Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

  This is the group Richard Davies has been targeting for three years.

  Allegedly.

  Two blocks away, a short, pear-shaped woman in a similar getup walks hurriedly along the sidewalk, a cheap glittery purse swinging at her hip. Charlotte slows her steps. Right now, she’s more afraid of having her cover blown by an encounter with a territorial working girl than she is of Richard Davies.

  A plain brown Toyota Camry with tinted windows rolls past her and slows to the curb right next to the woman. The Camry’s passenger-side window powers down. The woman turns to it instantly, recognizing a familiar call. Charlotte takes a deep breath.

  The brown Camry’s just one of several cars she was told to look out for—members of the ground team who will do their best to make sure that by the time Davies rolls up, Charlotte’s the only offer available. If they’re already at work, that means Davies is close.

  She reaches into her purse and takes out the burner phone they gave her. It’s set to vibrate and she didn’t feel it buzz, but she checks the display just to be sure. It’s loaded with a series of fake text messages from a fictional pimp. They’re disguised as directions, some of them laced in vague threats that aren’t too over the top. None of them is meant to direct her movements yet. Those will be written in an agreed-upon code she’s memorized.

  where u at? Slow your walk to a stroll.

  R u working? Turn right at the next intersection.

  Luv u girl, but need u to score. Turn left at the next intersection.

  need intel. how’s the street? Cross the street immediately.

  i’m talking 2 u. Davies’s truck is within sight. Stop immediately and hit a sales pose. Visible from the curb. Close to the nearest light source.

  why u never listen? Start walking again in the direction you were headed until you get further instructions.

  This strategy, combined with ground team members tying up all her competition, is intended to corral her and Davies into the same channel like cows to the slaughter.

  Yes, the earpiece would have made it easier, but so what?

  The worst thing that can happen tonight is she doesn’t get taken.

  But if her cover is blown, there’s no getting close to him again. If he doesn’t abduct her, then she doesn’t get to lay eyes on his kill spot. Then she doesn’t have proof he’s anything other than a creepy asshole. So even if she does get triggered somehow, she won’t have cause to go full Zypraxon on him, other than Cole Graydon’s assurances that he’s a bad, bad man, and how good are those anyway?

  Cole’s never lied to me, Charlotte tells herself. Manipulated me. Invaded my privacy. Treated me and the people I love like pawns in a chess game. Withheld information. But Cole’s never flat-out lied. Yet.

  The next gust of cold wind brings drizzle that needles her legs.

  If the rain starts up again, the microdrones can’t operate, and that’s not good at all.

  There’s another gust, dryer than the last one.

  That’s better.

  She puts the burner phone back in her purse, alongside the fake ID for Sara Ann Wakeman, a twenty-six-year-old high school dropout and meth fan from Clarkston, Washington, who doesn’t exist except in Charley’s imagination.

  Serial killers, for the most part, don’t interview their victims. Once they’ve got you in their clutches, you’ve become a prop in their sadistic fantasy. They aren’t interested in acquiring information about you that will distract them from the sick role they’ve forced on you. A john, on the other hand, might engage his chosen girl in a little preliminary chitchat. That’s why Charlotte had devised an extensive backstory for Sara designed to poke at Richard Davies’s psychological pressure points.

  Sara’s father cramped her style, so she ran away from home after stealing some of his cash. She wants to be an artist; she’s always been good with a BeDazzler. Every now and then, when Sara’s running low on funds, she calls the old bastard and cries into the phone for twenty minutes until he breaks down and sends her some money. He always caves. What a loser! Men are so obvious. Especially dumb dads.

  Over the past few weeks, Charlotte’s spent as much time researching the history of Washington State and towns like Clarkston and Cashmere as she has the lives of streetwalkers. In her heart, Sara’s got a longer story. A deeper, more complex story that put her on the path to victimhood by age seven. But Charley’s not out to change Davies’s thinking. She’s out to stop his killings in their tracks. So, the version she’ll present of Sara is shallow and crafted.

  Weaponized.

  At Cole’s request, she wrote up a dossier on her chosen alias—two thousand words, thank you very much!—a day or two after he gave her the file on Davies. For prep, the psychiatrist on Charley’s ground team had put her through a dozen interviews about Sara Ann Wakeman’s past.

  They weren’t just interviews. They were rehearsals.

  Acting comes naturally to her for someone who’d never spent a day in the high school drama club. God knows, when she was young she had to put on enough performances as the star of her father’s traveling carny show about her gruesome past. So many that the first thing she did after she fled to her grandmother’s at age sixteen was find ways to work with written words. In privacy and silence. She edited, but never wrote, for her new high school’s literary magazine and newspaper, two activities that cut down on her contact with other people and allowed her to use language to make the world seem more orderly and knowable.

  But after her grandmother died and she won the lawsuit against her father, giving her a modest portion of the money he made off her when she was a girl, she decided to take a cross-country road trip, alone, to visit the graves of everyone the Bannings had murdered during her time on their farm.

  A few days in, she found herself alone in a roadside café in Amarillo, Texas, eating some of the best chicken-fried steak she’d ever tasted, struck by the realization that if she wanted to she could change everything about herself. Not in terms of wealth or her profession—the lawsuit hadn’t given her that much money—but in terms of how she walked into a room. How she talked. How, in each and every moment, she chose to just be.

  Should she change her accent?

  Should she glare back at strange men instead of turning away from their unwanted attention?

  Should she laugh uproariously when she thought a joke was funny instead of biting back her guffaws for fear of drawing too much attention to herself?

  It suddenly had felt as if her entire identity was composed of choices meant to please or repel the people who’d been in her life. And who was left? Her grandmother was dead. Her only close friend was the lawyer who’d won her lawsuit against her dad. And she’d given herself a new name meant to protect her from the Bannings’ obsessed fans.

  If she was free to roam, maybe she was also free to pretend.

  And so, when the waitress brought her bill that afternoon, Charlotte became Sammy, a college student from UCLA who’d dropped out to move in with her boyfriend in Miami and was maybe going to work with animals because she really loved dogs and cats but probably dogs more if she had to make a choice.

  God, it had felt good. Like scratching an itch. Finally, she was someone whose past wasn’t draped in murder and loss.

  At a Cracker Barrel in Lubbock, Texas, she donned a New York accent and explained to the family seated next to her how her parents had money and they’d bought her a car and told her to go on a road trip through the South because she was turning into one of those Northeast bigots who thought everyone south of Kentucky was an inbred fool. The family was from Dallas, so their eyes lit up as she described what they clearly thought was a worthwhile venture. They even offered to buy their new friend, Heidi, some dessert. Heidi declined. That would be taking things a little too far. She wasn’t out to swindle people.

  Charlotte told herself these tissues of lies were the only way to discover who she truly was underneath. After a week of pretending to be someone else to strangers, she was conf
ident the fundamentals of her character would pull back against the fake accents and the made-up stories, revealing who she was meant to become before her mother was slaughtered and her life derailed.

  She’s never been a drinker, but she imagines that the joy and freedom she felt during those few days of lying to waiters, waitresses, and other road trippers were similar to what an alcoholic feels while they’re on a good run.

  There were no rules, no limits. Along the way, she realized that most of what she’d done from moment to moment throughout her life was just a habit that could be unchosen with enough forethought.

  But the insight she craved never came.

  The true Trina Pierce, or Charlotte Rowe, or Burning Girl, wasn’t finally coaxed out of hiding by all the lies, demanding to be seen and recognized once and for all. Worse, Charley could no longer ignore that most of the anecdotes and pieces of trivia she’d used to construct her false identities had come from her grandmother’s close circle of friends back in Altamira, California, the same ones she’d abandoned because just a glimpse of them around town made her smell her grandmother’s perfume.

  By the time she’d reached New Orleans, the first stop in her gravesite tour, she was overcome by a sense of loneliness so acute, she pulled over to the side of the road and wept for the first time since Grandma Luanne’s funeral. Maybe it was just guilt over having lied to so many people. Or maybe what she’d really coaxed to the surface was her grief for her grandmother, still raw and beating like a second heart a year after the remarkable woman’s death.

  She’s not that lonely anymore, thank God.

  One of the unexpected perks of Dylan Cody’s—Noah Turlington’s—deception was that it drove her back into the bosom of the only place she’d ever considered a hometown.

  That’s where she reunited with Luke Prescott.

  A different, better version of Luke than the one she knew in high school.

  But thinking of Luke now isn’t a comfort. It only reminds her of how close he was the last time she did something like this. This time, having him nearby wasn’t an option. This time he had to stay in Altamira while she prepped and practiced and waited for Davies to escalate. Cole made that clear. And she didn’t fight him on it.

  Maybe she should have. Despite the number of people currently monitoring her every move, she feels surprisingly alone.

  She’s got a dozen unwritten text messages to Luke floating around in her head still. Right before she stepped from the back of the transport truck, she almost broke down and sent him one. But her support team would have seen, and then they would have reported it. And besides, she and Luke made an agreement before she shipped out: If she did get in touch, he’d only want to ask questions she couldn’t answer. How was she would lead to where was she, which would careen into how much longer. Why put themselves through that torture? No communication was better, they agreed.

  It doesn’t feel that way now.

  She’s afraid. Not of dying, but of what she’ll see when she enters the belly of the beast. And she’s afraid of what will happen to her sanity in the long run since she’s barred from talking about any of it with Luke once she’s home.

  The phone buzzes in her purse.

  i’m talking 2 u.

  She almost curses.

  Instead, she starts for the nearest lamppost, turns to face the street, and leans against it.

  A glance to her right. No sign of the pear-shaped woman or the brown Camry.

  She returns her attention to the street, and that’s when she spots Richard Davies’s brown pickup truck headed straight for her. The headlights blind her for an instant, then she can see again.

  The truck’s slowing down.

  7

  Richard can’t get a good look at the girl until he powers the driver’s side window down. That’s when she uncrosses her arms and steps forward.

  She’s too young, he thinks. Not a kid. He wouldn’t even pull over for a kid. She’s just not the age of his usual prey. Not as broken down.

  “How yah doing, mister?” There’s a defiant tone in her voice, and her expression’s searching and a little hard.

  Not nearly as desperate as what he’s used to.

  Not like Mom. But before this little whisper in his ear can make his stomach swim with sickness, another one answers it. More like Stephanie. She thinks she’s too good to be out here. Too good for you. That’s interesting.

  “I’m good,” he answers. “How you doing?”

  “All right. It’s kinda cold out. What you looking for?”

  “Nothing complicated. Car stuff.”

  She steps closer, leans her head in through the window. “I don’t know much about cars, but I’m willing to learn about you, handsome.”

  Oh, you’ll learn, bitch.

  “How’s whatever fifty bucks’ll get me sound?”

  She takes her time considering this. She probably wants to charge more. Probably thinks she’s worth it, but she’s reconsidering because he’s not twenty pounds overweight and doesn’t reek of body odor. “Oh, it’ll get you something good,” she says with a smile that looks more genuine than the last one.

  “You need some of it now?” he asks, playing the part of the good, honest, decent john.

  “Nah. Payment for services rendered’s just fine.”

  “You need to see it?”

  “You seem like a reliable guy.”

  He unlocks the doors. “Hop in.”

  She does. When he takes his foot off the brake, the nerves in his legs are tingling with excitement, and there’s a stirring in his groin similar to the one he felt when Stephanie handled his wallet. “You new around here?”

  “Kinda. Yeah.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Far enough away.” She turns and gives him a grin. He can’t tell if she’s telling him to mind his own business or trying to pass herself off as some kind of free spirit. “Dad kinda cramped my style, you know?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just . . . bullshit. Expectations. That kind of thing. I mean, he’s some fucking dirt farmer. What does he know about life?”

  A lot more than you do, you stupid little whore.

  “Dads can be a pain,” he says.

  “You’re telling me. But it helps if they’ve got a bad hiding place for their cash, if you know what I mean. Helps you get the hell away from ’em.”

  He tries not to grit his teeth. He does it sometimes when he’s angry and sometimes when he’s excited. One time he even cracked one.

  “How ’bout over here?” he asks, pointing to the alleyway up ahead.

  “Whatever’s clever, handsome.”

  8

  Cole’s feeling a sudden burst of performance anxiety so strong he might as well be the one inside Richard Davies’s pickup. Then he notices something on the screen monitoring Charley’s vital signs. “Why is her pulse dropping?”

  “It’s not abnormal.” The tech who answers, the balding one with the fine-boned face, hasn’t said anything up until now, probably because his work just started a little while ago. He’s in charge of monitoring Charley’s vital signs, and out of some show of respect for her privacy, they kept that particular monitor dark until she stepped out from the back of the transport truck.

  “She just got in a car with a serial killer. I’d say a drop in heart rate’s pretty abnormal. Give me her blood ox.”

  The balding tech nods, taps keys on his computer. The boxes displaying Charley’s vitals shift and change size so her blood oxygen reading can pop out to dominate the lower left quadrant.

  96%, it proclaims in Day-Glo orange.

  Normal, especially when Cole considers what it might reach before the night’s over.

  Blood trackers have been circulating through Charlotte’s body for months. To the control center and to a central lab facility farther away, they transmit a constant stream of data about almost every chemical interaction happening in her bloodstream. Protein levels, white and red blood cell counts
, you name it. The second any of her levels become abnormal outside of a testing period, Cole gets an immediate call from the lab.

  Someday this kind of technology will be implanted in anyone who can afford it, alerting them to see a doctor the minute they show even the slightest sign of heart attack, stroke, or generalized pathology.

  For now, no one can afford it. Except Cole, which is why he injected it into Charley a few months before. So far, the data compiled has proved one remarkable fact again and again—Charlotte’s body remains unchanged even after multiple exposures to Zypraxon.

  “She’s breathing deeply,” the med tech says.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “No, I mean she’s making an effort to. It’s not her usual pattern. It’s almost . . . meditative.”

  “She’s meditating. In a car. With a serial killer.”

  “So she can stay focused maybe?” The female tech speaks more confidently now that Ed’s out of the room.

  Charley’s trying not to trigger, Cole realizes, and a chill goes through him.

  She’s alone in a car with a psychopath, and she’s got something in her veins that allows her to tear through five boa constrictors at once with her bare hands, but she’s making sure not to use it until the time is right. The last time Charlotte did something like this, she got so caught up in her strategy for hooking a killer she forgot the most important thing she needed to do—be afraid. Frederick Pemberton had knocked her unconscious before he could scare Zypraxon into working its magic. Now, Charlotte’s trying to re-create her old mistake for a very simple reason: she doesn’t want to burn up her three hours of Zypraxon time before she gets to Davies’s kill site.

  For maybe the hundredth time in the past few months, Cole thinks, You really are something, Burning Girl. Even though he’d never use that dreaded nickname to her face.