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She had effectively lost him.
Hayley gave a chuckle of relief out loud to herself, allowing her pace to drop just a little. Not so much that he would have a chance to catch up again, since that would be stupid. She let herself relax a bit, looking to the side at all the new-build homes that were slowly going up there. She remembered walking along this road when there was literally nothing on either side. She remembered seeing the foundations being dug. It was kind of exciting now, seeing that they were almost completed, thinking of the people who would be moving in soon.
She followed the curve of the road as it bent around the new development, glancing over her shoulder one more time at the apex and still seeing nothing. She really had lost him. She was alone on the road again.
Which left her remembering it was pretty cold, wrapping her hoody tighter about herself over her low-cut top. Soon she would be home, she told herself, and there was a big old duvet waiting for her along with some pajamas that would have made her grandmother proud.
Hayley looked up from concentrating on her feet to see how far she had left to go, and her steps faltered.
He was there – ahead of her. She was sure it was still him by the outline of his shape, the silhouette she had seen behind her. A hood up over his head, an overcoat that hung partway down his calves. That was him.
He must have gone around through the development – cut his way along the other side of the new lots there. He’d cut out the bend and got there way ahead of her.
And now he was just standing there, right in the middle of the path where she needed to go, watching her. She couldn’t even see his face, but somehow, she just knew. He was watching.
Hayley stopped walking altogether, and for a moment the two of them just stared at one another in silence.
Then he took his hands out of his pockets and started to walk towards her, and Hayley had never known so much fear in her life.
She turned and ran, relying on her muscle memory to keep her upright and not let her trip in the heels, wishing they weren’t attached by straps so she could kick them off, wishing she wasn’t drunk, wishing she had just called a taxi.
Hayley ran and ran, until the inevitable happened and she tripped, going down hard and only at the last minute having enough presence of mind and control to pitch herself to the side so that she rolled onto the grass embankment instead of skinning her legs and hands.
She rolled and put herself onto her back, the best way she could think of to be able to see how close he was and to try to get back onto her feet, but there he was – right in front of her. She looked to the side, looked around desperately for something to grab that she could use to defend herself. Her cell phone had fallen out of her pocket, fallen onto the sidewalk. She lunged for it –
But he was on her already, strong hands grabbing her and shoving her back, putting her where she had started. She spared one last glance for the phone that could have been her lifeline and then up at him, and the way he smiled at her made her heart beat so fast in terror she thought she might die right there and then.
He muttered something she couldn’t make out and brought his hand down towards her head, and the last thing she knew was a pain in her temple and complete blackness as unconsciousness swallowed her whole.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Laura lay on the motel’s stiff and uncomfortable bed, trying to ignore the scratchiness of the sheets. She rolled over again, trying to get comfortable.
There was no getting comfortable.
Not when she knew full well there was a killer still out there, thinking he’d got away with it all, believing no one even knew his victims were linked.
Two year gaps between cases, and the last one was two years ago. There was no way of telling when he would strike again. It could be today. It could be next week. It could be three or four months from now – or he could already have attacked and killed someone who had fallen off the radar.
Laura rolled again and then gave up, sitting up in bed with a sigh.
She needed to get deeper into the killer’s mind. That was always what helped. The more she got into their minds, knew how they thought, the better she was at tracking them down and knowing where they would go next. Not only was that just the standard way it worked for any FBI agent, but it would also help her to have more visions, to be able to interpret them better.
The problem was that she kept having her visions when she was asleep. That was why she had suggested to Nate that they take a break for the night, at a time when she would normally have been dead set on staying up and investigating until dawn broke and beyond. She would normally have thought that sleep was useless right now, and investigating was the only thing that could pull them forwards.
But these days, it turned out, she was doing a lot of investigating in her dreams, as weird as that was.
In order to do that, of course, she actually had to fall asleep – which was proving impossible with all the turmoil her thoughts were in.
Laura pressed her hands against her temple, resting her elbows on her knees so that she was fully supported, trying to relax as well as to think. Getting stressed out about everything – including the safety of her daughter and the other people she loved – wasn’t helping. If anything, it was making things worse, because the more she worried, the less she slept.
She needed to find some way to calm herself. Some way to focus in on the killer. To be him. To understand how he felt, what he saw, how it moved him to act.
She closed her eyes and focused, going over the first vision she had seen in as much detail as she could manage. She allowed herself to really linger there, to be part of it again. To see the lights of the bar shining on Joy’s hair as she moved away from it. To see the way she stumbled slightly and swayed from time to time. The way her eyes changed when she thought someone was behind her.
Laura focused on every small detail, replaying it as closely as she could to the original, absorbing herself back into the vision like she was watching it at the theater, letting it take up the whole of the screen in her mind, filling everything she could see. Every time she thought of Lacey or Nate or Chris, or Rondelle and the time pressure she was under, she pushed it aside and tried to get back to where she had been. To let the moment linger even longer in recompense. To be part of it as much as she could.
The forest where Joy Kingsley had run was empty. There was no one around to disturb the peace of the night. Somewhere, a night bird called. There was a rustling underfoot here and there from the smallest of animals moving in the undergrowth. In the middle of it all, the hut: alone and abandoned. It was derelict, the door snapped in half. No one slept there tonight, lured by the scant shelter it could provide, hardly anything against the elements and the cold of February.
