Jenna picked up the roll of indigo ribbon. “Kind of like that. But Mom says, not half as exciting. Mostly hunting down deadbeat dads and working on insurance scams.”
Shali let out a laugh, touching her abdomen, still a little tender. “I’ll give her my dad’s last address.”
Jenna returned her best friend’s smile.
“Let’s go inside,” she said. “The wedding starts at two.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to acknowledge Michaela Hamilton, Susan Raihofer, Jessica Rose Wolfe, Jean Olson, Tina Marie Brewer, Bunny Kuhlman, Jim Thomsen, Charles Turner, and Kathrine Beck for their much-needed advice, guidance, and general good sense on this project. Also, to Claudia for being the best reader a writer ever had. I love you.
Turn the page for a sneak peek at
Gregg Olsen’s next spine-tingling thriller,
VICTIM SIX,
coming from Pinnacle in March 2010!
“Quiet, number five,” he said. “Be a good girl.”
His words came at her with the smell of sweat and motor oil, and were delivered in a strangely calm, almost soothing, cadence.
Amy Lewis was terrified, her body, her very presence shrinking under his power.
“Don’t!” she said, the last words that she recalled falling from her trembling lips.
“Good girl.”
Tears rolled down her ashen face. A coppery flavor filled her mouth. It was as if she tasted spare change or something, yet her mouth was empty. She was bleeding where he struck her.
And her pleas for help were screamed only in her head.
No answer. Just a slow fade to blackness. A curtain pulled. A moon eclipsed. Then absolutely nothing at all.
But that was before. Just how long ago, Amy couldn’t be sure. At that moment, what he called her barely registered in her mind. Instead, her memories were a mosaic. They came to her in tiny shards and splinters, not the seamless reel she had imagined people saw in their mind’s eye when their final moments came and their life “flashed” before their eyes.
Her high school graduation and how she and her best friend Danita had purchased a bottle of screw-top wine from the Stop ’n Go near the pavilion where the ceremonies were held. They’d guzzled it in Danita’s car.
How her mother had sat her brother Richard, her sister, Courtney, and herself in a neat row on the old floral sofa that faced the TV. Mom flipped off
Another splinter came at her. Amy recalled how she’d stolen a handful of candy corn from a bin in the produce section of Safeway when she was seven. She never told anyone that she’d done so, but to that very day the sight of the Halloween confection made her stomach roil with guilt. She never stole anything again, never broke any law. One time when she was stopped by a state trooper, she cried because she’d thought she’d been speeding and was surely going to get a ticket. Instead, he told her that her taillight was out, flashed a smile, and waved her on to the nearest dealership. “Need to be safe. Have a daughter of my own and wouldn’t want her driving with a winking tailgate,” he said.
Some thoughts materialized as if underscored by the divine, reminding her not to steal, that parents don’t always stay together, that there are good men out there, too. Some were more random. Things that came to her that felt like filler, a recap of moments that had never been important. She lost her car keys the week before. She threw up on the Merry Go Round when she was four. She endured a bad sunburn and smelled of aloe after a vacation on the coast when she was fourteen. She hated ravioli from the can and could remember the slap she got from her aunt when she told her so at the dinner table.
Shutting her eyes did nothing. The images still came.
The man on the side of the steel wall sandwiched between them had his own downpour of recollections. He steadied himself by leaning against the small, cold doorway. The rumble of the machinery soothed him like one of those cheap motels with Magic Fingers attached to the bed frame. Drop in a quarter, ride the pulsating massage. Feel good. He thought of the first one. The Juneau bookstore clerk looking for adventure who begged him to let her go.
“I have a baby at home! Don’t do this. You don’t want to do this!”
But, he did want to. So very, very much.
He remembered how after that, everything had been about the killing. Even when he’d watch TV and a potato chip commercial would come on, he’d write it in his head: no one can kill just one.
He knew all of their names, though he pretended he’d recalled them only in number or town. No. 1 Juneau, No. 2 Sitka, No. 3 Seattle, No. 4 Port Orchard, and No. 5 Seattle again. Seattle was a big city, but as No. 5 squirmed on her army surplus cot, he let it pass through his mind that he shouldn’t have been so lazy.
Getting caught would kill the rush that he’d collected from each victim as he sucked in their lives like a really good smoke.
In the darkness, Amy Lewis was growing a little stronger, a touch more lucid. She felt the rumbling of something outside the space that held her prisoner. She was on her stomach. Her hands had been bound by tape. Her feet, too. She realized that she was breathing hard, too fast, out of fear. She told herself to slow down. She
