Already Trapped (Laura Frost FBI)

It was going to be harder now, of course. Both of them together. Each could defend the other, and he might be seen. But that wasn’t going to be a problem, not when the waitress realized why he was there. Maybe at first she’d be shocked, horrified. He could imagine that.

But if she saw him, well, he’d just have to explain. Show her that he wasn’t there for her. That he was just there to take care of the banker, because only one of them had to go. Only one of them had no place in this world.

And once he’d done that for her, once he’d relieved that burden, she would be grateful. She would probably tell the police she hadn’t seen anything, or even give them a false description. Because there was no way this sisterly camaraderie, this closeness, was real.

And he was just going to have to take care of that for her, so she never had to worry about it again.

Or if she wasn’t grateful, if it turned out that he’d presumed wrong and she was the spiteful one, the hateful one, all along… then he could correct his mistake and kill her, too.

So long as he could figure out a way to change his plan on the fly so that only one of them had to get hurt, he could still make this work.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Laura sat alone at her computer, the files spread out across her desk. Nate had gone. She didn’t ask him where he was going, and he didn’t tell her. He was too angry to get anything out. She hoped he was off investigating somewhere, putting all of that angry energy into the case, but she had no way of knowing.

She didn’t want to call him or send him a message either. He had made it clear what he felt about her right now, about her methods. And if she was going to be alone in this investigation, then she needed to get it done. She couldn’t let his attitude put her off. Even without his help, she needed to find the twins, figure out where they lived before the killer followed them home. She had no doubt that it was going to happen tonight. The intensity of the headache she’d felt, now soothed away by a few painkillers into just a dull ache, confirmed it. He was stalking them, maybe even right now, and he would find them tonight.

Laura couldn’t bear the idea of failing again. They had missed the opportunity to predict Kenneth Wurz. She wasn’t going to miss the chance to protect these women, whoever they were.

She had the files separated neatly into piles, with all of the irrelevant cases put back into the box and all of the male twins set off to one side. Maybe they would be useful in the future, if she couldn’t stop him tonight. But right now, they were useless. She needed female twins, and the good news was that there were only a handful of them in the box.

But the bad news was that these files were slim, and a handful still amounted to a score of births. Add in the fact that each of those births had two babies, and she was looking at a pile of forty women. They ranged in age, but only slightly. By coincidence, the first box that she had chosen to open was the box of those born in the same span of five years as the cases they had already seen. That was why it had triggered her visions—it had to be.

Laura had already taken Ruby and Jade Patrickson, and Kenneth and Kevin Wurz, out of the files. All she had to do then was look at the ones that remained. But it was slow going. These children were now in their mid-twenties, and while that might have meant that they all had social media profiles because they were from the right generation for it, it wasn’t so easy to find them. So long as she could find one twin out of the pair, she was able to set the files aside. All she had to do was confirm that they did not look in any way like the twins she had seen in her vision, and she would be able to rule them out.

It started well. The first three files were all women she could immediately find just by searching their names. But in the fourth file, the first twin was nowhere to be found. After finally locating the second twin, she realized that it was because the first twin of the couple was married and changed her name. This was a complication Laura hadn’t even thought of yet.

The sixth file made her want to tell her hair out. She could not find any mention of either of the twins anywhere on social media, and they did not seem to appear when she searched their names in any kind of database. For all intents and purposes, they might as well have been ghosts. She tried searching census records to see if they still lived in Milwaukee, and it appeared as though they did. Which only made it more annoying. She needed to know what they looked like, or she couldn’t rule them out.

Of course, there was a little hope. Perhaps it was just that these were the twins she was after. If she ruled out all the others, she would be able to say for sure that these were the ones she wanted.

But then when the ninth set of twins came up blank as well, she knew she was in hot water.

It was going to be hard enough to track down and protect the twins even if she only had one address to go on. She had to get there in time, had to organize backup, had to get this research done all on her own. Nate was nowhere to be found, and the detectives that Gausse had assigned them were already working on other tasks. Things that they still needed to be done, just in case Laura was unable to stop what happened tonight. And not just that—they needed to keep building a case, they all did, because if they caught this guy they would need to potentially take him to court and prove what he had done. There was no forensic evidence right now, no way to pin things on him definitively unless he was caught in the act or confessed.

This was the delicate balance of cases that the FBI always had to bear in mind: solving the case was one thing, but actually getting a result in court was another. And if no one saw justice for what had happened, and the perpetrator simply walked away to be able to kill again, what did it all matter?

Laura kept searching doggedly, working her way through the files. Another set of twins had the same kind of hair that she was looking for, but as she scrolled through their profile, she realized with a mounting sense of despair that she still had no idea what their faces really looked like. This could have been them. Could have, but was it?

Having long, dark, curly hair was not exactly a rare thing. Before she had even got all the way through the files, she had another pair of twins who fit the bill in terms of that description as well. Irritatingly, none of them posted anything that would make her able to identify them from their jobs. There was no waitress in an apron in any of the shots. There was no woman in a smart suit, not in a way that would definitively mean she was looking at the right person. They posted selfies with their friends, pictures of their special occasion dinners, vacation shots and date nights. But the mundane, the everyday, was not documented to the same extent.

In a way, Laura was glad, because it would mean it was harder for someone to track down these women the way that the killer was. But in a way, it did not help her at all. Because he had tracked someone down somehow, whichever of these twins it was, and he was going to kill them anyway. If she could not figure this out in time, their lives were over.

She finished working her way through the pile and looked down at the five files she had not been able to rule out. Two sets of twins who did not come up on social media at all. Three sets who had dark, curly, long hair. The final set she couldn’t quite be sure of, because neither of them had updated their social media profiles in such a long time. One of them had shorter hair, but the post was dated two years ago. Could she have grown it out since then? Could she match her sister now?

Laura put her head in her hands, trying to think. She couldn’t. She had no way to narrow this down any further, not without another vision to tell her where to find these girls. And she had no idea, still, who the killer could be. He had been as blank to her as the screen in front of her was now. All she knew was that he was a man, and that she might recognize his right hand if she saw it again up close, but that was all. And when it came down to it, what did a hand really look like? It wasn’t unique enough to pick it up out of a line-up. The information was almost useless to her.

And then it hit her again, like a ton of bricks: maybe the only reason she’d triggered a vision with this particular pile of files was because Ruby, Jade, Kevin, and Kenneth were located within it. Maybe that was the link to the killer, not the new file of tonight’s intended victims. The women she was looking for could still be in the other boxes.

It was enough to make her want to give up and scream.

A message alert beeped on her phone. She looked down to see that it was from Chief Rondelle. A brief, to-the-point missive: Amy Fallow has been taken in by her next of kin. Reported safe by CPS.

He’d obviously sent her the message because he didn’t want to distract her from the case with a phone call—or, more likely, didn’t want to get into a shouting match with Laura about why she couldn’t go visit and see for herself.

L

aura stared at the words on the screen miserably, feeling as though she was slowly sinking into a black hole of despair. She had an awful feeling about Amy, about what would happen to her now. Once before, Rondelle had reassured her that Amy was safe, that she was away from her father. Then she’d ended up right back where she started. Maybe that wasn’t an option now, with Fallow in police custody, but she still wasn’t sure that safe was the right word.