by Mary Stone
“My guess is that ‘off the record’ is the only way he’d talk to anyone, anyway.” Combing the fingers of one hand through the ends of her hair, Autumn paused. “I don’t know how useful it would be, honestly. That really depends on Cameron. But if he’s willing to talk, there’s always the potential to learn something that you didn’t know before. Personally, I think that’s worthwhile, but I don’t know that everyone would agree with me.”
Though slight, a smile crept onto Winter’s face. “I agree with you.”
Autumn returned the smile and nodded. “You might have to wait until Nathan Arkwell’s trial is over, but yeah, I think it would be worth picking Cameron Arkwell’s brain. I can help you figure out some questions to ask him, if you want. Nothing that sounds too much like a psychologist, though. Just a few things to help get a dialogue started. Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Kemper were chatty, but that doesn’t mean that every serial killer is.”
Winter’s smile was more pronounced. “That would be really helpful, actually.”
Maybe with a bit of luck, Cameron Arkwell would be helpful too. Though Winter tended to avoid the topic of her brother, Autumn knew the uncertainty about his fate weighed heavily on her friend. She could only hope that a discussion with Cameron Arkwell would lead Winter to some semblance of peace.
But deep inside, she didn’t think so.
She didn’t think that anything would.
7
On the same day every week, Sandy and Oliver Ulbrich took an evening hike through a wooded trail about thirty minutes from their house. The couple lived just beyond the outskirts of Danville, and they’d been at the Riverside Mall with their heathen friend, Ellen Santiago. Ellen was long dead—she’d been shot in the back of the head at close range before the FBI had even positioned their snipers that night.
That night.
Sometimes, I had trouble with the fact that the massacre at the Riverside Mall had occurred less than a year ago. To me, the event might as well have transpired in a different lifetime. In the months since that fateful night, I felt as if I’d lived another lifetime.
The chatter of birds in the woven canopy of tree branches overhead pulled me back to the present. The rays of sunlight that pierced the relative cover warmed me where they landed on the olive drab jacket I constantly wore. Yesterday had been unseasonably warm, but today was more in line with the normal December weather in Virginia.
I’d almost let myself daydream. Gathering wool, as my granddad would have said. As tempting as it was to give myself over to the sense of nostalgia I felt when I stepped onto the hiking trail, I couldn’t afford to lose my focus right now.
Will and I had a task to complete.
As I reached into my pocket for a stick of spearmint gum, I cast a quick glance at Will. His bearded face was stone, his pale blue eyes alight with determination and focus.
I stuffed the gum in my mouth, careful not to let my thoughts show on my face.
If I told Will to jump off a bridge, I was almost certain he’d follow through with the order. He was different than Jackson Fisher or even Shawn Teller before him. Though I told Will that I’d killed the three people on our list, they’d actually been killed by Shawn and Jackson. But neither of the two men were here to say otherwise, so I figured I might as well take the credit.
There had always been a certain spark of inquisitiveness in Jackson and Shawn’s faces, a spark I hadn’t much cared for. I didn’t need my lackies to be curious or critical. I needed them to follow orders, to listen to what I asked of them and carry it out without a second thought. I had a job to do on this earth, and I didn’t have time to answer some henchman’s slew of questions.
Will didn’t ask questions. Will just obeyed.
Dammit, there I went again. Gathering wool.
Will and I had deviated from the hiking trail to trudge through the brush of the woodland floor. Fortunately, the shrubbery and fallen leaves weren’t as much of a hindrance as they’d been in the forest where I’d killed Jackson.
Sure, the plant life was handy for hiding a freshly buried body, but it was unpleasant to navigate. Even with boots and long pants, it never failed that I wound up with a burr or three attached to my ankles. To my relief, it hadn’t rained in close to a week. Trudging through mud and brush was a nightmare.
No matter how unpleasant it was, the trip through the underbrush was a necessary part of today’s plan. The hiking path wound in a wobbly circle through the woods, but Will and I were taking a shortcut. We’d wind up on the trail soon, well before Sandy and Oliver Ulbrich got there.
Reaching out to tap Will’s upper arm, I kept the movement slow and measured to avoid startling him. Like me, he’d fixed his attention on the ground in an effort to avoid a hidden pit or a fallen branch.
As Will’s blue eyes flicked over to meet mine, he lifted an eyebrow.
I raised a finger to my lips to indicate that we should keep our voices quiet. I wasn’t worried that they’d hear or spot us in the middle of the woods—in fact, if they did, it would only lend believability to my cover story about being lost. However, I didn’t need them to hear my discussion with Will.
“If we finish cutting through this part of the woods here, we should run into the trail up that way.” I gestured past a moss-covered oak. “It’s only a little after five right now, but it’ll be dark soon.”
Will wrinkled his nose. “They hike after dark?”
I was careful to keep my annoyance from my face. “No. They head home before it gets dark. We’re going to try to run into them so we can ask them for directions, maybe get a better feel for their routine, you follow?”
Lips pursed, Will nodded. “The more we know about their routine, the better we can plan for things later on.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s right. And the better you can plan, the less likely it is that anything will go wrong. You don’t have to say anything to them, just follow my lead, okay?”
Will nodded again, eager as a pup for a pat on the head. “Okay.”
Maybe I should have felt bad for lying to him. He’d shown me nothing but loyalty, hadn’t he? And here I was, lying to him about what I’d planned for Sandy and Oliver Ulbrich.
But I knew better than to feel bad. This was all part of the learning process—the same process I’d gone through more than a decade ago.
I had to see death for myself, had to witness it unexpectedly so I could fully appreciate how fickle life could be. In the same instant I turned my blade on a sinner, they could have pulled out a weapon to turn on me. I had to be faster. Had to be smarter. Had to be more ruthless than the devil worshippers I chased.
After another glance around the tall trees that shrouded the area, I stretched out a hand and beckoned Will to follow me. The bushes thinned, and soon the fallen leaves gave way to a hint of green grass.
I nudged Will with an elbow. “This is it. This is the trail.”
Will’s eyes darted to the packed earth that cut through the forest. “Now what?”
I shrugged. “We wait. They’ll be along soon. This is the part of the trail that leads back to the parking lot. They’ll have to come through here to get back to their car. That’s another important thing to remember. When you’re hoping to intercept someone, you always want to stick to the routes that are necessary for them to get where they’re going. That way, you know you aren’t wasting your time.”
With another nod, Will took a seat at the edge of a large rock. The opposite side of the stone was green with a coat of moss, and a handful of ferns had sprouted from the earth below. “What are we going to say when they get here?”
The kid was obedient and sharp. Good.
“That’s good, Will. You always want to know what you’re going to say before you run into the person you’re tailing. Eventually, you’ll be able to wing most of it, but to start with, it’s best to be prepared. We’ll act like our phones are dead and we’re lost.”
Will straightened his back and shifted his gaz
e to me. “If we ask them for directions, then maybe we can get a feel for a little bit more of their routine. Such as how often they come here or where they live.”
The smirk that tugged at the corner of my mouth was all but involuntary. “We sure can. That’s quick thinking. I’m impressed. I like to crank up the friendly banter when I run into folks like this too. You’d be surprised the type of info people are happy to cough up when you ask them all nice like.”
The glint of determination in Will’s eyes didn’t dissipate. I really had hit the jackpot with him. Will had been a quiet loner for most of his life, but there was another dimension to his seemingly harmless exterior.
There was an animal lurking under that nonchalant façade.
An animal that had been waiting many years to be fed.
Almost fourteen years earlier, I’d learned the same was true about myself. And the hell of it was, I doubted there was any way I would have found out if it hadn’t been for my parents’ death.
Until that night, I’d been content with trying to cram my thoughts into the mold that society had given me. I’d been certain I’d have to suppress my feelings and urges for the rest of my life.
Then he showed up.
In a single night, he changed everything. He opened my eyes. Gave me room to be who I truly was.
Some kids on the internet these days liked to talk about taking a red pill or disconnecting themselves from the Matrix. I’d done that long ago. I was just glad to know that others were starting to see the same ugly parts of society I’d been taught to see.
Someday, we’d start a revolution. Me and Will were just the start.
As the mournful wail of a distant coyote drifted down to us on the early evening breeze, I smiled to myself. I never did understand why people wanted to live in a place like Richmond—a city infested with car exhaust and police sirens. The woods were beautiful, the air was clean, and the stars shone brightly at night.
Even when I was a kid, I’d loved these woods. We were about fifteen miles outside Danville, on the same hiking trail my parents used to take me and my sister when we were younger.
My mother had lived in Danville for a spell when she was younger, and the woods held a certain sense of sentimentality for her and my father.
We didn’t come out here every week like Sandy and Oliver Ulbrich, but we were here often enough that I got familiar with the lay of the land.
I could still remember our last visit to the trail before my parents died. My sister was seven years older than me, and she’d wanted to wander down a slope to the banks of a shallow creek to see if she could catch a frog. At the time, I’d slept with a stuffed frog on my bed, so I was naturally interested.
Our parents told us to stay in their sight, but the banks of the creek were steeper than we’d anticipated. Once we got down to the water, we could no longer see our parents, but we could hear them. My sister assured me that was good enough, and our search for frogs began.
Even at six years old, I’d known there was no way our parents would let us bring a frog back home if we found one, but I’d still held on to a shred of hope.
I still wasn’t sure how long we’d trudged along the creek bank, but we’d been so focused on spotting a frog or a salamander that we almost completely forgot about our promise to stay within our parents’ line of sight. Eventually, we’d even hopped over a series of rocks to reach the other side of the creek. Maybe all the noise we made had scared away the frogs, and we’d both vowed to be stealthier.
On the opposite bank, our luck had only been slightly better. Though we’d spotted a couple frogs as they hopped from one slick stone to the next, none of them were in range for us to capture. My sister had harrumphed and ordered me to follow her back to the side of the creek from where we’d come. We were prepared to return to our parents with no frogs or salamanders, and we were sure that would be the worst part of our day.
To our surprise, when we’d climbed past the final line of plant life, our parents were nowhere to be seen. Naturally, I blamed my sister, and she blamed me. If we hadn’t been searching for her stupid frogs, we wouldn’t have gotten lost. But if we hadn’t had to throw in my stupid salamanders, then we wouldn’t have gotten lost, either.
We bickered back and forth, but when the irritability subsided, my sister was scared. She didn’t say it, but I could see it in her eyes.
Though we’d been to the trail a few times in the past, we didn’t know it well enough to get our bearings and head back to the family car. I wasn’t scared, and as far as I was concerned now that I thought back on the memory, that was just another piece of evidence that I wasn’t like them.
I’d thought about what it would be like to live in the woods, to be taken in by a family of wolves or coyotes, to live free of the restraints imposed by mankind.
But my sister, well, she wasn’t like me. I hadn’t realized back then how different we really were, but we were much, much different.
Sure, we shared the same raven black hair and deep blue eyes, but that was where any resemblance ended. Our similarities were all superficial. I knew that now, but I hadn’t known then.
Fourteen years later, I could still picture her as she tugged at the end of her long braid as her eyes darted back and forth, biting her lower lip to keep it from trembling. She’d raised a hand to point and said, “I think it’s this way.” She’d tried to sound certain, but I hadn’t missed the tremor that tinged her voice.
When we found the hiking trail, we’d done exactly what Will and I were doing today. We’d stayed put in one spot and waited. Our parents were frantic when they rounded a bend to spot us, and even though my sister had tried to hide her fright, she was just as shaken as they had been.
We didn’t hear the end of their spiel for the entire drive home. They speculated on how we could have been hurt, how we could have fallen into a deep part of the creek and drowned, how we could have been mauled by a wild animal, or even how we could have been carted away by a stranger.
My sister had scoffed at the last scenario, but she shouldn’t have. She had no idea how close we’d come to that exact fate.
After all, we weren’t the only people in the woods that day. Just like I was now teaching Will, there had been someone following our footsteps…watching, waiting.
Three weeks later, my parents died, and my life started anew.
I took in a deep breath of the crisp woodland air and found myself smiling as I looked up through the bare limbs of the trees. It was fitting that I should begin my mission in this forest. It was a sign from God if ever I’d seen one.
Will’s eyes flicked up to me as a questioning look crossed his bearded face.
In response to the unasked query, my smile widened. “They’re close.”
The younger man’s expression was curious. “How can you tell?”
My smile didn’t falter as I shrugged. “Just a feeling. Have you ever been to these woods before, Will?”
He was silent for a moment before he shook his head. “No, not that I can recall. Most of my family lives around Fredericksburg. I didn’t move to Richmond until about a year ago. Right after I graduated high school.”
I nodded my understanding. “I used to come here sometimes with my parents when I was younger. It’s been a while, but I still remember the place pretty well.”
The lie fell from my lips just as easily as if it had been the truth. I had been here recently, within the last year even.
Not far from the part of the creek where my sister and I had emerged all those years ago, I’d buried the first man who had tried to subvert my authority. Shawn Teller’s body still hadn’t been found by the cops, not that I was trying to keep his death a secret.
Shawn was just some skinhead from rural North Carolina. I knew no one would think much of his passing. Before he met me, he’d been involved with a handful of motorcycle clubs that boasted their black and white Nazi flags like they were a part of their heritage.
They weren’t, of cours
e. Those men were nothing more than a bunch of posers, almost as bad as the sinners who’d escaped from the Riverside Mall. Maybe someday God would direct me to punish those heathens too.
However, those types were unforgiving, and no one would be surprised to learn that Shawn had been killed by an irate biker after he’d threatened to rat them out, or after he’d stolen from them.
One mission at a time, I reminded myself. Even if God directed me to another group of sinners, I had a job to finish first.
“Back when I was a kid, these woods used to be a safe place to be, even at night.” I hunched over to carefully pull a string of burs off the bottom of my jeans. I held up the little barbs for Will to see. “It used to be that these were the only things you had to worry about running into if you were out here by yourself.”
Will brushed off the front of his plaid shirt. “What happened? Is it not safe anymore?”
I flicked the bur away. “No, it’s not. Bunch of those bikers started hanging around here after dark, selling dope and only Lord knows what else. It’s the worst during the summer when it’s warm outside, but no doubt there’s still some of them that creep around here during the winter months.”
The look on Will’s face soured. “This is supposed to be a place for families.”
I nodded. “It’s supposed to be. And someday, maybe God will gift us with the task of returning these parts to the way they’re supposed to be.”
Before Will could make another comment, the light drone of a woman’s voice jerked my attention away from my musing. With a quick glance to Will, I tilted my head in the direction of the sound. He squared his jaw and nodded as he pushed himself to stand.
I reached to the interior pocket of my jacket to retrieve my phone. I’d removed the battery earlier in the day, and I’d told Will to leave his smartphone back in the RV we’d been staying in. Living off the grid was easy when you could drive your home anywhere you wanted.
Powering off my phone completely served two purposes. First, it made my dialogue with Mr. and Mrs. Ulbrich more believable when I showed them that I couldn’t bring the screen to life. Second, it prevented any likelihood—however small—of a GPS satellite tracing my steps.
