She was my subordinate at work, which was a major problem. She was Damon’s little sister, which disrespected our friendship, plus the guy would probably try to run me over with his truck if he found out I had hooked up with his sister. Then there was the third and sharpest point of the going-straight-to-hell pitchfork I was speared on. She made me forget about my wife. With the three women I’d picked up over the years, I’d just gone blank. I hadn’t felt anything beyond the physical. If I had tried to access my feelings, it would’ve been a vortex of missing my dead wife and wondering if I might as well have died when she did, since I was basically missing out on any ability to be present or feel things any longer. The numbness had set in when she was in hospice. I’d grieved the night she died, but mostly I’d walked through life in this fog of moving forward without feeling anything at all. Laura blazed back into town and turned everything Technicolor on me. I was waking up, painfully, and the fact that I cared about her wasn’t just unwelcome—it ached like an atrophied muscle I was trying to use again. It was too late. And it was plain wrong of me to pursue her or go to bed with her or lead her on like there was any future at all, even a week or two. I knew in my blood and bones that that part of my life was over. I couldn’t even reach the part of me that had existed once, idealistic and hopeful and capable of falling in love. I was a shell, walking a path, trying to protect my town and do the right thing. Tonight I’d done the wrong thing. And I didn’t know how to take it back. Worst of all, I didn’t know if I really wanted to.
I didn’t sleep at all, not even close. When I saw her in the kitchen at six-thirty, she just nodded to me, aloof. I didn’t know if she was just embarrassed or if she really regretted being with me. Either way, from the way she crossed her arms to the monosyllables she answered me with when I tried to talk to her, everything about her attitude said to leave her alone. We rode to work together in awkward silence. Clint was waiting when we walked in.
“We got a lead on who the guy is,” he said. “Some drifter out of West Virginia, been picked up a couple times for vagrancy and a few petty thefts over the last year. I got the department out of Huntington, where his last arrest was, to fax us the file on him.”
Clint handed me a sheaf of papers.
“Thanks, man. Good work,” I said, and went into my office to do some digging.
I logged in to a database and searched a few of his more recent arrests, all misdemeanor theft, one public indecency for pissing on board a municipal bus. I searched the local papers from around the time of his arrests to see if there was any media coverage. The last five times he was picked up for a petty crime, a young woman had disappeared from the area within forty-eight hours. Once or twice might have been a coincidence, but the unexplained disappearance of teenage girls occurring in a predictable interval from his release and as he left town was a pattern. A chilling one.
The time relationship was too circumstantial to tie him to any crimes without further evidence, but it was a damning trend. Further digging revealed that none of the five girls had been located, one of whom had been missing ten months now. They were probably dead, a string of shallow graves across a couple southern states. Souvenirs he took with him when the local cops hassled him. I looked at our records, but he hadn’t received any citations in our county. Not even anyone matching his description had been picked up for so much as public drunkenness. But if he was the guy with the hoodie, the one who bought the burner phone, then there had to be some link. I texted all the guys on my force and asked if they’d encountered the man in the photo I sent them. Then I had to grapple with the fact that what had looked like an isolated runaway or abduction was now shaping up like a serial homicide.
More than that. A killer with his sights set on Laura. I got on the intercom and asked Mrs. Rook to send her into my office. I didn’t care how uncomfortable the conversation was going to be. I had to warn her that this guy who was after her, who carved a warning into her car, could be more dangerous than we first thought.