trunk, she realizes she might be lost. Well, that would be the icing on the cake, wouldn’t it? The insides of her thighs feel like someone took an acetylene torch to her skin. Her bladder is about to explode, and she’s no longer sure where the camp is. She only meant to jog fifty yards into the woods to do her business. The damn forest is a labyrinth of bramble, slopes, and trees.
A pin prick touches Sasha’s neck. She slaps the mosquito and looks down at her hand, cursing as she wipes the blood on her shorts. Sick. Another flying vampire buzzes at her ear and gets her running through the forest, desperate to find her way back to camp. When her bladder can’t take the running, she crouches between two trees. Cringing, she finishes and pulls her shorts up, careful not to step through the puddle she left on the forest floor. The stench makes her plug her nose. Beer always goes straight through her.
“Now what?” she asks no one in particular.
Standing with hands on hips, she turns in a circle. The woods turned her around, but she’s confident she’ll reach camp if she climbs the ridge. There should be a pond at the bottom. If there isn’t, all bets are off. Pulling her phone from her pocket, she checks her bars and finds no signal. Not that she expected service beneath the canopy. She barely grabbed a signal at the campsite. Calling the camp doesn’t seem like a good idea, anyhow. Brit’s boyfriend drank too much. He’s a class-A jackass when he’s drunk, focused on sex and arguing. Often at the same time.
When Sasha starts up the ridge, a swishing noise brings her head around. Cricket songs ring through the forest. She swore she heard someone walking through the dead leaves.
“Hello? That you, Brit?”
Sasha’s lips curl into a grin. Yes, it has to be Brit. Since they arrived at the campsite yesterday evening, Brit has been trying to scare Sasha. First, Brit told a campfire story about a ghost that haunts these woods, concocting a tale about a twelve-year-old girl who died at her father’s ax because he didn’t want her to become a teenager. Lame story. Sasha didn’t buy it, but the story convinced her boyfriend, Jorge, who slept with the lantern on all night. It sounded too much like one of the old school horror movies Brit always pushes on Sasha. Last year, Brit forced them to watch Dawn of the Dead before they left for their annual camping getaway. Then Brit slipped into the woods, donned white makeup, and trickled Halloween store blood over her head. When she stalked out of the woods, looking like a zombie straight out of the film, even Sasha screamed. Brit got her good that time. She’s up to no good again.
“Knock it off, Brit. Your boobs are too big to pass for a twelve-year-old’s, so quit while you’re ahead.”
Sasha’s words drift into the forest and vanish without a response. She expects the cackle of laughter. But there’s nothing. Which suggests she’s farther from the camp than she feared.
“Brit? Hey, if you’re out there, just scare the hell out of me and get it over with. The mosquitoes are eating me alive.”
Still no response.
Teeth chattering despite the thick warmth trapped inside the woods, Sasha cups her elbows with her hands and hurries up the ridge. Her flip-flops drag through leaves, soggy from last week’s storms. Sasha chides herself for not sliding on socks and sneakers before she ventured into the forest. Her feet slip, and she pitches forward, palms sinking into the mud. The farther she climbs the ridge, the less certain she is the camp lies on the other side. When she doesn’t see a pond at the bottom, she knows she’s lost.
“Hey!”
Her voice echoes off the trees.
“Hey.”
Sasha yelps and spins around. The man’s voice came from behind. Empty forest stares back at her.
“Is that you, Jorge?”
No one answers. Did she imagine the voice? Her paranoia exploding, Sasha races over the ridge and bounds down the other side, limbs whipping her skin as she covers her face. For a frozen moment, she hears footsteps pursuing her. But there’s nobody over her shoulder, just the looming darkness and the memory of Brit Ryan’s wild eyes, her face zombie-pale and covered with blood.
Sasha reaches the bottom of the ridge. Catching her breath, she turns in a circle. There’s no pond here. Only trees growing in all directions.
She pushes through a pricker bush, the thorns tearing her skin. A second ridge climbs out of the earth a hundred feet ahead. That must be the hill she’s looking for. It has to be, or the rescue crews will find her tomorrow. Or next week.
Slogging through the woods, head swiveling toward every owl hoot and snapping branch, Sasha convinces h
erself she’s almost back to camp. A few more minutes, and they’ll all have a laugh at her expense. And it’s the last time she’ll use the forest as an outhouse after dark.
As she starts up the incline, her surroundings look familiar. Or maybe it’s Sasha’s mind convincing her. Skirting a stand of pines, Sasha pulls up when she spots a strange glow at the base of a tree. Her heart pounding into her throat, she edges toward the shape.
It’s a girl. No, not just a girl. It’s Brit. She sprawls beneath a gigantic oak tree, her nightgown radiating beneath a slice of starlight cutting through the canopy. The way her arms and legs splay appears almost comical. A little too heavy on the horror. Don’t try so hard next time.
“Very funny,” Sasha says, walking toward Brit.
At any second, her friend will spring up with bared claws and hiss.
“So you’re the ghost girl of the forest. Where’s all the blood, Brit? Are you gonna pull the zombie act again?”
Brit doesn’t move. Not even a twitch. There’s something unnatural about her body. The loll of her neck, and the way her legs twist inward at the knees.
Stopping, Sasha stares at her friend. Is she breathing?
“Chris? Jorge? If you guys are in on this, it’s not freaking funny.”
A coyote calls from deep in the forest.
She places one foot in front of the other. Drags herself toward her unmoving friend. Brit’s eyes stare at the sky, unblinking and vacant. Two ugly wounds mar her flesh—a puncture on the pale meat of an exposed arm, one on her cheek. Brit’s skin blisters with pus, each disgusting wound girded by a red bullseye. Brit’s face bloats like a balloon from a deranged carnival. Sweat…no, not sweat…saliva drenches the girl’s shirt as though she froths at the mouth with rabies.
Something black and spindly skitters across Brit’s face and vanishes into the brush.
Sasha drops to her knees and screams.
CHAPTER TWO
Thursday, September 10th
3:15 p.m.
Delving into the darkest minds comes at a price.
Darcy Haines stares at her computer screen inside the cramped corner office. Since she returned to the Behavior Analysis Unit of the FBI, every day has been a struggle to compartmentalize.
She flips through the folder of a case they closed two weeks ago: Harriet Monroe, the Widow Maker of Washington state. Harriet spent her evenings in clubs and lured men back to her apartment, where she drugged and raped them, then jammed a knife into their hearts. Before that, it was Richard Oswalt, the Doll Face Killer. Oswalt experienced tragedy when his father drowned in a boating accident on Veil Lake in Michigan in 1989. This year, after his abusive mother passed, Oswalt murdered five residents, faced them toward the island where his father perished, and covered their faces with porcelain masks, replicas of the dolls his mother kept inside her bedroom.
She almost lost Julian after Oswalt captured Darcy’s husband. Serial killer in the making, Phillip O’Grady, plunged a knife into Julian’s stomach after stalking Darcy.
Where is the good in the world? Paging through the case files from the last two months, Darcy sees only evil.
Darcy wipes her forehead on her sleeve and turns the desk fan toward her face. The damned central air failed yesterday, and the BAU has been a sauna ever since. She checks her email, replies to the administrative staff regarding training opportunities in the coming months, and blows brunette hair out of her eyes.
“You okay?”
Darcy swivels her chair and finds Agent Adan Ketchum in the doorway. Kind eyes soften his ruddy complexion. His jacket hangs by a thumb over his shoulder, sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Ketchum convinced Darcy to return to the BAU during the Doll Face Killer case.
“Just trying to stay cool,” Darcy says, sitting back in her chair.
“I wanted to poke my head in and tell you the Bureau loved the work you did on the Monroe case. Lots of discussion over how great it is to have a full-time, experienced profiler leading the newbies.”
When she files the folders inside her cabinet instead of answering, he pulls a chair in front of her desk and sits.
“How is your family handling the work agreement?”
“Well, Jennifer is on a woe-is-me streak, blaming the lack of a mother figure for her problems. She pulled a seventy-three on her calculus exam yesterday, her lowest grade in four years.”
“She’ll get used to it. You’re only here two days a week, and you get your weekends.”
Except she doesn’t. Not when there’s a case to solve and a murderer to catch. Two weekends ago, Julian and Darcy planned to take her son, Hunter, and Jennifer to the mountains for a two-day hike before Hunter returned to college. They reserved a rustic cabin halfway up the ridge and lost the money when she canceled at the last second. There’s no time for her family when sociopaths like Harriet Monroe spend their nights littering the morgues with corpses.
“How’s Hunter holding up at Coastal Carolina?”
“He’s happy to be back with his friends,” Darcy says, rolling a pen between her palms. “His girlfriend, Bethany, transferred to Coastal Carolina this semester.”
“They’re back together?”
“It’s an on again, off again thing.” Darcy lifts a shoulder, remembering the hell Bethany went through after her brother and his friend raped her. She gives Bethany credit for entering a relationship with a guy. Were Darcy in Bethany’s shoes, she couldn’t imagine dating. “They never truly break up. Instead, they take time off. Now that they’re neighbors, I wonder if they’ll find steady ground.”
“Hunter has a good head on his shoulders. They’ll make it work, I bet. Everyone else at home okay?”
Ketchum doesn’t mention Julian by name. He must know Julian is going through a tough time with Darcy’s work arrangement. Darcy taps the pen on her desk and stares off at the corner.
“Julian is getting his strength back, but he lost a step. He’s worried how he’ll react in the field, and if he still has what it takes to protect and serve.”
“Tell him to call me. See this?”
Ketchum pulls his shirt out of his slacks and lifts the side, revealing an egg-shaped scar above his hip.
“If you claim shark attack, I’m not buying it.”
“A bullet passed through my side, missing my hip by an inch. Stray shot from a gang member in St. Louis when I worked as a beat cop. The FBI accepted my application three weeks before the gunshot wound. That knocked me out of action for a couple months, and I figured the FBI would renege on the offer and leave me hanging. But they waited, and I got better. I busted my ass in the weight room until I surpassed my previous lifting records. Sure, I lost a step for the first six months. I kept working and gained it back.”
Darcy scoots her chair forward and runs her eyes over the old wound.
“Sorry I made light of the situation. I didn’t realize you took a bullet.”
Ketchum rolls his eyes.
“Don’t apologize. It’s not a badge of honor. More like wrong place, wrong time, or crappy luck. The point is I got better, and Julian will too if he gives himself a chance.”
Darcy skirts the real reason Julian doesn’t like Darcy’s new job. Even when she’s home, she’s knee deep in paperwork and profiles. The world’s evils dominate her head space. By the end of the day, she can’t let it go. Gone are the evenings they spent binging Netflix. She can’t sit still.
The phone rings as Ketchum opens his mouth.
“I’ll let you get back to work,” he says, sliding the chair against the wall. “Remember, have Julian call me when he’s ready to talk.”
As Ketchum turns the corner, Darcy shuffles through her case notes and clamps the phone between her head and shoulder.
“Agent Gellar…sorry. Agent Haines.”
Darcy curses at herself. During times of stress, she reverts to her previous surname. Her first husband, Tyler Gellar, died from an aneurysm ten years before Michael Rivers, the Full Moon Killer, stabbed Darcy inside a pitc
h-black house in North Carolina.
“Agent Haines, it’s Gail Shipley.”
Darcy clicks the papers together on her desk and freezes. She hasn’t heard Shipley’s name since the Darkwater Cove murders. Last Darcy knew, Shipley left Genoa Cove for a high-profile reporting job at a national television news outlet. What does Shipley want with her now?
“Ms. Shipley. What may I do for you?”
“I’m putting together a story on the Darkwater Cove murders.”
“That was a long time ago. Why now?”
“Murder sells, Agent Haines. You should know that by now.”
“I wasn’t part of the FBI then. If you want the lowdown on the murders, contact the Genoa Cove Police at—”
“I’ve already done so. There’s been too much turnover since the murders. Detective Ames retired, and Officer Faust isn’t with the GCPD anymore.”
“Obviously. She aided Michael Rivers, then he turned on Faust and murdered her.”
“That’s interesting, Agent Haines. Did you witness the murder?”
“What are you implying?”
“Besides Michael Rivers and Officer Faust, the only three people in the forest were you and your two children, Jennifer and Hunter. Didn’t Detective Ames arrest your son for the murder of Amy Yang?”
Darcy releases a frustrated breath.
“You were in Genoa Cove, Gail, so you know Detective Ames cleared Hunter’s name. Hunter better not be the subject of your documentary.”
“Never. I wouldn’t ruin a young person’s life to move my career forward.”
Sure, you wouldn’t. Darcy pinches the bridge of her nose. Between the heat and Gail Shipley’s interrogation, Darcy feels a headache coming on.
“Then I’m unsure what it is you want with me.”
“Not everyone is convinced Hunter is innocent. I spoke to your neighbor—”
“Harold Gibbons?”
Gibbons remains a thorn in Darcy’s side. He blames her for attracting a serial killer to Genoa Cove, and he refuses to accept Hunter’s innocence.
“I don’t divulge my sources.”
“I’m very busy, Gail. Get to the point.”