“I’m telling you I don’t have any enemies.”
“Maybe someone you’re making nervous.”
“I just got this information. I haven’t . . . done anything.” She was shaking her head, but the images of the women who looked like her, some alive and some dead, slid through her brain. “But it has to be him. It has to do with this whole dopplegänger thing,” she said, reluctantly releasing him to sink onto the couch.
“Has anyone ever tried to harm you?”
Her inner eye flashed on the attacker, a man in black, ski mask covering his face, leaping from the shadowy staircase of the parking structure. Terror sizzled through her, as it had that night.
“Kacey?” Trace prodded.
She let out her breath, and sensing she had a story to tell, he took her out to the front porch, where she whispered, “There was one time. But it was around seven years ago, when I lived in Seattle, still going to medical school.” She shuddered, remembering that day. She had been fighting a cold and was dead on her feet. It was late, and she’d spent hours in the library, on the computer, as hers had been ravaged by the latest virus.
Just before the library closed, she’d left, crossed to the parking garage where she’d parked her car, and taken the elevator to the si
xth floor.
She hadn’t seen him hiding near the stairwell, had been too busy fumbling with her keys and wishing she were already in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin and a cup of hot lemon water with a teaspoon of clover honey, her grandmother’s cure-all for everything, at her bedside.
As she walked to her car, she noticed that the lights in the garage seemed dim. Then she’d seen that two bulbs were smashed, the glass having rained onto the concrete floor.
All she’d been concerned with at that moment was that shards of glass might become embedded in her tires.
And then she’d heard something out of place—a quiet cough? Or the scrape of shoe leather? She’d started to turn. A glimpse out of the corner of her eye. A man leaping from the shadows near the stairwell. Dressed in black, some kind of body-fitting suit, a ski mask pulled over his head, he raised a hand as he jumped at her.
In his gloved fingers, a knife blade glinted.
She screamed, hit him with her purse, and tried to run. Too late. His weight came down on her. Bam, her forehead cracked against the concrete. Blood poured from her face as they wrestled. Adrenaline fired her blood, and she fought wildly, yelling and swearing, grabbing his wrist, forcing the blade away from her throat.
“Bitch!” he snarled, but there was another sound, that of a car’s engine starting a floor or two above.
His attention wavered, and she shifted beneath him, twisting his wrist, turning the knife upward, so that when he looked down, she sliced open the mask near his eye, a thin line of blood showing near his temple.
“Help! Help me!” she screamed and heard the car above heading down.
He heard it, too. Swearing viciously, he threw her away from him, leapt to his feet, and ran off just as the car, a white Volkswagen, turned the far corner and headed directly toward her.
She lifted an arm, and the driver, a woman about her age, stood on the brakes, then flew out of her car, leaving it idling as she cried, “Are you okay? What happened?” She recoiled at seeing Kacey’s bloody face but was already dialing 9-1-1.
Now Kacey relived the attack, feeling again that stone-cold fear that brought color to her cheeks and sweat to the back of her neck.
She told Trace about what had happened, how she’d escaped with her life, how the assault had seemed random, a crazy who was just waiting for his chance. He’d shown no interest in robbing her; he’d left her purse. Rape? Maybe. But she’d seen his eyes through the slits in his mask, and they, a steely blue, pupils dilated, were cold and deadly. Whether he first had planned to kidnap her, then sexually assault her or torture her, she didn’t know, but she was certain in those few desperate minutes that he intended to kill her.
“The police never found him?” Trace asked soberly.
“No. I know I cut him, but they collected no blood except my own. And so he’s out there, somewhere.”
“Bugging you?” Trace asked, inclining his head toward the closed door, behind which the mics that were still in place.
“Why?” she whispered aloud.
Trace didn’t immediately answer, and she said, “Shelly Bonaventure’s death was well planned, made to appear a suicide. Jocelyn Wallis fell into the river. Elle Alexander’s minivan slid off the road.... Those attacks took time and thought.”
“If they were attacks,” he reminded, but Kacey was on her own track.
“When I was fighting off the psycho in the parking garage, I thought he was a wack job, completely off the rails. Not the kind of person who would meticulously plan someone’s death.”
“Do you have security here?”