6
Lebanon, Kansas
“What do we think he’s waiting for?” Luke Prescott asks in Cole’s ear.
“Not sure,” Cole answers.
It’s been an hour and thirty since Charlotte stepped from the shower.
Mattingly’s Econoline is still parked in the nearest bed of shadow to the little one-story rental house. The cameras planted inside reveal an almost motionless figure, watching Charlotte’s rental house like a faceless hawk in a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. Any cop on a stakeout would aspire to this man’s level of meditative calm, Cole thinks.
Off to Cole’s left, the digital map of Dallas still shows Charley’s, Mattingly’s, and Luke’s locations in gently pulsing red dots. Just above the map’s top border is the local time, same as theirs in Kansas: 11:45 p.m.
The rest of the surveillance screens offer various views inside Charley’s—Hailey Brinkmann’s, he corrects himself—rental house, along with repeatedly alternating exterior views of the backyard, side alley, and surrounding streets. It’s a flat, tree-filled suburban neighborhood, but Julia Crispin’s upgraded their camera technology to night vision without any of the customary flare. He can see insects flittering around the streetlamps. Over the past hour, he’s been able to track the lights winking out in the front rooms of the neighboring houses.
It’s a nice setup, but Cole still misses his microdrones, tiny little eyes in the skies he could sweep almost silently over any area. They weren’t much good after dark if you weren’t chasing a specific light source, but still—they gave him a sense of almost godlike power. Despite their individual resolution, the angles on the surveillance screens feel fragmented, too interior. His brain’s already tired from constantly assembling them into a complete picture of the scene in his head—another consequence of Charley’s new rule that they fall back.
“Seriously, what’s he waiting for?” Tim Zadan asks. Cole realizes another twenty minutes have gone by since Luke asked the same question through his earpiece.
Zadan is baby-faced, blond, and blue-eyed; not Cole’s type, but cute enough that Cole has to constantly catch himself to make sure he doesn’t treat him with unearned deference. The camera tech is seated at one of the monitoring stations in front of where Cole’s been slowly pacing since Charley walked inside the house. Zadan’s usually tight-lipped, but without flocks of microdrone camera feeds to monitor, he, like Shannon, has a lot less to do.
The only one who seems as intent as always is Paul Hynman, the med tech in charge of monitoring Charley’s vitals. Her blood tracker stats are displayed on a constantly refreshing screen to the extreme right of the monitor bank above their heads. The neuro panel is brand new. After some work, they’ve made it so it can detect the actual presence of paradrenaline in her brain. In the past, Charley’s blood trackers identified trigger events solely on the basis of the impossible blood pressure and blood oxygen levels they produced. No more.
All told, Paul is the only tech who now has more responsibility, not less. Right now, it shows. Bald and wiry, with a constantly skeptical expression, he’s relying on the computer monitor in front of him instead of the display screen filled with the same information overhead. It looks like he expects Charlotte’s heart to stop at any second.
“I don’t know,” Cole answers. Then he touches his earpiece and asks Luke, “How you holding up out there?”
“What can I say,” Luke answers, “the Caddy’s comfy.”
On one of the displays overhead, Luke looks right into the camera implanted in the Escalade’s dashboard and gives them a broad smile and a thumbs-up.
It’s also damn near invisible, Cole thinks, and thank God, because Mattingly’s sure had a lot of time to study the street from behind the wheel of his van.
“She’s still got a light on, right?” Luke asks. “I think I can see a light.”
“He can’t see her feed?” Noah asks from behind Cole.
Cole spins in place. When Noah sees his expression, he bows his head and mutters a soft apology. It’s doubtful Luke heard him through Cole’s earpiece, but still, orders are orders. Maybe he should give Noah a little credit, though. For the past hour he’s been sitting in a chair against the back wall, quiet and erect as a statue, studying the uneventful progression of events on the monitors with the fierce intensity of a student trying to impress the teacher.
Making sure the connection to Luke isn’t open, Cole says, “We don’t think it would be possible for Luke to maintain an effective tail while also being treated to the sight of some sicko trying to dismember his girlfriend.”
“We?” Shannon Tran says. “Nobody asked my opinion.”
“Did you have one?” Cole asks.
“No.”
“But you wanted me to ask you anyway?”
“No, you just said we so I thought I should point out . . . Look, it’s been slow, OK. I’m just bored. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Over the internal channel, Bailey Prescott says, “Ask her about my Nutella.”
“Shut up, Bailey,” Cole and Shannon say at the same time.
Then, to Shannon, Cole says, “See. We’re more of a we than you thought.”
For some reason, the longer they all sit down here together in tense silence, the sillier Cole’s gag order on Noah seems. Cole moves to him, then takes out his earpiece and clamps it in one hand.
“I don’t think he’s up to it yet,” Cole says quietly.
“Who?” Noah asks.
“Luke.”
“What’s he doing out there, then?”
“He’s not up to watching her feed during an op. That’s what I meant. He’s got a history of emotionality, and it’ll be a while before I’m comfortable.”
“Makes sense,” Noah says in almost a whisper. “Have the control room act as a filter, telling him only what he needs to know. It’s how I would have done it.”
It’s chilly down here under the ground, but Cole feels suddenly warm. He’s worried it’s pure attraction, triggered by Noah’s nearness. But it’s not. He feels less alone. For the first time in years, it actually feels like he and Noah are working toward the same objective and not just on the same secret project.
Or Bailey’s intrusive advice got into his head.
Cole moves back to the monitoring stations, wondering if he’s made a mistake.
A little while later, Noah breaks the silence. “Two a.m.,” he says.
“Excuse me?” Cole asks.
“If he’s done his homework, he’s going to wait until two a.m.”
“Why?” Shannon asks.
“The Night Stalker was about home invasions, and that’s how he did it. He figured out the majority of people obeying a normal sleep schedule entered REM sleep by two in the morning, so it was easier to break into their house without waking them up first. That way he could surprise them in bed.”
The room takes in this information like a family trying to process a relative’s explicit account of surgery during Thanksgiving dinner.
“He also stopped smoking crack so he could be a better serial killer,” Shannon says. “That’s one fact I wish I could get out of my head.”
Tim says, “I think he’s going to try to lure her outside. Maybe take her in the yard. Who wants to bet?”
“We are not betting on the actions of a serial killer,” Cole says. “You want to play games, go back to Trivial Pursuit, Night Stalker Edition.”
“Sorry,” Tim mumbles.
“Which one was the Night Stalker?” Shannon asks.
“Richard Ramirez,” Paul Hynman says without looking up from his computer. Everyone’s startled by his sudden contribution.
“Was that the Golden State guy?” Tim asks.
“No,” Noah answers. “The Golden State Killer was the original Night Stalker. But he went so long without being caught they gave the title to somebody else who also liked breaking into people’s houses in the middle of the night and raping and sometimes killing them.”
“California’s a competitive place,” Shannon says. “He started out as the East Area Rapist.”
“Who’s the East Area Rapist now?” Paul asks.
“That’s enough. I understand the need to let off a little steam while we kill time,” Cole says, “but I don’t want us to get tunnel vision here. We can’t be one hundred percent sure he’s going to go for a break-in, so let’s keep our eyes open so we can advise Luke accordingly.”
They answer with silence, which he figures is about as much obedience as he’s going to get. And he understands. The worst part is the waiting, and Mattingly is making them wait a long time. But is it really Mattingly making them wait?
He looks to the monitor showing Charley’s TruGlass feed. The pages of a novel are gently drifting past the frame. She’s actually reading the damn thing, as she might do on any normal night before bed.
“What is she doing?” Shannon asks.
“Getting in character, trying to forget we’re there,” Noah says.
Cole doesn’t disagree, so he doesn’t say a word.
“Maybe we could tell her it’s time to turn out the light,” Paul mumbles.
“That would be about our comfort,” Cole answers, “not hers. We only speak to her if it’s critical. That’s the deal.”
“That’s not why,” Noah says.
“Not why what?” Cole asks him.
Noah’s next to him so abruptly, Cole actually jumps. Then Noah points to one of the views of the neighborhood on-screen overhead. The light in one of the back rooms of the house next door to Charley’s is still on, just a few yards away from where her bedroom drapes haven’t been drawn all the way closed.
“She’s waiting for them to go to bed,” Noah says. “She doesn’t want the neighbors to scare him off.”
Nobody says anything for a while. Then the neighbor’s back room light clicks off.
A few minutes go by, then a few more, and then, as if sleep has overtaken her, Charley closes the book she’s been reading, reaches over, and turns off the lamp next to her bed.
7
Dallas, Texas
Charlotte pretends to sleep.
First on her back, then on one side, facing the bedroom window so she can see any shadows that might dart past the crack in the curtains. At what feels like regular intervals, she opens her eyes slightly to check the time on the nightstand’s digital clock. After a short while, she’s able to predict the passage of fifteen minutes with a fairly impressive success rate.
Then, sometime around 1:00 a.m., she hears a sound that probably wouldn’t have awakened her if she’d actually been asleep—the sound of the lock on the back door being picked. It helps that she’d left all the doors between her and the kitchen partly open. But still, if it’s really Mattingly and he’s doing what she thinks he’s doing, he’s incredibly skilled.
Then silence returns.
A cool breath of air moves across her throat, then her face. She knows it has to be coming from outside because it smells faintly of the confederate jasmine growing on a trellis in the neighbor’s yard. Mattingly opened the door so quietly she didn’t hear the lock click.
She can hear her pulse in her ears.
Not good. It’s too much, too soon. She doesn’t want to trigger yet, so she tries to imagine the room her earpiece connects her to, even though the connection’s been silent for hours. She’s never seen a command center, but no doubt the space is dominated by Cole Graydon in his usual dark slacks and one of his perfectly pressed dress shirts pacing in front of a bank of computer monitors that reveal multiple views inside the house she’s in now. Visualizing this remote space is helpful, but the surrounding shadows and her pose, prone in bed in pajamas, are triggering fear receptors no sense of connection to something larger and more powerful can keep dormant.
And Luke is outside, ready to kiss your neck in all the right places when all of this is done.
“Thread the needle” is a mantra she typically uses once she’s triggered, a way of focusing her actions and reducing her strength so that she can do everyday movements without pulling off doorknobs or breaking keys in half. Right now, it applies to the delicate dance she’s doing between fear and confidence, isolation and connection. She can’t let go of her fear entirely. She needs it close, but still coiled.
Cobra in a jar, she thinks. That one’ll work because I’m not all that afraid of snakes.
Her breaths are short and shallow, nothing like sleep. She forces herself to breathe deeply. Loudly, creating something close to a snore. It helps. Slowing her heartbeat, dropping the temperature of her body some. She’s so focused on her breaths she misses the first few footsteps he’s taken into her bedroom. He’s not a spry or slender man, but he’s moving like someone at home in shadows. How many bedrooms, how many women? If I’m bound for the truck on his property, who knows how many unexplained missing persons cases he’s behind? If it’s as many as it is purchases that landed him on the Hunt List, there’s no way she’s letting this go wrong.
Her eyes slits, she continues breathing deeply even as he stands over her nightstand.
There’s a soft squirt. She groans slightly, turns onto her side, facing the nightstand, figuring it would be more suspicious not to react to the sound at all, given how close it is. She feels movement in the air above her, but she’s more taken by the sight on the nightstand, which she sees while trying not to visibly squint. A tiny tendril of pale, viscous fluid is drifting through the water in the glass she brought to bed with her. The squirt must have come from the syringe he loaded onto his tool belt earlier that night. Instead of piercing her flesh with it, he’s used it to spike her water glass.
The tendril falls, dances slightly, like a tiny spirit trying to gain corporeal form. Then it’s gone.
Poison? she wonders. All this trouble just to poison a woman in bed?
She doubts it, but maybe she’s being too optimistic. A rash of poisonings throughout the Dallas area would have come up during Cole’s investigation into Mattingly. The bastard’s been Dallas-based for twenty years. No, that can’t be it.
When she’s dosed with Zypraxon, a potentially fatal injury can trigger the drug, releasing the paradrenaline needed to heal the injury. But there’s always the possibility that some instantly fatal injury might be able to sneak through the tiny gap between injury and release—severing a nerve related to heartbeat or respiration so quickly the trigger event will come too late to heal. The chances of this aren’t substantial, but they exist, and it’s been a constant source of anxiety during their lab tests this past year. Cole calls it the trigger gap. Poison raises a host of other issues, ones they haven’t tested. Not all poisons are sudden, jarring injuries that immediately traumatize the body and the brain; some of them are creeping monsters in the blood, damaging the inside with slow, silent persistence. How much cumulative damage could a poison do before she feels the kind of sharp pain or traumatic injury that triggers Zypraxon? The drug doesn’t respond to actual physical damage; it responds to the conscious awareness of it and the terror that results.
Once triggered, sedatives of any kind, ranging from alcohol to medical-grade anesthesia, don’t work on her. But they’ve got no research to prove that Zypraxon can stave off a deadly poison prior to a trigger event.
Triggering now could blow half the game. If Mattingly plans to carry her out of here—which she’s ninety percent sure he will—he might figure out that her limbs aren’t bending quite the way they should, that she’s not really out cold. She hasn’t verbalized this to anyone, but throughout the run-up to this operation, she’s harbored hope that a man who goes to this much trouble to whisk victims off in his truck might be keeping some of them alive somewhere, and then she’d have the chance to set them free. According to Cole, they’ve intercepted no communications at all about Mattingly’s destination, not even a map search. That means he knows exactly where he’s going. And since he’s made no recent visits to his destination, there could be an accomplice there, possibly an u
nsuspecting one, holding down the fort while Mattingly arranges deliveries.
Any attempt to overpower Mattingly before they reach the evidence of his crimes throws off Cole’s endgame. In a perfect scenario, tonight will end with Cole’s ground team drugging Mattingly and leaving him surrounded by the evidence of his killings. They don’t just want Mattingly to go down for his awful crimes; they want him to be a babbling lunatic by the time the authorities arrive, raving about the woman who overpowered him in the language of drug-induced madness.
Mattingly’s no longer standing over her, she realizes.
The next sound she hears is so strange she can’t place it at first, a light spray accompanied by a tiny metallic rattle. A breath of cool air fires across her nose and lips. The coughs are instantaneous. Violent enough that they would have awakened her from a dead sleep had she been in one. At first, she thinks he might have gassed her, but the coughs are dry and irritating, and she smells a strange combination of noxious scents—a hint of bleach and pepper and other smells that don’t belong together and that make the back of her throat burn. When she starts sneezing, she sits up. Against her will, her eyes open. Mattingly has dropped down out of sight, probably pressed to the floor on the other side of her bed.
Oh, I get it, she thinks, amazed to have such neutral thoughts about the workings of a serial killer.
Charlotte does what any person in her situation would do. She reaches for the glass of water on her nightstand, the same one Mattingly just spiked.
One swallow, two swallows, then three.
Only once she’s nestled back into the covers does she realize the implications of surrendering to his little trick. She’s allowed him to drug her before she’s triggered. And that means darkness will be on her soon. A part of her resists this, but she needs to stave off a trigger event. So she tries banishing the images that might bring her closer to it—her mother’s face, a wild collage of a dozen different photos used for her MISSING posters after the Bannings abducted them—and reaches for the ones that will delay it. Luke. Kissing my neck. Singing along—badly, but who cares?—with “Angel of the Morning.” That goofy smile he makes when he pulls so hard on the jar lid it snaps off unexpectedly and he spills artichokes or tomatoes or who knows what else on the kitchen floor because he’s just so goddamn strong after all the training they’ve given him.
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 7
