The two-way mirror was behind her, and she wondered if Special Agents Lee and Samson were back there. To say Riley was nervous as hell that she’d screw this up was an understatement. She didn’t want to say or do anything that could affect Shawna’s, Brynn’s, or Emery’s cases. She didn’t want to disappoint the detectives or special agents who had put so much faith in her abilities.
While the lawyers discussed a few things across the table, Anders still only had eyes for Riley. He was an unremarkable-looking man. Not attractive or unattractive. Average height and build. There were dark rings under his dull blue eyes; she suspected he hadn’t been sleeping well. She liked the idea that she was the reason for his tormented rest.
There was a slight curve of his nose that had no doubt been broken, and a faint scar lined his chin. His beating had been extensive if he’d been out of commission for four months. Howard had said that Anders had a court-appointed lawyer because he couldn’t afford one of his own. Was that because his medical expenses had eaten up what little money he had, or was he unable to pay that either? She had to imagine a bill for four months of care would be astronomical without a stellar health care plan.
It was then that Riley realized the talking had quieted, as had her frantic nerves. Something like calm had settled over her now that she sat here in front of Anders. Had someone asked her something?
“The floor is yours, Anders,” his lawyer said.
Anders adjusted himself in his chair, the chains on his handcuffs clanging on the table. His lip curled at the sound. “How did you come to be in possession of my cameras?”
Riley’s posture was relaxed, her back pressed firmly against the backrest. With her legs crossed, she placed her folded hands in her lap. “My friend bought them from a thrift store. There was film inside one of the cameras, so we sent it off to get developed. One of those found-footage stories you hear about on the news, you know? We thought there might be something of historical significance on the film.”
Anders clenched his jaw. “How did the picture end up in the possession of the reporter?”
“I brought it to him,” she said, knowing the matter-of-fact tone would annoy him even more. “When I saw Shawna on the roll of film, I knew Emery must have been one of your victims, too.”
“Not mine,” Anders said. “I was paid to do a job and I did it. That’s all. Doing your job isn’t a crime.”
“What he did with the information wasn’t any business of yours, I know,” she said, keeping her tone just shy of bored. “You told him Brynn was a mistake, though. You knew what he was doing and offered advice on what to do better next time, didn’t you?”
Anders bristled.
“You don’t have to answer that,” his lawyer said.
Riley said, “You told him that victims like Shawna were better targets. Women the media cared less about. Women who didn’t have parents with fat checkbooks. If he chose better targets, it meant he had women to kidnap, rape, and kill, and you had money flowing into your account. Who cares what happened to these women as long as you got paid, right? You might not have killed them with your bare hands, but you gave him advice on how to be smarter. Win-win for you both.”
Anders lurched forward, the table’s edge pressing into his chest. His lawyer leaned over, attempting to offer counsel, but Anders ignored him. Riley willed herself not to flinch away from Anders. Up until now, he’d been as mild-mannered as his appearance. Now real hints of a temper, of a personality, were poking through. His blue eyes darted wildly, as if he looked at every inch of her face, he’d figure out where he’d gone wrong. All his building rage spilled out in one desperate word: “How?”
She offered him nothing but a smug little smile.
His face grew so flushed, it was nearly purple. It was occurring to her as she sat here, reveling in the knowledge that she’d figured out how to push this stranger’s buttons, that something similar had happened the first time she’d met Francis Hank Carras. She’d slipped into a flirtatious persona as a means to get information out of him. She’d chalked up the transformation to Jade’s assessment that Riley was an incorrigible flirt—at least she had been back in college. Now, with Anders, she was smug and nonchalant.
She realized that this was part of her psychic gift, too. Her clairsentience allowed her to sense emotions, not just of the dead, but the living. Not as strongly as Olivia could, but what Riley had always thought of as an ability to figure out how people tick was more an ability to feel their emotions and shift her behaviors based on them. Hank responded to flirting. Anders responded to what he perceived as a slight to his intellect.
“How what?” she asked, having taken an excessively long time to reply, solely to rankle him further.
“How. Did. You. Find me?” he snapped, slamming his fists on the table, making both lawyers and the chains of his cuffs jump.
“Easy,” Detective Howard said.
Riley cocked her head at Anders. “What, because you were so careful?” She chuckled softly.
“Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ve been called a ghost. No one can see me. Except you did. I want to know how.” He cocked his head too, mirroring her. “Where did you get your name?”
“Excuse me?”
“Clair4U,” he said. “Your name is Riley, not Clair. So where did you get it?”
“I made it up.”
“Liar,” he said. “You know, there’s a rumor that the anonymous source who led police to Emery is a psychic. A clairvoyant. I mean, it seems fairly outlandish that after sixteen years, someone walking in the area with a metal detector looking for loose change happens upon a metal drum buried five feet underground.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re bent out of shape because a twenty-five-year-old waitress found your secrets and you’re trying to find a way to soothe your ego? The only way anyone would ever outwit the brilliant Anders Pedersen is if the supernatural is involved. How could you possibly compete with that, right?”
He glared at her.
Riley told him about the John Anderson business card Brynn’s mother had found, the Wayback Machine, the handle he used as both his registrar and on review sites to complain about overpriced sandwiches. She told him about the negatives she found hidden in his camera bag. None of that had been supernatural.
As she spoke, he went from purple to ashen gray.
“I have a question for you,” she said. “Does the name Gunnar Lowry mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
“Probably. He called in a tip to the police that the guy who tried to snatch Brooke Winters off the street is the same guy he caught spying on his girlfriend Kendra.”
Anders worked his jaw. “I guess Axel or Gage wasn’t that far off,” he muttered, more to himself it seemed than to her.
“Your composite sketch was all over the news. It was a pretty good likeness, too. Turns out that after Gunnar knocked you around, he went through your wallet and found your ID. He committed your name to memory, just in case.”
Anders swallowed.
“He saw your picture on the news and realized it was the same man whose face he smashed in some four months ago,” she said. “You said you were a ghost? Gunnar saw you long before I did.”
“I was fine until he assaulted me,” Anders snapped. “Has he been arrested? He almost killed me. Aggravated assault is still a crime in this country, the last I heard. What he did was worse than anything I’ve done.”
“Why were you watching Kendra?” Riley asked.
“Because I was paid to,” Anders said, the words slipping out without thought.
His lawyer winced beside him and tried to whisper counsel again, only to have Anders wave him off.
“That’s just what you do then? Watch people for money?”
“It’s not as crude as you make it sound,” Anders grumbled.
She cocked a brow at him.
“There’s not much difference between what I do and what a private investigator does. A man was heartbro
ken over his breakup with Kendra, so he paid me to find her when she stopped answering his calls,” Anders said, indignant. “I help husbands find wives who have run off with their kids. I catch cheaters in the act.”
“And help serial killers find their next victim.”
“All I do is find the information I’m paid to find. I can’t be held responsible for what my clients do with it.”
“Intent has to count for something,” Riley said, leaning forward. “You’re not a dumb guy, Anders. You knew. You knew what he was doing and you kept helping him. You sentenced each one of those women to death because you cared more about the number in your bank account than you did about the fact that those women were people. They had families and friends and lives and you gave this guy a road map on how to end all of that.”
Anders stared at her for a long beat, then sat back. “I’m done talking.”
The man standing vigil by the door took a few steps forward. Riley’s attention swiveled toward him.
“Ask him about tomorrow’s storm.”
“What?” she hissed, realizing too late that she’d just spoken to a ghost while in the company of several people, including a psychopath.
“Tomorrow’s storm,” the man said, standing at the end of the table opposite Howard. “Ask him.”
Riley inwardly groaned. Anders wasn’t exactly the kind of person she wanted to share this secret with. Why did this man want to talk about the weather of all things?
Tomorrow’s storm.
Tomorrow’s storm.
Tomorrow’s storm.
Ugh! He was even more persistent than Brynn had been.
“What do you know about tomorrow’s storm?” Riley asked.
Her lawyer leaned over to say there wasn’t a storm on the horizon, but Anders cut her off. “Why would you ask me that?”
An image flashed in her head of a boat floating among chunks of ice.
“It was the name of a boat.” Riley glanced at the man beside the table and recognized the similarities now. They would have had the same nose had Anders’ not been broken recently. Her gaze returned to Anders’s pale face. “Your father’s boat, to be exact.”
His full blue eyes scanned every inch of her, his mind no doubt working overtime. “I’m done talking,” he finally repeated, but she noted sweat dotting his brow.
She tried a few other tactics to get him to talk, but he’d fully shut down on her.
“I think my client is done,” Anders’s lawyer finally said.
She pushed out of her chair, disgusted with him. Even now, there wasn’t a shred of remorse in him. The whole time she talked to him, he was looking for an out, a way to convince whoever was listening that he was innocent, and that all the blame was on Bruce.
Anders’s father lingered by the door again. When she looked at him, a word popped into her head. She turned back to Anders.
“Was your father’s name Magnus?”
Anders’s gaze scanned the area behind Riley. The raw hope on his face shone through for only a moment before he shielded it. “My father’s name wouldn’t have been hard to find.”
She knew then that he knew what was happening here. Her sixth sense tingled. Magnus was beside her now. In her ear, he whispered something, then vanished. The message made absolutely no sense to her, but she repeated it anyway. “Your father says you’re standing with your beard in the mailbox.”
Both lawyers in the room looked at her as if she’d spoken in tongues. Anders’s mouth, however, had dropped open.
He quickly turned in his chair, looking left and right, but was limited by his cuffs. “Is he here?”
“Not anymore,” Riley said. “You were right about the clair thing. All I can tell you is that they don’t show up for just anyone, and they don’t show up without a reason. I suggest you listen.”
CHAPTER 28
Over the course of the next few weeks, Riley got updates about the case. Detective Howard, Detective McGregor, and Carter Quincy called, emailed, or texted her on what felt like a rotating basis. She didn’t hear directly from Special Agents Samson and Lee again.
A couple of days after Riley’s chat with Anders, he decided he was ready to talk. The message she had relayed to him, she learned later, was the translation of a common Norwegian saying that had been used often by his late father. It was a saying about getting caught up in other people’s problems and getting trapped because if it. Anders told Detective Howard that he’d had a tumultuous relationship with his father, and yet it had been his father’s words from beyond the grave that had finally swayed the man to fess up to what he’d done.
“I don’t think the guy suddenly had a change of heart or anything,” Howard told her. “He doesn’t seem to have much of a conscience. But I do think Anders believes in the afterlife and the idea of not confessing to his role in the murders made him twitchy. I think Anders is nervous about the idea of running into pissed-off dear ol’ dad when takes his final dirt nap.”
“Always covering his own ass,” Riley said.
“Basically. He’s rolling over on Bruce now. Anders is under the impression that if he gives us everything we need, it will lessen his sentence. He’s on the books for Brooke’s attack, as well as being the Nob Hill Prowler. Not only did Gunnar Lowry call in a tip about him, but so did a Tracy Kirk. Apparently she used to date the guy and recognized him from the composite sketch. And—my personal favorite—is a teenager who works at Epicurean Subs called in saying the composite sketch looked like a guy who screamed at her for two solid minutes about his sandwich being made with the wrong cheese.”
Ha! She knew it.
She wondered what Tracy Kirk was like. The idea of dating Anders Pedersen was nothing short of horrifying. “Any idea where Bruce is?”
“The FBI is working on that with us,” Howard said. “Last I heard, a team of cybercrime guys were scouring both Anders’s computer and the dark corners of the web chasing down every place rangefinderanders has been. They’ll find the guy eventually.”
“Did you find the other cartridge of film?” Riley asked, knowing that yesterday, Nina had gotten a vision about a cartridge taped to the back of Anders’s headboard.
“Yep. All this may all still be circumstantial, but the amount of it piling up is going to make it nearly impossible to say Anders didn’t actively stalk women for Bruce knowing full well that the women would end up dead. How all of this will hold up in a court? I don’t know. That’ll be up to a jury to decide.”
Carol and Marty both got their fifteen minutes of fame, too, when the FBI and police both dropped by their shops to question them about the storage unit purchased in Clovis. Marty had called Riley after the FBI had left, telling her how she’d handed the bomber jacket with the blood on the cuff to Special Agent Lee.
“This was the most exciting day of my life!” Marty had told her.
Carol, in contrast, had cried when Riley talked to her, relieved that the woman in the yellow dress who had briefly graced her store had found some semblance of peace.
Two weeks later, Bruce Trager was found living in suburbia outside of Denver, Colorado. He’d been a long-haul truck driver for two decades and had grown up as a military brat. He spent most of his childhood moving from place to place, and once he was an adult, he got a job that allowed him to keep moving. As an avid outdoorsman, he knew his way around recreational areas, wildlife reserves, and parks.
Riley had worried that it would take months for the FBI to compile enough evidence of Bruce’s travels from nearly two decades ago, including getting hold of dispatch logs from a trucking company that had shuttered its doors. But when authorities pulled him over for a routine traffic stop, and then asked if he’d be willing to talk to them because he matched the description of someone they were looking for in connection to a homicide case, he’d confessed within a matter of days. Apparently once he started talking, no one could shut the guy up.
Once he’d been caught, Bruce, a sixty-five-year-old man who got around with the
use of a cane, had rolled over on Anders almost immediately, also assuming that if he gave the police all the information they wanted, including everything Anders had done for him, it might lessen his sentence.
“I have a quote here that’s pretty incredible,” Carter said one day. “Detective McGregor told me, and I quote, ‘We were talking to the guy about a series of terrible murders he committed. He’d confessed to six at that point. Six women in nine years. He stalked them, raped them over the course of several days, strangled them to death, and then disposed of their bodies. I mean, the last four were found in steel drums he’d buried in remote areas. Heinous. And yet the thing he can’t stop talking about is how he couldn’t have done any of those things without Anders’s help. Bruce said he would have been too sloppy on his own. He tried to kidnap a girl on his own once, a Black teenager, in the months after Shawna. The girl got away. Slipped right through his fingers, he said. He needed Anders. Those women would all be alive, he said, if Anders hadn’t given him the tools he needed to be successful.’”
Goosebumps had risen on Riley’s arms at that. Not just because of what Carter had told her, but also from the confirmation that Gigi hadn’t been lying about the man who had tried to snatch her. Bruce had been brazen enough to drive around looking for another victim in the same neighborhood as Shawna’s. If Gigi had been taken more seriously, if the police had even entertained the idea that Bruce had been the same man who had killed Shawna, if they had been on the lookout for a guy like Bruce and had plastered his face all over the news, that might have saved Brynn. It might have saved Emery, as well as the other women they found—Rose, Zoe, and Mia.
Bruce had been left floundering for a job after Amity Trucking went belly-up in 2011, the same year he’d kidnapped eighteen-year-old Mia. Mia had walked home from her best friend’s house in her rural town in Georgia one evening, and no one ever saw her again. Mia had lived with her mother, who had been out of town with her new boyfriend for the weekend. Bruce knew that because Anders had known it. Mia had walked that path home in the dark countless times. She’d grown up there. It was only a ten-minute walk and it was a safe, quiet neighborhood.
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