The Best Victim (Kindle Serial) (4 page)

“I’ll listen,” she agreed. “I’ll listen and then decide. But first I want to know, when did you meet Rachel? What did you talk to her about?”
Why didn’t you protect her, even from herself?

“She agreed to meet about a week ago, at a coffee shop.”

Her gaze narrowed. “Which coffee shop?”

“Ah, I don’t recall the name. Some trendy little place on Chicon Street—great espresso.”

Lauren nodded, remembering her sister taking her there on one of her rare visits. Rachel had started mooching the shop’s free Wi-Fi back in college, but the hazelnut lattes were what kept her coming back long after leaving school to work in hospital billing.

Still, Lauren reminded herself that anyone could figure out as much about Rachel’s habits by checking out her Facebook page or Twitter account, or reading a review of the café she’d posted online somewhere. As often as Lauren had warned her about blabbing her whereabouts to the world so casually, Rachel had only laughed off her concern, accusing her of letting her cyber-security work make her paranoid.

Frigid waves of nausea broke Lauren out in gooseflesh. If she only had the chance to annoy her little sister with another lecture…

Durant took her silence for permission to continue. “I wanted to see if she’d received any direct communication from a troll who was leaving comments in the discussion sections under online news stories related to her accident. I’d been scanning social media and forums, checking out the conversations, looking for similarities in the wording, threatening statements—”

“I’m surprised all that ugliness didn’t melt your eyes in their sockets,” she said bitterly. “I’ll never understand the kind of person who gets off on leaving sick, judgmental comments about people involved in tragedies.”

“Actually, you just nailed it right there.”

“What?”

“They get off on it, at least that’s what the bureau experts and the forensic psychologists have to say about the subject.”

She made a sound of pure disgust. “Sexually, you mean?”

“A lot of times. But sometimes, it’s just a matter of relieving their own stress or boredom by inflicting pain on others. And just like with face-to-face bullying, it can get competitive. Like a sport.”

“A
blood
sport,” she corrected, her short nails digging crimson crescents in her palms.

“I’d been following discussion threads related to women I believed might fit the suspect’s profile,” Durant continued, “when I noticed a similarity in the wording of some of the most vicious comments. And there were personal details in them, details I suspected could have only come from Rachel. How she blamed herself. How she was seeing a counselor to help her with the bad dreams she’d been having—nightmares about Megan Rutherford’s unborn child coming to accuse her of murdering her mother.”

Lauren’s heart raced, hearing Rachel’s anguish in the words. Or had she sent them in an e-mail? “He could have hacked her phone or maybe her computer. If her password wasn’t secure enough, or she logged in on a public access wireless hotspot somewhere—”

Somewhere like the coffee shop.

“Or if he somehow got her number and spoke to her by phone,” Durant said. “She denied speaking to him, but she wouldn’t look at me when I asked. She became defensive and asked me to leave soon afterward.”

Lauren shook her head. “Maybe she wasn’t lying. Maybe she was just sick of talking about it. That’s why she left counseling. She said it was bad enough she’d had to survive the accident once, let alone rehash it again and again.”

“She was lying, Lauren. And it fits this suspect’s pattern, digging up his targets’ numbers somehow and phoning to torment them.”

“If some creep had called her, she would have freaked out,” Lauren insisted, “and I would’ve been there in a heartbeat. Would’ve made her report it to the police and even slept on her damned doorstep if I had to, with my gun in hand.”

“Before I, um, before I left the bureau, I was able to subpoena a couple of the other victims’ phone records. Right around the time of their deaths, both had dozens of calls from private numbers, numbers that turned out to be from burner phones, disposables paid for in cash from various locations. Little mom and pop stores with no security cameras—or old, low-tech systems where nothing could be made out but a blurred figure in a hoodie sweatshirt.”

“So how can you be sure it’s always the same person?”
And how can I be sure you not making up all of this?

“I can’t. Not for certain. And I can’t prove he’s connected to the troll on the forums. But I damn well know it’s him. I swear, I can practically feel the evil welling up in the final message he posted in relation to each victim.”

Durant’s reasoning might not completely hold together, but the utter conviction in his voice drew a shudder from her. And a question, too. “What was it he wrote? What did he say about my sister?”

Durant braked hard as a coyote dashed across the road a few feet from their bumper. Her grip on the dog tightened as the tires squealed. There was a moment the car lost its grip, the rear end sliding sideways. But the ex-agent kept them on the road, and the coyote vanished into the tall grasses.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“Sure. Fine. Never better,” she said, though her heart was pounding with the near miss. Clearly upset with the jostling, the dog whimpered and struggled in her arms until Lauren helped her climb down to the floor of the backseat. “There you go, sweetie. Curl up down there. Good girl.”

Turning around, Lauren strapped herself back in and focused on the agent. “Now tell me, what was this troll saying on the forum?”

His gaze locked on the road, Durant said, “You don’t need to hear it. Trust me, you don’t want it in your head.”

“I want to know. I
have
to. I owe that much to Rachel.”

The car grew so quiet that Lauren could make out the chatter of each pebble that passed beneath the tires, every breath the driver took.

When he spoke again, his words were scarcely louder. “That’s what I thought once. But I was wrong, Lauren. I never should have—”

“But it’s your job,” she argued.

“No, it
wasn’t
,” he ground out, “as the special agent in charge—all my colleagues and the damned psychologist they made me see—were all too quick to remind me. But because I had to know what he said, this investigation—this
hunt
for the twisted animal who killed her—is fucking all that I have left.”

By the dim light of the glowing dashboard, she studied the tension in his handsome features. The tautness of his square jaw, the way he gripped the wheel so hard, it looked as if he might rip it from the column. Though she wasn’t particularly bothered by the language, she took the harshness in his voice as another warning. A warning that this man was skating dangerously close to the edge.

“All? I don’t understand.” Hardly daring to breathe, she asked, “You’re not talking about Rachel, are you?”

He shook his head before confirming, “Hell, no, I’m not talking about Rachel. This all goes back to the very first victim that I know of. Her name was Carrie—Carrie Wilkinson…”

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.”

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

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—do 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.”