Ignoring her questions, he asked, “Where’s your cell phone?”
She hesitated a moment before answering, “After the detective called this morning and told me about Rachel, I was so upset I dropped it—drowned the thing in my dish water.”
“Let me see that,” he said, pulling the purse off of her shoulder. Heedless of her protests, he plucked out a cell phone. Along with an item that surprised him even more.
It was a little .38 revolver, of the hammerless, snub-nosed variety some women liked to carry. But slim as it was, it was plenty big enough to kill, and he’d bet what was left of his savings that she knew how to use it.
“Hey! That’s mine,” she cried. “You have no right.”
“How about the right of self-defense?”
“I’m calling bullshit on that. You don’t get to claim self-defense in a kidnapping. Especially when you’re armed.”
“It’s not a kidnapping,” he argued, though from her point of view, he was sure it must seem that way.
“I doubt the detective would agree,” she said, “and that gun’s my legal property. I have a concealed carry permit,” she explained. “Rachel hated that I have it, but out here in the country, it makes me feel safer. Because you never know when somebody’s going to stop by for a kidnapping.”
He slipped both the gun and phone into a pocket of his jacket. “I’ll return them later.”
“When?”
“When I’m sure you’re not going to call the cops or drill a few holes in me.”
She glared at him, her gaze assuring him that if she managed to get the weapon, it might be more than a few holes.
On second thought, he added, “Come to think of it, I might hold off until we catch the son of a bitch who killed your sister—and I make damned sure he never gets the chance to drive another blonde to suicide.”
#
As he marched her into the yard, Lauren’s every instinct screamed that she shouldn’t get into his sedan, with its darkened windows and the driver whose grim determination chilled her to the marrow.
But whatever lies he’d told her, she recognized one sure truth. He wasn’t out to just arrest the man responsible for Rachel’s death. Durant meant to kill the bastard.
The idea burned like straw thrown on the hot coals of her anger, and bloodlust leapt like flame inside her: the desire to see the monster who had taken Rachel from her dead. Need burned even brighter, the need to know for certain that her sister had not willingly chosen to leave her, to leave life behind, without so much as a goodbye.
Though the first few flakes swirled on a bitter breeze, Lauren didn’t feel the cold as their feet crunched over frozen gravel. She picked up Dumpling and climbed into the passenger seat while Durant put her bags in the trunk.
What are you doing? Rachel’s voice was in the car, so clear and so urgent, Lauren swung her head to stare into the seat behind her. And nearly wept when she found it empty.
Get out, Lauren, now. Run, while you still can!
Deeply shaken, Lauren fought back her terror, telling herself it was her own subconscious speaking, not her sister. And knowing she could never hope to outrun Durant, let alone a bullet. Besides, as dangerous as the man seemed, he offered the answers she craved—and maybe even the chance to avenge Rachel’s death.
Still, Lauren’s muscles remained coiled, begging her to listen to the voice of reason.
The driver’s side door opened, and he climbed in and started up the engine. When he put the car into gear, a loud click echoed in the silence: the sound of the door locks automatically engaging.
She forced herself to swallow, though her throat felt hard and tight. As he backed into the empty road, she managed, “You promised me you’d answer all my questions.”
He didn’t say a word but instead flipped on the headlights against the bruised-sky gloom. Flurries spun away, parted by their passing, and her nerves stretched taut, as if one end remained anchored back at home.
His gaze remained fastened to a country road pockmarked by potholes. They passed another farmhouse, but the lights were off, and the neighbor’s truck was gone.
Angered and frightened by his silence, she tried again, her mind assembling truth from disparate pieces. “You said ‘we’ before. ‘Until we catch’ the person who killed Rachel. So that means you need my help, right? It’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
Remembering his recent access to FBI records, she ventured yet another guess. “You know about me, what I do, and you think I can help you somehow.”
“Something like that,” he admitted.
“Exactly like that, and if you want my help, you’re going to have to answer my questions like you promised, Durant. Or whoever the hell you are.”
“They might’ve drummed me out of the bureau, but they didn’t take my name. It’s Brent Durant, just like I told you.”
She wouldn’t bet on it, but right now something else he’d said pricked her attention. “Drummed you out? I thought you said you were suspended.”
“It started out that way. But when they figured out I’d never stop, they made it permanent.”
She digested this new information, wondering if this man ever opened his mouth without spewing lies or half-truths. “Never stop what?”
He slowed to turn onto the same state road she would have taken if she’d gone to visit Rachel, as she should have. As Lauren stroked the dog on her lap, she struggled to keep her head above the sense of unreality rising like an icy tide, threatening to drown her. She had nearly forgotten what she’d asked him when he finally deigned to answer.
“I never stopped ignoring my assigned cases and looking into suicides across the country. Looking for connections where nobody else sees them.”
“What sort of connections?”
“Younger women—all blond and attractive—with no history of depression or suicide attempts.”
“What else?” she asked. “What else did you find that linked them?”
“Not enough to convince the SAC—that’s the special agent in charge—to pull me off drug trafficking and let me run with this full-time. But then again, he wasn’t really listening, only watching me like I was a damned time bomb ready to go off any minute.”
Smart guy, Lauren thought, remembering how swiftly, how violently Durant had ripped out her phone and answering machine. Putting the memory aside, she said, “Well, I’m not him. I want to hear it. What else connected these women?”
“Every one of them had been involved in some recent tragedy, one receiving widespread negative publicity.”
Lauren frowned, thinking of Rachel’s accident, of the new stories surrounding both the drowning and the lawsuit, along with the heartbreaking photos of the pregnant victim and her children splashed across the evening news. There had been interviews with loved ones, too, friends talking about the Megan’s devotion to her church and family, her many acts of kindness, how she’d sold her own car to help pay for therapy for their little boy, an adorable, blond four-year-old born with Down syndrome.
In the eyes of the media, Megan—a pretty blonde herself—became the perfect mother, a sainted victim who inspired candlelit services and roadside memorials heaped with flowers, teddy bears, and crosses. Rachel, on the other hand, was just as quickly vilified after former judge and current cable TV darling Jaycee Joiner had unearthed a tagged Facebook photo showing Rachel, clearly buzzed, at a friend’s bachelorette party months before. It had been enough for the host to brand her a party girl, a reckless threat to respectable married women, and lambaste the grand jury for failing to punish the perpetrator of this “blonde on blonde crime.”
After a couple of hellacious weeks—weeks in which Rachel was publicly crucified as the “Blonde on Blonde Killer”—the furor was drowned out by an even more sensational news story involving a drug-addled young starlet accused of murdering her own baby. Still, Lauren had regularly searched the web for anything and everything to do with Rachel’s case. Unlike her sister, she was net-savv
y enough to stop short of reading various forum comment sections, knowing that the conversations on these websites often were both personal and painful.
“They’re just stupid trolls,” she’d warned Rachel the day her sister called in hysterics over a rash of particularly cruel comments, “pathetic losers who’ll say anything to get a reaction. They’d come out against fresh air, sunshine, even the damned Easter Bunny if they thought it would get them five minutes’ attention.”
Recalling what Durant had just said about the other victims’ tragedies, Lauren asked him, “What kinds of tragedies? Were there similarities?”
“Sad stuff, all of them.” His mouth tightened before he added, “You’re sure you want to hear the details?”
No, she wanted to shout, but she had to understand. Had to know if Durant could be right—or if he was completely insane. “Yeah.” She nodded. “I have to know.”
“One was a young mother whose baby died after she absentmindedly left him to roast in her hot car. There was a teenaged girl, too, who’d been blogging about her struggles with anorexia for about six months when another set of parents accused her of ‘encouraging’ their daughter to starve herself to death. And then there was the woman whose—”
“Enough, please.” Lauren raised a hand, bile burning in her throat. Sickened, she turned her head and stared out the window at the bleak, brown farmland sliding past, stark behind the rippling veil of snow.
“I’m sorry,” he said somberly. “It’s just—I know you’re already in shock, overwhelmed.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m feeling,” she interrupted, too upset to care that he was right on both counts. Not when he’d added raw fear to the mix. Fear that she was blinded by grief—and as crazy as her captor for believing anything that came out of his mouth.
“I think I do know,” he had the balls to answer, “I know because I’ve—”
“You’ve what? Delivered bad news to a lot of people? Abducted them from their homes, too?”
He glanced over, his jaw clenched and his brow furrowed. “I am not abducting you.”
“You scared me half to death at the house. You still do.”
“I’m only trying to make sure you’ll listen long enough for me to explain the truth to you. The truth you’ll never get from the police, the FBI—not from anyone but me. I’m giving you the information I’ve spent the last year gathering, and I’m letting you decide for yourself if you want to help me catch your sister’s killer.”
“And if I don’t believe you?”
“Then when we get to Austin, you’re free to go and grieve your sister’s suicide.”
As the flurries in the headlights dwindled, sunset peered beneath the cloud cover to stain the flat horizon as red as fresh-spilled blood. She wasn’t ready to let her fury die, too, to leave herself in the grip of an endless winter mourning and questioning her sister’s choices. Questioning, too, whether her own first instinct—that Rachel never could have done this—had been right, or she was merely being sucked into Durant’s delusion.
“I’ll listen,” she agreed. “I’ll listen and then decide. But first I want to know, when did you meet Rachel? What did you talk to her about?” Why didn’t you protect her, even from herself?
“She agreed to meet about a week ago, at a coffee shop.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Which coffee shop?”
“Ah, I don’t recall the name. Some trendy little place on Chicon Street—great espresso.”
Lauren nodded, remembering her sister taking her there on one of her rare visits. Rachel had started mooching the shop’s free Wi-Fi back in college, but the hazelnut lattes were what kept her coming back long after leaving school to work in hospital billing.
Still, Lauren reminded herself that anyone could figure out as much about Rachel’s habits by checking out her Facebook page or Twitter account, or reading a review of the café she’d posted online somewhere. As often as Lauren had warned her about blabbing her whereabouts to the world so casually, Rachel had only laughed off her concern, accusing her of letting her cyber-security work make her paranoid.
Frigid waves of nausea broke Lauren out in gooseflesh. If she only had the chance to annoy her little sister with another lecture…
Durant took her silence for permission to continue. “I wanted to see if she’d received any direct communication from a troll who was leaving comments in the discussion sections under online news stories related to her accident. I’d been scanning social media and forums, checking out the conversations, looking for similarities in the wording, threatening statements—”
“I’m surprised all that ugliness didn’t melt your eyes in their sockets,” she said bitterly. “I’ll never understand the kind of person who gets off on leaving sick, judgmental comments about people involved in tragedies.”
“Actually, you just nailed it right there.”
“What?”
“They get off on it, at least that’s what the bureau experts and the forensic psychologists have to say about the subject.”
She made a sound of pure disgust. “Sexually, you mean?”
“A lot of times. But sometimes, it’s just a matter of relieving their own stress or boredom by inflicting pain on others. And just like with face-to-face bullying, it can get competitive. Like a sport.”
“A blood sport,” she corrected, her short nails digging crimson crescents in her palms.
“I’d been following discussion threads related to women I believed might fit the suspect’s profile,” Durant continued, “when I noticed a similarity in the wording of some of the most vicious comments. And there were personal details in them, details I suspected could have only come from Rachel. How she blamed herself. How she was seeing a counselor to help her with the bad dreams she’d been having—nightmares about Megan Rutherford’s unborn child coming to accuse her of murdering her mother.”
Lauren’s heart raced, hearing Rachel’s anguish in the words. Or had she sent them in an e-mail? “He could have hacked her phone or maybe her computer. If her password wasn’t secure enough, or she logged in on a public access wireless hotspot somewhere—”
Somewhere like the coffee shop.
“Or if he somehow got her number and spoke to her by phone,” Durant said. “She denied speaking to him, but she wouldn’t look at me when I asked. She became defensive and asked me to leave soon afterward.”
Lauren shook her head. “Maybe she wasn’t lying. Maybe she was just sick of talking about it. That’s why she left counseling. She said it was bad enough she’d had to survive the accident once, let alone rehash it again and again.”
“She was lying, Lauren. And it fits this suspect’s pattern, digging up his targets’ numbers somehow and phoning to torment them.”
“If some creep had called her, she would have freaked out,” Lauren insisted, “and I would’ve been there in a heartbeat. Would’ve made her report it to the police and even slept on her damned doorstep if I had to, with my gun in hand.”
“Before I, um, before I left the bureau, I was able to subpoena a couple of the other victims’ phone records. Right around the time of their deaths, both had dozens of calls from private numbers, numbers that turned out to be from burner phones, disposables paid for in cash from various locations. Little mom and pop stores with no security cameras—or old, low-tech systems where nothing could be made out but a blurred figure in a hoodie sweatshirt.”
“So how can you be sure it’s always the same person?” And how can I be sure you not making up all of this?
“I can’t. Not for certain. And I can’t prove he’s connected to the troll on the forums. But I damn well know it’s him. I swear, I can practically feel the evil welling up in the final message he posted in relation to each victim.”
Durant’s reasoning might not completely hold together, but the utter conviction in his voice drew a shudder from her. And a question, too. “What was it he wrote? What did he say about my sister?”
Durant braked har
d as a coyote dashed across the road a few feet from their bumper. Her grip on the dog tightened as the tires squealed. There was a moment the car lost its grip, the rear end sliding sideways. But the ex-agent kept them on the road, and the coyote vanished into the tall grasses.
“You okay?” he asked her.
“Sure. Fine. Never better,” she said, though her heart was pounding with the near miss. Clearly upset with the jostling, the dog whimpered and struggled in her arms until Lauren helped her climb down to the floor of the backseat. “There you go, sweetie. Curl up down there. Good girl.”
Turning around, Lauren strapped herself back in and focused on the agent. “Now tell me, what was this troll saying on the forum?”
His gaze locked on the road, Durant said, “You don’t need to hear it. Trust me, you don’t want it in your head.”
“I want to know. I have to. I owe that much to Rachel.”
The car grew so quiet that Lauren could make out the chatter of each pebble that passed beneath the tires, every breath the driver took.
When he spoke again, his words were scarcely louder. “That’s what I thought once. But I was wrong, Lauren. I never should have—”
“But it’s your job,” she argued.
“No, it wasn’t,” he ground out, “as the special agent in charge—all my colleagues and the damned psychologist they made me see—were all too quick to remind me. But because I had to know what he said, this investigation—this hunt for the twisted animal who killed her—is fucking all that I have left.”
By the dim light of the glowing dashboard, she studied the tension in his handsome features. The tautness of his square jaw, the way he gripped the wheel so hard, it looked as if he might rip it from the column. Though she wasn’t particularly bothered by the language, she took the harshness in his voice as another warning. A warning that this man was skating dangerously close to the edge.
“All? I don’t understand.” Hardly daring to breathe, she asked, “You’re not talking about Rachel, are you?”
He shook his head before confirming, “Hell, no, I’m not talking about Rachel. This all goes back to the very first victim that I know of. Her name was Carrie—Carrie Wilkinson…”
The Best Victim Page 3
