fingers on her arm. And later, when he kissed her in the attic.
She nodded to the Glock. “You’ve been watching over me. Protecting me.”
“Trying to learn from my own mistakes,” he said. “Our gypsy friend doesn’t have an exclusive in that area.”
She thought about that. “Does it really matter? You say we have choices, can control our world, but maybe there is no controlling it. No changing what’s happened, or what will happen.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “And right at this moment I feel more in control than I’ve felt in a long, long time.”
He proved it by kissing her, deeply, moving his hands to the small of her back, pulling her close. Anna forgot all about her battered body and leaned into him, crushing her breasts against his chest, moving her arms around him. And it all seemed so familiar to her. So right.
She turned her head, pressing her cheek against his, whispering in his ear.
“Why do I feel like I know you? That I’ve known you forever?”
“Maybe you have,” he said softly.
She awoke with a start.
She’d been dreaming again, but something-some noise-had pulled her out of it.
Fumbling for her Glock, which Pope had left under the pillow, she sat bolt upright and looked around, willing her eyes to adjust.
But she saw nothing. No threat.
The room was quiet, except for the sound of Pope’s breathing as he slept beside her.
The clock on the nightstand read 4:00 a.m.
She was about to settle back when she heard the noise again.
A small cry.
The cry of a kitten.
Climbing out of bed, she moved to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out. A small, malnourished gray tabby stood on the walkway outside, tearing at a discarded burger wrapper.
Another orphan, she thought.
Worthington’s wall full of cats came to mind and she smiled. Nothing to get excited about here, folks. Everybody’s safe.
For the moment at least.
But then she remembered the photographs. All those poor, butchered women, who had shared her soul. A soul that this monster seemed to want.
But why hers? Why had she been singled out? And why was he killing her again and again and again?
Would it ever end?
If he were to kill her on the spot, to gut her right where she stood, would she move on to yet another life, only to be hunted down and killed again?
Chavi, he’d called her.
Chavi.
Who was this girl? What did she mean to him?
Was she the young gypsy from the locket? Had it all started with her? Another past life that had been snuffed out by this freak?
Anna turned from the window, feeling helpless and alone. She looked across at the gentle rise and fall of Pope’s chest and thought about his kisses, his touch, the way their bodies had fit together so naturally as they made love.
He wanted to help her. Protect her. But for all of his good intentions, what could he really do?
Would he be there in the next life? And the next?
Had he been there before?
A husband? A lover? A friend?
If so, he hadn’t been able to protect her then. So what made this life any different? How could he protect her now?
Perhaps the only glimmer of hope in this mess was Red Cap’s ability to bleed. To feel pain. If he could be slowed down by a bullet, maybe he could be stopped by one, too.
The trick, of course, was finding him before he found her again. But his apparent ability to appear and vanish at will would make that a difficult task.
An impossible one.
But then she shouldn’t be thinking about possible, right? Isn’t that what she’d told Worthington?
Maybe Susan had the answer to all of this. Maybe somewhere in that notebook of hers, that private obsession, she had discovered the truth about what drove this man.
And maybe that truth would help Anna.
Before he killed her again.
Cracking Susan’s code took about three minutes.
The actual translation, however, took nearly an hour and a half.
Anna discovered that Susan had used a primitive form of cryptography called a Caesar cypher, which substituted one letter of the alphabet for another. If an A equaled a D, then a D would equal a G, and so forth down the line. The name Anna McBride, for example, would read: Dqqd PfEulgh.
Why Susan had felt the need to encrypt her writing was a mystery all its own. Most of it had little to do with the so-called bogeyman, but was, instead, a tribute to her friendship with Jillian. A chronicle of how they’d met and time they’d spent together.
Their neighborhood adventures. Their days at school. Their favorite teachers. Friends. Enemies. Crushes.
Through it all, however, Anna sensed an undercurrent of both envy and worship in Susan’s words. Jillian was the pretty one, the popular one. Susan, the hanger-on. Yet despite that trace of envy, there was no malice intended. It was clear to Anna that Susan loved her friend.
And as she read, Anna was surprised to find that she remembered some of the events and people Susan wrote about. Only vague glimpses here and there, but enough to fill her with a profound sense of loss.
Jillian had been taken away so young.
What would have happened if she had lived? What kind of life would she have had?
When Anna reached the passages chronicling those terrible moments in the alley and the discovery of Jillian’s body in Foster Park, she had trouble breathing.
Susan’s pain was so raw that all Anna could think about was how this one incident had led to so much heartache. A trail of devastation that could be traced forward to this very moment in time.
She looked across at Pope, still fast asleep. How different would his life be, if Susan had never suffered such a blow? Would they still be happily married, raising a beautiful son?
As she continued to read, Anna noticed a change of tone in the narrative. A darkness that had settled into Susan’s words. This was where the passages became less coherent. A rambling screed against Red Cap. Part rant, part analysis, with detailed, but often confusing, commentary on the newspaper clippings and photographs.
She wrote of the failed police investigation. When the Rambler was found abandoned in the parking lot of Big Mountain-the same place from which it had been stolen-the police expanded their investigation to Allenwood, questioning neighbors near the amusement park. But none of them had seen the man young Suzie had described.
He was a phantom. A mystery.
But the police’s failure to find this mystery man didn’t stop Susan. As the years went by, and Susan got older, she spent hours in libraries, sitting behind microfiche machines, searching through decades-old newspaper articles, always looking for the same thing. Always hunting for that symbol of Red Cap’s broken soul:
The gypsy wheel.
From what Anna could decipher, Susan’s take on all of the material she’d gathered was much the same as hers and Pope’s and Worthington’s. The past lives, the chain of killings-all linked by that simple, circular symbol…
