AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But, God, that vision… another woman, just like the last. Laura hadn’t seen the man’s face clearly yet again, but she could feel his signature the way any investigator would. A woman walking alone by herself in a secluded area – a place that had lots of shadowy hiding spots where it would be possible to commit a murder without being seen at all. A woman who was drunk, no less. Partially incapacitated, less able to run.
Laura found her mind running in overdrive already, trying to solve it. This killer took a lot of precautions. He was clearly not as confident in his abilities to take someone down as other killers she had seen; not only did he want time and privacy to do what he wanted, but he also wanted a victim who had severe disadvantages. Someone who wouldn’t even be able to fight him off when the time came.
He seemed to thrive on fear, too. Both times, he had let the women see him. Both times, he’d had no qualms about just striking when it was easy – he seemed to want a little bit of a chase. He could have reached out and grabbed the woman in that last vision the first moment she saw him, but instead, he chose to follow her, chase her, take her down when she was terrified.
That got Laura thinking.
Was there someone out there who had managed to get away from him?
Was there someone out there who could give a witness statement that would help them to track him down?
Laura hadn’t seen any clear or distinct clues about the place she was in, but she was willing to bet it would be somewhere in Maryland. Probably not very far away from the place she and Nate had driven to yesterday, which gave her more of a starting point.
She stayed in bed, laying down as if she actually believed she was going to be able to get back to sleep after a dream like that. There was no urgency, this time, and her head was still pounding. She needed to lay down, to recover from the lack of sleep she had yesterday.
What she had seen had happened in the past, and there was no one to save. The woman she had seen was dead. Laura knew that had to be the case.
But still it burrowed away beneath her skin, niggling at her, trying to make her get up so that she could investigate it…
Laura closed her eyes with determination, promising herself that even if she didn’t manage to fall asleep, she would stay here in bed until dawn if that was what it took.
***
Laura sipped her third coffee of the day, looking up at Nate as he crossed the bullpen to sit down at his desk.
“Hey,” he said, then frowned. “You look like you’ve been here a while.”
“Since about dawn,” Laura shrugged, draining the last of the cup.
Nate dropped into his chair and then wheeled it over to her, lowering his voice. Agent Fred Jones, who usually sat behind them, was out on a case somewhere – he’d been out all week – so they were more or less alone in their quiet corner of the office. “You had another one, didn’t you?”
Laura nodded. She cast her eyes around the rest of the room just in case, confirming for herself that everyone else was too busy to pay attention, and then showed Nate the notes she had been working on.
“At first, I wasn’t going to do anything about it,” she said. “It was the same killer. The same MO – a drunk woman walking home at night past an area with a lot of shadows, where he was able to drag her out of sight. I knew it must have already happened and there was no point in trying to look into it to save someone – she’s already dead. But I lay awake and I got to thinking.”
“That’s never a good sign,” Nate said with a smirk.
Laura aimed a faux swipe at him. “Anyway,” she continued. “I have to be seeing these for a reason. Right? I mean, okay – sometimes I see something really banal like someone dropping a cup of coffee, which I would never be able to stop without incriminating myself, and anyway, doesn’t ruin anyone’s life if it happens. But even when it’s banal, I see it because I’ll be there and able to stop it if I want to. I get shown things that I can personally have an impact on. I don’t understand how any of this works, but I do really believe that.”
“Right,” Nate said. “So, your reasoning is that if you’re seeing these cold cases now, there must be a reason. Like you think maybe you might be able to solve them?”
“Well, why not?” Laura asked. “We have more information than the original investigation did, by a mile.”
“That’s true, but we have to be very careful about where we source that information,” Nate said. “As in, there has to actually be a source. Remember?”
“Right, I know,” Laura said. “I’m just hoping that if we pretend I got interested in the cold cases out of sheer curiosity, we can bring something up via investigation that will actually help.”
Nate shrugged. “Look, I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You investigate the case, I’ll keep going on our paperwork. It’s got to be done by one of us. If this thing has legs like you think it does, then I agree that we should look into it, but we can’t just drop everything else and then tell Rondelle we were just curious about the cases.”
“Fine,” Laura said. “But listen to what I’ve got so far. It’s actually pretty compelling.”
“Go ahead,” Nate nodded.
“So, I used the location we were at last time as a starting point to search for the kind of place I saw,” Laura said. “As it turns out, on the other side of the same town, there’s an area of factories and warehouses. I used the street view and found the spot where I was in the vision.”
“So, we’re talking the same town?”
“Right. But this is the thing. The two cases – even though they were both cases of young women who disappeared on their way home from a bar and both were drunk, no one connected them at the time. Not even when the bodies were found and they both had marks of manual strangulation. There were two years between them, they were on opposite sides of town, different residences, no connection between the women – and the fact that they were coming home from a bar, it seems like the local cops just assumed it was some sort of drunken tryst that went wrong or a crime of opportunity.”
