Watching Their Steps

by Alana Terry

  I sat back down on the bench and Izzy stretched her hands across the table to touch me. Marx gave her a sharp look, and she jerked them back with surprising quickness and stuffed them under the table.

  “Tell us about the night you found Holly,” he demanded.

  I felt the warmth of his body as he leaned on the table beside me, staring down my former mother with frightening intensity. I could see the internal struggle reflected on Izzy’s face. In order to tell us the story, she would have to admit to a crime she didn’t want anyone to know about.

  She hissed in a breath, and her voice quivered with emotion as she began to speak. “We didn’t kidnap you, Holly. It wasn’t kidnapping. We rescued you from him.” Her eyes pleaded with me to understand. “We were traveling. Moving . . . product. We were headed back here to Maine, where we lived, and we passed through a small town in Kansas.”

  The word Kansas sent a jolt through me, and I looked at Marx. He made the connection too. The note card had been sent to me from Kansas. We had both wondered if it was sent to lure me to the killer’s “home” or my own.

  “We were on a back road, and the next thing we knew, this little girl—this beautiful little girl—ran out of the woods covered in blood. She ran straight in front of the car. Paul tried to stop, but we hit her.” I caught a glimpse of the pain and guilt that secret had burdened her with before she looked down at the table. “She was just lying there on the road, and we thought . . . we thought she was dead. But then she mumbled something. A man came running out of the woods after her. He was a big man, and there was no good reason he should’ve been chasing that little girl through the woods. He had a knife, and it was covered in blood. Paul pulled out his gun and shot him. We picked up the little girl, put her in the back of the camper, and drove as fast and as far as we could.”

  Marx’s fingertips curled in anger on the tabletop. “You didn’t think to take her to a hospital?”

  “She was fine.”

  “You hit her with your car,” he bit out.

  “What were we supposed to do? A hospital would ask questions, and we couldn’t exactly tell the police, now could we?”

  Not with a bunch of drug paraphernalia in the back of the car.

  “Maybe she had a family,” he pointed out.

  “Officer,” Izzy said with a patronizing lilt to her voice. “If she had a family, they were dead. The blood on that knife, and all over her clothes, it wasn’t hers. He killed someone with that knife.”

  Marx’s eyes slid to me, but I was too shocked to do anything but stare at Izzy. She’d known all this time and had never uttered a helpful word of it to anyone.

  “Where did your husband shoot him?” Marx demanded.

  Izzy shrugged. “Somewhere in the torso. He dropped like a rock, and we just assumed he was dead.” Her eyes widened with sudden comprehension, and I saw a spark of fear in their depths. “He’s not dead, is he?” Her gaze darted to me and then back to Marx. “That’s why you’re here.” She wrung her hands anxiously. “No, you have to do something. He was gonna hurt Holly. What if he comes after her?”

  She was begging a police officer for help on my behalf. That had to taste bitter on her tongue.

  “He already has. He came for her last night, and not for the first time,” he explained. “I need to know everythin’ you can tell me about him so I can stop him from hurtin’ her.”

  Izzy was so pale I thought she might faint. “He’s here? In Maine?” She grappled with that concept for a second and then seemed to pull herself back together. “Okay. What can I tell you?”

  “Where in Kansas did this shootin’ take place?” Marx asked.

  “Stony Brooke. It was a back road between the trees. I don’t remember the name of it. We tried never to travel on main roads.” She glanced at me with worry. “If it helps, he was well over six feet with dark hair. And he was young, probably in his twenties. And his nose looked . . . crooked, but it could’ve been the shadows. It was too dark to see much else.”

  “It helps. Can you remember anythin’ else?”

  Izzy strained to remember anything else that might have stood out, and then shook her head in frustration. “Just that he wore black.”

  “Do you think you can work with a sketch artist?”

  Izzy shook her head. “I’m not good with faces. I can’t remember enough. Oh! One more thing. It was the night before Halloween.”

  Marx sighed and stood up. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Lane.” He offered me a hand, which I blatantly ignored as usual. He would get used to it eventually.

  I rose from the table and looked at the woman I’d once thought was my mother. She did care about me in her own way, and after all the rejection I had experienced in my life, it mattered to me that she cared. But I wasn’t sure I wanted her to be a part of my life.

  “Will you come back?” she asked hopefully. “You’re all I have. Paul . . . Paul passed away in prison.”

  Paul died in prison? I stared at her, unsure what I was supposed to feel. I had only known Paul for two years, and I hadn’t been nearly as close with him as I had been with Izzy. She’d cared for me. But if she was to be believed, Paul had saved my life eighteen years ago. Surely that counted for something.

  I knew how it felt to drift through life alone and disconnected, and that wasn’t a life I would wish on anyone. “I’ll write.” It was the most I could offer her. Izzy looked a little crestfallen as we left her sitting alone at the table, but we left the prison a few details richer.

  Chapter 26

  THE ROAD TRIP BACK to New York was even worse than the trip to Maine. The few breaks we took were nerve-racking, because we both knew the killer was lurking somewhere in the background, taking pictures and planning his next attack.

  Relief swelled through me when Marx pulled his car up to the curb outside my apartment. I was finally home. Before I could open the door and hop out, he said, “Holly, there’s somethin’ I wanna talk to you about.”

  The gravity in his voice made my fingers freeze on the door handle. The last time he took that voice, it was to tell me that Izzy was a murderer. “Okay . . .”

  He looked as though he was still working through his thoughts when he started to speak. “God forbid it ever happens again, but . . . if the killer manages to get you alone, I need you to pretend you don’t remember any more about him than you did when we left New York.”

  Unease crawled through. He was usually careful not to alarm me unnecessarily, which meant he thought this scenario was a very real possibility, and it worried him.

  “You want me to lie.”

  “I want you to give him reason to doubt that it’s the right time to take you,” he said, with a quick look my way. “Give us a chance to get to you. He might take you anyway; there’s no tellin’ with his state of mind.”

  “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “After last night, yes, I have,” he said, and I could hear the tension in his voice. “I just want you to be prepared.”

  I inhaled a shaky breath and looked out the window. The killer had bided his time for who knew how long, and now he was running out of patience. “Okay,” I agreed. I wasn’t the most convincing liar, but if my life depended on it, I would try.

  I climbed out of the car and into the fading light of evening with my bag, and started toward my apartment. The door swung inward with a familiar squeak of metal, and I welcomed the scent of must and lilac air freshener as I stepped inside. I dropped my bag on the counter and took a moment to just breathe in the comforting smells of home.

  Jordan trotted across the room with a chirp of delight, and I crouched down to meet him. “Hi, fatty.” I smiled and scooped him into my arms with a grunt of effort. I really had to revisit that diet idea. I rubbed between his ears as I turned in the doorway to see Marx still standing by his car. He was on his phone.

  A man jogged by on the sidewalk, and it took too long for his face to register. I tried to duck out of view, but judging by his brea
thy exhalation of my name, he’d spotted me.

  Wonderful. I’d been home for all of thirty seconds.

  I gritted my teeth and stepped into the doorway to see the man striding down the sidewalk toward me with his hands on his hips. He was panting heavily from exertion, and his gray T-shirt stuck to him in damp patches of sweat.

  “I didn’t know you lived here,” he said.

  I stared at his face as I strained to remember his name: Lance, Luther, Lucky . . . Luke! He was the man I usually crossed paths with while jogging, and the same man I had politely refused to have drinks with at the café.

  I gave him a tense, unwelcoming smile. “Yep.”

  I saw Marx straighten and murmur a parting comment into his phone before snapping it shut. He looked at me with a silent question in his eyes: do you need help? I gave him a subtle shake of my head. I was pretty sure this situation wouldn’t require police involvement.

  Luke descended the few steps to the patio, and I stiffened when he stopped less than two feet from me. If backing up wouldn’t communicate that I was inviting him inside, I would’ve taken three giant steps back to give myself some breathing room. I set Jordan on the floor and folded my arms instead to express that I didn’t want him coming any closer.

  “How are you?” he asked. He looked me over, his visual inspection more clinical than intimate. “I heard what happened at the café that day: a guy died, and when I looked up an article on it, I saw your picture online. You were covered in blood.”

  My throat constricted. Online?

  “I was worried something happened to you, and I felt really bad for leaving when I did. If I’d stayed a few more minutes, maybe I could’ve done something.”

  “I’m fine. And there really wasn’t much to do. He died quickly.”

  “I’d like to think I could’ve done something. I am an EMT.”

  Well, that was interesting. I would’ve never pegged him as an EMT; something more like a businessman or an office worker.

  “I jog by here sometimes, and I’ve noticed there’s almost always a police officer standing out front. Are you in some sort of witness protection program?”

  “Something like that.”

  Marx cleared his throat just loudly enough to draw Luke’s attention. He gave the man a friendly smile, but Luke seemed to understand that it was time for him to leave.

  “Well, I just wanted to check in with you and make sure you were okay.” I got the impression it wasn’t what he’d originally intended to say. “I hope to see you jogging sometime.” He hopped up the steps and then paused at the top. He gave me an oddly sweet smile as he said, “Have a good night, Holly.”

  Marx watched him jog away down the sidewalk before returning his gaze to me. “Well, he seems normal.” At my noncommittal shrug, he said, “I take it he’s not your type.”

  I blinked at him, unsure what I was supposed to say to that. I knew most people had types. Jace preferred men with accents. I preferred men fifteen feet away, but I didn’t think that qualified as a type.

  I could appreciate a man’s handsome features like I could appreciate a beautifully taken photograph, but whatever was supposed to trigger an attraction between two people . . . was broken.

  Somehow that made me feel even more defective.

  “He has a nice smile,” I offered before Marx could notice my hesitation. His dark green eyes were speculative as he walked down the sidewalk. My answer hadn’t come quickly enough.

  I sighed and walked away from the door, leaving it open so he could come in when he was ready. I opened my refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of fruit punch. I gripped the cap and twisted, but it didn’t budge.

  I only had this problem with screw caps. I cursed the person who invented them. For the life of me, if I managed to get them off without a wrench, I could never get them back on straight.

  Marx stepped inside and closed the door. With a frown, he asked, “Would you like a hand with that?”

  “No,” I grumbled. I grabbed a towel off the counter and wrapped it over the lid, but the lid was stuck to the bottle as if someone had melted them together. The towel slid uselessly around the cap along with my fingers.

  “All right then,” Marx said. He sat down at the table and watched my struggle with a vaguely amused smile.

  I flung the towel aside and banged the lid off the edge of the counter, trying to break the impenetrable seal. Jordan ducked for cover when the violent banging erupted. I made one last valiant effort to twist off the dented cap, and then admitted defeat. I slammed it on the countertop with a hateful glare.

  Marx hunched over the table and buried his face in his hand. It took me a moment to realize his shoulders were shaking in silent laughter.

  “Stop laughing at me,” I demanded as I reached into the refrigerator and grabbed another bottle of fruit punch. The cap popped right off. Apparently, the first one was the devil.

  He dropped his hand on the table, but his face was still flushed with laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. He cleared his throat. “I’ve never seen quite a display of . . . determination.”

  I scowled at him as I took a sip of my drink. “Well, you’re welcome to have it since I’ll apparently never get it open.” I tossed the first bottle to him.

  He caught it and twisted the cap off with embarrassing ease. His lips twitched as he tried not to laugh at my frustrated expression. “This is one of Sam’s favorites.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s a pretty private person. Not unlike yourself.”

  He took a swig of the red liquid and made such a face of disgust that I nearly choked on my own fruit punch. “That bad?”

  He forced himself to swallow and screwed the cap back on. “I think I’ll stick to coffee.” He slid the bottle back across the table.

  I grabbed a glass from the corner of the counter, checked it for cat food, and filled it with water before setting it on the table in front of him. “Thank you,” he mumbled before he took a gulp. He swished it around in his mouth to erase the flavor of the punch and then swallowed.

  “So what happens now?” I asked. There had to be somewhere we could go with the information we’d gathered. I couldn’t stand to just wait for the killer to make his next move.

  “I received a call from the crime lab while we were on our last break, but I wanted to wait until we got back to discuss it,” he said.

  If he’d wanted to wait, it probably wasn’t good news. I gripped my punch with both hands and leaned back against the counter for support. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  “There were no suspicious fingerprints on any of the items, not even the pictures. Probably because he wears gloves.”

  Matte black leather gloves that absorbed the light rather than reflected it, helping him to melt into the darkness.

  “The blood on the cat collar appears to be feline,” he continued. “The name on the collar says Buttercup, and there was a small fingerprint on the heart-shaped name tag—probably a child’s.”

  The photograph the killer had left for me the night Jacob died materialized in my mind: a younger version of myself cradling a kitten with a silver heart name tag dangling beneath its chin. “The fingerprint is probably mine.”

  “That was my thought as well.” He pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons, scrolling through something I couldn’t see. “The knife that killed Jimmy, Cambel, and Jacob . . .”—he hesitated for just an instant on the last name— “were the same knife. There were no stab wounds to get a good mold of the blade, just slices. Take a look at these and see if any of these knives look familiar.”

  I accepted his phone and scrolled through the pictures slowly. I shook my head and handed it back. “None of these are right.”

  “What do you mean they’re not right?”

  The knife I’d seen in the killer’s hand looked far more frightening than any of those, but it could’ve just been the fear that shaped my perception of it.

  I grabbed m
y notebook and pen from my bag and sketched a quick, rough image of the knife I remembered. The blade wasn’t that long, maybe three or four inches, and the top of it wasn’t perfectly straight; it curved upward to a frighteningly fine point.

  I stared at the completed image to make sure it was somewhat accurate—I wasn’t the best artist after all—and then handed it to Marx. The grimace on his face made me wonder if I’d done something wrong.

  “Holly, this is a skinnin’ knife.” At my blank expression, he clarified, “For flayin’ the skin off animals, usually fish. This is what he was carryin’ the night he came here?”

  I really didn’t like where this was headed. I rubbed my arms, trying to dispel the chill that came over me as I nodded. I liked my skin very much attached to my body.

  Marx’s expression darkened and he glanced back at the picture. I had no doubt his mind had just traveled to the same terrifying place mine had: did the killer intend to skin me like an animal?

  After a moment’s pause, he said, “This knife can also make very quick, shallow cuts.” As if that would somehow make either of us feel better. “If he was skinnin’ people, the press would know about it by now. That isn’t the kind of story that stays quiet.”

  That was true. Stabbings and shootings were too mundane to attract much attention in the media, but if a person had been skinned, it would be in every newspaper and on every news channel by the following morning. So at least I only had to worry about being stabbed to death. That was an improvement.

  “I’ll have Sully look into possibilities. Maybe he bought it from a special store or website and we can use it to help track him down,” Marx said. He tore the page out and handed the notebook back to me.

  “What about the rabbit?” I asked.

  “The blood on the rabbit is human. There was a DNA match in the system to an open homicide case in Stony Brooke, Kansas, from October 30, 1998.”

  I sank slowly into the chair across from him and stared numbly at the bottle gripped too tightly in my hands. I had appeared on the road the day before Halloween, Izzy had said, and I’d been fleeing from a man who had already murdered someone that night.