“Football. Basketball. Whatever. Opponents say shit to each other. They do it to get into your head. They do it to break your concentration. If what happened today had to do with our guy, it was trash talking. He’s trying to get into your head, which in turn will get into my head.”
“So I need to stay cool for you?”
“No, you need to stay cool because we’re gonna get this guy. I told you, he’s leaving clues. They don’t think they leave clues. They always do.”
“You said you know how to commit the perfect murder.”
“The perfect murder is suicide. It takes a life. It leaves no witnesses. It bears no clues. It leads to no suspects.”
“Suicide isn’t murder.”
“That isn’t a judgment. But killing is killing. And outside a killing that has the same victim and perpetrator, there is no perfect murder.”
“Right.”
“I also said that because you’re sexy as all fuck, and I wanted to get in your pants, so I was trying to sound cool.”
That almost made me laugh.
“Talk to me,” he ordered.
“Are you really this calm and collected about this? About him targeting you? About him maybe targeting me?”
And about him maybe turning to Celeste, I did not say.
“No. I talked to the boys up the hill. Tomorrow, you and Celeste are going up there and you’re having an in-service with them. Celeste has had this kind of training all her life, so it’s a refresher for her. For you, it might be new. They’re gonna teach you vigilance and self-defense. It’ll help with your confidence. He sees you shaken, Larue, he’s gonna get off on that.”
“And we’re starving him from what he needs…” I let that trail, so he’d fill in the blank.
“To get him to make a mistake.”
“Could that mistake be another murder?”
“I don’t think so. He plans those. He knows who his victims are going to be and he’s laying them out according to that plan. It would chafe, being forced to make a kill he isn’t ready to unleash yet. But he’s feeding on attention. And if he’s starved for it, he might do something compulsively to get it.”
Holy cow.
“Like, when the media descends on Misted Pines, and his two murders take backseat to a sex scandal,” I guessed.
“Like that. Like he waits for you to get back from LA and follows you to freak you, which will trigger me.” He hesitated, and with care, he finished, “Bonus for him if you chase him down the street and remind the town a murderer is on the loose.”
So, okay, yes.
I’d really screwed up doing that.
But my breath started coming faster, and not because of that.
“Do you think it was the guy?” I asked.
“I’m wondering now, because it’s one thing to offer someone fifty bucks here and there to lurk outside a dormitory. Someone who has no idea what you’re doing and could think you’re just fucking with some chick who did you wrong, or playing a prank. It’s something else, and it’s risky, not to mention probably expensive, to keep that player on the board. Especially considering you make him come to a town where girls are getting murdered, and one of those girls stayed in the dorm where you got paid to be lurking. There are people who would do anything for cash. There are people who need it that bad, just to eat or to get a fix. But desperate people don’t make good pawns.”
“Okay.”
“What else?” he pushed.
God, he was good.
“I don’t know if it was a hoodie,” I confessed.
“Baby, that happens,” he said gently.
“Why do I feel like that’s important?”
“Because everything is important in this. But you have to know, witnesses second guess what they see all the time. Fear is a factor. Adrenaline is spiking. The gravity of a situation plays a part. Emotional and physical reactions clash and break up shit in your brain. But think about it logically. How important is it if he’s partial to wearing a hoodie?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
“It’s not important, Larue. If he had some kind of fetish and wore a bright-red clown wig, I gotta know that. What he chooses to cover his body means dick to me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I concluded it with the thing that was really haunting me.
“You think today was about him.”
His pause was scary.
And what he said next was worse.
“Yeah, baby. Today was about him.”
Forty-Nine
Don’t Ever
I had not yet been up to the house on the hill.
The next day, when Bohannan took Celeste and I up there, I found it wasn’t a house.
It was a log cabin.
A pretty log cabin that was a little bit smaller than my place. It had a fire pit with Adirondack chairs surrounding it in the front. It had trees all around. It had no access to the lake, possibly because the pitch was very steep to get down there.
But it had impeccable views.
For instance, I could see through the trees nearly the entirety of Bohannan’s compound, save for part of the boys’ house, since it was tucked into the pines off to the side.
I could see my place, totally.
And I could see the somewhat bigger house up from mine on my side of the lake. It was higher up the hill, exposed to view, but it also had a switch-backed set of steps to get down to a small pier on the lake.
Taking all of this in, I swung directly into impossible, but phenomenal, fantasies of Celeste marrying some marvelous man and filling that big house up top with family. Camille and Joan moving into this cabin, expanding it, and filling it with babies. Us building a getaway cabin for Fenn (and James?) to bring their family for visits. And the boys splitting off, one of them moving into my place so they could have space for their families.
Yes, I was in this with Bohannan deep.
I was also watching David, who was doing something at the spout on the back deck. He was working on a Sunday because Robyn’s pregnancy had, so far, been a display of hormonal fireworks that even her very devoted husband needed a break from on the weekends.
I knew this because it was so bad, he’d asked, falteringly, as he was so desperate to know if she was crazy, or if he was.
Unlike many mothers, Fenn, my first, had been a breeze.
Which made me completely unprepared for how Camille had done me in.
So at least I could set his mind at ease that he wasn’t going crazy, and neither was Robyn, and better yet, this was temporary.
But so he could get through it, I advised him that breaks were good for the both of them.
He’d texted to say he was going to come that day for a few hours and do some work.
I stopped thinking on all this when I stepped into the comfortable, attractive, but sturdily furnished and rental-ready environs of the cabin.
They’d swept it before we got there so the guts of the case weren’t spewed everywhere, but it still was clearly a command post, and a fastidious one. No fast-food debris or spent coffee mugs that needed cleaning. And the three large white boards that took up a lot of the space had been turned around.
Special Agents Everett Robertson and Ben McGill looked like who they were. Clean cut, fit, no-nonsense G-men.