She wrenched herself to the side, pretending she was trying to get away from the killer but really just trying to get herself closer to the gun. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded, yelling it into his face. “Why are you killing all these women?”
“I b-b-b-b…”
The killer stopped moving so frantically, slowing down, concentrating on his words and not on trying to strangle her. The combination of the stutter and the fact that he had stopped moving allowed Laura to finally get a good look at his face, and it nearly froze her in shock.
It was him. The actor she had asked for directions in the theater. The one who’d told her his coach was backstage, only for Laura to find out that she’d left the whole building already. He had been trying to delay her.
He hadn’t delayed her enough. Laura had jogged all the way down the street until she caught up with them. Geneveive Piper couldn’t have known she was being followed: she would have walked at a gentle pace.
He had tried to fool her, to throw her off, and it hadn’t worked.
“What?” Laura said again, seeing the strain on his face, the way he fought over the ‘B’ sound. He couldn’t get it out, not with the agitation of the fight throwing off any tactics he would normally use to overcome his stutter. She wanted to push him, to distract him more. Anything she could find, any little weakness, she wasn’t going to hesitate to use it against him and save her own life. “I can’t understand you. What are you saying?”
He started again, his face contorting in fury. “You b-b-b-b-! I b- I b- I had to stop these b-b-b-b-!”
Laura felt him shift just a little, his weight coming off her left shoulder as he tried to get the words out. As he gave in to a blind fury that was consuming him, that threatened to make him even more violent, to put her in more danger –
As he lifted his weight, she reached. She didn’t hesitate. She felt her fingers close on the gun and swung it around, twisting her fingers until it was held in the correct grip, pointing it at him. She took only a single second to aim and then she squeezed the trigger, just as –
Just as, out of nowhere, Nate tackled the killer and pushed him off Laura, to the ground, both of them rolling away from her and over the sidewalk into the road.
Laura couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t hear anything over the high-pitched ringing in her ears from discharging her weapon twice in a short timeframe, close to her own head. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t dare to.
She’d hit him. She’d hit him, she knew. This was it. This was the shadow of death that she had been waiting for, and it had been her fault all along. She’d fired just as Nate had jumped, and she had been the one to kill him.
She’d killed him.
Nate was dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
Laura lay on the road with her eyes closed, no longer wanting to get up. She had killed her partner. What point was there in moving, in trying to defend herself? She’d failed him, in the worst possible way. Everyone she touched ended up worse off, and now Nate…
“You’re under arrest for murder, and for assault on an FBI agent,” Nate said, and Laura found the strength to move her head and open her eyes. To look. To see him, kneeling in the road, his knee on the back of the killer to pin him down. He was pulling handcuffs off his belt, putting them on the wrists of the man who was crying out wordlessly below him.
He was kneeling. Breathing. Talking. He was alive.
Nate was alive!
Laura sat up rapidly, then stopped, her head spinning. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She wasn’t even sure if it was real. Was this a guilt hallucination, or the real thing?
“Laura?” Nate said, looking at her in concern. In the near-dark, he was like a phantom, Black man in a black suit kneeling on black tarmac. Or maybe it was the fear that had wrecked her vision. “Are you injured?”
“No,” she said at last. Something in her head clicked into place. Nate was real. He was alive. He was right there in front of her. They had the killer in handcuffs.
They’d done it.
“You sure?” Nate said. He was grabbing a phone out of his pocket, ready to call for backup.
“Just winded,” Laura said. She stood up slowly and dusted herself down, glancing back along the road. “I’m going to go find his intended victim. You’ll be alright?”
“He’s not going anywhere,” Nate said, nodding. “You hit him in the shoulder.”
“I hit him in the shoulder,” Laura repeated to herself.
Nate was alive, and her vision had led her right to where the killer would be, and she’d saved a woman’s life.
Laura allowed herself to smile as she set off walking, limping slightly, heading around the corner to see if Genevieve Piper had waited for help or run away – keeping her eyes open for a dropped knife that would be the final nail in the coffin for the killer’s defense.