The killer?
Dante scanned the woods, searching for anything out of place—any lump, any figure, any shadows, any movement, but he didn’t see any.
Still, that feeling of being watched didn’t leave him.
The killer was out there. He could feel it. The man was watching his handiwork be discovered. He was getting off on knowing that the cops didn’t know who he was.
They were opponents—on opposite sides of the law—and yet, Dante felt some sort of connection to the man. No matter how this turned out—and he would make sure it ended in his favor—they would forever be connected. He had seen inside this man, seen the darkness that lurked there, and the man had seen him too. Seen the darkness inside him.
Darkness was infectious.
Once you came into contact with it, it got inside you, it grew, and he didn’t think there was any cure for it.
With a nod of his head to his watching adversary, Dante got into his car and drove off.
11:18 A.M.
Sydney Carriere hummed “I’m a Little Teapot” as she put a stack of picture books back on the shelf. She loved story time at the library where she worked; it was always her favorite day of the week. She had loved books ever since she was a small girl, and when she led story time, she got to impart that same love of books to other children.
The looks of joy on their faces when she picked up a new book, and the squeals of delight that came out of their little mouths when they got excited, there was nothing in the world like it.
Working in a library was her dream job and she loved coming here every single day. She felt so lucky that she got to do what she loved. Spending her days surrounded by books, reading to children, leading a book club, tutoring kids with disabilities, chatting with other people who loved reading as much as she did—it made work not even seem like work. Whenever she gave a recommendation of a book she thought someone would like based on their other book and author preferences, and that person came back and told her how much they loved the book, she felt a little rush like she had just saved an animal from extinction or something.
Now, if only she could get the rest of her life to fall in line with her work life.
While the job box was ticked, nothing else in her life was. Okay, well, that wasn’t quite true. She had a family she loved, Mom and Dad still together, three brothers and two sisters whom she fought with but would also die for, and friends who drove her crazy, made her laugh, and were always there when she needed them.
But she wanted more.
She wanted a boyfriend and one day a husband and a family of her own. She had just turned thirty; all her friends and all her siblings were either married or in a serious relationship and she was all alone.
It was almost five years now since her husband had been killed—just two months after they were married.
Five very long years.
But through it all, she’d had her books, and she was so very grateful for them. She might be lonely and alone, but she had vicariously lived hundreds of fictitious love stories. She had cried when they cried, laughed when they laughed, and rejoiced with them when they got their happy endings. They were as real to her as her family and friends. She had even tried writing her own romance book, but she was way too self-conscious to try publishing it. Maybe one day.
“Ms. Sydney.” A small hand tugged on her skirt, and she looked down to find one of the little boys who came to story time with his mom and baby sister every single week.
“Yes, Jimmy?” She crouched down so she was eye to eye with the three-year-old.
“I made you a teapot,” he said, holding out the paper teapot with moving spout that they’d made as part of today’s craft activity.
“Oh it’s great, you did such a good job with your cutting,” she praised the child. “But don’t you want to take it home and show your daddy?” Her refrigerator at home was filled with artwork from the children who came to her story time, but she always made sure that the children were positive before accepting any of their work.
“For you,” Jimmy insisted.
“He said as soon as he picked up a crayon that he was making this for Ms. Sydney,” his mom added.
“Then I would love to take this home and hang it on my fridge,” she told him, taking the brightly colored piece of paper. She loved these moments. She loved introducing children to books so they could grow up to love them as much as she did, and she loved their enthusiasm and curiosity about life. Sydney couldn’t wait to have kids of her own one day, but first, she had to find someone she wanted to have them with.
“Before we go,” Jimmy’s mother said, strapping the baby into the stroller, “I need some more book recommendations. I’ve already devoured every book by the last author you told me about and loved every one of them. Now I need something to keep me going until her next book comes out.”
“Same genre?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, let me think on it. I’ll have a list waiting for you when you come to story time next week.”
Sydney said goodbye to the family, watching a little wistfully as Jimmy took his mother’s hand and chattered away with her as they walked out of the library. She couldn’t wait to be a mommy.
“Did you hear?”
She looked at her colleague, Lex, as he came up beside her, a huge stack of books in his arms. She took the top half and asked, “Hear what?”
“There was another one,” Lex said, leaning in conspiratorially.
“Another what?” She had no idea what he was talking about.
“Another murder.”
“Oh no,” she said as she finally caught on. “Another librarian was murdered?”
“Yep,” he nodded gravely.
“Do we know them?”
“It was Kim Johnson.”
They did know her. She was a lovely lady who had worked here for a while before transferring to a library on the other side of the city about a year ago. Kim had been married for thirty years. She had four grown-up children, and nine grandchildren, and she was kind, always looking out for everyone and would give the shirt off her back to help someone in need.
“That’s three now,” Lex said.
“You think that someone is targeting them because they’re librarians?” They had all heard about the previous two librarians murdered. At first they had assumed the victim was targeted for some other reason. After the second murder, they had all assumed there was a connection of some sort between the victims and that was what had gotten them killed.
But now there were three.
Three librarians dead in just the last few weeks.
Had they all been killed because of their jobs?
If they had, did that mean that all librarians in the city were in danger?
Did it mean she was in danger?
12:40 P.M.
“The couple who found Kim Johnson’s body didn’t see anything,” Milla announced, interrupting his train of thought.
“I didn’t think they would,” Dante said, glancing up from his laptop.
“I know, but I was hoping they would have seen something. Anything.” Milla dropped down into her desk chair with a defeated sigh; it wasn’t like his partner to be so despondent.
“The killer was there,” he told her.
“Where?” Her brow scrunched in confusion.
“The woods. While we were there. He must have hung around to watch us discover the body.”
“You saw him?” Milla’s violet eyes grew wide and she bolted upright in her chair.
“No, of course not. If I’d seen him, he’d be in custody now, wouldn’t he?”
“Then how do you know he was there?”
“I felt him watching me.”
“How do you know it was the killer and not just someone out walking who happened to stop and try to see what was going on?” Milla asked as she relaxed back into her chair.
How could he explain that he knew because the same darkness that lived inside the killer lived ins
ide him too?
Like recognized like.
The only difference between him and the killers he hunted was that he had learned how to channel his darkness into tracking psychopaths and locking them away. If he didn’t have his job and an outlet for his own personal demons, he would likely find himself on the other side of the law.
“I just know,” he said vaguely.
Milla nodded, her eyes saying she knew there was more to it but wasn’t going to push the issue. “How does that change our profile?”
“Everything we learned today affects our profile,” he reminded her. “When Kelly Mac was found torn to shreds we assumed that it was either personal or random. When we didn’t find any similar crimes and there were no signs of robbery, we settled on personal. We wasted almost two weeks going through every single aspect of her life, grilling her family and friends, looking for a motive.”
“Only we never found one,” Milla inserted.
“Right … what we found instead was a second victim. When Teresa Mateo went missing, we saw a connection. Two librarians—both murdered in identical scenarios. It made sense that there was something between them that had led to their murders.”
“Only, again, we never found a connection.”
“Until now. Now we know that the only connection is the fact that they’re all librarians.”
“Why would someone want to kill librarians?” Milla looked both confused and repulsed by the notion.
He had long ago learned not to let emotions and preconceptions guide the way you thought. Librarians were just as much a target as anyone else. There was no reason they should be excluded when they were talking about a sociopath.
“Right now, the only reason we need to know the why is to find the who. At the moment, the facts are that someone has been breaking into libraries after hours when there is only one person there, abducting that person, then donning a set of dentures and claws and ripping them to shreds.”
“So he has a particular grudge against libraries or librarians?”
“Possibly, or he thought they were an easy group to target.”
“So far, he has only killed women. Do you think that’s a deliberate action and a choice he’s making or merely convenience in that there just happened to be women at the libraries he hit?”
“Deliberate,” Dante answered without hesitation. “While you were interviewing the couple who found the body, I checked in with the other libraries in the area. The one closest to where Kim Johnson worked, there was a man there last night, after hours, finishing up some paperwork. He reported finding a back door that should have been locked wide open.”
“You think the killer went there looking for victim number three, but when he saw it was a man, he went somewhere else?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“All right, so he targets female librarians. Age doesn’t appear to be an issue to him. Kim was fifty-two, Kelly was only twenty-four, and Teresa was forty-seven. Ethnicity and looks don’t seem to matter to him either, we have a Caucasian, an Asian, and a Hispanic victim.”
“It’s not the women themselves that are important to him; it’s just that they are females librarians.” His brain was swirling with possibilities, but so far, they couldn’t settle on any one thing. “We also know that he seems to think of himself as an animal of some sort—a beast, you mentioned earlier—and I think that would appeal to the man we’re looking for.”
“Despite the frenzied attack on the bodies, everything else he does seems precise and clearly thought out,” Milla said. “He targets low risk victims, and he manages to remove them from where he abducts them and get them to another location without being seen. And he doesn’t leave behind any forensics.”
“Both organized and disorganized. He’s able to hold it together, do what he has to do, but then he lets himself go, morph into what he probably sees as his true form. When he’s done and they’re dead, he’s able to pull it back together and attempt erasing any parts of himself that he might have left behind.”
When he was finished mauling his victims, the killer poured bleach all over them. While bleach didn’t necessarily destroy DNA, it could mess with it enough that getting a clear reading on it was difficult. Crime scene techs had—and still were—going over each of their three bodies, collecting all of the DNA that they could, and if they were lucky, they would eventually get a hit, but so far, any DNA discovered hadn’t been usable.
“The thing that confuses me the most,” Milla said, “is what he leaves behind at the scenes of the abductions.”
That had been baffling him too.
It was unusual, specific, certainly out of the ordinary, and obviously was something very personal to the man they were looking for.
“When we find out what that means, we’ll have our guy,” Dante said. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that they would get this killer, because anything less wasn’t just unacceptable; it was completely out of the question.
6:56 P.M.
He lay on the grass, staring up at the stars.
He liked it out here, away from all the houses and streetlights and car lights. The sky seemed so big, millions of stars stretched out across the great black expanse, twinkling and sparkling like someone had thrown billions of tiny diamonds up into the universe.
This was what life was about.
Quiet moments just relaxing watching the stars shine, the wind blowing gently across his face, the grass tickling the back of his neck—these were the moments when the fire inside him dimmed a little.
It never lasted.
How could it?
He had been betrayed by two people he loved. They had destroyed him; they had turned him into the beast he now was.
Now there were only two things that would release him from the prison that betrayal had locked him in, and he was determined that one way or another he would make one of those two things happen.
As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t an if; it was simply a when.
He was already making progress. He’d hung around for a while after he’d dumped the last body, camouflaging himself and blending into the trees. No one had even realized he was there.
Except that cop.
Even though he’d known that no one could see him, that cop had looked straight at him. Their eyes had met, and he had known that the other man didn’t just see him, but saw inside him too.
He didn’t like that.
He didn’t want some random stranger being able to figure out what he was and what was going on inside his head.
And not just a random stranger but the very man who was hunting him. He wasn’t used to being the prey. He was a beast, a hunter, top of the food chain, but when the cop was around, his position in the food chain changed. No longer was he the strongest, the fastest, the best. He had to defer that position to another.
That was unacceptable.
He might have to do something about the cop.
But not tonight.
Tonight was just about enjoying the outdoors. As spring slowly washed away winter, new leaves uncurled themselves, blossoms spoke of the coming fruits, flowers bloomed, and the whole world was colorful, fresh, and new.
Spring was a time of rebirth, and that was exactly how he saw this time in his life. It was a time for unleashing the real him, of embracing the beast within, of taking the betrayal he had suffered and getting his revenge. It was also a time of healing, of moving forward, of starting a new life. As soon as he’d left behind the infidelity that had destroyed him, then he could finally start that new life.
He thought of himself as a caterpillar, of sorts. Instead of spinning a cocoon of silk, he was using his revenge to change himself into a butterfly. And once he’d gotten his wings, he would be free to fly away to live the life he truly loved.
For now, though, his cocoon wasn’t full formed. There was more work to do. Starting with his next kill.
He had waited two weeks between his first and his second. Not because he wante
d to but because he thought it was the smart thing to do.
But it was getting harder to wait.
He’d lasted only a week and a half between his second and third kills, and even though it had only been a day, the need for blood was already consuming him.
Was it too soon to take another?
If he was going to do the smart thing, then he should wait, let the dust settle a little, before he found another librarian to kill. But there was a sense of urgency inside him that he couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was seeing that cop today, knowing that the man would be relentless in his quest to stop him.
However persistent the cop was, he wasn’t really afraid of being caught. He was close to getting what he wanted, and once he had it, he would simply disappear. He knew how to live off the grid. He could build a fire … he knew how to hunt … he could build himself a shelter … he didn’t need electricity or running water, and he certainly didn’t need human companionship.
All he needed was this.
The great outdoors.
A cold wind began to whistle through the air, and reluctantly, he stood and gathered his clothes. He liked to sit out here naked, the wind in his hair, the warm sunshine on his bare skin, or the caress of the night air against his flesh. It made him feel like he really was part of this world.
Throwing on his shirt and jeans, he shoved his feet into a pair of boots and headed for his car. The van was where he kept most of his stuff. Since he spent most of his time out here in the woods, it was just convenient to have the majority of his belongings close at hand.
Since he was the only one out here, he never bothered locking the van, and when he reached it and swung the door open, the warmer air hit him. While it was pleasant, he kind of missed the cold air, but for now, it was time to grab something to eat, get some sleep, and be ready for the next day.
Opening a packet of corn chips, his gaze fell on the set of fake teeth that he’d made for his transformation. They worked well, fit him perfectly, and had come out so much better than he had envisioned. He was very proud of them, if he did say so himself.
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