IS A SERIAL KILLER STALKING THE BAY AREA?
The pages were from a variety of Bay Area newspapers: San Francisco Tribune, Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury Times…
Heart pounding, Camilla checked the dates. Most were within the past four years. But one article was older than the others. “
ARE WOMEN SAFE IN THE PARK?
” was from seven years ago.
Which park? Golden Gate Park?
She scanned the article, and her brows knitted.
Central Park? That couldn’t be right.
Camilla looked at the bottom of the newspaper and froze.
All the other articles were from San Francisco Bay Area papers. But that particular page had come from the
New York Times.
New York, and then California. Oh god.
The goose bumps started on her forearms, ran right up her shoulders, and met at her spine. Her hands shook, rattling the papers she held.
She could sense someone standing silently in the doorway behind her.
“W
ell, this is a little awkward,” Mason said. “I guess I don’t really need to ask what those are about.” He pointed at the articles.
Camilla stared at him. He leaned against the doorway, wearing the same familiar easy smile. Familiar, but a complete stranger.
“This whole time…” She started to rise but couldn’t, and settled back to her knees. Instead of terror, she felt only the sick, bitter disappointment of betrayal. “You’ve been working with Brent. You’re a… a…” She couldn’t say the words. “Mason, how
could
you?”
He raised his hands in protest. “Camilla, you’ve got this wrong. I was
never
working with Brent. I’m just another innocent victim in this scheme of his. I still don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Oh god, how can you say that? How can you stand there talking to me, like you’re some kind of normal person?”
She could feel tears running down her face, and she wiped them away.
“I even
liked
you, Mason. I thought you were my friend.”
He took off his glasses, then straightened up, rolling his shoulders back, and suddenly looked taller. Menacing. She realized with horror that the glasses and the hunched posture were simply a part of his camouflage.
“Like a cat with a mouse,” she said. “Having fun. Pretending.”
Mason shook his head. “No, this is the real me…” He paused. “Well, okay, fine—I’m not really gay.”
“Mason!”
Strangely, she found this the worst betrayal of all. But it made the perfect disguise, didn’t it? The gay friend—safe, nonthreatening, trustworthy…
“You were stalking me,” she said.
“Maybe at first. But now I don’t think of you that way anymore.”
“You killed Heather! You killed Natalie!”
“No, not Natalie. That wasn’t me.” He hesitated. “Well, actually, I
did
take Natalie the first time, but Juan found her and brought her back.”
“Oh god.
You
conked Dmitry and freed Travis just so we’d blame him. You smeared his paint color on Natalie’s sweatshirt and waved it in front of Veronica like a red cape in front of a bull.”
“But I didn’t take Natalie the
second
time. I have no idea who did. It must have been Brent.”
“And Veronica?”
Mason laughed—a sound of nervous relief.
“That was one scary, scary woman. She very nearly killed me, Camilla.” He held two fingers an inch apart. “It was
that
close. She broke my knee like a toothpick.”
He grinned. “But I got her in the end. I hope I never have to face someone like that—a
survivor
—again. I have a fairly limited capacity for fear, but Veronica was truly terrifying.”
“How can you be like this?” Camilla asked. “So casual about it. Acting the same as always: laughing, joking, friendly. Oh god, this really
is
the real you, isn’t it? But you’re a
serial killer
…”
“Stereotyping? Camilla, I’m disappointed in you. That’s just a meaningless label.”
He shrugged. “I’m human just like anybody else. Ed Gein, a fellow sort of like me back in the fifties, used to say that every time he saw a pretty girl he thought two things at the same time. One part of him wanted to take her out and talk to her and be real sweet and treat her right. The other part of him wondered what her head would look like on a stick.”
Spreading his hands, he leaned back against the door frame.
“To some extent, that’s how everyone is. I’m just in better touch with the duality of my own nature than most people are. I guess it’s one of those contradictory, biphasic survivor traits that psychologists love to talk about.”
Camilla’s knees hurt from kneeling. Letting herself slump to the side, she rested her weight on one hand and looked down at the floor.
“I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Look at me, Camilla,” he said. “I’m still the same person you met on the yacht. We’ve been through a lot together here. We know each other pretty well by now.”
“I can’t have this conversation right now, Mason. I just can’t.” Her breath hitched. “It’s been a bad day for me.”
“Okay, I’ll stop talking.”
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think of you that way—not anymore.”
“What about the others?”
“Brent I’ll kill for sure. The rest, I don’t know.” He grinned. “I’m making this up as I go along.”
Camilla thought of Juan: wounded, vulnerable.
“You’ll have to kill me first,” she said.
“I won’t do that,” he said. “When Brent described how you got out of that car, I realized something about you. You’re a girl after my own heart…”
“Don’t!”
“…and I’d like my heart to stay inside my body, where it belongs. So I don’t dare try anything with you. If you could do what you did to survive when you were only a kid, I’d hate to find out what you’re capable of now as an adult. Veronica was bad enough.”
He was afraid of her. Mason was frightened of
her
. Camilla choked back the horror that made her want to curl up and make the world go away. What kind of monster
was
she, that a serial killer was scared of
her
?
“So what happens now?” she asked.
He put his glasses back on. “Look, I may have my little hobbies, but I’m not the one you need to be worrying about right now. Brent’s planning something else. He
let
us catch him, Camilla. It was just too easy.”
Her heart sped up, thinking of the whistle part that Brent had hidden in her luggage. Mason was right.
“So what do we do about this?” He pointed at the newspapers.
She thought of Juan, wounded and grieving over Jordan. How could she dump this on him, too?
“We can’t just pretend this didn’t happen here between us,” she said. “I’ve got to tell the others.”
“If you do, I’ll kill Juan.”
“No!” Camilla’s heart raced.
Mason grinned. “I can promise you that.”
M
ason stood in the doorway, resting his leg, watching Camilla. She sat on the floor, surrounded by newspapers, thinking. She looked so vulnerable, but he knew it was misleading—camouflage, like his own. But hers was natural rather than deliberately cultivated.
The room was silent for long minutes. Looking at her made him feel strange. He liked her. He liked being around her. The thought of her rejecting him made him feel empty and hollow inside. But she would never accept the things he did.
“I could stop,” he said, surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth.
Camilla looked up at him with exasperation on her face.
“How do I explain this to someone like you? This isn’t a… a
lifestyle choice
, Mason. It’s what you are.”
The silence that followed was uncomfortable.
“Why did you come at all?” she asked him. “Why didn’t you just throw the Vita Brevis letter away? I would have thought someone like you would want to keep a low profile.”
Mason grinned.
He remembered standing inside his Brisbane warehouse two weeks earlier, holding the device in his hand, puzzled, his arm drenched in red to the elbow. He remembered ignoring the weakening gasps, moans, sobs, and pleas behind him as he turned the small bundle of electronics from side to side, thinking,
artificial kidney? How could someone like
her
afford this?
He remembered the trapped, panicky feeling that seized him when he realized that what he had dug out of that evening’s playmate and stood puzzling over was a GPS tracker. He remembered rubbing the blood away from the round glass bubble on the front of the device to find himself staring into the lens of a camera. He remembered watching, stunned, as the iris of the lens dilated to stare back at him. Recording him.
“I don’t think the letter I got was exactly the same as yours,” he said to Camilla. “Mine really didn’t leave me too much choice.”
“We need your help,” she said.
“You truly
are
a survivor, Camilla.”
“Oh god, shut up.” She held up the missing piece of the steam whistle. “Brent’s got something nasty planned for all of us. We have to figure out what he’s hiding, and when it comes to thinking like him I’m afraid you’re our best bet.”
She looked at him with an expression of reproach.
“We need you, Mason.
I
need you.”
“This stays our little secret, then?”
“God help me, but yes,” Camilla said. “For now.”
C
amilla watched Juan squat in front of the steam whistle with the valve lever in his hands. He slid the lever inside the open compartment at the base and maneuvered it into place.
“It fits.” He looked up at her. “You’re right. Brent’s taunting us with this.”
Behind him, Mason craned forward as if peeking into the open compartment. But the way he leaned over Juan—the implicit threat in his posture—was unmistakable to Camilla. Mason held a fist over his mouth in a prissy gesture of concern. His eyes flicked up to catch hers almost playfully. She got the message all too well: if she let Juan suspect anything, he would die.
But now Juan was staring at her, too. His eyes narrowed.
He had caught something in her expression.
She did her best to keep her face under control. “We’re all going to die if we sound this signal,” she said. “Don’t ask me how I know, but I’m sure of it.”
Juan nodded. He put a hand on his knee and pushed himself slowly up to a standing position.
“Let’s go talk to him.”
• • •
“What’s going to happen, Brent?” Juan asked. “What happens when we blow the fog signal?”
Brent stared back at them, looking amused. Camilla caught the tic in his eye, though. He would need more drugs soon. Maybe they could use that to make him talk.
“Shoot him in the gut.” JT sounded disgusted. “Or give me the gun. I’ll do it.”
Juan leaned into Brent’s face. “Why
Jordan
, then? You didn’t discover her in any hospital.
She
wasn’t a survivor story. Why did you have to bring
her
here, Brent?”
The bleak expression on Juan’s face made Camilla’s eyes sting.
Brent’s eye twitched violently. “Are you noticing any side effects?” he asked. “The dosages you all took were moderate, and there are significant environmental stressors right now. How are you feeling? Any anxiety reactions or disorganized thoughts? Unusual sensations you can describe?”
She realized he was talking about the pills—the modafinil he had given them to stay awake. Disquiet rippled through her stomach.
“You had Julian present this all as fun and games,” she said. “But I noticed he used a lot of behavioral psychology terms: ‘zero-sum game,’ ‘double blind’… The contests were even based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Why?”
Brent smiled at her like a proud parent. “I’d say Maslow’s pyramid made an ideal framework for our competition. Step by step, contest by contest, each of you has climbed the levels of his hierarchy. The top layer of Maslow’s pyramid? It’s self-actualization—realizing your true potential. Abraham Maslow said, ‘What a person can be, he or she must become.’ And all of you have. You have, indeed.”
He raised his voice.
“Take a good look at yourselves. Other than your one defining moment, each of you has gone through your life asleep. I’ve woken you up again. I’ve stripped you of the civilized camouflage you use to disguise your true nature.
“And here on this island, we can see what you truly are—what it really means to be a
survivor
. Survival is not a gentle process, it’s a brutal one. Half the seals born here will fall prey to sharks before they reach the open sea. Others will be crushed by their own parents or pecked to death by hungry seabirds. But not the survivors.
They
are the ones doing the crushing and the pecking. That’s who you are.
What
you are. And anyone unlucky enough to get in your way ends up as collateral damage—chewed up, spit out. Dead.”
“Why do you hate us so much?” she asked.
“I don’t hate you, Camilla. In many ways, you’re like a daughter to me. I’ve followed your progress for twenty-three years, even as I watched my own son grow up. I do hate
what
you are, though: a survivor.”
She refused to see herself the way he did: as a monster.
“You’re a survivor, too,” she said.
Brent shook his head. He looked old.
“No, I’m not. I never was. I wanted to be, tried to be, but I’m not.”
He raised his eyes to hers, his gaze steady.
“I didn’t beat the cancer. I’m dying. I didn’t beat the drugs. I need them to stay functional right now. At these elevated dosages, the drugs are killing me faster than the cancer. But I did beat you—all of you. None of you will leave this island alive.”
Staring at him, her heart in turmoil, she couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You’ve got the lowest body mass here,” he said. “You took the same two-hundred-milligram dose of the experimental variant. Has it enhanced your ability to function under stress? Do you feel any negative side effects, such as a heightened fear reaction?”