Already Trapped (Laura Frost FBI)

“Sorry,” the manager stuttered, going slightly red in the cheeks. “We don’t really socialize. We’re just here to work. He’s always been very quiet.”

Laura wheeled around, glaring an I-told-you-so at Nate, before stalking out of the office building. She had to. She was too annoyed to stay there and talk to the man. She was going to start yelling at him, and that wouldn’t get them anywhere.

Nate finished up talking with him, Laura watching them both through the windows as she leaned against the car. She wrapped her jacket tighter around herself against the chill of the day. It was starting to get later already. The evening wasn’t quite setting in yet, but she was losing hope that they would get anywhere before it did.

And once it got dark, the women she had seen in her vision were in danger. If her pattern prediction was correct, they could both die tonight. The killer might be waiting in one or the other’s apartment, even now.

“Hey,” Nate called out, jogging over to her from the doors of the office. “What was all that about?”

“I just want to get this solved,” Laura said, still fuming. “Don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Nate said. He paused, then looked at her again. “Hey, the car crash you said killed his brother.”

“Davey Seabrooke.” Laura nodded.

“Was there anyone else in the vehicle?”

For a moment, Laura didn’t know why he was asking. But then her eyes widened in realization. She pulled up the artic

le she had read again, scrolling through it hurriedly. “Yes,” she said. “Wait, no—not in the vehicle with the twins. They were alone. Davey was killed outright as the driver’s side was crushed, and Brady survived with only a few injuries. But the other car—it was occupied only by the driver, and it was the passenger side at the rear that slammed into the Seabrookes. He was fine. Just minor whiplash and nothing else.”

“Is he local?” Nate asked.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “His name is given as Tom Jeffries.”

Nate pulled out his own cell phone, making a quick search. “There’s a Thomas Jeffries listed in the online phone book,” he said. “He’s still local, if it’s the same one.”

“So?” Laura asked.

“So,” Nate said, giving her a look over the top of the car as he walked around to the other side. “If I was a psychotic murderer trying to kill other random twins to make them feel my pain, I’d sure as hell want to make sure that one person suffered more than anyone else. The person who made me feel that pain in the first place.”

Laura wrenched open the door of the car, almost stumbling in her haste to get in. “Give me the zip code,” she said, her hand fumbling toward the GPS.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Laura’s head ducked and whipped backwards and forwards as she peered through the windshield and both windows, looking desperately in all directions. Beside her, Nate was doing much the same, examining every property they went past and every person on the street.

“There,” he exclaimed, pointing at a house just ahead of them. “That’s it. Number fifteen.”

Laura moved the car closer, speeding up a little to get there faster. Almost in the same moment that she hit the accelerator, however, instinct drove her to hit the brake again—to stop the car before they passed a man who was crouching behind the bushes next to the house.

The rapid movement of the car and the squeal of the brakes caught his attention, and he looked around at them. It was an almost comical moment. This thin, tall, dark-haired man staring at them wide-eyed, and them staring back at him from the car. For a moment, nobody moved.

Then he shot to his feet and ran, and Laura cursed out loud as he took off between the two houses and toward the area of their backyards.

“Stay in the car and drive around,” Nate barked at her, already shoving his door open. “I’ll go on foot—we can cut him off!”

Laura didn’t have time to argue with him. Again, she found herself useless, untethered without anything to trigger a vision. She didn’t even know for sure who the man they had seen was, although she had a good idea. He was older than the picture that had been in the paper, and thinner, as though it had been a lot longer than a year since it all happened. But he definitely looked a whole lot like Brady Seabrooke.

She clocked the map on the GPS; ahead, the road was a dead end, a residential cul-de-sac that went nowhere. Behind, though, she could get back to where the road curved around. Nate was already gone, his door slamming shut when he was already feet away, and Laura quickly put the car into drive to perform a U-turn in the middle of the street.

She shot back along the road and down the next one, taking the turn as fast as she dared while also keeping her eyes open for their suspect running right in front of her. She didn’t want to hit him and kill him with the car—that would have been supremely ironic as well as the kind of thing that would get her conduct on the case investigated—but all the same, they couldn’t risk him getting away just because she’d been too tentative.

She tried to make calculations in her head, working with too many unknown and unknowable variables. Had the time she needed to swing the car around nullified the time she saved by moving in a car rather than on foot? Would he be delayed by jumping a fence? Had Nate caught him somewhere back there already?

Laura flashed down the road with her heart in her mouth, one foot so ready on the brake it was like her finger resting on the trigger of a gun. That was the only thing that saved him. When he darted across the road in front of her, looking back at Nate instead of where he was going, she hit the brake so fast the seatbelt nearly choked her. She grazed him with the car, making him stumble to the side and then trip over his own feet to fall down.

He sat there in the road, looking up at her with a dazed expression, as Nate grabbed him and pulled out his handcuffs.