Her face.
Darell’s jaw sagged open. He touched her left cheek. It was purple red with multiple small abrasions. Streaks of dirt ran down to her chin. Pieces of leaf and twig were stuck in her hair. “This where he hit you?” His voice was gruff. Rage popped around in his chest like oil in a wet pan.
Kaitlan winced. “Does it look bad?”
“Oh, my.” Margaret looked sick. “I hadn’t noticed in the dark.” She plucked a broken leaf from Kaitlan’s scalp.
Kaitlan backed up, rubbing her arms. Exhaustion pulled at her mouth. “I fell. And I had to hide in the forest so …”
Darell stared at her, searching for words. What on earth had happened? His rage spattered higher, its heat turned up. He would trap Craig Barlow if it was the last thing he did. If he had to die in the process.
He inhaled deeply. “Let’s sit down in the library so I can hear what happened. And I will lay out our plan.”
Margaret’s eyes rounded as though she was shocked he could come up with anything. He threw her a look.
Kaitlan’s gaze cruised the cabinets as if she’d only half heard his words. “I need some water.”
“I’ll get it.” Margaret fetched a glass and started to fill it from the refrigerator.
“No, just tap.” Kaitlan ran a distracted hand through her hair, picking at the debris.
“Okay.” Margaret stepped to the sink.
Kaitlan murmured “thank you” and guzzled the water. She set down the glass and swayed against the counter. Margaret reached out a hand to steady her.
“I’m okay.” Kaitlan waved her away. “I’m just …”
“Exhausted.” Margaret huffed. “And I’ll bet you’ve hardly eaten.”
Kaitlan shook her head. “I couldn’t. That dinner with Chief Barlow threatening me—no way. Not knowing what Craig was going to do when we left. And the smell of the food …” She scrunched her nose. “I’ve felt sick all day.”
Her eyelids flickered, as if she’d let something slip. She firmed her mouth.
A warning bell sounded in Darell’s head. Was there something she wasn’t telling him? An illness? “Why, what’s wrong with you?”
Kaitlan’s tired eyes fixed on his. She swallowed, defensiveness falling across her face in pale shadow. The moment stretched, as if she considered what to say.
A sigh escaped her. Both shoulders sank. “I’m pregnant.” She closed her eyes. “There. I’ve said it.”
“Oh.” Margaret’s fingers lifted to her lips.
Darell felt the blood drain from his head. Everything he’d planned in the last hour rose before him in a new, tainted picture. “You telling me Craig’s the father?”
Kaitlan focused on the floor. Her chin rose and fell in a tiny nod.
No.
Darell’s fingers tightened on his cane. His head pulled back, eyes narrowed. “How far along are you?” Disdain coated his voice.
Kaitlan bit her lip. “About six weeks.”
“Good. You’ve got plenty of time to get rid of it.”
Kaitlan’s eyes rose to his face in shock. “I don’t want to get rid of it.”
“Of course you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Kaitlan.” His tone snapped and he didn’t care. “What are you thinking? We want the world and especially you rid of this man. How do you expect that to happen if he’s the father of your baby? Forever, Kaitlan, you’ll be tied to him, whether you want to be or not. You want to raise a child who came from that? Whose daddy is a convicted killer on death row?”
Kaitlan’s face flushed. She thrust two steps forward, an arm flinging out. “I don’t care who her father is! What I care is that I’m the mother.” She jabbed at her own chest. “I care about loving this baby the way my mother never loved me. I want to raise her and be there for her.”
“With what means? You haven’t got a penny to your name.”
“I’ll find a way! What’s it to you? You want me to kill my baby just because I’m not rich like you?” Tears sprang to her eyes. “I want a family, don’t you get that? It’s more important to me than anything.”
“But Craig is the father.”
A tear spilled down her cheek. “When he’s in jail he won’t have any part of my baby. I’ll go to court if I have to. Or maybe I won’t even tell him it’s his. I’ll say I was with someone else. She won’t tie me to him. My daughter will be mine.”
“You don’t know it’s a daughter,” Darell retorted inanely.
“Son then. Either way, I’m not having an abortion.”
Darell backed up and leaned against a counter. This was too much. He should sit down.
Margaret cleared her throat. “Could I just—”
“No,” Darell spat.
“Stop it!” Kaitlan’s tone shrilled. “Why are you so mean to her? Just because you never cared about family.”
The words bit deep. “Fine, then.” Darell hit the hardwood floor with his cane. “You two talk all you want. Apparently you don’t need me, and I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
“What, you can’t go to bed!” Margaret caught his arm. “You said you have a plan. This news doesn’t change anything for tonight; we can deal with it later. Right now we’ve got enough to think about.”
Darell yanked his arm away. “She said she doesn’t need me.”
“She never said that.”
Kaitlan bent over, hands hiding her face. Just folded like a rag doll. A sob pressed through her fingers.
Margaret shot Darell an accusing look. “See what you’ve done?”
The crying squeezed Darell’s heart. He gawked at Kaitlan. “I didn’t do anything. She brought it up.”
“D.” Margaret’s green eyes moistened. “Kaitlan could have died tonight. Craig came back before I got there, and she had to hide in the woods. She got hit by a car—”
“What! Hit by a—”
“On top of everything she’s pregnant and sick. Now you want to tell her what to do with her own baby?”
Kaitlan’s breathing shuddered then quieted. She lifted her head to gaze at him dully.
Darell buffed his forehead. “You got hit by a car?”
She tilted her head. “Actually, I hit it.”
His face scrunched.
Kaitlan waved a hand—doesn’t matter. Her gaze slid into the distance. Exhaustion and defeat trailed across her brow.
Margaret raised her eyebrows at Darell.
He scratched his ear, nonplussed. “Come into the library.” He turned to thump out of the kitchen with all the dignity he could muster. “Heaven knows I’ve waited for you long enough.”
Sudden music sounded. Darell halted. “What’s that?”
Kaitlan’s stunned gaze pulled toward the counter. Dreamlike, she crossed to her purse and opened it. The music turned louder.
“It’s my cell. He gave me back my cell.” Her hand slipped into a side pocket in the purse and withdrew a phone. “This is Craig’s ring tone.”
“Don’t answer,” Darell commanded.
They stared at the phone as if Craig himself might crawl from it.
After a moment the music stopped.
Kaitlan set the phone on the counter. “No message.”
“Evidence. He wouldn’t be so foolish.” Darell gestured with his chin. “Turn it off.” The location of a live cell phone could be traced.
She held down a button. Notes sounded, then the phone went silent.
“If he did that …” Kaitlan checked in her purse again. “Hah!” She pulled out a car key. “Look. He gave this back too. Why would he do that?”
Darell’s mind chugged. He frowned at the key.
Margaret shifted. “Maybe—”
“Quiet!” He massaged his jaw, frowning at the floor.
The answer surfaced.
Darell’s head came up. “He was afraid you’d gotten to someone for help and would tell what’s happened. The only thing he could do was make you look crazy. With no sign of the body you cl
aimed to find, and your keys and phone in your purse where they should be …” Darell lifted his hand and shrugged.
Kaitlan’s eyes rounded as if she couldn’t believe Craig’s cunning. “What about the bruise on my face?”
“He’d claim to know nothing about how you got it.” Darell’s gaze roamed over her cheek. The scrapes were redder now. “Your fall hasn’t helped matters any. Now it would be hard to prove the bruise didn’t come from that.”
“Oh. Of course.” Kaitlan’s expression flattened. Shoulders slumped, she put the key back in her purse, then pressed her palms to her temples. She looked like an orphan, hollow-cheeked and lost.
Her gaze drifted to the cell phone. She scooped it up with a sigh and dropped it into her purse. Turning away, she did a double take. She leaned over the handbag. “What … ?”
Reaching deep inside, she pulled out two white rectangles. Kaitlan turned them over. Her skin blanched white. She cried out and shook the objects from her hands as if she’d been stung. They landed on the floor face up.
Photos.
Darell squinted. What were they of?
Margaret’s wide eyes locked on the pictures. She cut a glance at Kaitlan, then edged over to pick them up. As she bent down, her face registered horror. Air seeped up her throat. She hesitated.
“Give them to me!” Darell thrust out his arm.
Gingerly she picked up the photos by one corner and shoved them into his hand. He peered at them.
The victim’s body.
One was taken from the right, one from the left. Vivid color shots of her ghastly frozen features, the black and green fabric around her neck. Clear in the photos were the surroundings. A bed, a cheap wooden headboard, walls and furniture.
Kaitlan’s bedroom, no doubt.
OBSESSION
forty-two
You think you have problems? Your issues are nothing.
After that second kill my life plummeted. Or did it soar? I couldn’t tell. One minute I’d feel free as I’d ever been. The next I’d be eating dust.
The killing itself was the soaring part. The rightness of it. The seductive call of the fabric, the way it felt in my hands. Its power to take life—just like that. A living, breathing human choked to a deserving, sudden end.
Then out of nowhere fear would drive me to my knees. Utter chest-constricting fear of getting caught. It would descend at the most unexpected of times. When I was at work. Watching television. Taking a shower. On the phone. The thought of friends, family, society at large knowing what I had become petrified me. They would never understand. They would hate me, judge me.
Punish me.
I can’t go to jail. Not me. That happens to other people. Criminals. People not so smart.
When the panic is at its worst my brain swells like a rushing river. Visions of being apprehended roil and plunge, dragging me under. The worst thought is of being separated from my black silk fabric with green stripes. From its touch and smell. Its comfort.
I’d be undone. Purposeless.
In those horrific moments I tell myself I won’t kill again. I’ve succeeded undetected so far. Why push it?
But deep inside I don’t believe my own words. Because even then the fabric calls to me.
The very same night of that second killing I cut another strip of cloth.
Sliding it through my fingers, I remembered the knowledge that had surfaced within me. That I would soon pursue death, not wait for it.
When you first ingest something sweet you get the full effect of the sugar. But sip perfectly sugared coffee, then follow it with candy. The next drink of coffee will no longer taste sweet enough. We humans always want more.
Where did our craving come from? Why are we never satisfied? Why couldn’t I, of all people, be content, hoarding the incredible gift of life the fabric had given me?
Three weeks after that killing I found my next target.
I was reading the paper at the breakfast table, a piece of toast in my hand. My eyes grazed the woman’s name in some small article—one I would have ignored. The letters leapt off the page.
The fabric in my car’s glove compartment switched on. Waves of heat radiated through the car window, into my kitchen. Caressed the back of my neck.
I stared at the name. Why this one?
That day at work I heard the name again. Gossip. Talk around town of the woman’s lurid past—one she denied. An abandoned baby. Three abortions.
And she claimed to want to serve the city.
I had little time. The cloth lulled me, sang to me. Then foreswore all pretense and downright demanded me. I would either break in two or answer its siren song.
Through diligence I learned where the woman worked. Her habits. I planned what must be done —detailed, schemed, clever plans that demanded forethought.
And I struck.
As soon as the deed was done, blessed relief descended once more.
The feeling was short-lived.
It wasn’t my fault. Sometimes even the best-laid plans go awry.
I have entered new waters, far deeper than I
ever intended. They are dangerous and icy, and will demand of me actions I hadn’t expected to take.
But take them I will. Desperation drives the best of us.
Before I knew it a new strip of fabric was cut. Strange, but I don’t remember doing it. The hours were too full of anxieties and details.
Something else. I am no longer two people in my mind. The days of barely remembering the killings—gone. I now tread the center divide, blessedly aware of Who I Am and ever so cautiously hiding it from the world.
The cost of being chosen.
I wear the fabric on my body, carefully folded, tucked into a pants pocket. There it clings to me like sucking tentacles.
This is my salvation. I can no longer function apart from it.
Death—at my fingertips.
forty-three
“Help me, God.” Slumped on the couch, Kaitlan whispered the words toward the library ceiling. She had to believe they’d rise up to heaven. God had listened before. He could save her again.
Visions of Kaitlan’s old life reignited in her head. Stretched out on a ratty floor, coming down from cocaine in a room full of traitorous friends. Turn her back and they’d steal from her, lie to her. Anything for their own fix. She would have done the same.
With God’s help, she’d overcome all that.
Despite her prayer, defeat sucked up the air around Kaitlan in a noxious cloud. Hadn’t the three of them been here hours earlier in the very same positions? Scheming how to outwit Craig? Lot of good that had done.
This is real, not a novel, she’d told her grandfather. Yeah. And in real life, even with prayer, the good guys didn’t always win.
“Sit up and listen to me, Kaitlan.” Sternness edged her grandfather’s voice.
“But he has pictures of her. Dead—in my bedroom! Now that I’ve disappeared he’ll use them against me.”
“I doubt he wants to do that. They’re evidence of the murder he’s trying to hide.”
“Great, they’re just back-ups—in case he doesn’t kill me first.” Kaitlan covered her eyes with both hands.
“Listen to me, girl, those photos are a point for our side. That was a major misstep for Craig.”
“You said you had a plan, D.” The hope in Margaret’s tone sounded forced.
“I do. Kaitlan, sit up.”
She rubbed her forehead and dragged herself up straighter. Whatever her grandfather said, it wouldn’t work. Every corner they turned, Craig was already ahead of them.
Darell Brooke perched in his chair, legs spread, cane planted between them. Shocks of white hair stuck this way and that, straggly brows hanging in his eyes. His gaze gleamed like some wild and weary Einstein.
“I am catching Craig Barlow tomorrow,” he announced. Glancing at the clock, he drew his mouth in. “Make that today.”
It was after midnight. Kaitlan sighed. So much terror and no sl
eep.
Her grandfather pointed at her. “You won’t go to work. In fact you will not leave this house until he’s caught.”
That would be a nice thought.
She lifted a hand. “We have no evidence to catch him, even with these pictures. They only point to me.”
“Not true about the pictures, and evidence exists.” Her grandfather shrugged. “The police just haven’t found it yet. More likely, the chief knows and is doing everything to point away from it. Craig bought the fabric. That transaction can be traced. Likely he still has the cloth in his house. Now he’s taken photos. He may well have taken pictures of the other victims too. They would be his trophies. Perhaps fibers have been found on the victims that will match the carpet in the make and model of his car. Maybe a hair.”
“What if he’s gotten rid of everything?” Margaret rubbed her knee in small, nervous circles.
“Doubtful. But even if he tried, down to erasing the pictures from his memory card, a skilled technician could recover them. I’ll bet Craig doesn’t know that. The digital card is like a computer hard drive that’s been erased. Old photos can still be found.”
“So what do we do tomorrow?” Kaitlan asked.
Her grandfather eyed her with the satisfaction of a cat conning a mouse from its hole. “The King of Suspense is about to make one local fan’s day.”
The meaningless words floated down inside Kaitlan, weightless as feathers. But they reached bottom with the thud of stone. Understanding puffed up like dust. “You’re going to call Craig?”
“More than that. I’m going to invite him to the house.”
Margaret gasped.
Kaitlan’s lips parted. “No way!”
“You got a better idea?”
“No, but—”
“Then I suggest you listen to what I have to say.”
“You can’t.” Kaitlan shoved forward on the couch. “It’s dangerous!What if it doesn’t work? What if he gets here and realizes he’s been set up—”
“It’ll work.”
“But the minute he sees me …”
“He’s not going to see you. Or Margaret. He won’t know anyone else is in the house. It’ll just be him and me.”
Kaitlan stared at her grandfather. Determination and stubbornness hardened his features. She knew the look all too well. No matter her arguments, he would not be stopped.
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