Linger: Dying is a Wild Night (A Linger Thriller Book 1)

by Edward Fallon

  Not that any of it mattered at this point. They had all gone into the darkness and the man who had sent them there was still walking free.

  A man that Kate might know.

  And Christopher was right. The killer may not have been the beast that he and Weston were after, but he was, without a doubt, a beast.

  One who needed to be put away.

  As Weston nudged the wheel through the twists and turns in the road, Kate looked out at the trees lit up by the moon, and wondered how much they had seen that night. Or worse yet, how much pain and suffering and violence had they witnessed over the course of their ancient lives?

  She braced herself as they took the final turn toward the Branford house, wondering what she was getting herself into, wondering if she’d be able to handle the visions any better than she had this morning—and not all that anxious to find out.

  Then a voice in her mind said, It’s okay, Kit Kat. You’ll be fine.

  But it wasn’t Christopher she heard.

  It was her own voice, filtered through her memories of her mother.

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  They were less than a block from the Branford house when she saw it.

  “Pull over,” she said suddenly. “Kill the headlights.”

  Weston did as she asked, the brakes squeaking faintly as they came to a stop at the side of the road. She reached for her bag and pulled out the Steiner binoculars she always carried with her.

  She put them to her eyes and pointed them at the Branford house, looking for the light she thought she’d seen coming from that direction. She saw only darkness at first, then there it was again, the faint beam of a flashlight, bobbing and weaving for a moment before it disappeared.

  Someone was inside the house.

  “What’s going on?” Weston asked.

  “We have an intruder,” Kate said, then turned to Christopher, who sat on the back seat. “Did you know about this? Is that why you wanted to come here?”

  I wasn’t sure. But yes.

  “A word of warning would have been nice. Is it the man we’re looking for?”

  I think so.

  Kate felt her pulse quicken. Weston had characterized the boy’s accuracy as hit and miss, and she had no idea what his track record was like, no data to rely on, but her own intuition—her own experience with him—told her he was right about this.

  And whoever was in there was undoubtedly hoping to find something else that she and her team had missed. Something incriminating.

  A homemade porn video?

  A compromising selfie with an underage girl?

  Kate considered her options, the stupid cop/dead cop mantra once again tumbling through her mind. She knew she should call for backup. Get Linkenfeld and MacLean out here, or maybe Clark and Donahue or even their requisite weirdo of a night man, Billy Zimbert, who would just be coming on duty.

  But what if it was one of them inside that house?

  If this guy was someone she knew, a phone call to the wrong person would warn him that she was out here, and that wouldn’t be good.

  She lifted the binoculars again and studied the area. No cars in the driveway. None on the street. Whoever it was had probably parked on one of the other access roads and taken a hike through the woods to reach the house.

  Kate put the binoculars back in her bag and touched the grip of the Glock holstered at her side. The magazine was full and she always kept a round in the chamber.

  Not that she wanted it to come to that.

  “I need you two to listen carefully,” she said. “You do not get out of this car. Okay?”

  Weston’s brows went up. “You’re going in there alone?”

  “We can debate the pros and cons when this is over, but believe it or not, I have a bit of experience on my side.”

  Then again, if the intruder was a cop, so did he.

  She turned to Christopher. “Do you have anything more to tell me? Any feelings you want to share?”

  He shook his head.

  “Be sure now, because you’re not all that forthcoming sometimes. You might want to work on that.”

  Just be careful.

  She nodded and opened her door and the interior lamp came on, lighting them up. She quickly got out and closed it again, hoping the intruder wasn’t watching, but they were nearly a block away, and chances were good he was too busy concentrating on his search.

  She took a moment to assess her situation, then started to move.

  She didn’t want to take the direct approach, so she stepped sideways, into the woods, dodging broken branches as she worked her way toward the house. There was just enough moon tonight to make the journey possible, but she stumbled a couple of times and was tempted to unclip her mini-mag for the extra light.

  Resisting the temptation, she forced herself to slow down. She was nearly to the house when she stopped and studied it, seeing nothing but darkness inside, and wondering if she’d taken too long.

  Was the intruder gone?

  Had he found what he was looking for and headed back into the woods?

  She heard a faint crackling sound behind her and stiffened.

  She heard it again—like boots trampling twigs—and pulled her Glock free as she spun around and saw a silhouette looming in the darkness.

  “Don’t move,” she said, then unclipped her mini-mag and turned it on, shining it into the face of Noah Weston.

  Shit.

  She quickly doused the light, heart pounding, and kept her voice low. “What the hell is wrong with you? You were supposed to stay in the car.”

  “You think this is my idea? Chris was worried about you, and when he worries, I pay attention.”

  “And in the meantime, if our guy’s still inside and he saw that light, we may have scared him away.”

  “I think we’re okay,” Weston said. “Take a look.”

  She turned and peered through the trees at the front bay window. The flashlight beam was back, bobbing and weaving, as the intruder crossed through the living room. She saw a dark shape, but couldn’t quite define it.

  She holstered her Glock and gestured to Weston. “Stay here. If you move from that spot, I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

  “Maybe Chris is worried about the wrong person.”

  “Maybe he is,” she said, then continued through the trees toward the house.

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  She had nearly reached the place when she decided to go wide and circle around to the back, where the woods would give her better cover. There was no longer any sign of the flashlight beam, but she felt confident that someone was still inside.

  If he had left, she was close enough to the house now that she would have heard noises of some kind. A door opening and closing. Footsteps on the wooden deck that surrounded the place.

  Yet the absence of light and the silence that accompanied it were unnerving.

  Did he know she was out here?

  Every step she took brought with it the crackling of tree branches and leaves—just as it had for Weston—and she doubted her approach was as quiet as she had hoped it would be.

  Maybe doing this alone was a mistake, but what other choice did she have?

  She kept reminding herself that calling in the cavalry when the guy inside might be part of that cavalry was not a workable strategy. Although a part of her, despite Natalie’s confirmation, still wanted to believe that Christopher was wrong about the killer.

  None of the cops she knew, from Captain Ebersol on down, seemed capable of doing what this man had done. Even Bob MacLean, for all his annoyances, had never struck her as a psychopathic pedophile. It was too much of a stretch.

  But then she thought of Bree Branford and her friends’ insistence that she was good girl. And Thad and Chelsea, who had led a secret life as Mike-n-Maisey, unknown to the people around them.

  And that was the truth of the matter, wasn’t it?

  We never really know what lurks beneath the skin of the people we work with. Or the people we liv
e with, for that matter.

  She thought of Dan, and his betrayal after six years of marriage. The pain she felt when she realized he’d spent two of those years—two whole years—lying to her. Deceiving her. Taking someone else into their very own bed. And he was a psychiatrist, for God’s sake. A professional. A man of insight and integrity.

  A man she had loved and who had claimed to love her.

  If her own husband could hide something like that, what about the detectives on her squad? What about Linkenfeld, who had reportedly taken to harassing prostitutes in his spare time? Or the patrol officers who walked in and out of their building every day? Or the crime scene techs, or even members of their support staff, from Drew Kelp in Services and Communications to Matt Nava in Computer Forensics?

  And what about the man who had murdered her mother? Mickey Bonner? He had presented himself as a witness all those years ago, a simple security guard who had stumbled into something horrific, and his story had never been doubted. Yet beneath that uniform was an evil so deep that it could almost be classified as supernatural. Not of this world. And for a brief moment, as she had occupied his body, Kate had felt that evil.

  She remembered what Rusty had told her up in the chapel about his now dead partner. That this job and the things they saw in the course of it were like a virus that ate some cops alive.

  Could it also turn you into someone else? Send you spiraling into a darkness so addictive that you did things you never thought you’d do, and would go to any length to keep from being discovered? And how much effort did it take to hide it all? How many of the smiles you smiled masked the disease you carried? The blackness of your heart?

  Maybe she’d have an answer when she took this son of a bitch down.

  Maybe.

  Crouching in the trees at the back of the house now, she studied it carefully, shifting her gaze from window to window, hoping to see that flashlight beam.

  But there was nothing. Only darkness.

  She knew he was in there somewhere. She could feel him, as Christopher had, her newfound sixth sense kicking into overdrive. After calculating the time it would take her to cross to the back door, she emerged from the trees and moved at a crouch as quickly and stealthily as possible. Leaves crunched beneath her shoes, and she winced at the sound, keeping her right hand on the grip of her Glock.

  She reached the deck, took the steps up to it and sidled up to the wall between a window and the back door. Wondering if it was safe to take a peek inside, she decided it was worth the risk and ducked her head toward the window, looking into what she knew was Bree Branford’s bedroom.

  The intruder was nowhere in sight, but there was enough moonlight filtering in to reveal the chaos he had left behind. The shelves had all been cleared, the closet and the dresser drawers hung open, the contents of the room scattered haphazardly across the wooden floor. Clothing. Lipstick and bottles of make-up. Stuffed animals with their guts torn out. Picture frames. Posters of rock bands and movie stars that had been ripped from the walls. Bree’s mattress and bed overturned, and the rug beneath it tossed aside.

  There was a desperation to it all that led Kate to believe that the killer was reaching a fever pitch. Maybe he hadn’t found what he was looking for on the Sorianos’ computer, or maybe he believed that Bree had hidden a duplicate of whatever it was, just as she’d hidden the phone. Whether he’d found it in her bedroom was anyone’s guess, but Kate didn’t think he’d still be here if he had—assuming that sixth sense of hers was right.

  So where was he now?

  She knew the back door was locked—or at least it had been last night when she’d conducted her own search. Fortunately, she’d made a duplicate key and had been carrying it since the first day of the investigation.

  She crouched in front of the door and checked the knob.

  Definitely locked.

  Which meant the intruder had likely gone in through a window.

  Taking her keys from her pocket, she found the one she needed, carefully slid it into the lock…

  (Not a sound, she told herself. Don’t make a single sound.)

  …then turned the knob and started to push, but felt resistance. Then she remembered that Thad Branford had, for reasons known only to him, designed it to be an outswinging door, and had secured it by welding the hinge pins to the hinges themselves.

  Unfortunately, she remembered this a moment too late.

  Just as she was about to open it, the door flew wide, knocking her backwards. Kate grunted in surprise as a dark figure barreled into her at a run and slammed her to the deck. The back of her skull hit it hard, sending a bright burst of pain through her head.

  The intruder jumped up and over her and scrambled down the steps as Kate cursed under her breath and rocketed to her feet, trying to shake away the pain as she leapt off the deck and followed.

  He was already disappearing into the darkness of the trees, and she tried to determine from his size who he might be, but her head was pounding and her vision had begun to double, making it impossible to determine much of anything.

  She lit out after him, each footstep jarring her brain, and then she, too, was in the trees, dodging fallen branches as she barreled into the darkness, hoping she was even headed in the right direction.

  Then she saw him as he moved into a wan pool of moonlight, still nothing more than a dark figure, impossible to identify.

  Yanking her Glock from its holster, she shouted “Stop, goddamn it! Stop!”

  But she knew she was wasting her breath, there was no way this guy was going to slow down. And as he disappeared into the darkness again, she saw the flash of a muzzle and dove to the ground.

  A bullet whizzed past her and took a chunk out of a nearby tree.

  Keeping a tight grip on the Glock, she scrambled for cover and returned fire—once, twice—and thought she may have hit him but couldn’t be sure. She waited for what seemed an interminable amount of time, hoping she’d gotten lucky, but those hopes were dashed when she heard the distant sound of a car starting.

  Kate exhaled a string of curses, knowing he had reached the access road, and she had blown her one chance to bring him down—whoever the hell he was.

  She heard the sound of footsteps behind her and spun around to find Weston again, holding his hands up, palms facing her.

  She really needed to break him of this habit.

  “I heard shots,” he said, a little out of breath. “Are you hurt?”

  Her head was still pounding, but she knew it would pass.

  “Only my pride,” she told him. “Only my pride.”

  39

  _____

  IT WAS WESTON WHO SUGGESTED they do what they had originally come here for.

  He and Kate had gone back to the house to assess the damage the intruder had caused, and discovered that every room in the place had been thoroughly trashed. If there had been anything here for the killer to find, he had likely found it.

  They were standing in a fresh new crime scene now, and Kate knew she’d have to call this in to the CS techs and put them to work looking for fingerprints and DNA. She’d also have to report what had happened to her team, and to Captain Ebersol—but she didn’t have to tell them why she’d come here, or that she hadn’t come alone.

  “You should probably take Christopher back to the motel,” she said. “Once I make this call, they won’t waste any time getting here.”

  “Why make it at all?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Because it’s my job?”

  “And how will you explain how you got here? I drove, remember?”

  She hadn’t thought about that. “I’m not sure, but I’ll figure something out.”

  “Or you could put it off for a while, and once we’re done here we can take you to your car and you can drive back out by yourself.”

  “Once we’re done?”

  “Doing what we came here to do.”

  Kate thought about this. “I’m not sure I want to go there anymore.”


  Weston sighed. “I don’t think you were ever sure.”

  “And what if I wasn’t?”

  “You have to stop running away from it, lieutenant. Christopher has a gift and so do you. You may have lost your killer out there, but don’t forget he’s still in here. All around us. And if we’re lucky, and Chris is firing on all cylinders, we may find out who he is.”

  “I don’t think you know what you’re asking of me.”

  “I know exactly what I’m asking.”

  “But you don’t know me. I’m not sure I can go through that again.”

  “Was it really that hard?”

  Kate bristled. “I saw and felt a man try to cut out my mother’s tongue. What do you think?”

  “Then let me do it,” he said. “Find me some paper and something to sketch with and let us loose in here. We’ve done it enough times before.”

  She considered this and nodded. “All right, but let’s make it quick.”

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  Kate waited as Weston retrieved the Rambler, parked it in the drive, and helped Chris up the steps and into the house. The boy was carrying his pink photo album and she eyed it dubiously.

  “You couldn’t have left your book in the car?”

  I like to have it with me. Are you all right?

  “I will be when this is done.”

  Stop being afraid, Kate. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

  “I shouldn’t be afraid of sushi, either, but one bout of food poisoning and I’ve sworn it off forever.”

  She was trying to make light of the situation, but felt weak and foolish and knew he was right. But she would’ve been lying if she said she wasn’t glad that Weston had volunteered to serve as Chris’s conduit. If his experience was even half as emotionally wrenching as hers had been, she didn’t envy him for a moment.

  Besides, her head hurt and she was still smarting over the loss of her suspect.

  The electricity had definitely been turned off and there was no light in the house. Kate found some candles in the kitchen and placed them strategically around the living room, lighting them as she went. The furniture had been ripped to shreds, so Weston dragged a couple chairs in from the dining room.