by Nora Roberts
“And you think it’s longer.”
“I’m going to find out.”
“He’s not following, he’s stalking.” When her shoulders only went stiffer under his hands, Xander turned her around on the stool. “You’ll handle it because you have to. She’ll handle it,” he said to Mason without taking his eyes off Naomi. “He’s been stalking you for at least two years. His preferred victim is blonde because you are. And they’re all you. That’s what your brother’s not saying.”
“It’s a theory, and I need more information.”
Xander flicked a glance at Mason, barely a heartbeat. “You’re trying to ease her into it because you’re worried she’ll break. But that’s not the way for you, is it, Naomi?” His gaze met hers, held her. “You’re not going to break.”
“I’m not going to break.” But a part of her was trying desperately to shore up the cracks. “He . . . He takes them, and he keeps them at least for a couple of days so he can rape them, torture them, gratify himself. After he’s beaten them and raped them, kept them in the dark, cut them, choked them, kept them bound and gagged, he strangles them.”
She drew a shaky breath, then another, steadier before she turned to Mason. “Like our father. Too much like our father now, too much like it to say there are other cruel, sick men who do this. He’s killing like Thomas Bowes, and following me, the way I followed our father that night.”
“I believe he’s studied Thomas Bowes—he may have written to him, visited him, and I’m pulling that line. I believe he’s studied you. He’s here, and for the first time that I can verify, he’s killed twice in the same place.”
“Because I’m in the same place.”
“Yes. From what I’m putting together, he’s evolved. His method, while not exactly the same as Bowes’s, has mimicked it.”
No coincidence, no excuses, she ordered herself. The facts stood clear and straight. She had to face them.
“Why hasn’t he come after me? The others are what you call surrogates; why hasn’t he come after me? There have to have been countless opportunities.”
“Because then it’s over,” Xander said, shrugged. “Sorry,” he said to Mason. “It’s what makes sense.”
“And I agree. I still have more to do, more to analyze, but I can tell you I’ve got enough to have convinced Chief Winston and the coordinator of the BAU to send a team here. This unsub is smart, organized, mission-oriented, and tenacious. But he’s also arrogant—and that arrogance, using those particular sites for his dump spots, is going to break this open. We’re going to stop him, Naomi. I need the data from you. It’s key.”
“I’ll go up, email you the files.” She slid off the stool, went up the back steps without another word.
“She’s telling herself she can’t have this.” Mason lifted his hands to encompass the house, the life. “Not now. What Bowes is, what she tried to leave behind, came here with her.”
“Yeah, she’s telling herself that. She’s wrong.”
With a nod, Mason started to get up, sat back again. “You go. The torch passed while I wasn’t around. And we both came from him. She needs somebody who doesn’t carry that.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
—
She sat at her desk, her beautifully restored desk in her beautifully designed studio. A space that, less than an hour before, had made her so happy, so hopeful.
Had she really told herself, really believed, the past was done? Never done, she thought now. Never over. The ghosts never exorcised.
And once again a killer’s life twined and twisted with hers.
When she heard footsteps, she opened her computer, began to bring up the files.
“It’s going to take me a few minutes,” she said, very, very calmly when Xander came in.
“I got that.” He wandered, measuring the space, the look and feel of it. “Swank, but not fancy. That’s a hard note to hit.”
“You should go down. You and Mason should get to that pizza before it gets any colder.”
“Nothing wrong with cold pizza.”
“There’s nothing for you to do here, Xander.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. You need another chair in here. How else is somebody going to hang out and bug you when you’re working? Why don’t you spit out what’s circling around in your gut. I can figure some of it anyway.”
“You want me to spit it out? Start with if I hadn’t gotten it into my head I could stay here, live here, Donna would still be alive.”
“So, straight to the cliché?” He shook his head. “I thought you’d do better. That’s not even a challenge. If you’d moved on, how many others before somebody like your brother finally clued in on the pattern? And what are the chances anybody but him would’ve seen the connection with your photos?”
“I don’t know the chances. But obviously the chances of me being connected to a serial killer for the second time are really good.”
“Sucks for you.”
Shock snagged her breath. “Sucks for me?”
“Yeah, it does. It sucks for you that some lunatic’s out there obsessed with you and emulating your fuck of a father. But you’re not the reason, you’re the excuse. The reason’s inside this sick bastard’s mind, just like your father’s reasons were in his.”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter: excuse, reason. It doesn’t matter what’s in their minds, what drives them to kill. It matters that for the first twelve years of my life I grew up in a house with a monster, and I loved him. It matters that where I spent those years is now best known as Thomas David Bowes’s killing field. It matters that what I grew up with followed us to New York until my mother killed herself rather than live with it. It matters that it’s followed me, leaving death behind, ever since.”
She wouldn’t weep. Tears were useless. But fury, full-blown fury, felt righteous. “It matters that I tried to convince myself I could have what the majority of the human race has. A home, friends, people I care about. A damn idiot dog. All of it.”
“You have that, all of it.”
“It was—is—a fantasy. I got caught up in it, let myself believe it was real, but—”
“So what, you’ll pack up, take off, sell this place, dump the dog?”
The fact stood clear, she thought again. “Sometimes people have roots so corrupted, they shouldn’t try to plant them.”
“That’s bullshit, and it’s weak. If you want to feel sorry for yourself, I’ll give you a pass, but that’s weak. You’ve got better than that, baby.”
“You don’t know what I’ve got, baby.”
“Hell I don’t, and because I do, I know you’re not going to let some son of a bitch send you running.”
He put the palms of his hands on her desk and leaned toward her. “I know what I’ve got, and I’m damned if I’ll let you run. You’ve got what you need right here, and you’re going to stick.”
She surged to her feet. “Don’t tell me what I’m going to do.”
“I’m telling you. You’re going to stick because what you want, what you need is right here. What makes you happy is right here. You need me, and I make you happy. And I fucking well need you, so you’ll stick.”
“It’s my life, my choice.”
“Screw that. You want to try to run, I’ll just bring you back.”
“Stop telling me what to do. Stop yelling at me.”
“You started it. Maybe you haven’t worked it through your system, pulled it free from the I’ve-got-bad-blood excuses you fall back on, but you’ve got feelings for me.”
“How can you say things like that? How can you minimize this?”
“Because you overinflate it, so it’s easy to stick a damn pin in it. Because I’ve got feelings for you. I’m in fucking love with you, so you’re going to stick. And that’s it.”
She took one stumbling step back, went pale.
Xander rolled his eyes. “Cut that out and breathe. Yell back. You don’t panic when you’re pissed. A
nd maybe I’d have done that with more class if I weren’t pissed right back at you.”
Or maybe not, he thought, but either way.
“Sunlight in your hair. Morning light. You’re standing there, working on a piece of plywood, sunlight all over you, and I feel like someone kicked me off a damn cliff. So you’re not going anywhere, just check that off the list.”
“It can’t work.”
“You should try to balance out that Pollyanna attitude of yours, season it with some cynicism. It has been working,” he added. “For both of us. I know what the hell works and what doesn’t. We work, Naomi.”
“That was before . . .” When his eyebrows lifted, she dragged a hand through her hair, tried to find level ground again. “Can’t you see what’s going to happen? I pray, and I’ll keep praying Mason’s right. They’ll find him, they’ll stop him. And I’ll hope with all I have they do that before he kills again. But when they do find him, it’ll all fall apart again. Me, my father, whoever this maniac is, all tied together. And the press—”
“Oh, fuck the press. You’ll stand up to it.”
“You have no idea what it’s like.”
“You’ll stand up to it,” he repeated, without a hint of doubt. “And you won’t be alone. You’ll never have to be alone again. You can count on me.”
“Oh God, Xander.”
When he crossed to her, she tried to back away, shook her head, but he simply grabbed her, pulled her in. “You can count on me. And you’re damn well going to.”
He tipped her head back, kissed her more gently than he ever had. “I love you.” Kissed her again, drew her in, just held. “Get used to it.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“You don’t know until you try. We’re not going anywhere, Naomi.”
She felt herself breathe in, breathe out. “I’ll try.”
“That’ll do.”
BALANCE
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Twenty-six
It felt like an interrogation. She knew better—she knew—but when Mason came into her studio in the morning, set up a folding chair, and sat, he turned the sanctuary into an interrogation room.
“You didn’t sleep well,” he said.
“No, not very well. Neither did you.”
“Well enough, just not very long. I worked late.”
“You didn’t come down for breakfast.”
“Because it’s at dawn.” He smiled a little. “I grabbed a bagel, had coffee, talked to the tile guys. The room you’ve earmarked for the uncles is really coming along. They’re going to love it.”
“I’m not sure they should come.”
“Naomi, I know it has to feel like your life tipped sideways, but you have to keep living it.”
“If something happened to them—”
He cut her off. “The unsub’s not interested in men.”
“He’s interested in me, and they’re mine. So.”
“They’ll come anyway. Put that away for a while. I’m heading into town shortly, meeting the team. We’ll work out of the police station. He’s never had an investigation focused on him like this, Naomi. It changes things.”
“Whatever we do, it doesn’t change what’s already happened.”
“No.”
“And I know, Dr. Carson, dwelling on that, brooding on my part of it, however involuntary, isn’t healthy or productive.”
Knowing that, knowing he thought it, irritated the crap out of her.
“But I might need a couple days to dwell and brood.”
All understanding, he simply nodded. “You should play to your strengths, and you’ve always been a champion brooder.”
“Up yours, Mason Jar.”
“Another strength,” he went on, “is your power of observation. You see the big picture and the small details. It’s going to be an advantage. It’s going to help.”
“My keen powers of observation didn’t clue me in that I’ve been followed by a serial killer for a couple years.”
“Longer, I think—and being clued in now, you can go back, remember things and people you noticed. You can go back, refresh those memories by going through pictures you took—the where, when, what was going on around you.”
Longer, she wanted to dwell on longer, but pressed her fingers to her eyes, ordered herself to deal with it. “I don’t pay attention to people when I’m working. I block them out.”
“You have to pay attention to block them out. You know more than you think, and I can help you bring it to the surface.”
Though she had to stifle a sigh, she decided if she had to take another trip into a therapy session, it might as well be with her brother in the chair.
“Let’s go back first, and tell me how much longer you think this has been happening.”
“Did you know Eliza Anderson?”
“I don’t know.” Already battling a vague headache, Naomi rubbed at her temple. “I don’t think so. Mason, I’ve brushed up against dozens and dozens of people. On shoots, at the gallery on trips to New York. There are motel clerks and waitresses and gas station attendants, shopkeepers, hikers. Countless. The odds of remembering . . .”
But suddenly she did. “Wait. Liza—I think they called her Liza. I remember hearing about her at college, my sophomore year, after she was killed. But, Mason, it wasn’t like this. And everyone said it was her ex-boyfriend. He’d been violent with her before, which is why he was an ex. She was beaten and raped, but she was stabbed to death, wasn’t she? And—God—they found her in the trunk of her own car.”
“What do you remember about her?”
“I didn’t know her. She was a year ahead of me. But I recognized her when I saw her picture on the news, on the Net, after it happened. We didn’t have any classes together, didn’t socialize, but she came into the restaurant where I worked the first two years of college before I could intern with a photographer. I waited on her enough times to remember her face.”
Now, she brought that face back into her mind. “Blonde, short, swingy blonde hair,” she said, waving her hands just under her own ears. “Very pretty. Polite enough to actually speak to her waitress, say thanks. I understand she was blonde, killed where I went to school, but she wasn’t held for any length of time, wasn’t strangled.”
“I think she was his first. I think he panicked before he could attempt strangulation. It was messy and quick, even sloppy—and he was lucky. If the investigation hadn’t zeroed in so completely on the ex, he might not have gotten away with it. She’d had a fight with the ex that night.”
“I remember reading that, hearing it around campus.” She found her calm, pushed back for memories. “He—the boyfriend—tried to get her to come back, and they fought, he threatened her. People heard him tell her he’d make her sorry, make her pay. He didn’t have an alibi.”
“And they had no physical evidence, and no matter how hard and long they worked him, he never came off his story of being alone in his room, asleep—when she was grabbed and killed and put in the trunk of her car.
“She looked a little like you.”
“No. No, she didn’t.”
“You wore your hair longer then, not dissimilar from hers. She wasn’t as tall as you, but she was tall, slim.”
And the way he paused, the way those warm brown eyes fixed on hers, Naomi knew worse was coming.
“Say it.”
“I think he used her as a surrogate, his first, because of those similarities. It may be he couldn’t get to you, so he
