Coulson always did that. Sure, I’d had precious little to do with him, but I was already starting to learn his habits.
And heck, if I survived this case, maybe I’d get to know him even better. After all, it sounded as if my grandmother had worked with him closely, solving the kinds of tricky cases no one else could.
Which I grimaced at.
This was not the life for me.
This time, Coulson led us into a different room. It wasn’t his office. In fact, it looked like an interrogation room.
Instantly, my stomach kicked, but before Coulson could round on me and accuse me of some crime, he leaned forward, plucked several Manilla folders off the table, and started arranging photographs.
My stomach had kicked when I’d been concerned he was here to accuse me of a felony. Now? Oh, it sank. All the way through my torso, all the way through the floor, all the way through the friggin’ center of the Earth. Because he wanted me to do it again, ha? Go inside the mind of a killer, try to figure out what would happen next.
Max didn’t enter the room, just stood outside, arms crossed as usual.
I felt his gaze on the back of my neck, and it was a decidedly unpleasant experience.
Detective Coulson cleared his throat uncomfortably. He flattened down his tie, locked two hands on the edge of the desk, and looked at me entreatingly. He may have been a big, broad-chested man, but right now his gaze was like that of a puppy dog’s. “You need to be alone?” he asked.
I looked from him to Max and nodded. Sure, I needed to be alone. Then I could neatly stack the photos up, cram them back in the file, and find a nice window to climb out of.
“Ah, yes, that would be good.”
Coulson didn’t question, just nodded, looked at me hopefully once more, then walked out of the room. Max? Oh, he took the opportunity to glare at me, and there could be no doubting what that glare meant.
I swallowed, okay, gulped, and waited for the door to close. As soon as it did, I pushed back in my seat, locked a sweaty hand over my mouth, and closed my eyes. And there I would quite happily remain until Coulson got bored and came back in.
Or at least, that’s what I told myself I’d do. Because a funny thing started to happen. Curiosity. It licked at me like flames beginning to caress a dry log.
I tightened my grip on my face, but it didn’t matter – the curiosity couldn’t be contained. It wasn’t morbid curiosity or anything. I didn’t want to stare at the photos to get a thrill from seeing dead people. Quite the opposite, I just… needed to know who they’d been. I needed to witness them, even if I couldn’t make amends for their deaths.
“Yes you can, you can make a difference,” an entirely unwelcome voice rose unbidden from my mind.
I clenched my teeth and tried to force it back, but the voice simply would not comply. “You can make a difference. You can go into the mind of the killer, find him, see the future – change it.”
I shook my head at that intruding voice, trying to dislodge it from my mind. But it would not be shifted. With every second, it grew stronger and stronger until finally I did it – I reached forward and plucked up the first photo.
And I stared at her, one of the victims. Fortunately, it wasn’t a photo taken from the crime scene. No, but the photo directly underneath this one was.
Like I’d said many times before, I had no stomach for violence. I was certainly not the kind of girl who could conjure curiosity in the face of death. It was the exact opposite. And now was no different. My stomach kicked, doing a 360 around my torso until it felt as if I would puke out all my internal organs.
I brought up a hand, clenched it into a fist, and pressed it against my lips until it felt like I was trying to squeeze them through my teeth like spaghetti.
“Come on, come on. Put it down,” I begged myself. Except, I couldn’t do it.
Slowly, achingly slowly, gathering every scrap of courage I’d ever had, I leafed past the photo of the smiling woman to the one beneath. Where she was dead.
Fortunately, the photo did not show her torn-apart chest cavity, blood splattered over the concrete and up the walls. It simply showed her still face, her head tilted to the side, her once life-filled eyes blank and dead. Her face was as pale as the full moon.
Though I could only see a glimmer of blood along her throat, as the photo was a close-up of her head, that was enough. Enough for my stomach to pitch so violently, I had to clap a hand over my mouth before I retched. But I didn’t drop the photo – I just stared at it. And as I did, they came – the sparks. More and more, more and more. They exploded at the corners of my vision as if someone had somehow lodged live wires into my eyes.
I began shaking my head frantically, from one side to another, until my neck cracked. But even then I couldn’t stop.
The sparks swamped me until I could see nothing else. The next thing I knew, I rocked forward, clamping my hands protectively on the table as I lost all awareness of where I was.
Then… then I started to hear footsteps. Slow, methodical – whoever was walking towards me, they weren’t in a hurry.
Even though a part of my brain knew I was still
