The Surviving Girls

by Katee Robert

  Lei closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the doorframe. My brother. Since she didn’t have a brother, that was quite the feat. “I understand.” She hung up. “How the hell did he get my password? It’s just a jumble of numbers, and the only place I had it saved was on the closed-network computer.”

  Emma flinched. “Shit.”

  “Shit is not a word I want to hear coming out of your mouth right now.” She tried and failed to keep accusation out of her tone. This isn’t Emma’s fault any more than it’s my fault. We’re both in over our heads. Lei took a measured breath and moderated her tone. “What happened?”

  “I was clearing out the files and switching the nonsensitive ones to the other system. I dumped a bunch of your stuff into a file with your name on it and moved it.” Emma’s shoulders bowed. “I didn’t realize you kept your password in a Word file. Why don’t you write it down like a normal person?”

  It wouldn’t have made a difference if she had. The bastard had been in their house, moving through their things. She’d bet good money that if he wasn’t able to find access electronically, he would have come there and done it in person. She shivered. “At least we know how he did it. Is there a way to keep him out of our system?”

  “I’m trying, but . . .” Emma lifted her hands and let them drop into her lap. “He’s better than I am. I’m good. Really good. But he’s outmaneuvered me at every turn. I can’t guarantee that I can kick him out indefinitely.” She lifted her chin. “He’s out now, though.”

  “That’s something, at least.” It didn’t feel like much. It felt like they’d been played. All this time, she’d been so smug about her impenetrable house, and there had been someone lurking close enough to watch her sleep. “Why didn’t he just kill us when he was in the house before? He had the chance.” Lei came and went, but Emma was always there. Saul might not have picked up on a new scent, but he’d have sensed an intruder—of that, she was sure. Prince mostly stayed with Emma, which meant he stayed downstairs in her office more often than not. Maybe the killer hadn’t wanted to risk facing the dogs in the effort to get to the women . . .

  She didn’t know. There were far too many things she didn’t know at this point. All she really had was projection.

  Emma’s fingers clattered against the keyboard as she shuddered. “Can we please stop talking about home invasion and murder?”

  “We have to face this and figure out the extent of the damage. We’re not safe here.” The killer could come back at any point. Except it’s possible that he’s occupied with Clarke right now. Lei closed her eyes, counted to ten, and then counted to ten a second time. It didn’t calm her racing heart, but it helped her take a slow step back to look at the bigger picture.

  Dante couldn’t be sure the killer had Clarke, but Lei had no doubts. There was no such thing as coincidence, and it would be one hell of a coincidence if some random predator attacked the FBI agent here investigating murders linking back to Travis. No, this was connected. She was sure of it. “We need to find Clarke.”

  “What? Lei, we need to get someone in here to change the locks, and more bars on the windows wouldn’t be amiss. Not to mention we need to change all the codes, but we can’t do it online or over the phone, so we’ll have to have the company send out someone to do it.” Emma spoke so fast that her words almost ran into one another at the end of the sentence. “Clarke is a badass FBI agent. If she can get taken by him . . .” She shook her head. “If she can, then we don’t stand a chance.”

  Panic. Fear. Something akin to hysteria. She actually looked at Emma. Her friend’s hands shook, and she was too wide around her blue eyes. She wore the same yoga pants and loose shirt she’d had on yesterday, and though her hair was up in a ponytail, it had started to look greasy. Shit. She should have known Emma would start to lose it. She was starting to lose it, and Lei was usually the more controlled of the two.

  “Emma, look at me.” Lei bent to catch her friend’s gaze. “Take a break.”

  “I don’t need a break.”

  Lei grabbed the coffee cup before Emma could get to it. “Yes, you do. When’s the last time you slept?”

  “I can’t sleep.” Emma pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She very carefully didn’t look at Lei. “Every time I close my eyes, I see him. He’s wearing that fucking button-down and jeans, and there’s this spot on the right cuff. I looked and looked at that spot, and it was only after he left the room with Hilary that I realized it was blood.” She raised haunted blue eyes. “And then I see their faces. Not before. After.”

  After Travis was through with them.

  Lei had climbed out the window and fallen to safety, though escaping had almost killed her. Emma had walked out of that sorority house of her own power. They never talked about what that walk had been like. She knew Emma had checked on Hilary and Kristen before she fully understood that all their sisters were dead, but only because it had come out in the trial. Even in therapy, Emma didn’t talk about that nightmarish trip—and Lei didn’t blame her for wanting to block it out completely. She took her friend’s hands, and it struck her that she didn’t know which one of them was the source of the shakes causing tremors in their clasped fingers. “Honey, you can’t keep going like this.”

  “I can’t sleep, Lei. He got inside the house before. He can do it again.”

  She pulled her friend to her feet. “Come on.” Lei didn’t bother to wait for Emma’s arguing before she towed her up to the stairs and nudged her into her room. “Take a quick shower. I’ll be here.” She nodded at the two dogs waiting just outside the bedroom door. They were technically trained not to come in without permission, but both she and Emma slept with Saul or Prince in their rooms more often than not. “We’ll all be here.”

  Emma hesitated, but finally nodded. She left the bathroom door cracked, and a few seconds later, the shower started.

  It was only then that Lei sagged. She was close enough to the bed that she landed there instead of the floor, and she bent in half to rest her head in her hands. Too much. Too many things have happened. She couldn’t process any of it—she didn’t have the time or capacity.

  The search. The dead girls. The break-in. Clarke missing.

  Dante’s kiss.

  She settled on the last, because it scared the shit out of her slightly less than the others. If she concentrated, she could still feel his big hands on her waist, his strong body against hers, his mouth taking control the second they made contact. She should have moved away instead of forward, shouldn’t have climbed into his lap with absolutely no prompting, should have . . .

  Lei sighed. It didn’t matter what she should have done, because she had kissed him—or let him kiss her. She wanted to kiss him again. She flat-out wanted him. She wished she could chalk it up to her being emotionally unstable because of the case and the memories that had been gliding ever closer to the surface. It would be a lie. If she’d walked into a room on a normal day with no stakes involved and seen Dante, she would have felt the same uncomfortable fluttering in her stomach, the same sheer desire. She knew that without a shadow of a doubt.

  Lei had more or less given up on the opposite sex. She didn’t trust people, and getting naked body and soul with another person required at least a modicum of trust. After her handful of disastrous relationships over the last decade, she’d just . . . given up. Resigned herself to a life with Emma and their dogs and their jobs. It might have been enough. It should have been enough.

  But being around Dante had her thinking thoughts that reminded her of the girl she used to be. Before. The one who was sure she’d find love and have a better relationship than her parents had. The one who had the world at her feet and didn’t know what real damage was.

  What would Dante have thought of that girl?

  What would I have thought of him?

  The shower shut off, and she forced herself into movement. She couldn’t let Emma know how close she was to breaking down. She was the only thing ho
lding this situation together—there wasn’t room for both of them to lose it. Emma needed strong support more than Lei did, so Lei would be that strong support. There wasn’t another option.

  She walked around the bed and patted the mattress. “Up, Prince. Up, Saul.”

  The dogs scrambled to obey, their shaggy bodies radiating sheer joy to be breaking a rule yet again. Emma slipped out of the bathroom wearing another pair of black leggings and a tank top. She disappeared into the closet and came out with another baggy sweater—this time in a deep blue—and thick socks. Her boots were next, and she sat on the edge of the bed to lace them up. “You should probably shower, Lei. I’ll be okay for a few minutes.”

  She didn’t have to say it twice. Lei swore she could actually feel the grit on her skin, and she wanted out of those clothes and into something clean. “I’ll be right back.” She almost called Saul to her but reconsidered at the last second. It was only a quick shower.

  She walked the few short paces down the hall to her room and straight into her bathroom. Lei didn’t bother to leave the door open. There was something about being in a room with the door cracked that set her teeth on edge. Anyone could stand just out of sight—listening, watching. An irrational fear, to be sure, but it didn’t feel particularly irrational after today. She locked the door, paused to check the linen closet and ensure there were no murderers hiding behind the shower curtain, and then she turned on the water and stripped.

  Stepping beneath the near-scalding spray was a little slice of heaven. She tilted her head back and let the water drench her hair and just . . . existed. Lei gave herself a full thirty seconds, and then she opened her eyes and scrubbed herself down thoroughly. She shampooed her hair twice, mostly to prolong her reason for staying in the shower. But she could only leave Emma waiting for so long, so she braced herself and turned off the water. Lei dried off quickly and wrapped her long hair in a towel on top of her head. She straightened, and froze.

  There, in the middle of the mirror, someone had written the words I miss you, Lei-Lei.

  She staggered away from the mirror. Her back met the wall, bracing her, keeping her on her feet. “He’s not here,” she whispered, trying to make it the truth. “Travis is in prison.” The truth didn’t matter. Her body screamed at her to run, run, run until her legs gave out and she was miles away from this place. Until she found a city she could melt into and disappear forever.

  Until she escaped Travis once and for all.

  Except she never would. Travis had ceased to be a person the second dawn stole over the sky the morning after the massacre. He’d evolved into a dark god she could never escape. Some days, she wasn’t sure she had escaped. He still took up too much space in her life, and she suspected he always would. She might have walked away from the Omega Delta Lambda house, but the old Lei had died there as surely as her sorority sisters had.

  She forced herself to walk to the mirror and dragged her hand over the words. He had to have written this when he’d broken into the house earlier—either before or after he’d gone for Emma. He’d known that eventually she’d come in here to shower, and the steam would reveal the message, so she’d see it when she was at her most vulnerable.

  Fuck that.

  Lei kicked her dirty clothes to the side and grabbed her gun and holster. She stalked, naked, into her bedroom and then her closet. Anger pulsed in steady waves as she dressed, choosing faded jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt, wool socks, and her extra boots. She grabbed a jacket, too, just in case. Lei slipped her shoulder holster on and, after checking her gun, added it.

  She found Emma sitting on the bed, her back propped against the headboard. She narrowed her eyes at Lei. “What happened?”

  “Nothing important.” She shut the door and walked to the empty side of the bed. “It’s been a long day.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Lei sat on the bed, mirroring Emma’s position. Saul immediately rearranged himself between her and the side of the bed, and Prince lifted his head from where he’d laid it on Emma’s stomach to woof softly. They were as safe as they were going to be. “Try to sleep, Emma. I’m here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Emma slid down to lay her head on her pillow and laced her fingers through Lei’s. “I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes.”

  “Okay.” Lei stared at the door. Emma held her left hand, so she could draw her gun with her right, easily. The dogs would give a better early warning than any electronic alarm that could be bypassed. Both she and Emma wore clothes and boots, so if they needed to run, they could without hesitation.

  They were as ready as they were going to be.

  She squeezed her friend’s hand and settled down to wait.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Dante managed to catch a few short hours of sleep after filling out the missing-persons report for the sheriff. He’d wanted to start searching immediately, but without some kind of lead—or, at minimum, the rental car make, model, and license plate number—it would be a waste of time and resources. He hated that he could measure things by that standard, but there was no help for it.

  He took a quick shower and got ready, exhaustion starting to set in. It was too early in the case to be this tired, but most cases didn’t involve this amount of activity. Serial killers tended to have cooling-down periods between kills when they liked to relive the details of the murder in vivid color. As time went on, those fantasies lost their allure, and the killer was driven to murder again. And so on.

  There wasn’t any of that with this case.

  The unsub had the feeling of someone with a plan, an endgame that drove him to keep to some kind of schedule. Whether that endgame was his or Berkley’s was still up for debate, but so far there wasn’t a damn bit of evidence that Berkley had enough contact with the killer to justify the belief that he was behind all this.

  It was enough to make him wonder if Britton wasn’t right and that there had been another person in that house twelve years ago.

  He had to talk to Lei about that possibility, but it’d wait until after the autopsies.

  Still . . .

  Dante got on the highway heading for Seattle and dialed Lei. He needed to hear her voice, to know she was okay—or at least holding it together. That kiss had been . . . He shook his head. A bad idea. Lei’s alibi might be solid enough that she wasn’t a potential suspect, but she was still connected intricately to the case. Getting involved with her in any way was a mistake, and unprofessional in the extreme.

  He didn’t care.

  She answered, her voice quiet. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” He cleared his throat. “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, you know, scared out of my mind and furious because I’m scared.” She paused, sounding almost shocked she’d admitted that aloud. “We’re fine. The house is as secure as it’s going to be, the dogs are on alert, and Emma and I are safe.”

  “Good.” He would have felt better if she’d let him cart them to a secondary location, but nowhere was really safe until they found the unsub. “I have to go into Seattle for a bit, but I’ll be by sometime today. There’s a theory I want to go over with you—with both of you.”

  “We’ll be here.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “Where else are we going to go?”

  “Call me if you need anything.” He wanted to keep her on the phone, to draw out this conversation until he could almost feel her presence, but that was selfish reasoning. “Get some sleep, Lei.”

  “Maybe when the sun’s a little higher in the sky.” She cursed softly. “Why do I keep doing that? I’m not an oversharer.”

  “It’s okay. I’d rather you shared than kept it all locked up.” He wanted to know her, and he wanted her to trust him enough to share some part of herself. “Stay safe.”

  “Yeah, you, too. I’ll talk to you later.” She hung up.

  Dante turned his thoughts to the case as he drove through the pass and down into the greater Seattle area. They had a plethora of informat
ion, but nothing about it was helping to narrow the field any. This unsub was undoubtedly a white male somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five—probably leaning to the older end of that spectrum, considering his probable participation in the first set of murders at the sorority house. But that didn’t ultimately tell them anything, because most serial killers were white males in that age range.

  This unsub was also highly organized, from the way he had set up the two separate kill sites, and he had to have serious knowledge of hacking, because Lei and Emma’s security system was top-of-the-line. It shouldn’t be able to be hacked. Dante’s forte didn’t lie in that direction, but he was savvy enough to know that nearly everything was hackable given enough time and skill.

  Their unsub had both in spades.

  He’d planned these events down to the last detail. This series of murders was likely years in the making. Maybe Berkley being caught had scared him—or maybe it had been exhilarating to get away unscathed.

  Dante frowned. That was the one problem with this theory—if Berkley had worked with a partner, why hadn’t he used that knowledge to leverage either a plea bargain for himself or to create reasonable doubt? He would have had a good shot at the latter, and a better-than-good shot at the former. It didn’t make sense . . . unless Berkley was the submissive partner. The thought raised the small hairs on the back of Dante’s neck.

  They were in trouble. That was for damn sure.

  He made it to the morgue before the early-morning commuters were out in force, and then he just sat in his car. Clarke should be there. She should be sitting next to him, bitching about needing coffee this early in the morning, or bouncing ideas off him as she formed her own profile of the unsub.

  Instead, she was missing.

  And there wasn’t a single damn thing he could do about it.

  Dante took a couple of minutes to check his e-mail. Britton had forwarded Tucker’s flight information—the man would be there around noon. Too early for him to drive back to Stillwater before Dante picked him up. He growled and then forced himself to take several deep breaths. Lei had survived this long without him standing over her. She’d be fine today, too.