by Lisa Jackson
“Calm yourself,” he ordered quietly. He paced to the door, grabbed the handle, then let it go. Closing his eyes for a second, he recaptured some of his fleeing composure. Finally he walked back to his desk. This wouldn’t do. He prided himself on being in control. Somehow he had to regain his equilibrium.
This was a situation that had to be dealt with, that was all. A problem that needed fixing, and fast. His mind spun ideas for an “accident,” not just for one, but two. The rancher would have to be killed, too.... Together, they had to die together.
Lovers in a passionate but deadly quarrel?
Murder/suicide?
A robbery gone bad?
Another car wreck, where neither one survived? The winter weather and coming storms would provide believability. He balled his fists and held them tight over his eyes.
Think!
You’ve worked too hard to give up now!
Again he wondered if the Fates were against him.
Of course not!
But he couldn’t shake that same old feeling that something or someone was watching him. Like a deadly snake deceptively wound around a twisted branch, an unseen enemy lying in wait, ready to strike. His skin crawled, and he slowly let out his breath. This was insane; he couldn’t let his fears undermine him.
He was in charge.
He was the protector.
And none of the Unknowings were going to outwit him.
With a glance at his inversion boots, he dismissed thoughts of sweating out his frustrations. For the moment. He had too much to think about, too much to plan. Grimacing, he slid the headphones over his ears and listened with the sole intent of righting a very old wrong.
Trace turned up the radio in the kitchen and the television in the living room. With the Christmas carols filtering from the back of the house and the news blaring from the front, he felt that he and Kacey could talk. He showed her the tiny microphones he’d located, including the ones in her bathroom and bedroom, which, when he pointed them out, drained the color from her face.
“Who?” she said in a low voice. “Why?”
“Someone who wants to know what you’re doing.”
“I should go to the police.”
He nodded.
She started to shake. “He’s been in my house!”
He drew her near and whispered in her ear, “You asked who.... Can you answer that question?”
“No . . . I don’t think so. I’m usually here alone, and until Bonzi moved in, I didn’t talk to anyone except on the phone, but those are pretty one-sided conversations.”
They were practically in an embrace, and now Trace made it official, talking to her like a lover to keep their voices from being overheard. “What about disgruntled boyfriends or your ex-husband?”
“Not JC. He’s over me and he wouldn’t stoop to this. The divorce is long over. And there hasn’t been an ex-boyfriend since my freshman year in college, maybe.”
“An unhappy business partner, or someone who didn’t like the medical treatment, or a girlfriend that thinks you put her down?”
“I’m telling you I don’t have any enemies.”
“Maybe someone you’re making nervous.”
“I just got this information. I haven’t . . . done anything.” She was shaking her head, but the images of the women who looked like her, some alive and some dead, slid through her brain. “But it has to be him. It has to do with this whole dopplegänger thing,” she said, reluctantly releasing him to sink onto the couch.
“Has anyone ever tried to harm you?”
Her inner eye flashed on the attacker, a man in black, ski mask covering his face, leaping from the shadowy staircase of the parking structure. Terror sizzled through her, as it had that night.
“Kacey?” Trace prodded.
She let out her breath, and sensing she had a story to tell, he took her out to the front porch, where she whispered, “There was one time. But it was around seven years ago, when I lived in Seattle, still going to medical school.” She shuddered, remembering that day. She had been fighting a cold and was dead on her feet. It was late, and she’d spent hours in the library, on the computer, as hers had been ravaged by the latest virus.
Just before the library closed, she’d left, crossed to the parking garage where she’d parked her car, and taken the elevator to the sixth floor.
She hadn’t seen him hiding near the stairwell, had been too busy fumbling with her keys and wishing she were already in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin and a cup of hot lemon water with a teaspoon of clover honey, her grandmother’s cure-all for everything, at her bedside.
As she walked to her car, she noticed that the lights in the garage seemed dim. Then she’d seen that two bulbs were smashed, the glass having rained onto the concrete floor.
All she’d been concerned with at that moment was that shards of glass might become embedded in her tires.
And then she’d heard something out of place—a quiet cough? Or the scrape of shoe leather? She’d started to turn. A glimpse out of the corner of her eye. A man leaping from the shadows near the stairwell. Dressed in black, some kind of body-fitting suit, a ski mask pulled over his head, he raised a hand as he jumped at her.
In his gloved fingers, a knife blade glinted.
She screamed, hit him with her purse, and tried to run. Too late. His weight came down on her. Bam, her forehead cracked against the concrete. Blood poured from her face as they wrestled. Adrenaline fired her blood, and she fought wildly, yelling and swearing, grabbing his wrist, forcing the blade away from her throat.
“Bitch!” he snarled, but there was another sound, that of a car’s engine starting a floor or two above.
His attention wavered, and she shifted beneath him, twisting his wrist, turning the knife upward, so that when he looked down, she sliced open the mask near his eye, a thin line of blood showing near his temple.
“Help! Help me!” she screamed and heard the car above heading down.
He heard it, too. Swearing viciously, he threw her away from him, leapt to his feet, and ran off just as the car, a white Volkswagen, turned the far corner and headed directly toward her.
She lifted an arm, and the driver, a woman about her age, stood on the brakes, then flew out of her car, leaving it idling as she cried, “Are you okay? What happened?” She recoiled at seeing Kacey’s bloody face but was already dialing 9-1-1.
Now Kacey relived the attack, feeling again that stone-cold fear that brought color to her cheeks and sweat to the back of her neck.
She told Trace about what had happened, how she’d escaped with her life, how the assault had seemed random, a crazy who was just waiting for his chance. He’d shown no interest in robbing her; he’d left her purse. Rape? Maybe. But she’d seen his eyes through the slits in his mask, and they, a steely blue, pupils dilated, were cold and deadly. Whether he first had planned to kidnap her, then sexually assault her or torture her, she didn’t know, but she was certain in those few desperate minutes that he intended to kill her.
“The police never found him?” Trace asked soberly.
“No. I know I cut him, but they collected no blood except my own. And so he’s out there, somewhere.”
“Bugging you?” Trace asked, inclining his head toward the closed door, behind which the mics that were still in place.
“Why?” she whispered aloud.
Trace didn’t immediately answer, and she said, “Shelly Bonaventure’s death was well planned, made to appear a suicide. Jocelyn Wallis fell into the river. Elle Alexander’s minivan slid off the road.... Those attacks took time and thought.”
“If they were attacks,” he reminded, but Kacey was on her own track.
“When I was fighting off the psycho in the parking garage, I thought he was a wack job, completely off the rails. Not the kind of person who would meticulously plan someone’s death.”
“Do you have security here?”
“No alarm system, except for Bonzi.”
; “Weapons?”
“My grandfather’s shotgun.”
“Do you want to go to the police?”
“No,” she answered immediately. “Not yet.”
“Then I’ll stay here till morning. You take the dog upstairs, and I’ll camp out on the couch with the gun.” He opened the front door, and they headed back inside, which was just as well because Kacey had started to shiver.
She wasn’t sure what she thought about him spending the night. What did she know about Trace O’Halleran? He seemed like a nice enough guy, a good father, but that wasn’t enough to hand him a gun and go off upstairs to sleep soundly. Not after what had been happening.
“How about you keep the dog and I’ll take the gun?” she whispered.
He almost smiled. “Smart,” he said, already reaching for the blanket that was always folded at the end of the couch. “Tell ya what. You take ’em both.”
Snow was falling in big, wet flakes to pile on the ground at the edge of the night-darkened river. Shivering, Kacey stood on the icy bank, where the wind shrieked down the canyon and billowed her nightgown. Barefoot, she stared down at the rushing water and shivered with the cold.
“Kacey!” She heard her name over the screaming wind and saw Grace Perchant with Bane, her wolf dog. “Evil,” she said, her voice a whisper over the keening wind. “Evil.”
“Who?” Kacey tried to say, but her voice was lost and the thick falling snow became a shroud, Grace and the dog disappearing into the gloom.
Fear coiled around her heart, and when she glanced down to the water again, she saw faces beneath the surface. Distorted and pale, they stared up at her in horror. Shelly Bonaventure, her makeup smeared; Jocelyn Wallis, crying; Elle Alexander, her eyes round with accusations; and then her own face, floating up to the surface, as if disembodied, her features twisted and ever-changing, but hers nonetheless. And Leanna O’Halleran, she was there, too, with Trace’s face, his mouth twisted into an evil grin, between Jocelyn and Leanna. . . . He stared up at her through a watery veil, and Jocelyn’s naked body drifted past him. Her breasts were flaccid, the dark nipples pinched, and a jagged, raw, Y-shaped autopsy scar marred her pale skin.
Kacey tried to scream but no sound came. She tried to back up, but her feet seemed rooted on the bank, and the snow, as it continued to fall over the river, turned pink, then red, before dropping in thick scarlet drips of blood.
Sweet Jesus!
A dog growled and barked, and she looked across the river again, where she made out Grace, now no more than a skeleton, her pale hair whipping frantically in the wind, her jawbone opening to expose a dark hole as she whispered, “Stay away. . . . He’s evil.” The now emaciated animal beside her growled low in his throat as the bloody snowflakes caught on what was left of his coat.
“Who?” she cried again as the dog’s voice startled her. A low, gruff growl ...
Kacey sat bolt upright in her own bed.
The room was dark; her bedcovers were mussed. Bonzi stood at the window, staring out to the backyard. The hackles on the back of his thick neck were raised, hair stiff, tail unmoving, while his nose was pressed to the glass, fogging the pane in two tiny spots.
Her heart froze. “Bonz . . . ?” she said softly as she eased out of the bed. She stood next to him at the window, near the curtains, next to the shotgun she’d loaded and propped against the casing. Through the glass, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. The yard and surrounding shrubbery were covered in white, shivering in the wind that moaned through the rafters of this old farmhouse.
It was almost morning, but the outbuildings stood in dark relief, black against the blanketing snow, illumination pooling from the twin garage lanterns.
Was there something or someone out there? Just around the corner of the old barn? Or farther still, in the dark row of saplings and scrub pine that edged the fields her grandfather had plowed? A light snow was falling. Gentle and soft.
Nothing. It’s nothing. Maybe a stray cat or a hare . . .
But her heart was knocking irregularly, her nerves strung tight as bowstrings. The edges of her dream clawed at her brain, disturbing images of dead women and bloody snow and Grace’s ominous warning.
Evil . . .
She saw her own pale reflection in the window, an ashen image that reminded her of the women in her dream. Was it true? Could Gerald Johnson possibly have fathered all the women she’d found and who were now being killed one by one?
She heard a noise coming from the lower floor. Her heart jolted at the same moment she realized it was Trace.
“Kacey?” he called softly up the stairs, the sound of bare feet slapping the steps as he climbed upward. “I thought I heard—” He appeared, filling up the doorway, his bare shoulders, silhouetted by the night-light in the hallway, nearly touching the jamb, his battered jeans hanging low on his hips. “The dog.” He glanced around the darkened room and demanded, “Something wrong?”
“No.” She forced the image of his leering face from the nightmare from her brain. “Bonzi woke me.”
Hearing his name, the dog finally turned to look over his shoulder and then, whatever enemy he’d thought he’d sensed no longer snagging his attention, wandered around the end of the bed and waited for Trace to scratch his ears.
He stared at Kacey for a second. “I’ll go have a look around outside.”
“No . . . it was probably just some animal. A squirrel or deer or whatever. This place is new to him.” She left her post at the window and patted the big dog’s head. “Probably just my nerves. I was having a particularly gruesome nightmare.”
“You okay?” he asked, and one big hand fell lightly on her shoulder. Warm and steady. She nearly melted into him, but didn’t. She didn’t have time to fall apart.
“As well as I can be,” she said, sliding into her slippers and grabbing her bathrobe off the hook on the back of the door. A thought nagged at her just below her consciousness, something about the women in the dream, how they were linked, but she couldn’t quite catch it. “I’ll make coffee,” she said, then slipped past him as she headed downstairs. The dog trotted after her, and Trace followed last.
It all seemed so normal.
So damned domestic.
Except for the threats, real or imagined, that lay just outside her door. And the hidden microphones. And maybe even the man she was with now, who had been married to a woman who could be her twin, a woman who’d disappeared. He was also linked to Jocelyn, another look-alike who had ended up dead. Murdered.
Whatever fantasies she had about him, she had to push aside, she determined as she snapped on the lights on the first floor.
With one finger, Trace snagged his T-shirt from the back of the rocking chair. Despite her warnings to herself that getting close to him could be dangerous, Kacey watched his muscles work beneath a patch of curling hair that spread across his chest and arrowed lower over tight abs.
Her throat went dry, and she turned toward the kitchen, pushing all images of him out of her head.
She’d already started coffee by the time he, in his sweater and jacket and boots, walked over the old linoleum to the back door. “I’ll take the dog and take a look,” he said, whistling for Bonzi, who seemed eager to go. “Once I know everything’s secure, I’ll be on my way.”
“Okay. I’ll be heading to the hospital after I take care of some chores.”
She nodded and glanced at the clock, noting it wasn’t quite six.
“And the authorities?” he asked softly, almost inaudibly.
She nodded. She planned on contacting them but wasn’t sure exactly when.
While he was outside and the coffee was dripping through the maker, she ran through the shower. Within five minutes she was dry, half dressed, and winding her hair into a quick knot that she pinned to the back of her head. Today she applied only a slap of lipstick, a brush of mascara, then slid into slacks and a sweater before returning to the kitchen. Trace was just stomping the snow from his boots on the back porch. He o
pened the door, and Bonzi, fresh from relieving himself and, it appeared, running through the snow, bounded inside.
“Nice morning,” Trace said as he stepped over the threshold, shaking his head to let her know he hadn’t seen anything outside. She poured two cups of coffee and handed him one. They shared their drinks in silence for a few moments, acutely aware of the microphones.
Finishing his coffee, Trace put his cup in the sink. Kacey followed suit as he asked, “You leaving now?”
“Yep.” She grabbed her keys. She might not completely trust Trace, but she really didn’t like the idea of being alone in her house, Bonzi or no Bonzi.
CHAPTER 26
Water dripped onto the floor of his listening post. Snow melting off his clothes. He’d hurried back from Acacia’s, where he’d spent the night watching the back of her house through his night-vision goggles. O’Halleran had spent the night with her! He’d circled around and seen the man’s truck while snow came down heavily, obscuring his tracks almost as he made them. He’d circled back and waited, the big flakes silent and cold, a slow, hot fury taking hold inside him at all the things she’d learned and told O’Halleran.
A light had come on in Acacia’s room, and he’d quickly moved farther into the brush and jogged to his car. It had been a short drive to his lair, and he’d hurried inside, eager to listen in, but there was nothing more than what he’d heard the night before.
His blood burned through his veins. He wanted Acacia to die. Soon. Now.
He ripped out the earbud and threw it down. If only he’d heard more! The first part had been clear, but then they’d turned up the volume on the television and the radio.
Had they guessed? Had they found the tiny microphones? Been aware of him listening in?
Couldn’t be!
In frustration he’d left this morning to go to her place, and the only thing he’d learned was that O’Halleran had never left. She had an ally. O’Halleran! Leanna’s ex. How had that happened? He wasn’t sure, but he knew they had to die together. Somehow.