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With that being the case, there was only one thing she could do. She had to go there. She had to go back to that first place, opposite Mickey’s, and see what was going on. She wasn’t going to get any results sitting here and interviewing a man she didn’t even fully believe was a killer. She needed to go and follow the lead that her visions were giving her – and trust in them to give her what she needed in the investigation right now.
“Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” Nate said, nodding up ahead. There was a man in a suit with a briefcase, very clearly a lawyer, making his way across the room.
Laura felt torn for a moment. Her place was here, interviewing their suspect. That was how they always did things. It was what she was expected to do.
But she had to follow this lead, or she was never going to know whether or not she was right. Or worse – she would find out later, and regret it forever.
“I need to go,” she said, looking into Nate’s face and hoping that he would understand. That he would see she was being driven by something that went beyond protocol or logic. That she would stay if she could, but this thing required her to go out on a limb and take a risk – a risk that might lead to a real result.
“Okay,” he said, with a light frown. “Do you need me to come with you?”
Laura thought about it for a brief second, feeling the time pressure of the moment. “No,” she said. If she was wrong, someone still needed to stay here and get the interview in the bag. They only had a couple of hours left. If they changed course now in the wrong direction, they would face Rondelle’s wrath in an even bigger way than they already did. They had to get a result. It was the only way he wouldn’t want to skin them alive. “I’m going to go and check out a location or two where I think she might be. If I can find her, you don’t need his confession. She’ll be able to give us a witness statement – or in the worst case, her body will give us answers.”
Nate nodded. “Alright,” he said, hurriedly getting up from his chair. The lawyer was ready. They needed to start the interview. “I’ll have my phone in there. You call me if you find anything or if you need backup – I’ll send cars full of cops over to you immediately, got it? Don’t rush into anything if you find something suspicious.”
“I’ll call you,” Laura promised. “It’s not exactly like this is my first case, Nate. If I’m in over my head, you’ll be the first to know I need backup.” She wasn’t exactly sure how good she was going to be about keeping that promise, but she made it anyway.
Nate nodded once more and rushed off in the direction of the interview rooms, leaving Laura to catch her breath and make her plan.
She scooped up her cell phone and took a photograph of their map, thinking it would come in handy if the clues she found led her elsewhere. She opened Joy Kingsley’s file and read it again as quickly as she could, looking in particular for any specifics about how and where the body was found. Everything seemed to tally with what she had seen in her vision. He hadn’t moved her, abducted her, taken her somewhere else. She had fallen right where Laura had seen her fall, and that was where he had left her.
So what was so different about this case?
There was only one way she was ever going to find out. Laura took a surreptitious glance around at the other detectives milling around in the bullpen, but she ignored them. None of them had proven themselves to be particularly reliable or trustworthy, having not worked with Laura and Nate during the investigation so far. She didn’t want to take along someone she was going to have to babysit and micromanage, and she especially didn’t want to have to do it with someone she also needed to lie to. She couldn’t tell any of them why she had to go back to this specific place. She couldn’t explain her reasoning just then. It was better to go alone.
She walked out of the bullpen and then out of the precinct on her own, trying to tell herself that the way her hands shook when she took the car keys out of her pocket was just because of the adrenaline of the situation.
Out there, somewhere, was a woman who was missing. She was either alive and waiting desperately for help, or she was already dead, and her family deserved to know what had happened to her. Hayley Sommer. Laura didn’t know anything about her, but she knew that Hayley was someone’s daughter. There were people out there who loved and cared for her. And it was for Hayley that Laura had to do this – and fast.
She got into the car and turned on the ignition before she could lose her nerve, driving out to what she knew could very well be a direct confrontation with a killer.
***
He sat in the old beaten-up chair beside the door, or what was left of it, trying to ignore the chill that leaked through the broken wood. This place wasn’t quite as he remembered it. It had seen some hard times since he was last here. But that was okay. It wasn’t going to ruin the memory.
He glanced to the side to check on his new girl. Hayley. That was the name that had been printed on the ID he found in her purse. What a lovely name. They always had such lovely names. Joy, Sarina, Alayna – they trickled off the tongue like honey.
Beautiful names for beautiful girls. He never even planned it that way; that was the true beauty of it. He couldn’t plan it. The very nature of the way it had to happen meant that planning wasn’t possible.
He relied on the place, not the girl. He had to find a place that was right. It had to match up with what he had experienced that very first time, when he was walking home from the bar, an underage drinker who couldn’t even get a bus ticket to get him home. That night walking the back roads in the dark, when he had been a teen who felt invincible, who thought nothing of walking such a long distance through the night.
Nothing, until they had found him and set upon him.
There were memories he liked to go over again and again, reliving, and repeating each moment as if it was happening again. And then there were memories he would rather have blocked out forever, which had their way of creeping into his psyche all the same.
He closed his eyes briefly, but that only made the images all the more vivid.
The way they had appeared out of the darkness. He had looked up and seen the sweeping headlights of a car and thought maybe they were going to offer him a ride home when they had stopped in front of him. He had actually thought, for a moment, that they were there to help him. That was before they had all jumped out from the car, one by one, and started to surround him.
That was before he had looked up into the faces of the men and understood that they weren’t there to help him at all.
The men had been bad enough, with their kicking and their trampling, the way they had mocked and insulted him. But the women – the girlfriends of those young men – they had been the worst. He shuddered lightly as he remembered. The way they had pulled down his clothes to humiliate him. The way they had come up with more and more inventive ways to hurt him as the night drew on, highlighting him in the lights of that car, mocking him for the way he cried and whimpered. The way they had exposed him entirely, his soul, left him broken and defeated.
They hadn’t killed him. They had come close, but they hadn’t killed him. They had left him there on that isolated road, and in the morning he’d been found by someone who took him to hospital and called the police. And he’d said nothing, because he was afraid, and because he didn’t want to tell anyone what had really happened.
And he’d spent thirty years telling it over and over again to himself, in the echo chamber of his mind.
Hayley shifted in her sleep, and he redirected his attention to her, telling himself that the past had to stay there. The present, that was what it was about. He was going to make a memory so beautiful that it would overpower the other one, give him something to lovingly trace over and over for the rest of his life. It was taking some patience, but it was going to be worth it. Once she finally woke up and she was ready, it was going to be the best of all of them.
