Already Gone (Laura Frost FBI)

No, they had to do it with the phone book. It was the only way.

“Nate,” Laura hissed urgently, calling his attention before he picked up the phone to dial a new number. He hesitated, his hand hovering over the receiver. “We’re doing this wrong. We need to be looking for a man.”

“What?” Nate glanced around the room and lowered his voice, trying not to disturb the other officers who were still on calls. “Did you find something?”

“No,” Laura said, cursing the fact that she couldn’t tell him what she’d seen. “But I’m sure of it. The next victim will be a man, not a woman. Thirty-five or younger, listed in the phone book, and probably living alone. Called Alex. We have to—”

“Wait a second,” Nate interrupted, shaking his head. He was leaning out across the desk toward her, stretched out, giving her the impression of a resting panther. “Where is this coming from?”

Laura bit her tongue. What was she supposed to say? “It makes sense,” she said. “Alex—my dad was a man. Why would the target not be a man?”

Nate shook his head again, rubbing one hand over his eye. “Laura, we talked about this. We already agreed. The killer has been going after women all this time. Why would he suddenly change his MO and go after a man? It doesn’t make sense. We agreed.”

“I know we did,” Laura said, hesitating. “But… Nate, I just know. This isn’t right. We’re never going to find him like this. He’s going to die. We have to switch over to men.”

Nate narrowed his eyes, sighing. “Laura… I know you’re anxious about letting another one slip through the cracks. But we’re already up against it on time trying to reach all of these women. If we add men into the mix as well, we’ll never get through everyone, not with a hundred volunteers. Even if we only focus on men—it’s not getting any earlier. We’ve come this far. We have to push on.”

“Not all men,” Laura protested. “The parameters are much more p

recise. We’ll be able to get through them quicker. Nate, I can’t explain it, but I have this feeling—”

“And what if that feeling is wrong?” Nate paused and cast a glance around the room before continuing, as if to make sure no one had overheard how irrational she was being. “We made this choice based on data. All of the signs we have currently point to the killer going after another woman. We’ve asked all of these people to work long and hard at these calls, tracking down the next victim, and they’re doing it on faith that is already stretched thin. Now you want to change that when we’re not even halfway through. I’m sorry, but… unless you can give me evidence or even some kind of hint that a man could be at risk, we have to carry on focusing on women.”

Laura stared at him, her mouth hanging open. What was she supposed to say?

She didn’t have any evidence. Not even a hint. All she had was her vision, and even if she could come clean about that to Nate and expect him to believe her, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t exactly admissible in court. Nor would it convince the sheriff—and Nate was right. They were asking him to take a lot of this on faith already.

He had never doubted her before. She’d never given him a reason to. But she knew what he was saying made sense. Without proof, there was no reason to change their methods.

He’d trusted her this far. Gone along with everything she said. It stung deep in her chest that he couldn’t do the same now, but she couldn’t argue.

He was right.

Laura closed her mouth and turned back to her phone book, as though she was accepting what Nate had said and getting back to work. She heard more than saw him turn away and do the same, starting a new call. But her mind was racing. She couldn’t just carry on pretending to make the calls. There was no point. She knew now that they wouldn’t reach the one person they needed to. And there was no way she could get through enough names in the phone book on her own to have any shot at warning him herself.

She was going to have to do this alone—and she wasn’t going to achieve anything sitting at a desk with a phone in her hand.

She got up, grabbing her coat from the back of her chair, putting her cell into her pocket. “I need a break,” she muttered into the general air above Nate’s head, making him glance up at her. He couldn’t do anything else. He was midway through a call.

He couldn’t stop her as she walked right out of the precinct toward the parking lot, car keys in hand.

***

Laura was driving through the streets of Albany, taking random turns and exits, covering whole blocks just to take a corner or two and go right back in the opposite direction. It was a kind of grid search, except without a fully logical plan, letting her foot on the gas and her hands on the wheel lead her by instinct.

Somewhere out there, Ed Bronston was moving closer and closer to his victim. Somewhere, a victim sitting in his house, or maybe still making his way back home. If she could somehow get onto the right track, start moving in the same direction so that she was on a collision course with one of them, maybe she could force a vision to come.

Laura rested her head against her hand, one elbow propped on the side door, as she pulled up toward a red light. She was getting nowhere. On the one night that she desperately needed to get somewhere, she felt like she was just driving around in circles.

She looked up, the red of the traffic light seeming to burn right into her brain. It was so bright. So bright that it seemed to be making her head pulse with pain. No wonder, after she had had so many visions, forced herself to see so many things. But this pain seemed so insistent, so harsh—

Laura found herself looking down at the same head she had seen before, the same cap of hair. The man, the one who was going to die. It was him. But this time he was not sitting in front of her television. He was walking, heading to a refrigerator , moving across a shabby kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of beer, cold enough that he pressed it to his forehead with an audible sigh of relief. He was still wearing his coat. He must only just have come in from work.

A phone rang out, loud and startling. Laura felt the noise ricocheting around inside her skull, reminding her yet again that pain was the price of seeing the future. Even here, she could not avoid it. She watched as Alex, or whoever he was, headed toward the landline, frowning at it as he picked it up. It was on a low table.

“Hello?” he said.

Laura could not hear what came next on the other end of the line, could only see Alex frowning. The table, she could see, was scattered with envelopes. Unopened mail. One of them was stamped with a red “URGENT.”