Eric sighed, a little melodramatically. “There’s a burger joint up on the corner,” he said. “I saw it when we passed through earlier. It has a to-go window. We’d better get everything wrapped up.”
Laura was about to admonish him for not taking things seriously, but then she caught a look at his face. He looked tired, too, and stressed out. Like he was having a hard time coping with the pressure of the case. She guessed that, when she thought about it, being hungry on top of all that was probably an unpleasant feeling. She bit her tongue, leaving him be.
Laura started the car back up, even though it was beginning to feel stupid to drive around a town of this size. Of course, they need to be able to move quickly if they had a lead to chase down, but right now it felt like they were just burning fossil fuels for no results. All they were running into were dead ends.
Maybe Eric was right. A greasy takeout burger might give Laura’s brain a bit of fuel and put her in the right frame of mind to see what she was missing.
“What do you want?” Eric asked, as they pulled up alongside the takeout window.
Laura shrugged. She hadn’t even had the headspace to look at the menu they were driving by. “Whatever you’re having,” she said.
Eric leaned across her towards the teenager behind the window, rattling out an order that Laura also did not pay attention to. She was thinking about the time. It was late enough to have lunch, and there was a six-hour flight required before she would be back at home.
It was looking more and more like it was time to admit defeat and text Chris.
She sighed at the thought, a wave of frustration coming over her. There were so many reasons to get this case done fast, and yet she didn’t seem to be able to achieve it for any of them.
“Ma’am?” the teen said, and Laura snapped to attention enough to realize that she was holding out a brown paper bag towards her, emblazoned with the logo of the fast-food place. Laura took it and handed it off directly to Eric, then accepted a couple of coffees in a cardboard tray and passed those across as well. She pulled out of the to-go lane, back out onto the road.
“Where are we going?” she asked. She meant to park and eat, but she also recognized the irony in the question. It was what Eric had been asking her about the case for the last few days.
“Over by the shore?” Eric suggested. “There’s a lookout point not far from here I spotted last night, thought it might be a nice spot in the daytime.”
Laura followed his directions and they pulled up, staring out at the sea. It was quiet, barely stirring in the breeze. It could have been a perfect summer’s day, given the blue, clear sky and the stillness of the waves, except for the wintry cold. Laura accepted the coffee back gratefully and took a sip, not minding the slight burn on her tongue that she received for starting it too soon. The caffeine was needed badly enough to override the pain.
“Here,” Eric said, nudging her to take a paper-wrapped burger from his hands. She did so, accidentally brushing her hand across his as she took it and feeling a stab of pain.
Damnit.
Now she was probably going to find out more about Agent Won than she –
She was looking into the car, watching herself, as if she was floating outside the windshield. There she was with a burger in one hand, half-unwrapped, a few bites taken out of it. And there was Agent Won next to her, having just gleefully taken the burger out of the wrapper completely, enjoying the last few bites of an overstuffed bun filled with just about every topping the fast-food joint had to offer.
He took a giant bite and the bright yellow blob of mustard squeezed out of the back of the bun, falling right down onto his white shirt. He exclaimed in dismay, grabbing a napkin and swiping at it, but it was no use. That bright yellow stain was there to stay.
Laura blinked, looking down at the burger in her hand. Well, that was something. Her visions were still working. It was just that the ones she was getting in relation to the case weren’t getting her anywhere.
“You alright?” Eric asked, his tone one of genuine concern. He’d already taken the first bite of his burger, keeping it wrapped halfway for now.
“Yes,” Laura said, shaking it off. “I just realized I need to send someone a message. Be careful with these burgers – looks like there’s a lot of sauce in them.”
“You haven’t even opened yours yet,” Eric said, frowning a little.
She nodded her head towards him. “I don’t need to. I can see yours.” She opened the packaging with one hand and then grabbed her cell phone as she took the first bite, scrolling to her most recent conversation with Chris and opening it.
Hey, sorry. I’m still on the case out here. I’m not going to be able to make it back to D.C. in time for tonight. I have to cancel. Maybe we can do another night?
She felt a gnawing ache in her stomach as she sent the text, the kind of nervous reaction she always had when she got the feeling that she was letting someone down. It was an awful feeling. She waited for his response, trying not to see the fact that there were still so many messages Nate had not bothered to reply to. At this point, she wouldn’t be surprised if he had simply blocked her number. And if he had, she had no way of getting in contact with him save walking right up to his door – which would probably not do her any favors, either.
Her phone buzzed, and she opened the message hastily to read it. It was from Chris, of course, and while she was glad to hear back from him, she was also annoyed at the way her heart lurched with disappointment with every message or call that wasn’t from Nate.
Sorry to hear that! Hope you get it wrapped up soon. I can’t make the rest of this week – I’m on shift and then I’ve got a meeting with Amy’s teachers on Friday to see how she’s settling in. Playdate this weekend still good?
Laura sighed to herself as she sent back a confirmation for the weekend. A playdate was all well and good, but it was for the girls – not their respective guardians. It was a time for tea parties and dolls and watching inane children’s shows, not having eyes meet over candlelit dinners. Between the fact that they had two of the busiest jobs Laura could imagine – agent and doctor – and their lives as parents, she was starting to wonder if this thing was doomed before they even started it. When would they even get a chance to see one another?
“I wish we would just get something that panned out,” Eric grumbled. It came so out of the blue, Laura almost jumped.
“We’ll get something eventually,” she said. It was the kind of thing she told herself for reassurance, even though it didn’t always make her feel better. “We have to. We’re not letting him slip away.”
“What if it’s too late?” Eric said, frustration evident in his voice. “We’ve already let one girl die on our watch. I really wanted to do well on this first one.”
“Don’t worry,” Laura said, though she wasn’t exactly feeling calm about it herself. “We’ll get him. We just have to keep thinking. Keep seeing what we haven’t seen yet, figuring it out.”
And the same applied, she reminded herself, to both Nate and Chris. It felt like one new flame in her life was being lit, and she didn’t want it to be extinguished before she ever got the chance to find out how brightly it would burn. They would figure something out.
Extinguished…
Laura’s mind shot forward, going over that vision again. Flames being extinguished. What if they were seeing everything the wrong way?
“I have a new theory,” she said, working it out even as she spoke out loud. “We’ve been thinking that the killer uses candles because he’s obsessed with flames. But what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s the fact of the candle being snuffed out that is the point?”
Eric spoke around a mouthful of burger. “But wouldn’t that mean his method is wrong? He doesn’t get to blow the candle out. Whoever finds the body does.”
“It’s still symbolic,” Laura said, hesitating then rushing on as her mind worked this new angle. “In fact, it might be even more symbolic for it. This idea of the final resting place of the victim, their discovery and then their light going out forever once someone other than the killer knows that they’re gone.”
“I don’t get it,” Eric said, shrugging. “Sorry.”
“Well, think about it,” Laura said. “Candles are symbolic. They always have been. They represent light against the darkness. They have religious overtones, used in ceremonies even today. Not because we need them – we have electricity now. Because of how symbolic they are. And we even use it as a metaphor – we talk about a candle being blown out to symbolize the end of something, even a life.”
Eric shrugged again. “Sounds like something my English teacher would say,” he said. “I don’t know if the killer is that deep.” He took the last half of his burger out of the wrapper and put it to his mouth with some relish, taking a massive bite.
A dollop of mustard fell neatly out of the back and splattered on his shirt, making him cry out in dismay.
“Damnit!” he said, dabbing at it with a napkin. Laura didn’t need to look to see that that yellow stain was going to be there for the foreseeable future.
“I did tell you to be careful,” she said mildly. It wasn’t her fault if people ignored her warnings. It wasn’t as though she could force them to pay attention.
“I should change this shirt,” Eric said, grabbing the wrapper to hold it under the last few bites of his burger as he wolfed it down. “I have a spare clean one at the motel.”
“No can do,” Laura said. “You’ll just have to do up your jacket if it bothers you. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this – figure out what the candles mean and why the killer is using them. Once we know that, we might just know him.”
Eric sighed. “Look, no offense, but that just sounds like psychobabble to me,” he said. “I’m good at investigating, not profiling. If that’s your thing, whatever, but I’d rather follow real leads. I still think we’re onto something with the whole firebug thing. I want to keep looking into that.”
Laura could have pulled rank on him then and there, told him to shut up and pay attention. That she was the senior officer and he had to do as he was told. But on the other hand, even though she had warmed to him a little, she knew she was better off on her own. Without the distraction. She didn’t need to be anyone’s babysitter. And it was almost always better to have two agents pursuing two theories, rather than getting tunnel vision on one.
“Then do it on your own,” she said.
“Cool,” he said, and then, “Can you drop me off at the motel?”