“See, Cammie, last time, when I had you in my chicken coop, I didn’t kill you. I walked away. I gave you a chance. But I won’t do that again. This time it’s just you and me and eternity.”
Cameryn could feel her mouth widen in horror.
“See, the thing is, I’m tired of the game. I want to end it but I want it to be memorable. So I’ll take you with me. It will be poetic. Me and my anam cara.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“I will call you whatever I want.”
It was stupid to fight him, but she tried. If she was going to die it would not be passively sitting in the seat of a car. With her left arm flailing in a fist, she hit him as hard as she could, for Justin, for herself, and, for her mother and father and her mammaw. But he caught her fingers in his right hand and squeezed so hard she felt the bones crunch as she screamed in real pain.
“Don’t do that, Cammie,” he said coolly. “I’m driving and it’s not safe. My, my, my, you are a hellcat, aren’t you?”
“Let me go!” she said, swearing. Her fingers throbbed as he clamped down harder. And even though she didn’t want to, she cried out again.
“That’s not appropriate language from my anam cara.” Dropping her hand, Kyle looked at her, his eyes amused. “The thing is, you’re not in a position to tell me what to do, Cameryn Mahoney. You are my Angel of Death. And I own my angel.”
What does that mean? Frantically, she searched for anyone who could help her. Her left hand, almost useless, could still signal someone’s attention. In February, though, the plowed streets of Silverton were strangely empty, and the storefronts stood shuttered like pastel-colored ghosts. She searched for cars, trucks, pedestrians, anyone who might see her thrashing. Nothing. They might as well have been driving through a cemetery.
Moments later they left the buildings behind them and had reached the fork at the end of town. He carefully turned on his signal and headed north. Mountain peaks loomed above her, towering granite capped by a shimmering pearl white layer of snow. Overhead the blue sky mocked her. Spruce trees, dark green against the white, marched away from her up the mountainside, their legions a useless army. She struggled against the zip tie but it held her fast. Her heart was pounding, her breath coming in short gasps. The ends of her fingers were turning white as the strong plastic tie dug into her flesh and she thought of animals gnawing off their own limbs in order to be free. If she could, she would do it to free herself from this monster. But the knife was out of reach and there was nothing she could do.
Exultant, Kyle crowed, “Do you know how much preparation this took? Weeks of thinking. Weeks of planning.” A strange smile twisted his almost perfect features, distorting them so that she wondered that she’d ever thought him handsome. “I knew you were lying to me the whole time. I knew they would make you say what you did. Cammie, I was outside your house the whole time, watching.”
Through stone lips she whispered, “But you called me from Leather Ed’s phone. . . .”
“No, I used a spoofcard. Mobile invisibility.” He tapped the side of his head. “It’s all about the technology. A spoofcard subverts the caller ID system.” He spoke to her as though he had to make it simple enough for a child. “I turned on Leather Ed’s cell phone and left it there at the mine. They’ve probably found the phone by now, but”—he frowned comically—“they won’t find me.”
“I. Don’t. Care.” She put a space between every word.
“But you should!” His golden eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “I’m probably the only one you know who’s smarter than you. And now the game really begins.”
Cameryn’s mind raced. Feelings whirled around her head in a blur, but there was one sure bit of knowledge that sliced into her consciousness more clearly than the blade of Kyle’s knife he’d thrust against her back. He is going to kill me. Now, or very soon, my life will be over. She should have known she was living on borrowed time and she thought of Justin and her grandmother, her mother and her father. Before, when he’d tied her up in his chicken coop, Kyle had told her he would return for her.
“Two guarantees,” he’d said. “First, they’ll never, ever find me. And second”—he’d held up his middle and index fingers, pressing them together in a salute—“one day, when you least expect it, I’ll be back.”
Despite the barrier of her father’s and Justin’s protection, she was helpless once again. Fear rose in her like bile as Kyle downshifted, the Jeep now careening around deep bends more wildly. The needle on the speedometer inched up to sixty, then seventy, too fast for the winding mountain road.
You got out of it once, you can do it again. Don’t give up! But what else had he said? As the trees streamed by, she searched her mind for a chink in his emotional armor, trying as hard as she could to bring up memories she’d forced beneath the veil of buried thoughts. Think, she commanded. Think, think, think. He’d told her that she was like him, an idea that made her recoil. But it was a thread she could follow. Desperate, she began, “You said, before, that we are the same. Tell me why you think that, Kyle.” She barely squeezed out the words, but she knew it was best to keep him talking. To use his name.
“It won’t work, Cammie,” he answered, laughing coldly. “I read the same books. I know all about the psychology of a killer. You’re trying to humanize yourself, aren’t you? According to the books, though, there’s something not quite right with my brain. I don’t care if people die. Not even me. In fact, I’m going to welcome it.”
Frantic, she cried, “You let me live because of my mother. I met Hannah, right before Christmas. I met her because of you. You let me live, Kyle. You did a good thing. Hannah’s moved back to New York and she’s great—we talk all the time. There’s still good in you!”
He downshifted again, his foot pressing the gas pedal to the floor. “Did you tell her about me?”
“I didn’t want to worry her. Slow down!” she screeched.
“Then I guess you didn’t say a proper good-bye.”
“Kyle, why—”
“Because I want people to remember me. I told you, Cammie, I’ve played the game and I keep winning. I’m bored. If I go out I want to take someone with me. There’s a place called the Ruby Walls where the drop is a thousand feet straight onto rock. No guardrail to stop a car—nothing but air.” His hand flew from the steering wheel, straight out until it touched the windshield’s glass. “I thought you and me would sail right over the side and into eternity.” He looked at her and smiled, flashing teeth. Kyle’s face had frozen like a mask, everything dead, even his eyes. The flecks of gold in them had turned to ash.
“No!”
In reply he gunned the car faster, the engine whining as it made its final ascent. They crested the top and began the winding path down the narrow band of asphalt cut into the mountainside. Boulders covered by shrouds of snow whizzed past as Cameryn tensed, aware of things she’d never noticed before: the way her chest filled with air and the beat of her heart in her wrists, a heart whose beats were numbered. There had to be a way. To live and not die. The knife lay on the plastic dashboard, gleaming in its sheath of blood. Her left hand, crushed, almost useless. Not enough strength. Not enough time.
The plan came to her, and she realized she was putting the pieces together with surprising calmness. Thinking, calculating, she tugged on her collar with her throbbing left hand to help herself breathe. He was like a statue chiseled from the inside; the only thing left was a hollow shell of a human being. But maybe enough of a husk remained. With a deep, wavering breath, she looked at him. “Kyle,” she said.
Her voice was almost drowned out by the drone of the engine.
“Kyle,” she said again. “Look at me.”
“What is it, Cameryn? Another game? We’ll have forever now to play them.”
She swallowed hard, trying by the sheer force of her will to keep her panic down so she could speak. It all came down to this. “Kyle, before you do it, before you drive off the pass, there’s something y
ou should know. . . .”
Chapter Sixteen
“YOU’RE LYING,” KYLE said. “You want me to believe that there’s something I should know.” His words seemed to taunt her as he clutched the wheel so hard the vessels seemed to pop from beneath the skin of his hands.
Cameryn took a breath, trying to clear her mind in a wild bid to buy time. She could feel the seconds of her life were ticking away, each second, each heartbeat, each breath, almost her last. Fear rose and bloomed so large she could barely exhale. Control, she told herself. Stay in control.
“So what is it?” Kyle snorted with contempt. “Nothing, right? You’re trying to buy some time. A pathetic attempt, Cammie. I expected better from my anam cara.”
When she couldn’t answer, he said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. See, there’s nothing you can do. I’ve already covered all the bases. Kyle O’Neil is calling the shots, just like always.”
“No—I just don’t know how to put what I’m thinking into words. Please slow down.”
In reply, Kyle pushed the petal harder; the engine whined in protest as the trees streamed past in streaks of green.
“Kyle!”
“Relax, we’re almost there.” He leaned forward so that his chest brushed the steering wheel, his face manic, intent, his eyes narrowed to slits. “You can see into my mind by what I’ll leave behind. You and me, crushed to pieces on the rocks below. I’m thinking the car might explode and then all they’ll find will be ashes. Instant cremation. What a way to go.”
“Don’t—”
“Why not? I’m not afraid to die.” A sadistic energy emanated from his erect body, and with one hand he gestured wildly. “Everybody dies, remember—mortality rate stands at one hundred percent. It’s all about making a statement. Whoo!” He pumped his fist in the air. “Yeah!”
“Aren’t you scared about what comes after?”
He glanced quickly at her, his eyes alight with a strange gleam. “You mean hell? If there is a hell, I’m running it. I’m smarter than the devil, Cammie. Haven’t you noticed that I never kill in a common way—man, I have a signature! Exotic deaths. They’ll write about me forever, in their pointless little journals about the psychopathic mind. But like I said, I’m tired of playing. Now I just want to win. And I want to take you along for the ride.” He made a tsking sound between his teeth. “Me an only child, and you raised all alone. Both of us are drawn to death and now we’ll be going there together, sailing beyond straight into the other side. It’s perfect.”
“This doesn’t have to end!”She was screaming now. Pleading with someone who didn’t seem to feel, her words falling like petals against stone.
“Yes,” he said calmly. “I think it does.”
Outside she saw a meadow unfold before her, the tall stalks of yellow grass peeking out of the snow like the bristles of a golden brush. They were driving through the one last open expanse before the final descent into Ouray, to the sheer cliff of the Ruby Walls, the place where she and Kyle would die. Mount Abrams rose to the east: an amphitheater of rock touching the sky dome, void of trees, glistening as though it had been topped with pastillage.
He was going fast, much too fast, on this last straight stretch of road. Only moments to make a plan.
“Kyle, listen to me. No, just listen.” There was desperation in her voice that she couldn’t control. “Back in the cemetery, when you kissed me, something happened.”
“Really.” He gave her a strange half smile. “And what was it that happened to you, Cammie? What feeling did I unlock?”
“I think—I think it was the way that you said we both are drawn to death. But I don’t think we need to die, Kyle.” She placed her swollen left hand on his thigh. Her stomach roiled as she touched him, but she could see no other way than this. “I think we can both live. I know we can. We don’t have to go off the mountainside. You and me—we can be together.”
He laughed hollowly. “And how would that look to the outside world? Cameryn Mahoney and her little zip tie, following me around like a dog on a plastic leash. Or do you think no one would notice the binding?”
“No, Kyle.” Her head whipped from the road to his face as she tugged against the plastic cord, helpless, trapped. Images, maybe the last she would ever see, streaked by, so much beauty in the colors that spun in a kaleidoscope of blues and greens, browns and every shade of white, this world she was not ready to leave. “I don’t need this—thing. Cut me free and I’ll show you. Kyle, I think you were right about us all along.” Her breath was coming in gasps as she said, “You said you loved me.”
He snorted. “But you don’t love me. I already told you, I’m smarter than you are, even with that famous forensic brain of yours. You can’t play with my mind, Cammie. I can see all of your moves.”
The mountain was coming on fast.
“Kyle—we belong together. Why don’t you—try to see if your life is worth living! Why die before you’re sure?” The strangled words sounded so false she didn’t dare to believe he would buy any of it. But something behind his eyes seemed to flicker. A pause. A tiny consideration.
“Kyle!”
“Stop saying my name. You’re saying my name so I’ll see you as a person. I know the tricks.”
“I’m not trying to trick you.” She was frantic now—ready to promise him anything if he would just put his foot on the brake. “I mean it. I swear!”
Thrusting out his jaw, he stared straight ahead. “So you think you have . . . feelings . . . for me.” There was an almost imperceptible change in his tone. Some of the arrogance has gone, replaced by something akin to sadness.
The chink hold was all she needed. “I know I do.”
“You said you cared for me. On the phone. You said you’d be there if I gave myself up, but it wasn’t true.”
“That’s because they made me say that. I wanted to go but they wouldn’t let me.”
“The police . . .”
“They told me what I had to do. They wrote down the words and they were standing right there. What would you have done?”
“I wouldn’t have lied to you. You and me—I let you live, and then you turned against me.”
Cameryn almost laughed at the absurdity of his words. He wouldn’t lie to her, but he would kill her in a murder-suicide, send them sailing over the side of the mountain to certain and irrevocable death. But she couldn’t let her mind even register anything more than the toehold she’d gained. With a wavering breath she said, “Let me prove it to you. There’s a pull-off coming up. Take it, Kyle. Turn in and stop the car.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
They were racing toward the mountain. The tall peak cast its shadow onto the meadow, turning the snow a shimmering blue in the half-light and then, too fast, the shadow swallowed them whole. And then they were there. The mountain loomed above them and the switchback road with its sheer, unprotected drop began. To her left, an ever-deepening chasm. To her right, an unyielding wall of granite.
“It’s up ahead. Pull over! Please, please, just give me one minute! Please, Kyle!”
“Why?”
“Let me prove it to you!”
The vertical stone loomed above her so expansively she could no longer see the sky. If her hand had been free she could have reached out and touched it. Years ago miles of rock had been jackhammered away to create the thinnest precipice, a thread of asphalt more dangerous than any other highway in Colorado.
Kyle’s voice was suddenly low. “How can I believe you?”
This was it. Closing her eyes, she said, “Because you were right all along. You knew me better than I knew myself. And we don’t have to die. You are my anam cara.”
“I am?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“No.”
And then, miraculously, the car began to slow. She opened her eyes to watch as he removed his foot from the gas pedal. Centrifugal force propelled them, the Jeep’s tires squealing as he ma
de one hairpin turn, but his foot, hesitant at first, moved to the left to gently press upon the brake. The smallest of hesitations that could mean her life.
Not daring to speak, she waited, frozen, aware anything else she said now might be wrong. She knew this road. Three turns ahead lay the pullout, her sliver of hope.
Ten seconds later there it was—the crescent carved into the mountain, big enough for a single vehicle. She didn’t blink. She did not dare to blink, to break the spell of the slowing car.
And then, as if even he didn’t know what his body was doing, Kyle pulled the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes, skidding into the snow until they stopped in a movement so sudden Cameryn felt her neck lash forward and then back. In the silence she could hear them both panting as Kyle turned toward her.
“I must be stupid to listen, but maybe . . . show me,” he said.
“I will.”
To the left the mountain sheered down in a drop-off guaranteed to kill. To the right, the stone wall, varnished in a layer of ice, seeming to reach into eternity. She couldn’t see beyond the bend. Her prayer had been that a car or truck, any vehicle would appear, but the traffic was sparse in the winter over this pass and the two of them were utterly alone. In the abstract her idea made sense; but Kyle was looking at her in a way that engendered a new kind of fear. And then the thought that crystallized inside her: what would she do to save her life?
This. I can do this. As she moved close to him, he grabbed the back of her head and pressed her mouth violently into his. Like a statue she held herself immobile, her fists constricting as she forced herself to stay still. Compliant. He was working himself up, more brutal now. She could feel the anger in him, the rage as his tongue barged into her mouth.
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