The Best Victim

by Colleen Thompson

  There was a weighted quality to his pause, like a heavy stone dropped onto the frozen surface of a pond. With the cracks in the ice spreading toward her, Lauren knew instinctively that he had something more to say, something that would change everything she thought or guessed about him.

  “Carrie Wilkinson Durant,” he said, his words as cold and empty as the emerging starlight outside. “We’d been married for ten years when she took one of my razorblades out of the package. Took it with her to the bathtub. I found her floating hours later. Just the way he’d planned.”

  EPISODE TWO

  I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

  —Marquis de Sade

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The mention of his wife’s name reopened old scar tissue, and Brent was there again, seeing the streamers of pale golden hair floating on the surface, hearing the splash of blood-tinged waves as he’d dragged Carrie from her bath.

  But the water had long since grown cool, just as she had, her flesh pale and wrinkled from the water, her hazel eyes wide and fully dilated. Worst of all had been the absence in them, the yawning emptiness that told him his frantic efforts at resuscitation had come far too late.

  Yet he couldn’t make himself stop, not even when the paramedics—responding to a call he would never remember making—had tried to pull him away. Maybe it was because he knew, knew it to his marrow, that this cold kiss would be their last, this damp embrace final.

  “Your wife,” Lauren was saying, her words ringing in his ears like the distant tolling of church bells. “Of course. It all makes sense now. How long ago?”

  Caught in a memory of the funeral, he didn’t answer until she repeated the two words, “How long?”

  The death knell in his head fell silent long enough for her question to sink in. A question, as simple as it was impatient, without a trace of the pitying condolences he was so damned sick of hearing.

  “Two years,” he answered. “Two years ago today.”

  “The other killings,” she continued, sounding as detached and clinical as a federal agent investigating strangers’ deaths. “Did at least one of them happen on the first anniversary?”

  Recognizing the coping mechanism for what it was, he shook his head and clamped down on his own emotions, too. “No. And there’s no correlation among any of the other dates, except that the suicides I’m tracking have all been in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. One possible outlier in Albuquerque, but that’s the farthest I’ve found.”

  “So you’re thinking that this troll—this killer’s—located in Texas and choosing victims within driving range?”

  He would almost swear he heard her plotting points and drawing lines between them on a mental map, the way one of the bureau’s data geeks would. If he hadn’t seen the other Lauren, the one who’d pleaded for him to tell her the news of Rachel’s death was a mistake, the one who doted on a throwaway dog, he might have believed she was some sort of robot.

  “It’s a pretty broad range, considering the size of Texas, but yeah,” he said, gratified by how quickly she had grasped an argument that no one in the bureau had been willing to consider. Or maybe they had looked into his theory, just as Special Agent in Charge Fremont Daniels had sworn, leaving Brent out of the loop because of his relationship with an alleged victim. In the end, though, they’d refused to see it, figuring the connections he saw so clearly as figments of a guilt-stricken mind. A mind broken on the rocks of his wife’s suicide.

  “Why’d she kill herself?” Lauren asked him bluntly.

  “She didn’t. Kill herself. She was fucking driven to it, same as Rachel,” he barked, the frustration of not being heard for two long years beating at his temples, “the same as if he’d slashed her wrists himself. So don’t ask that again.”

  She flinched, grabbing the door handle beside her as if she might bail out at any moment. As if she thought he would try to hit or even shoot her.

  Her reaction stopped the red wash of his anger cold, filling him with shame. Was he really so far gone he’d take out all his fury on a frightened woman? A woman grappling with what was undoubtedly the worst shock, the deepest grief she’d ever known?

  Yet she was the one who burst out, “I’m sorry. I’m not always so good at—Rachel always says I cut straight through the niceties, get to the point without all the useless verbal foreplay.”

  He’d be willing to bet her bluntness didn’t get her a lot of second dates, or maybe even first ones, in spite of her trim body and unusual blue-green eyes. But he wasn’t here to make friends with her, much less teach her social skills. In the past two years, he’d been having trouble enough managing his own. Or so the exodus of his friends had informed him. Not even his own sister called him anymore.

  Still, what was left of his conscience nudged him, and common sense said that acting like a crazy man was no way to gain her cooperation.

  “I’m the one who should be sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He casually hit the child safety lock button on his own door to be sure she didn’t hurt herself with an unscheduled exit. “But Carrie didn’t kill herself. She was forced into it, coerced.”

  “Rachel always said I cut straight through, not says.” Lauren corrected herself with a frown, as if she hadn’t heard his half-assed apology. “I keep forgetting that she’s gone now, so she can’t tell me—All I want is to hear her yell at me about my lousy manners one more time.”

  He glanced over and saw her wipe her face. But if he’d expected a full meltdown, she surprised him, instead murmuring, “This isn’t real. It can’t be.”

  He grimaced, wondering how many times he’d thought the same thing, had prayed for it to be true, since Carrie’s death. Two years out, he’d come far enough to recognize her denial. And far enough to understand why others believed his theories about the bastard he thought of as “the Troll King” were denial, too.

  Lauren shook her head. “When I asked why your wife had done it, I only meant to ask, what was it he used? Which tragedy did this guy blame her for? You said that was his pattern, to guilt blondes into—you know.”

  He tried to answer, but the words knotted low in his throat.

  “Jesus, Durant,” she blurted. “Please don’t tell me she was the one who left the baby in the car. Your baby.”

  “It’s none of your damned business,” his voice rumbled through clenched jaws.

  “You said you’d tell me everything if I came with you.”

  “Everything about your sister.”

  “Whose death, you’re claiming, is related to your wife’s. So convince me.”

  She was persistent; he would give her that much. “It wasn’t the kid in the car. The rest—I can’t talk about it right now.” Or ever, if he had a damned thing to say about it.

  As they approached a speed reduction for the town ahead, she heaved a sigh. “Okay, I guess, for right now, anyway. But at least tell me the last thing he posted about Rachel, this troll on the net. Otherwise, whatever you want from me, forget it.”

  “All right,” he said, grateful to get her off the unbearable topic of his late wife. “Just last night, this guy put up a photo of Megan Rutherford from her last Mother’s Day. Gorgeous picture, taken in the sunshine. She was hugging two cute kids, the younger one with Down syndrome—”

  “That would be Luke, four years old, and his sister, Molly.”

  “—and this big, fluffy puppy.”

  Lauren nodded. “Yeah, I’ve seen that picture, with the Newfie mix named Badgers, paws like dinner plates. Huge by now, I imagine.”

  “They were all laughing at something,” Brent continued, wondering if she used such details to keep emotion at bay. “Underneath the shot, the sick bastard posted, Anybody with a single scrap of decency would blow their head off. Rot in Hell, Whore! ”

  Lauren pinched the bridge of her nose and turned her face to the glass. After collecting herself, she asked, “Did she—d
o you think Rachel read it? Surely, she wouldn’t have—I begged her not to look at that trash, not to pay attention to those monsters. And never, no matter what, to feed the trolls with any response.”

  “I don’t have access to her laptop, so I can’t say whether or not she ever read it. But if he’d been calling her on the phone like the others, spewing that same bullshit—”

  “Like I said, she would’ve told me.”

  “She didn’t tell you about me.”

  She waved a hand at him, as if she could somehow push him farther from her. “I need to think. It’s too much.”

  They rode in silence, the tiny towns they passed through like islands dotting the vast stretches of rangeland, much of it nearly emptied of cattle thanks to last summer’s drought and sell-off. He fiddled with the radio for a minute, searching for a decent station, but seeing Lauren’s pained look, he quickly cut it off.

  He understood her need for quiet, her inability to take in any more at this point, so he waited until they’d passed through Dallas before he spoke again. “We’re going to have to fill the car up, so we might as well grab something for ourselves while we’re at it. How ’bout you? You ready for a stop yet?”

  She shook her head. “I just want to get to Austin as fast as possible, so we can get this all straight.”

  From behind the seat, the fat dog scratched the floor mat and groaned, resettling her old bones.

  “Sounds like our passenger could use a break, too,” Brent told Lauren. “Don’t want her springing a leak on my upholstery.”

  “Dumpling’s perfectly housebroken,” she said before qualifying, “unless she gets upset.”

  “Do long car rides generally upset her? We’ve been on the road more than three hours already.

  After a measured silence, Lauren said, “Maybe we should stop, then.”

  With little to choose from this far out of town, he pulled into the lot of a restaurant called Burger Palace, which boasted a grassy margin that looked decently dog friendly. Still, he would need to leave her to go inside for a few minutes. The question was, could he trust her to still be here when he returned?

  “The way I see it,” he told her, “I’ve got a couple choices here. I could cuff you to the steering wheel and leave you ’til I get back. But I figure that would make Detective Jimenez in Austin right about me, and I don’t want him to be right, don’t want to be the kind of man who’d—”

  “Go to prison for decades, maybe, on a charge of armed abduction?” One corner of her mouth rose slightly.

  He nodded. “There is that. And if I end up rotting in a cell, that’d leave the Troll King free to go after other women, to destroy their lives and the lives of their families.”

  She looked at him for a moment, a frown tugging at one corner of her mouth. “Where would I go, even if I did run? One way or another, I have to get to Austin to fix this, and you’re my fastest way there.”

  The words told him she was still bouncing between shock and denial, still hoping she could bargain her way out of Rachel being dead. Grief would do that to a person. He’d gone through it himself with Carrie. Was still going through it on an unconscious level, waking up with a sense of crushing loss after dreams of finding her, alive and well—really well and not the shattered shell she’d become throughout the last months of their marriage, nor the obsessed and anxious woman she’d been before Adam.

  “Just hurry up and go inside already,” she said. “I’ll need you to hold Dumpling’s leash so I can visit the facilities, too.”

  He did as she asked and was relieved to see that she was still there, walking the dog among the frost-crisped weeds when he came out of the restroom. Watching her through the glass, he took a chance and ordered a couple of burger baskets and drinks for the road, which he paid for and told the clerk his friend would pick up in a few minutes.

  As he came out, he said, “You mind grabbing our order on your way out if it’s ready?”

  “Our order?” She waved off the idea. “I told you, I don’t want anything.”

  “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to eat, but we still have a long drive. You might change your mind.”

  She shrugged in answer and returned about five minutes later, just as he was wondering if she’d slipped out the employee exit or talked the manager into calling 9-1-1.

  He unwrapped his burger, and they were underway again. Maybe it was the smell of the food, or maybe she’d paid attention to what he’d said before, but about twenty minutes later, she picked at the fries and nibbled one end of her sandwich. Every so often, she leaned back and shared a bite of grilled beef with the dachshund, who was making obnoxious little grunts, snuffles, and whimpers as she begged from the backseat.

  He increased their speed as they rolled beyond the edge of town, the road slicing an arrow-straight swath across more empty land. Or nearly empty, save for a single dun-colored horse that jerked its head from grazing to watch them pass.

  It should have a pasture mate, he thought, remembering the horses he’d grown up with on his grandparents’ ranch in far West Texas. Like cattle, equines were herd animals, always jittery and uncomfortable, sometimes flat-out crazy, if they were kept too long on their own.

  Just as he was growing crazy, cut from his familiar herd of spouse and friends and fellow agents. This has to stop, Brent, Carrie whispered, his dead wife’s voice inside his head.

  Beside him, Lauren balled up what was left of her meal and stuffed it in the bottom of the bag.

  “I think the dog got more of that than you did,” he ventured.

  “Tasted like old grease,” she complained. “I hope it doesn’t make her sick.”

  “Trust me on this. The food wasn’t the problem. For a long time, everything will taste off, or it won’t have any taste at all.” He recalled how little appetite he’d had in the months after Carrie’s death, how his old clothes seemed to swamp him. “Remember that and make yourself eat anyway. Go through the motions, or you won’t have the energy to handle all the things that have to be dealt with.”

  “I don’t want to handle anything. I don’t want to ‘get through it.’ I just—I just want Rachel, that’s all.”

  “I know,” he said, not trusting himself to say more, to tell her how two years later, he still wanted Carrie, the way she’d once been. How he would doubtless want her until they someday buried him by her side.

  Lauren said nothing, but her misery spoke for her, the wounded silence radiating off of her in waves. And vulnerability, as well, to as cruel a fate as the one the Troll King had inflicted on her sister.

  “There’s something else we need to talk about,” he managed, hating the emotion running roughshod over his voice.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  “Then listen, just listen. Because this bastard isn’t through yet.”

  “You have to understand,” she said, turning on him viciously, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about other people. I don’t have room left in my head for that now.”

  “In the last few months, he’s escalated, coming after his victims’ family members, too,” Brent explained, “harassing them about their loved one’s suffering and their failure to see it. To stop them from taking their own lives. The calls and messages have been beyond cruel and extremely graphic. He’s been torturing these women with excruciating details of their relatives’ deaths.”

  “These women?” She shook her head. “You mean, he hasn’t called you?”

  “I wish to hell he would,” he said, “but he has a type, and I’m not a pretty little blonde.”

  “Neither am I. So if you’re thinking of using me for bait—”

  “You’ve got the young and attractive part in spades, and you’ll be plenty blond once we lighten up your hair and get you saying the right things in front of the news cameras—”

  “What the hell? No,” she shouted, her voice so sharp it made the dog behind the seat yip. “I thought you wanted me to help you track him electronically—becau
se of my experience with—with networking.”

  You mean hacking, he wanted to correct her, thinking about what Cisco had called her, “an old-school white hat freak.” Meaning that she liked breaking in for the thrill of breaking in, not doing any harm. For her clients, her work had another purpose: finding and closing security rifts before malicious hackers could exploit them.

  “I do need your experience,” he told her, “but the surest way to draw him out is for him to see you as a potential target. And the easiest way to do that is to disguise you as a potential vic—”

  “Screw that. I’m not some dancing pony for you to trot out for a performance. And I’m nobody’s damned victim. Including yours. You got that straight, Durant?”

  #

  They were closing in on Austin when Durant grimaced and turned an accusing look toward Lauren. “Tell me that’s not you.”

  “Ugh. Dumpling.” Her nose wrinkling, she turned to look back over the seat at the dachshund, who had a pained expression on her graying face. Or maybe she was just embarrassed. “Sorry about that.”

  Lauren was apologizing to the dog and not Durant, since the way she figured it, he deserved worse than a little stink. She put her window down a couple inches.

  Durant was quick to follow suit, creating a cold cross-breeze that did a lot for the air quality. “Do we need to pull over? Because I am not going to be a happy man if she loses it in my car.”

  “I think she’s okay.” Lauren waited a beat before laying her hand over her own stomach. “But I’m not so sure about me. I knew that greasy junk you picked out was a bad idea.”

  “It’s not like there were a lot of better choices. Besides, you’re the one who decided to feed most of your lunch to that overstuffed sausage.”

  “Poor Dumpling,” she said, feeling guilty for intentionally upsetting her dog’s digestive system. Though her own stomach felt fine, Lauren squirmed uncomfortably and tensed, groaning as she cupped her hands over her waist.