and he could not afford to let his image go out on the Web. There was no reason to think the police knew of the Web site, but others did-Steven Gader and his like-minded subscribers to the site. He did not wish to be seen by them or by anyone.
By process of elimination, the laundry room remained as the best place of concealment. It was windowless and not under surveillance. He entered it, and then he saw the trapdoor in the floor.
He knew at once that it led to a crawl space. The irony of it pleased him immensely. She had hidden from him in a crawl space years ago. Now he would turn the tables.
He had waited, prone under the low subfloor, amid the rusty plumbing pipes and the scuttling bugs, with only the glow of his laptop’s screen to light the darkness. The computer, wired into the AC, could run indefinitely. He was unaware of any hunger or impatience or discomfort. For him, there was only the soft glow of the screen, the creak of the house settling, the distant, steady beat of his heart.
He passed the time by preparing for the kill.
He intended to take her in her bedroom. He did not want an audience.
His preparations were nearly completed when she entered the house.
Now he bellied his way to the trapdoor and pushed it open slowly, wary of any sound that might give him way. Then he hoisted himself into the unlighted laundry room. Standing, he listened at the closed door to the hall. Footsteps passed by, diminishing.
She had gone back into the bedroom.
That was fine. That was perfect.
Treat opened the door and stepped into the hall.
61
“Something funny about the feed,” Brand was saying.
Rawls squinted at the image of the empty bedroom. “What about it?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t it look different to you?”
“Same room. Same lighting. Same camera angle.”
“Yeah, but there’s something…” Brand waved his hand, searching for the word. “Flicker. That’s what.”
“Streaming video always flickers.”
“I’m not talking about that. I’m saying-oh, hell, maybe I’m just tired.”
“I’ll bet you are.” Rawls swiveled his chair closer to the computer. “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.” He started tapping the keyboard.
“What are you doing?”
“We know the user name and password for the remote sysadmin. We can get into the site’s file manager, see if anybody’s been monkeying with the video.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Brand said. “Forget about it. I’m beat, that’s all. Seeing things.”
Rawls kept typing. He didn’t answer.
The most difficult thing was not to look at the camera.
C.J. knew where it was. Detectives Walsh and Cellini had told her that it was most likely installed inside the curtain rod over her bedroom window. The rod was a hollow cylinder, large enough to hide a miniature camera, and it was painted dark brown, so dark that a tiny hole drilled in the surface would not be visible except on close inspection.
Treat must have entered her house when she was at work, planted the camera, and run the electrical wire through the rod and into the wall, tapping into the main circuitry.
She wished she could study the wall for signs of spackling and repainting, but she didn’t dare. Anyway, she knew she would see nothing. Treat was a planner, not unlike Adam. He would leave nothing to chance. Most likely he had found the can of interior house paint she kept in the garage and used it when painting over his handiwork. The color would match exactly.
He was smart. Had to be, if he’d eluded capture for more than two decades, an extraordinarily long run for any criminal, and unheard of for a serial killer. Then again, only the ones who got caught were known. How many other men like Gavin Treat were out there, moving from town to town, state to state, changing their MO and their selection of victims-killing children sometimes, then adults-using different methods, different strategies-leaving no clues? Was Treat an isolated freak, or was he only a single soldier in an unseen army, one among hundreds, thousands?
She paced the bedroom, then stopped. He might be watching her right now. She should not appear agitated. She had to act normal.
What would she normally do in her bedroom at ten minutes to two in the morning? Go to sleep, obviously. But she couldn’t undress in front of that camera, not when she knew it was there.
Maybe she would just lie on the bed, fully clothed. Pretend to read or something. But to look natural, she had to take off the borrowed LAPD jacket. And that posed another problem-the Beretta in her waistband. Couldn’t let the camera see that.
Casually she sidled up against the bureau, orienting herself so that her right hip, where the gun was hidden, would not be visible from the Webcam’s vantage point. She slipped off the jacket and placed it in the top drawer of the bureau.
Now just take out the gun and slip it in the drawer also. No one would see.
She reached behind her right hip for the Beretta.
Another hand reached it first.
Plucked it free.
Him.
In her house, in her bedroom, directly behind her.
She tried to turn, but his arm-his taut, skeletal arm, all skin and bones-hooked her by the throat and yanked her backward against his chest.
“Got you, Caitlin Jean Osborn,” he whispered in that voice she remembered from her nightmares, the voice that called to her when she lay in the crawl space so many years ago.
She wanted to speak, to say anything, but the pressure of his elbow on her throat was too strong.
“You shouldn’t have come home.” Gavin Treat’s lips brushed her ear. “There’s such a thing as pressing your luck.”
62
“Where the hell is she?”
The voice on the radio belonged to Deputy Pardon, team leader of the Sheriff’s SWAT squad.
Another voice-the D Platoon leader-answered him. “We were hoping you could tell us. Team Leader Two. We’ve lost visual. No sign of her in windows four or five.”
“Nothing in window one,” a voice said.
“Negative on windows two and three.”
“All clear on window six.”
“How about the camera?” the Metro SWAT leader asked.
“Negative.” This was Tanner speaking, as he sat beside Walsh and Cellini in an undercover car a block down the street from C.J.’s bungalow. “She left the room five minutes ago, hasn’t returned.”
The computer resting on Tanner’s lap showed an empty bedroom, lit by the nightstand lamp.
“She’s disappeared,” somebody said in the radio cross talk.
