Out of nowhere, no more than a blur.
She heard him say, “Hi, Kati! How about an exclusive?”
The pain shot through her, an electric bullet that sizzled in every cell of her stunned, seizing body. The rainy gloom burst into blinding white as a scream gagged in her throat. In some shocked part of her brain she thought she’d been struck by lightning.
The white sliced to black.
It took less than a minute to bind her, to lock her in the trunk. He stowed her bag, her computer, her umbrella in the back, for now, carefully turned off her phone.
Filled with power and pride, he drove off into the rainy night. He had a lot of work to do before he slept.
Twenty-Eight
Kati’s phone provided a wealth of information. Scrolling through, Eckle carefully copied down all the names and numbers, studied her incomings, outgoings, her calendar, reminders. It fascinated him that virtually every communication, every appointment in her logs—but for an upcoming dentist appointment—dealt with professional interests.
Really, he mused as he wiped the phone clean, he and Kati had a great deal in common: no real connection to family, no particular friends and an absorption with rising in their chosen field.
They both wanted to make a name for themselves, leave a deep mark.
Wouldn’t that make their brief time together all the more important?
He tossed the phone in the trash at the rest stop where he’d parked, then backtracked, exited the interstate and drove the wandering twenty miles to the motel he’d chosen for this leg of the work.
He paid cash for a single night’s stay, then parked away from the lights. Though he doubted he’d need it, he angled her umbrella to shield his face as he climbed out of the car. People who frequented motels of this type didn’t sit around their shitty little rooms looking out the window at a rain-swept parking lot, but it paid to be cautious.
He opened the trunk.
Her eyes were wide open, full of fear and pain with that glaze of shock he found so arousing. She’d struggled, but he’d learned a thing or two and had linked the bindings on her wrists and ankles together in the back, hog-tying her so she could do little more than hump like a worm. Still, it was best to keep her absolutely still, absolutely silent through the night.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” he told her as he pulled a syringe from his pocket, removed the tip. Her screams were no more than harsh whispers swallowed by the rain as he gripped her arm, shoved up her sleeve. “Sleep tight now,” he said, and slid the needle under the skin.
He replaced the tip. She, like the others, wouldn’t live long enough to be bothered about any infection from shared needles. He watched her eyes dull as the drug took her under.
After securing the trunk, he got his suitcase and her belongings out of the back and carried them across the broken pavement of the lot to his room.
It smelled of old sex, stale smoke and the cheap detergent that couldn’t mask the brew. He’d learned to ignore such annoyances, and he’d learned to ignore the inevitable groans and thumps from adjoining rooms.
He switched on the TV, scrolled until he found local news.
He entertained himself first with a pass through Kati’s wallet. She carried nearly two hundred in cash—for payoffs? bribes? he wondered. The money would come in handy, another advantage of changing his target type. The coeds rarely had more than five or ten, if that.
He found the current password for her computer hidden behind her driver’s license. He set it aside for later.
He made piles of what he could keep and what he would dispose of from her handbag, and munched on the M&M’s she had in an inside pocket, toyed with her bag of cosmetics.
She carried no photos, not his all-work-and-no-play Kati. But she had a street map of Seattle and one of Orcas, tidily folded.
On the Orcas map she’d marked several routes from the ferry. He recognized the route to Fiona’s, wondered about the others. If time permitted, he’d check them out.
He approved of the fact that she carried several pens and sharpened pencils, a small cube of Post-its, a bottle of water.
He saved her breath mints, towelettes, pack of tissues, removed her IDs and credit cards to be cut up and disposed of along the way.
He used the money in her change purse to buy a Sprite and a bag of Lay’s potato chips from the vending machine outside the room.
Organized and settled, he opened her computer. As with her phone calls and texts, all of her e-mails centered on work and many were cryptic. But he could follow the dots, as he’d been following her.
While he, Perry and Fiona weren’t her only stories, they were, unquestionably, her focus. She’d pushed, and was pushing, for nibbles and bites from numerous sources.
Tenacious, thy name is Kati Starr.
She did well, he thought, digging, digging, digging, amassing details and comments from Perry’s past, from Fiona’s, from past and present victims.
She had files full of information on Fiona’s search unit, on the other members, on her training business, on her mother, her stepmother, the dead father, the dead lover. The current lover.
Thorough. He respected that.
And he understood she’d gathered and was continuing to gather more information, more deep background and areas than a reporter could possibly use in a series of articles.
“Writing a book,” he murmured. “You’re writing a book, aren’t you, Kati?”
He plugged in one of the two thumb drives he’d found in her case. Rather than the novel or true-crime book he’d expected to find, he brought up the file containing her next article.
For tomorrow’s edition.
He read it through twice, so engrossed he barely noticed when the couple next door began to fuck.
The betrayal—for he had little doubt Perry had betrayed him—slashed. A whip across the throat that strangled him so he shoved up to pace the miserable little room, his fists clenching, unclenching.
His teacher, his mentor, the father of who he’d become turned on him, and that turning could—almost certainly would—hasten the end of him.
He considered running, simply abandoning the plans he’d so meticulously set in place and driving east. Kill the reporter along the way, he thought, far along the way, out of what he knew the police would call his hunting ground.
Change his looks, his identity again. Change everything—the car, the plates and then...
What? he wondered. Be ordinary again, be nothing again? Find another mask and hide behind it? No, no, he could never go back, never be the pathetic shell again.
Calmer, he stood, eyes closed, accepting. Perhaps it was true and right and inevitable that the father destroy the child. Perhaps that formed the circle, brought the journey to its better, bitter end.
And he’d always known it would end. This new life, this sharpness of being was transient. But he’d hoped, he’d
No, he would not go back, could not go back. Would not hide like a rat in a hole. He’d go forward, as planned.
Live or die, he decided. But he would never, never simply exist again.
He sat and read the article again, and this time felt a sense of destiny. Of course this was why he took the reporter. Everything was happening as it was meant to happen.
He was at peace with that.
