The 7th Victim

of the Dead Eyes victims: marked with what appeared to be red lipstick: their names, their identification, their personality—who they were as people—reduced to mere numbers on darkly grained plywood. They were all there, Marci Evers, Noreen O’Regan, Angelina Sarducci, Melanie Hoffman, Sandra Franks, Denise Cranston; and a newspaper photo of Eleanor Linwood, two knives protruding from the wall. Stabbed through the eyes.

Vail now knew where she was: in the killer’s lair. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Tried to block the pain coming from her shoulder joints, which felt as if they were going to snap like the dead twigs she used to crunch beneath her heels in her parent’s yard in Old Westbury. What a far better place to be now.

But her situation was not going to be solved by visualizing better times or reliving the past. She was a spider caught on a web, hung out until the predator could come along and eat her alive.

Her legs, though cuffed at the ankles, were still free to move about. But the tractioning weight on her left knee was substantial. Which hurt worse . . . her shoulders and wrists or her knee . . . it was difficult to say. At the moment, none of that mattered. She had to shut off all pain, all thoughts of defeat.

Visual examination of her surroundings told her there was nothing she could use to her advantage, no walls or stools, boxes or handles for her feet to gain purchase. She would have to use her legs to kick and, hopefully, win her freedom.

Questions flooded her thoughts: Where was she? Down the street from her house or in another state? In the middle of nowhere? She thought of the bank, of the Alvin look-alike, of how there was no tactical team outside backing her up. Yet standing there with her Glock trained on the man’s head, she’d had control, she’d had power. What she would give to be back there.

Because as precarious as it had been, staring down the barrel of a crackhead’s .38 Special, it was nothing compared to this.

BLEDSOE WALKED BACK into the kitchen and joined Robby, who was kneeling beside a forensic technician.

“Anything?” Robby asked.

Bledsoe shook his head. “Nothing of use. There was a struggle in the kitchen. That’s about it. No obvious signs of forced entry.”

“Anything on your end?”

The technician looked up from his toolkit. “About the best news I can give you right now is that there’s no blood. We found a few footprints in the soil outside that don’t match any of your shoes. Sneakers, size nine, Reeboks, if I had to guess.” He stood from his crouch. “Latents galore, but it’ll be a while before we can sort them all out. Sorry. I wish I had more to give you. We may have more later.”

“Later . . .” Bledsoe griped. He walked off with Robby.

“So where does this leave us?”

Bledsoe rubbed tired eyes. “We thought Patrick Farwell was Dead Eyes. Everything pointed to that, even the shit at his place. But he’s dead—”

“Is he?” Robby asked.

“Look, Hernandez, I know it’s late and we’ve been pushed up against the wall, but you’re not making sense. You saw the bullet wound. His body’s lying at the ME’s office on a slab.”

Robby was waving his hands. “No, no. You’re missing the point. Someone was shot dead in that house. What if it wasn’t Farwell?”

Bledsoe sat down on the family room couch, eyes searching the floor. “It sure looked like him. We had his mug shots—”

“Yeah, from twenty years ago. Humor me. Call the ME, find out where they are in processing the body. See if they’ve run the fingerprints yet.”

Bledsoe dug out his cell phone, then punched in the number.

Robby stood there, trying to work it through. Feeling he was missing something, but not sure what. Then he realized what was bothering him. The email from the offender. He played it back in his mind: The hiding place smelled musty . . . it was small and dark. He watched everything through little holes in the walls. It had to be. If he was wrong, they would lose valuable time. But at the moment, there were no other leads to pursue.

Bledsoe’s shoulders fell. “Can you run them ASAP?” he said into the phone. “The body may not be Farwell’s. Soon as you get something, call me.” He shook his head, then closed his phone.

Robby grabbed Bledsoe’s arm. “I know where she is.”

“You know? Or you think you know?”

Robby hesitated. He had asked himself the same question. But he was relying on intuition . . . intuition and analytic logic. “How soon can you get a chopper here?”

“If there’s one in the air, ten minutes. If not, longer.”

“Make it ten. Karen’s life is at stake.”

THE PAIN WAS STARTING to reach her limits of tolerance. Vail tried pulling herself up to alleviate some of the strain on her shoulders. If her arms had been separated by just a few more inches, her position would be the same as the leg pull-up exercises she did to strengthen her abdominal muscles at the Academy gym. But because her hands were locked so close to one another, the increased strain on her arms only worsened the wrist pain.

“Shit,” she said. It was her first utterance . . . but not her last. Figuring that the intelligent offender would have gagged her had he thought her screams could be heard, she knew that calling out for help would be a useless exercise.

She did it anyway.

But after her first plea, she was stopped short by the feeling that someone was behind her. She spun her head around and saw, in the dim recesses of the small room, a figure dressed in dark clothing. Vail’s body swung from her sudden movement, allowing a sliver of light from the bulb to catch the shiny nylon of the pantyhose stretched across the offender’s face.

“Won’t do you any good,” the voice said. It was rough and strained, but confident.

“Who are you?” Vail shouted.

“I gave you more credit than you deserved.” He moved slightly to his right, making it more difficult for Vail to see him. It was a move of power, Vail was sure of it. He talked; she had to listen but could not look at him.

“Are you the Dead Eyes killer?”

“You still don’t get it, do you? Crack profiler, supervisory special agent and you ask a dumb question like that. What good is the title ‘special’ if you’re as stupid as the rest of them? Of course I’m the Dead Eyes killer!”

There it was again. The scent. She tried to force it from her mind, but it popped back in. The backyard. Sandra Franks’s yard, when she felt as if the killer was watching her, when she had run through the brush and sprained her knee.

“It is you,” Vail said.

“The light comes on. How very promising. Now for the million dollar question: Do you know where you are?”

“I’d say the million dollar question is who you are, not where I am.”

A snapping sound flicked in Vail’s ears before the searing sting of a whip slapped against her bare skin. “I ask the questions here, Agent Vail. Karen. Sweet little Karen.”

The bite from the whip was still throbbing and overrode all other pain; she bit her lip to contain the whimper that threatened to escape her mouth. She was not going to give him that.

“I’ll tell you where you are. You’re in the same place we grew up, the place where we watched father through that peephole in front of you. The place we hid, too scared to come out.”

“We?” Vail clenched her jaw, trying to will away the pain, trying to put it all together. Come on, Vail, think! An accomplice. There had been many serial killers who had a friend or spouse as their partner in crime. Then: “Where is he? Is he afraid, too scared to come out?”

The whip snapped again, this time striking the flesh over Vail’s low back and buttocks. Tears squeezed from her clenched eyes.

“I’d hoped to make you work for it, but I see you’re too stupid to get it. And I’m not interested in playing