Already Trapped (Laura Frost FBI)

Brady shook his head again, minutely, silently.

Laura bit her lip. Looking at him, she didn’t know what to think. When she’d touched him as they brought him in from the car, she’d felt nothing. No solid vision, not even an aura or shadow touching him. Nothing to give her a clue as to whether he was connected to all of this or not.

On the one hand, he struck her as someone who was just scared. Traumatized. Unable to cope with grief. Mostly harmless, stuck in one place. But on the other hand, she knew that conditions like this could be deceptive. That the harm could be hidden under the surface, triggered only when something powerful let it out.

She glanced at Nate, trying to catch his eye, but he wasn’t looking at her. She had to make an executive decision herself here.

“All right, Brady,” she said, standing up. “You wait here. We’ll be back later.” She ended the interview, turning to walk out of the room, waiting in the corridor outside for Nate to follow her and shut the door behind him.

“Well?” Nate asked, when it was just the two of them. His manner was blunt, brusque. “You’ve obviously come to some kind of conclusion.”

“Far from it,” Laura said, biting her lip to stop herself from reacting badly. “He’s too messed up. Without a confession or solid proof, I don’t know that we can call this case closed just yet. It might not be him.”

“He fits all the marks we’re looking for,” Nate said. “Deceased twin brother. Psychological issues. History of admitted stalking. No alibi.”

“And yet,” Laura said, letting the phrase hang in the air.

Nate sighed heavily. He glanced up. From here, just down the hall, they could see one window that led outside, to a courtyard where vans could roll up to the precinct in case prisoner transport was required. The light out there was getting dim. “We better hope it is closed. Because if it isn’t, it’s getting into the right time of evening for the killer to strike again.”

Laura followed his gaze to the window, a feeling of dread welling up inside of her.

They had a suspect in custody. Two suspects, in fact. So why did it feel like the worst was yet to come?

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Laura sat at her desk in the precinct, pressing her hands against her temples. The boxes of files were still surrounding the whole space, leaving her with only enough room to rest her elbows on top of the desk and stare ahead at the screen of the computer they’d assigned to her. She felt hemmed in, in more ways than one.

Nate was already acting like they had their man. He was organizing all the necessary strands of investigation, tasking Detective Frome and his colleagues with all the admin that would need to be done. It was a huge task, and daunting enough if they had it right.

Laura wasn’t convinced at all that they had it right.

In fact, the more she thought about it, the less she believed that Brady Seabrooke was their man. He just didn’t fit with the very little she had been able to see in her visions. The hand she’d seen holding the coffee cup was slim and white, the nails neatly kept and cropped short, clean and tidy. There was no dirt under those nails, and if Brady was in the habit of hiding behind bushes every night of the week, the dirt would be there.

And it was more than that. If the killer was going to strike again tonight, then the visions she had seen of him stalking the new twins had to take place today. It was daylight when they were out at the café, when they were walking around. Getting on for evening when she’d seen them meet up and head to the station together, or in the first set of visions, watching the smartly dressed one walk home.

So, if the killer had to have been stalking them even in the last few hours, then he couldn’t be Brady Seabrooke. She knew where Brady had been during that time. Crouched behind a row of bushes, and then here at the precinct.

There wouldn’t, surely, have been enough time for him to watch them and then head over to the house and find his hiding place.

Which meant that the killer was still out there—and all the while, Nate and most of the other cops in the precinct were switching their attention from catching a killer to investigating a suspect they already had in custody. They were letting their guard down. And that meant that the twins she’d seen were still in danger.

Either of them could be about to die. Maybe both.

Laura stood abruptly and thrust her hand down the side of the box of files she hadn’t yet opened, in the narrow

gap between the files themselves and the inside of the box. She gasped lightly as she felt paper cuts opening up, but that was nothing compared to the spike of pain in her head, the one she had been hoping desperately to trigger—

Laura was standing on the street somewhere near a subway station—not the same one as before; somewhere different. She could only see it from the corner of her eye, half cut off, the sign not visible. She wanted to scream. She tried so hard to look, to read the sign, but she couldn’t.

She couldn’t, because the eyes of the person she was seeing through were fixed somewhere else. On the twins. The same women that she had seen before.

They were dressed the same way. Their hair the same. Everything about them the same. The waitress had just come from work in her casual clothes, her sister dressed in the smart skirt suit. They had gotten on the subway, and he had followed them—maybe beaten them in a car—come out here to wait. And now here they were, walking down the road arm in arm in front of him.

Laura watched them with a sinking sense of despair. She knew it was him. He didn’t lift his arm into her vision, didn’t look down at himself, but she knew she was seeing them through his eyes.

And if she was still seeing them through his eyes in a vision now, then it was still going to happen.

It wasn’t Brady Seabrooke. It wasn’t Dr. Fairmont.