by Mary Stone
He was just the first FBI agent she had ever known. His was the first face she’d seen when she’d come out of her coma. He’d been in her room. Watching over her.
She wasn’t afraid of Aiden. Aiden had been trying to show her from the beginning that he was just a man. A broken, manipulative, scared, controlling man who had no power to stop her. She could handle him.
Winter hit the elevator button for the main floor.
It was time that she worried about most. Every second ticked closer to the end of an innocent, faceless woman’s life. The Preacher would steal her from her family. From her friends. From her destiny. Possibly from her children or husband.
Would the next victim have a child? A thirteen-year-old girl? A six-year-old boy?
It wouldn’t matter, she promised herself. Because there wouldn’t be a next victim.
Winter crossed the lobby, digging in her purse for her keys. It wasn’t until she saw her bike that she remembered.
Shit. She wasn’t driving anymore.
Energy hummed through her body. Urgency, pushing and clawing at her to act. She had to get home. Her bike would take too long. So would a taxi. She pulled out her phone and tapped the screen feverishly. Bus schedules. Private plane.
The quickest possible option would be to drive the Civic to Harrisonburg. She just had to hope she didn’t go into a seizure on the way, crashing her car and killing herself and anyone too close.
What the hell. She’d just aim for the closest tree if she felt one coming on.
Decision made, she just had to get to her car.
When the door opened behind her and Noah stepped out, she didn’t hesitate. “I need a ride.”
Noah blinked twice, his moss-green eyes widening when he saw her. She realized it was the first time they’d been face-to-face in over a month, and they’d both changed dramatically.
Noah’s dark brown hair had been clipped short, almost military style, sometime recently. When they’d worked together last, he’d let it grow out long enough to curl around his collar a little. Like Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies, even though he had more of a Danny Glover personality.
Instead, she was reminded that her kind, funny, easygoing friend and sometimes-partner was a former Marine. He wasn’t a cuddly teddy bear before he met her. He was a trained soldier, an MP, and then a cop. His familiar face, rough with a day’s worth of stubble, looked hard. One side of his mouth was creased with tension. Normally, there was a dimple there instead.
“Where to? What’s wrong?”
Of course, Noah would pick up on her tension. He was practically an empath when it came to guessing how other people were feeling. Especially her.
She let her face relax into an embarrassed smile.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bark at you. I was just stressing about a doctor’s appointment later. I have to stop at home first and forgot I rode my bike. How are you doing?”
His guarded expression softened a little but didn’t disappear.
“Fine. I was in a hurry myself. I have a p…a thing.”
Liar. He was going to Ocean View, New Jersey.
Bree had sent her a text this morning.
Leaving town for a few days.
The one simple line had cued Winter in that something was up…and allowed Winter to find out about The Preacher’s most recent murder before Aiden ever called her in to tell her about it.
Winter had gotten a few random texts like that in the last few weeks. And she’d sent a couple of her own, too, just to keep the collegial quid pro quo going. But she was steps ahead of everyone, and she had to keep it that way.
“You’re not stopping home first, are you?”
“Yeah, I can drop you there. Sorry I can’t take you to your appointment.” He was already thinking about something else, his voice distant. He hit the button to Beulah, his giant Ford.
Then, he caught himself and shot a quick glance at Winter, adding, “You know, because I have one too. An appointment.”
She almost rolled her eyes and asked him why he had to grab a go-bag for a supposed doctor’s appointment, but she held her tongue. The old Noah wouldn’t have lied to her. Probably because he sucked at it. But the new Winter had no problem lying to him, so she guessed it evened out.
“No worries,” she said instead. “I’ll set up a Lyft pickup while you drive me home.”
She matched his fast steps as he closed the distance to his truck. He moved in a hurry, like he was late, and she didn’t want him to miss his flight. He and Bree could go to Ocean View, with her blessing.
The farther from Harrisonburg they were, the better.
There was no automatic feeling of nostalgia for Winter, passing by the city limits signs to head into the town she’d grown up in. Hell, it hadn’t been that long since Winter had been to Harrisonburg. Less than a year. She and Noah had worked their first solo FBI case there.
No nostalgia, or warm and fuzzy feelings, even as she passed the elementary school she’d gone to as a kid. Tension had been knotting her neck muscles for the second half of the two-hour trip. In the last ten minutes, that tension had escalated into solid apprehension.
Winter drove past the hotel where she and Noah had stayed the previous fall. You weren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but the peeling avocado-green paint on the outside of the squat, cinderblock walls was pretty indicative of what the inside looked like.
It was in one of those second-floor hotel rooms that she’d discovered a hidden camera, mounted behind an ugly 1980s-era painting over the TV. She’d also had a picture slipped under the door. It had been the first one she’d received from The Preacher, taken of her brother, Justin. He’d worn the SpongeBob PJs she’d last seen him in.
She’d always assumed that it was by chance that The Preacher had found her in Harrisonburg. She’d imagined that he’d occasionally take trips down memory lane and stumbled across her by accident. It hadn’t made any sense then, and it didn’t make any sense now. Especially since everything in his profile leaned away from him being the type of guy who needed to revisit his crime scenes. Aiden believed the opposite: that he had an out of sight/out of mind mentality. When his victim was dead, mission accomplished. He had no further need for contact.
She passed the houses of childhood friends, grade school teachers…did The Preacher live next door to one of them? Participate in neighborhood potlucks? Did he pass for normal in the real world?
Monsters too often were able to blend in.
Winter slowed the Civic as she approached her old street. The streetlights were just coming on as she turned right. She should have been somewhere else. Getting a hotel room for the foreseeable. Maybe a room at the original place she’d stayed last fall. The desk clerk would remember her, though, and she was a gossip.
Her presence wouldn’t stay secret for long, especially with how high-profile they’d become in town, working their last case. But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. She could draw him out.
The houses on her childhood street were older, two-story, single-family homes. There were bikes in driveways and treehouses in backyards. It had been a good place to grow up, and she’d forgotten that.
She slowed the car to a crawl as she reached the circular turnaround at the end of the street. The last streetlight was out at the end, leaving the curve of the sidewalk in unrelieved shadow. The loop she made with her car now had been one she’d made thousands of times as a kid on a ten-speed. A purple, hand-me-down Huffy with pink tires. She’d gotten it from a cousin, and when she’d been eleven years old, she’d painted it silver with a can of spray paint she’d bought with babysitting money.
She stopped in front of her old house. Peeling paint. Boarded windows. The same For Sale sign in the yard that she’d seen last time she was in town.
Winter knew it wouldn’t sell. No one in their right mind would want to live there, unless they had a fascination with serial killers. It had been the scene of a double homicide, attempted murder, and kidnapp
ing.
The Preacher had been back to this house. In the second-floor master bedroom, where her parents had been murdered, he’d left her another picture of Justin in the long burned out ashes of the fireplace.
Winter didn’t shift the car into park. She needed to go through the house again, but not now. Down the street, kids played basketball in the gathering twilight. The yells and trash talk sounded blessedly normal and chipped away a little at the icy feeling that had come over her.
Did those kids dare each other to walk up to the porch on Halloween? Touch the front door? Hold their breath and pedal faster when they passed it? Did some of the older kids in the area use it as a make-out spot? Scaring their dates into cuddling up next to them, with gory stories about the family that had been killed there?
She couldn’t blame kids. They were still young enough to have an immortality complex that extended to their families and friends, keeping them cozy in their illusion of safety. They had no idea of the evil that existed in the world, rubbed elbows with them every day.
A movement on the shadowy sidewalk had her grabbing reflexively for her gun.
A young mother pushed a toddler in a stroller through the cool evening air. She stared Winter down suspiciously as she passed. She held her phone conspicuously in one hand, implying she’d call the police, given the smallest provocation. Winter smiled and gave the woman a little nonthreatening wave as she pulled away from the curb.
Maybe teenagers didn’t break into her old house to neck. Not under that neighbor’s watch, anyway.
Even putting distance between herself and the house didn’t do anything to set Winter’s mind at ease. She had to go through it again. Open herself up to anything that she might experience, painful or not.
The Preacher was in town, and he was going to kill again if she didn’t catch him first.
Still, goose bumps rippled over her skin, and her stomach felt faintly queasy.
Walking through the house wasn’t going to be any easier the second time than it had been the first.
18
Gabby Dean. She’d been pretty before The Preacher had chosen her.
Noah’s stomach turned, even though the picture was the smiling, happy girl that Gabby had once been. Not the lifeless pile of flesh The Preacher had left behind. His stomach turned because the waste was sickening. Who knew what the girl could have done with her life? From all indications, she was a good girl. She was working on her master’s degree in nursing, for shit’s sake.
Fury. Regret. Guilt.
It all twisted up inside Noah as he studied the heart-shaped face framed by auburn hair that waved smoothly to her shoulders. Gabby grinned sweetly out at him from a glossy color photo provided by one of her friends.
“You doing okay over there?” Bree’s voice cut through his reverie, sounding loud in the close confines.
They’d been given a breakout room to themselves, courtesy of the local LEOs. Their reception hadn’t been warm, but at least it had been professional and cordial. Judging by the windowless room they’d been given at the back of the building, Ocean View preferred to pretend that the agents weren’t there, rather than engage in open hostility.
“I’m fine. How about you?”
“I could do without seeing any more crime scene photos for a while. You want to take a break? Put this on hold for a half hour and grab some dinner?”
“Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t think I could eat.”
“That’s not the Noah I’ve come to know. You’re a freaking bottomless pit.”
Noah made the effort to disengage from his funk and grinned at Bree.
“Aw, you noticed.”
She snorted and gathered up the files that the detective had given them, tapping the edges against the table until they made a small, neat pile.
“I might be a bottomless pit, but at least I’m not OCD.”
Bree shrugged good-naturedly. “It’s my cross to bear. True genius comes with side-effects.”
Wasn’t that the case? He pictured Winter’s face. More gaunt than thin these days…there were demons that drove her, that was for sure.
It was Noah’s turn to choose the restaurant, so they went for New Jersey Italian at a little bistro near the station.
“I still say you’re too damned quiet tonight.” Bree glanced over the top of the reading glasses she’d pulled out to look at the menu. “Spill it, and I’ll let you get the veal parmigiana and half of my spaghetti marinara.”
He didn’t hesitate. “I gave Winter a ride to her apartment before I left Richmond today.”
The smile melted into concern. “Did you guys get a chance to talk on the way? Patch things up at all?”
Noah narrowed his eyes at Bree. He’d done his best to make his concern for Winter sound completely platonic. Either his best hadn’t been good enough, or Bree was the genius she claimed to be. She was good at reading between the lines.
“We kind of talked. Well, not really. I lied to her.” He winced and shoved a hand through his hair. “Told her I had a doctor’s appointment.”
Bree stilled, the wine menu suspended in her hand. “You didn’t tell her about the most recent murder?”
“No. She needs to stay out of it. It’s not her case.”
A waiter appeared at the side of their table, pen and paper in hand.
“Give us a minute, could you?” Bree asked, setting the laminated wine list down on the table in front of her. When he’d gone, she pinned Noah with a look again. “Tell me honestly,” she demanded. “Why don’t you want Winter involved in this? Is it because you’re afraid she’ll get hurt? Afraid that she’ll put herself in a dangerous position? Or are you on the side of the higher-ups, and believe she’s a liability?”
He flushed a little. “I like you, Agent Stafford. But that doesn’t mean I have to answer every personal question you get it in your head to ask.”
“You’re going to want to answer these ones, Noah. Trust me.”
Blowing out a long breath, he leaned back in the chair, considering his options. The hell with it. “I told her I’d do this for her,” he blurted. “It should be enough. She should trust me.”
Bree’s face softened for a second, and he relaxed a little. She was a romantic. She was on his side.
But just as quickly, her expression shifted to exasperation.
“Does Agent Black strike you as the type who needs a white knight? Or wants one, for that matter?”
Winter had told him roughly the same thing when he’d tried to explain his reasoning at the outset. He wasn’t any happier to hear it now. “See? You don’t get it either. It must be a female thing.” When Bree just stared at him, he tried again. “She’s obsessed. She’s not going to be thinking objectively. She—”
Bree held up a hand. “Maybe.” She sighed and gripped her glass with both hands. “But she’s a big girl. She got hired on for her merits, not her traumatic history. She’s FBI now and deserves her chance to be in on this takedown, as equally as anyone else.”
“Hold on.” Noah stilled, crossing his arms. “I didn’t realize you were so firmly in Winter’s camp. You guys hardly know each other.”
It was Bree’s turn to squirm. “We’ve hung out a little.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You never mentioned it.”
Bree heaved a breath. “Fine. I met with her a few weeks ago. We agreed to keep each other updated on any details that might slip out of the official reports in this case. Parrish has given her rein to work on The Preacher case from the BAU.”
His arms dropped to his sides. “Wait, you’ve been feeding Winter information? Does Parrish know?”
“I assumed that she would have gone to you if you two hadn’t been on the outs,” Bree prevaricated, looking uncomfortable as she twisted in her seat. “Parrish doesn’t know. She’s protecting him from getting in trouble with Ramirez. Winter had a solid argument. We should all be working together on this. I don’t know that she and I have provided each other with
anything really useful, but we’re keeping the lines of communication open.”
Noah felt a pulse of anger but squashed it. Winter was not only working around the edict, manipulating Bree, she was protecting that cold bastard, Parrish. Parrish didn’t need any protection. Winter needing to take care of the asshole was as ludicrous as a gazelle needing to take care of a cheetah.
He and Bree didn’t know each other well. They liked working together so far and complimented each other’s styles in a lot of ways, but the co-worker relationship hadn’t really gotten any deeper than that. The case took up too much of their attention to leave any time for work-related bonding.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t furious with Parrish. The asshole had been working angles since the beginning, and he’d probably seen the situation as a perfect carrot to use to get Winter under his thumb. The guy was a self-centered dick.
“Why’s Parrish letting her work on this?” Bree asked thoughtfully. It looked like she, too, was questioning the logistics of that. “Does he have some kind of personal stake in this?”
“Knowing Parrish like I do, he wouldn’t make a move if he didn’t have a personal stake in something.”
“Could he have thought the VC would use Winter as bait?”
It was a good question. “I don’t see him as being that selfless.”
Bree shrugged. “I don’t know the guy as well as you all do. I mean, we worked together for a couple years in VC but never on the same thing.”
She went on, but Noah stopped hearing her as a thought occurred to him.
“Do you have the file with the pictures of the victim?” he interrupted.
She raised her eyebrows at the abrupt question. The waiter came around again to try for their order, but Noah gave him an apologetic look as Bree dug into her bag for the right folder. “Five minutes,” he promised the kid.
