Already Gone (Laura Frost FBI)

“Yes,” he replied. “Why?… What? I just told you, yes. This is he. What are you talking about? Hello? … Hello?”

And then he hung up, putting the phone back on the receiver with an audible sound of disgust.

Laura strained to look at the envelopes, to try to read more. There was a set of keys sitting on top of the pile, car keys and house keys. They had landed right on the clear window of the topmost envelope, obscuring almost everything. Almost everything, but she thought she could read the name… Thomas…?

The man paused for a moment, looking at the phone as if expecting it to tell him more—but then he shook his head to himself and moved away, back through the same house. Jettisoning his coat as he went, he switched on the television and settled into an armchair with a thump, groaning as he worked his back into a comfortable position against the cushions. He relaxed, flicking through channels until he chose something funny, turning it up loud enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear anything else. And then he reached for his beer…

A car horn behind her startled Laura out of her vision, making her blink her eyes and try to focus. The light was green above her. It must have just been turning when the vision started, and even though she had only been gone for seconds, it was enough to make the driver behind her impatient. She started the car again and pulled forward, trying to think.

She had seen something. She knew she had, even if it didn’t make sense to her. Her visions never lied, though there was always the possibility that they showed something that would not actually come to pass. Still, this didn’t seem like one of those times. Not if she didn’t get there in time to stop the killer.

But how was she going to find the next victim in time, if the killer was going after someone random?

Because that was the only thing she could think of that made sense. The only reason why there might have been the name Thomas on the envelope that she had seen. Thomas was not Alex, and though she had not seen the full last name, she thought she had seen the very edge of a letter. A straight line, not a diagonal. Not an A. This wasn’t some clever ruse where the man’s name was Thomas Alex.

But if this victim’s name was Thomas, then he was categorically not Alex. Not the same name as Laura’s father. There was the possibility that he had recently moved, or was getting mail that had come to the wrong address, but that wouldn’t help her. She could pass it off as that and move on, but ignoring anything she had seen in a vision was always a massive risk. She had seen it for a reason. She had to cling on to that.

So, Thomas. But what connection could there be between Thomas and Alex? Or, for that matter, between Thomas and herself? There was no one in her family with that name, at least as far as she knew. It didn’t ring any bells at all.

Bronston was going after a man now, changing his method. Did that mean he was changing everything? Changing even the reasoning behind picking his victims? Was he done with Laura and now moving on to victimize someone else who he thought was behind his incarceration?

If that was the case, she had literally no hope of tracking him down.

But then, she still really had no idea if this vision had been of the killer she was looking for. The pain throbbing behind her eyes told her it was something that would happen imminently, but the location and the killer were still hidden to her. She hadn’t actually seen Ed. He didn’t have any kind of marking on his forearms that w

ould give him away. She had noticed his hands in the other visions, of course, but in the one where she’d seen Thomas being killed, the arms had not been clear enough to her. Just out of shot, dark and muddled, hidden behind Thomas’s head as it tilted back. His hands covered with gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, meaning she had nothing to go on there.

She carried on driving in circles, looking in vain for somewhere to pull over. What she really needed now was a dark parking lot where she could stop the car and give in to despair. Maybe one that adjoined a liquor store—that would have been ideal. But the brightness of the streetlights boring into her eyes from above seemed to have her trapped on the city streets like a fly under a magnifying glass.

A link to someone else… who would it be? Laura racked her mind, trying to think back to that case. The DA? The defense attorney who hadn’t done a good enough job at getting his client off the hook? She didn’t know them well enough to know anything about them that would help.

It was all so long ago, and not that long ago at all in other ways. Laura had been through so many cases since then. How was she supposed to remember tangential details from a case that had been just one of many, in the end? Yes, she had stepped in—but even the visions had faded enough in her memory to avoid triggering an instant revelation when she saw them again. The fact that she’d spent a lot of the intervening years blackout drunk probably had something to do with that.

She remembered how she had been at the time. Her father had already been dead, of course. And her mom—

Her father had been dead. Did that mean something?

Why would Ed Bronston target someone using the name of her father, when he wasn’t even around to be threatened? Because that was what this was, wasn’t it? Telling her that he knew the names of her family—that was a threat. Something to scare her. And she wasn’t particularly scared by someone implying that her dead father might somehow end up more dead.

But then, if it wasn’t her father, who was Ed targeting? Whose name would he use?

And, as if a strike of lightning, it hit her. Of course. It had to be. She had no idea why she hadn’t thought of it before.

She knew what Thomas’s last name was, and with that, she would be able to find him. She just hoped she hadn’t made the connection too late.

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

Laura pulled over on the side of the road, not caring about whether she was making a legal move or not at that time. She could always use the excuse of being right in the middle of a case, trying to save someone’s life. That was the benefit of being an FBI agent. She flicked on her hazard lights and grabbed her phone out of the center console, immediately opening her browser.

She accessed the online phone book quickly, inputting the search details that she knew would find him. Thomas Lacey. Of course—the one person left whom she would care about a threat to. Her own daughter.

The results loaded too slowly, making her bite clean through the top of her fingernail in frustration. When they finally did, her initial surge of adrenaline tapered down quickly.

There were two.

Two Thomas Laceys.

Right now, she had no idea what their connection was. Whether they were related, perhaps, two men in the same family given a traditional family name. Whether they were the same person, updated to a new address but not removed from the old one. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that there were two possible locations she could need to go to, and no way she could be in two places at once. They were on opposite sides of the city.