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There was little, if any, reaction from the two men fighting on the cold, hard ground of the wintry woodland. The desperation in their suspect gave him the upper hand for a moment, as he swiped across Nate’s face and pushed dirt into his eyes. Nate spluttered and hesitated, enough for the man to get a punch into his gut which left him doubled over. It looked like he was going to lose.
Laura had to take her threat to a level where it would be appreciated.
She pointed her gun upwards and fired it into the air.
The effect was instantaneous. The man on the floor froze, his head swiveling around to this new source of danger, his eyes fixed on her as his body went limp. Nate, still gasping for breath, managed to take advantage of the moment to snap a cuff on one of his wrists. When there was no further struggle, he managed to snap the other cuff into place, properly restraining their suspect.
“Goddamnit,” Nate said, panting for breath as he sat up, using his body weight to keep the suspect down.
They had him.
So why did that one flash of a vision Laura had seen make her feel very uneasy indeed?
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Laura rested her head in her hands for a moment, trying to catch her breath both physically and mentally. It had been a long morning already, and there were still a few hours to go until the deadline that Rondelle had imposed on them.
A few hours to go, and Nate was already celebrating – but Laura wasn’t entirely convinced she felt the same.
“Killer caught,” he said, raising a can of soda in the air like it was a beer. Of course, it wasn’t going to be a beer until they’d found the last victim, but there was a moment now when everyone felt they could at least celebrate the small win. “Well done.”
Laura raised her head and eyed him wearily, blinking slowly. She felt like her head needed to be submerged in a block of ice so it might start to actually function again. She was so tired from everything that had happened, and the repeated visions were a drain.
“Congratulations,” someone said, and Laura looked up to see an unfamiliar detective passing by the desk. “They said you caught a serial killer.”
She detected both admiration and jealousy in his tone. “Thanks,” she said, dully, though she wasn’t actually sure she had done what he said.
If they had caught a serial killer, caught him well enough that he was going to go to jail for a very long time, then why had she seen a vision of him cleaning up his act and getting an award in just a few years’ time? It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in prisons, and certainly not in the kind of prison he was going to end up in. How could the vision be true?
“You ready for the interview?” Nate asked, tapping her on the arm as though he thought she wasn’t paying attention.
“Yeah,” Laura said, but she shook her head almost immediately. “No, I’m not. Something’s not right.”
She was trying to puzzle it all out in her mind. Maybe what she had seen was the possible future before their suspect was caught. Maybe it was what had been awaiting him until he had been arrested. But that didn’t make sense, because he was already about to be caught by Nate when she had seen it.
All of which made Laura very nervous, because if their suspect’s future involved freedom and turning his life around, then either justice was about to fail…
Or he wasn’t their killer after all.
“What’s wrong?” Nate frowned.
Laura wanted to tell him what she had seen, but now they had someone who actually seemed like he could have done it in the holding cell; it was like everyone had decided to come into their part of the precinct. It was busy, far too busy for her to guarantee that someone wouldn’t overhear what she said.
“We still haven’t found the missing victim,” Laura said instead. “I don’t get it. It doesn’t fit his MO. Where is she?”
“Well, hopefully we’ll find out as soon as his lawyer gets here and he gets encouraged to talk,” Nate said. “He can’t keep up the silent act forever. The lawyer will see that it’s for the best if he confesses. If he helps us find her and she’s still alive, it could sit well with a judge. He’s going to see that. After all, he had her purse. We have enough evidence to very strongly imply his guilt.”
Laura bit her lip. That still ignored two very real possibilities: first, that she was dead, in which case it wasn’t in the killer’s interests to give that piece of information at all. And second, that this man was not their killer, in which case all they were doing was wasting time. The man had clearly been afraid when he was confronted by the FBI agents breaking down his door. Laura worried that they were dealing with someone who was too scared to speak in case they ended up getting fitted up for a crime they didn’t commit, not someone who was actually guilty. Maybe someone whose only ‘crime’ had been picking up a dropped purse from the street, thinking he could sell whatever was in it or find some cash.
“The thing is, we don’t know what has happened to her at all,” Laura said, trying to stress the words in such a way that Nate would realize what she was really trying to say: that she hadn’t seen a vision of that death. Surely, with all of these visions flying around, the one that would really be important would be the one that was happening now? Why hadn’t she seen it?
And that was the moment when the light bulb went off above her head.
Because she’d had a vision, hadn’t she?
That place where they’d found out about the first victim that had set all of this off. The other cabin, the one that was in a much worse state of repair. That was what her vision had shown her. A place she had dismissed because, she believed, she had already seen everything that it had to tell her.
Her visions were never random. Sometimes they didn’t make sense until later. Sometimes they turned out to be more trivial than she would have liked. But they were never truly random.
