I melted into him.
“It works for me too.”
Forty-Eight
Awake
I lay on my side in the dark, staring at the shadow of Bohannan’s back, which was turned to me.
When we’d called it a night, he’d essentially attacked me, demonstrating what “my bed is a playground” meant with a mind-boggling variety of positions, commands and locational penetrations.
It was back to basics with us, though with Bohannan taking more time—a lot more time—with primal caveman/cavewoman sex.
I was totally there for it.
When he was done with me, I was also spent, not even having it in me to get up and clean up.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t care if I had to sleep in the wet spot.
Fortunately, Bohannan was not in my same state, and he cleaned up for me.
He got that done, and I wasn’t proud of it, I realized cardio was in order, because before he even returned from the bathroom, I’d passed out.
I had no idea how long I was asleep before I woke in the dead of night, and I wasn’t simply awake.
I was awake.
And it didn’t take long for me to realize why Bohannan had put so much effort and creativity into exhausting me.
It just didn’t fully take.
Earlier that day, after we made up from our non-fight, we’d again gone over what I saw and felt, and he’d shown me for the first time the composite sketches they got from the co-eds at Berkeley.
Whoever it was, he was quite attractive.
But since I hadn’t gotten a good look at the guy’s face, I couldn’t say yay or nay.
All the witnesses in California had given a full physical description: lean, around five foot ten, wide shoulders, and chillingly that was the same not only for those who saw him in California, but who I’d chased in Misted Pines.
Bohannan had then shared that, alarming her or not, we had to pull in Megan, and Jess went off with copies of the sketches to track down Ray.
Megan told me on the phone she hadn’t noticed him, but she and Dan came over so she could look at the sketches anyway.
We took that opportunity to order pizza and share a bottle of wine, more than likely so she could give me something normal to do because that was Megan. She was a good person who cared. And when you watch your friend, who was not a cop or a superhero, take off to chase a perp down the street, that would make you worry about said friend.
It was the first time I met Dan. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Ronald Reagan in his younger years. He was also funny and failed spectacularly at not showing he was worried about me, which could only come from Megan being worried about me, and he wanted us both to feel better.
Those puzzle pieces falling into place, this meant he, too, was a good person who cared.
Bohannan had left our guests to go up the hill for a brief visit with the FBI, but other than that, he stayed close to me.
The boys, however, whose normal pattern was to be in and out of what I’d come to think of as The Big House (they were in for the most part if there was food) were not around.
Bohannan was his normal self, calm and collected, but I knew what that visit up the hill was about.
I knew that if this was the same guy who’d been in Berkeley, he could be the guy, because him being here and not being the guy was a substantially more elaborate charade.
And it could have just been chance that he was in Aromacobana when I showed.
Or it could be that I was his new plaything.
So, obviously, this was not conducive to sleeping peacefully.
I rolled to my back.
Bohannan rolled all the way around, hooked me with an arm and yanked me mostly under him.
“You can’t be ready for another round,” I joked.
“Don’t let him get in your head,” he replied.
I expelled a frustrated breath.
He stroked my side with his thumb.
“Larue, he wants that. Don’t play the game.”
“Are you not playing the game?”
“I got no choice but to play the game.”
“You can show me if things are upsetting you. Frustrating you. Pissing you off,” I informed him.
“I’m not proud I had to spend seventy-five bucks replacing that cabinet door in the kitchen, but I wasn’t pissed at this guy. I was pissed at Dern.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t let them under your skin.”
“That might be doable for the veteran FBI agent, but I’m struggling with that.”
“You know about trash talk. During games?”
“What?”
“Football. Basketball. Whatever. Opponents say shit to each other. They do it to get into your head. They do it to break your concentration. If what happened today had to do with our guy, it was trash talking. He’s trying to get into your head, which in turn will get into my head.”
“So I need to stay cool for you?”
“No, you need to stay cool because we’re gonna get this guy. I told you, he’s leaving clues. They don’t think they leave clues. They always do.”
“You said you know how to commit the perfect murder.”
“The perfect murder is suicide. It takes a life. It leaves no witnesses. It bears no clues. It leads to no suspects.”
“Suicide isn’t murder.”
“That isn’t a judgment. But killing is killing. And outside a killing that has the same victim and perpetrator, there is no perfect murder.”
“Right.”
“I also said that because you’re sexy as all fuck, and I wanted to get in your pants, so I was trying to sound cool.”
That almost made me laugh.
“Talk to me,” he ordered.
“Are you really this calm and collected about this? About him targeting you? About him maybe targeting me?”
And about him maybe turning to Celeste, I did not say.
“No. I talked to the boys up the hill. Tomorrow, you and Celeste are going up there and you’re having an in-service with them. Celeste has had this kind of training all her life, so it’s a refresher for her. For you, it might be new. They’re gonna teach you vigilance and self-defense. It’ll help with your confidence. He sees you shaken, Larue, he’s gonna get off on that.”
“And we’re starving him from what he needs…” I let that trail, so he’d fill in the blank.
“To get him to make a mistake.”
“Could that mistake be another murder?”
“I don’t think so. He plans those. He knows who his victims are going to be and he’s laying them out according to that plan. It would chafe, being forced to make a kill he isn’t ready to unleash yet. But he’s feeding on attention. And if he’s starved for it, he might do something compulsively to get it.”
Holy cow.
“Like, when the media descends on Misted Pines, and his two murders take backseat to a sex scandal,” I guessed.
“Like that. Like he waits for you to get back from LA and follows you to freak you, which will trigger me.” He hesitated, and with care, he finished, “Bonus for him if you chase him down the street and remind the town a murderer is on the loose.”
So, okay, yes.
I’d really screwed up doing that.
But my breath started coming faster, and not because of that.
“Do you think it was the guy?” I asked.
“I’m wondering now, because it’s one thing to offer someone fifty bucks here and there to lurk outside a dormitory. Someone who has no idea what you’re doing and could think you’re just fucking with some chick who did you wrong, or playing a prank. It’s something else, and it’s risky, not to mention probably expensive, to keep that player on the board. Especially considering you make him come to a town where girls are getting murdered, and one of those girls stayed in the dorm where you got paid to be lurking. There are people who would do anything for cash. There are people who need it that bad, just to eat or t
o get a fix. But desperate people don’t make good pawns.”
“Okay.”
“What else?” he pushed.
God, he was good.
“I don’t know if it was a hoodie,” I confessed.
“Baby, that happens,” he said gently.
“Why do I feel like that’s important?”
“Because everything is important in this. But you have to know, witnesses second guess what they see all the time. Fear is a factor. Adrenaline is spiking. The gravity of a situation plays a part. Emotional and physical reactions clash and break up shit in your brain. But think about it logically. How important is it if he’s partial to wearing a hoodie?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
“It’s not important, Larue. If he had some kind of fetish and wore a bright-red clown wig, I gotta know that. What he chooses to cover his body means dick to me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I concluded it with the thing that was really haunting me.
“You think today was about him.”
His pause was scary.
And what he said next was worse.
“Yeah, baby. Today was about him.”
Forty-Nine
Don’t Ever
I had not yet been up to the house on the hill.
The next day, when Bohannan took Celeste and I up there, I found it wasn’t a house.
It was a log cabin.
A pretty log cabin that was a little bit smaller than my place. It had a fire pit with Adirondack chairs surrounding it in the front. It had trees all around. It had no access to the lake, possibly because the pitch was very steep to get down there.
But it had impeccable views.
For instance, I could see through the trees nearly the entirety of Bohannan’s compound, save for part of the boys’ house, since it was tucked into the pines off to the side.
I could see my place, totally.
And I could see the somewhat bigger house up from mine on my side of the lake. It was higher up the hill, exposed to view, but it also had a switch-backed set of steps to get down to a small pier on the lake.
Taking all of this in, I swung directly into impossible, but phenomenal, fantasies of Celeste marrying some marvelous man and filling that big house up top with family. Camille and Joan moving into this cabin, expanding it, and filling it with babies. Us building a getaway cabin for Fenn (and James?) to bring their family for visits. And the boys splitting off, one of them moving into my place so they could have space for their families.
Yes, I was in this with Bohannan deep.
I was also watching David, who was doing something at the spout on the back deck. He was working on a Sunday because Robyn’s pregnancy had, so far, been a display of hormonal fireworks that even her very devoted husband needed a break from on the weekends.
I knew this because it was so bad, he’d asked, falteringly, as he was so desperate to know if she was crazy, or if he was.
Unlike many mothers, Fenn, my first, had been a breeze.
Which made me completely unprepared for how Camille had done me in.
So at least I could set his mind at ease that he wasn’t going crazy, and neither was Robyn, and better yet, this was temporary.
But so he could get through it, I advised him that breaks were good for the both of them.
He’d texted to say he was going to come that day for a few hours and do some work.
I stopped thinking on all this when I stepped into the comfortable, attractive, but sturdily furnished and rental-ready environs of the cabin.
They’d swept it before we got there so the guts of the case weren’t spewed everywhere, but it still was clearly a command post, and a fastidious one. No fast-food debris or spent coffee mugs that needed cleaning. And the three large white boards that took up a lot of the space had been turned around.
Special Agents Everett Robertson and Ben McGill looked like who they were. Clean cut, fit, no-nonsense G-men.
The lead, Robertson, was a tall, handsome Black man wearing dark-wash jeans and a subdued dark orange turtleneck (it was Sunday).
His partner, McGill, was white, had thick auburn hair, a lot of freckles, and was wearing khakis and a plaid button-down under his navy sweater.
I’d met them before, briefly. They’d both been in suits then.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t the first time I wondered why Bohannan had gone from the army to the FBI, and now had the appearance and wardrobe of a lumberjack biker.
I’d need to ask him about that.
It might be Sunday, but it wasn’t fun day. They were in their roles and their task today was important. There were greetings and oodles of courtesy and respect, with some gentleness for Celeste due to her age.
But they had things to do that day, and talking to us was only part of them, so it didn’t take long before Robertson stepped back, and McGill sat with us in the living area and launched in.
There was a brief lecture about how we were safe.
They had a tech person, who was currently not there, and I had not yet met, named Erin Reinhart who, among other duties, kept an eye on our whereabouts that pinged from our fobs. We were to continue to be sure to carry those at all times, as well as our Tasers. We were also to continue what we’d been doing, making sure more than one person knew where we were going, and when we were likely to return.
Onward from that, admirably without a smidge of blame detected in his tone, he said, “Be aware of all of your surroundings. When you enter a class. When you go down the aisle of the grocery store. As you walk to your car. Who’s around you? Are they paying attention to you? What kind of attention? Try not to be alone. This doesn’t mean you can’t do things by yourself, but such things as finding a parking spot among cars, not parking in the vacant ones at the edge of the lot, are good habits to get into. Take a second to look in the backseat. The passenger seat. Both before you unlock your car to get back in.”
He was in an armchair across from us.
Celeste and I sat next to each other on the couch across from him.
Robertson and Bohannan were on the other side of the room, by the dining room table that fed off the kitchen behind us. I heard them, in low tones, conferring.
McGill fished in the pocket of his khakis and pulled out a set of keys. “It’s good practice to walk to your car with your keys like this.”
He lifted his hand, tucked his car fob in his palm, and positioned the blade of a key between his index and middle finger.
“This is assurance, it isn’t your go to,” he said. “If someone approaches you aggressively, you make as much racket as you can, and by that, I mean shouting and screaming, and those don’t have to be words, but ‘help’ is a good way to go. Whatever you do, just make noise and run like hell to someplace that’s populated. But if you have to use it, that key will hurt a lot worse than a scratch or a punch or even a kick.”
When he got nods from us, he put the keys back in his pocket and kept speaking.
“You don’t carry Mace because Mace can go wrong. If not used correctly, it can get in your eyes and incapacitate you or be taken from you and used against you…” Pause then, a subtle reminder, “Like the Taser. But if you feel like you can use it and handle yourself, we’ll get you canisters that hook to your keychains, and you walk to your car with your finger on the trigger.”
He waited for us to nod again, so we did.
“The more experience we have behind a wheel, the more we become conditioned to accepting our surroundings. It becomes instinct to sense things you need to know to keep you safe when you’re driving, so you might not attentively check for them. I need you both to go back to basics. You get in your car, the first thing you do is lock your doors. Then check your mirrors. And keep checking them. Make note of cars behind you, but also any around you. If you see a red Jeep in the city lot by the Double D after you’ve had something to eat, had you seen it in the one behind the movie theater before you went in to se
e a movie? If you saw a blue Honda in front of you on your way to school, is it behind you on your way home? That kind of thing. If you notice patterns, or even if something spooks you, we don’t care. Tell us. We’ll check it out.”
He paused.
We both nodded again.
“Make note of license plates, even a couple of numbers or letters and the make of a car can help us. Light is your friend. We’d really like you not to be out by yourself at night, but if that’s ever the case, park under a light, keep to the lights. Don’t ever be in the—”
Both Celeste and I jerked on the couch because he was interrupted by a gunshot that came from nearby.
And then another one.
“Get down!” McGill shouted at us as he surged from his chair.
I sought purchase of whatever I could on Celeste, which was the back of her neck, and I took her to the floor with me.
We both ran into the coffee table.
Vaguely I registered that it hurt to slam my shoulder into it, but even as heavy as it was, it lurched away at our impact, and we scrunched together on our hands and knees.
There was urgent movement around us, then I saw Bohannan’s boots and looked up.
“Down!” he roared. “Bellies!” he went on.
We dropped to our stomachs, and since there wasn’t a lot of room, I was half covering Celeste’s body.
I still had my head up as Bohannan turned, caught a rifle Robertson tossed him, and then he motored toward the back of the house as McGill rolled out of the front, his sidearm in his hand, closely followed by Robertson, who also was holding his weapon at the ready.
I then ducked my head and pressed my face to the back of Celeste’s hair.
I was panting, Celeste was doing it with me, and we coasted on terror across what felt like decades.
I came back to the room realizing I had Celeste’s sweater in my grip. My knee hurt because I was pressing it into the floor, ready to use it to leap up and flee if whoever out there got to us, and equally ready to take her with me.
I heard nothing. I felt Celeste trembling against me. I then felt an intense blast of fury that subsided as quickly as it came.
The Girl in the Mist: A Misted Pines Novel Page 29