The last time he saw the man, Moses was an FBI profiler on the verge ofretirement. The Night Hunter often wondered what might have happened if Moseshad left the bureau to retire out west just a little earlier, before taking onhis case. He suspected the last two decades would have been much different.
With no one skilled enough to stop him, he could have continued hisadventures up and down the eastern seaboard without interference. By now hemight have taken close to a thousand targets, rather than the paltry 267 he’dtallied to date.
And if he was really honest with himself, that latter number wasinflated. A whopping 186 of them came after “The Skirmish,” as he liked to callit, with Moses. Only eighty-one of the subjects were truly worthy, ones on whichhe was able to use his signature calling card, a machete.
Almost all the others came without fanfare, in the dark years, when hisbody was suffering from the aftereffects of The Skirmish. His two-storyfall—really a desperate jump—from Moses’s condo had left him with both a brokenleg and hip on one side, a dislocated shoulder and crushed ankle on the other,as well as facial fractures and several broken ribs. And that didn’t includethe gashes Moses had inflicted on him with his own blade. He still had a longscar that ran horizontally across his forehead, a final parting gift from the profiler.He had to literally drag himself away before the police arrived on the sceneand barely managed to sneak into the sewers mere seconds before the first copcar pulled up.
In the years afterward, not wanting to draw more attention, and physicallyunable to escape if he was ever found, he’d been reduced to fulfilling hiscravings by acting them out on the homeless and the addicted, sacrifices whowere less likely to put up a struggle when the frail-looking older gentleman henow was suddenly revealed his true intentions.
But even then he had to mask his work so that it couldn’t be connectedto his past exploits; never using the same method, rarely in the same city,often going many months between completing his work. Sometimes he felt like avampire reduced to feeding on injured wild animals so as not to draw theattention of the townsfolk. It was demeaning.
But that had all changed last summer, when he saw the report on thenews that Garland Moses, now a consultant for the LAPD, had been murdered. Whenhe did the research, he uncovered a delicious discovery. His longtime nemesis’sdeath came at the hands of Garland’s own protégé’s ex-husband, a fellow whoseemed like a real piece of work in his own right.
The axis of the whole world tilted that day. The one man who had beenhis equal, who had kept him in the shadow for twenty years, was dead. The NightHunter had a new lease on life. And just as exciting, he had a potential newadversary. He had to know if Moses’s golden child, this woman named JessieHunt, was as good as her mentor. So he’d come west to find out, to test her.
So far he’d found her wanting. She was talented, to be sure. She hadthwarted Bolton Crutchfield, an impressive student of slaughter himself. She caughtAndrea Robinson, who seemed to be just like any other wealthy socialite, butwas actually a sneakily brutal murderess, one whose obvious potential was goingunfulfilled while she languished in a mental hospital. Most impressively ofall, Hunt had bested her own father, the legendary Ozarks Executioner, whom theNight Hunter had both admired and envied.
But to his dismay upon arriving in Los Angeles, he found that she’dleft the business, choosing instead to teach others about the minds of serialkillers rather than try to catch them herself. Yes, she occasionally consultedon cases to help her old colleagues. But she seemed to have been scarred by theloss of Moses, the near-death of her detective boyfriend, and the close callthat she and her young charge, a half-sister named Hannah, had barely survived.Some might say she’d gone soft. But he knew that wasn’t the case. She was justhibernating. He knew the feeling.
He’d tried to help her find her way again, first with the eliminationof Jared Hartung last month, and more recently by removing Jenavieve Holt. ButHunt had been oblivious, perhaps because she was no longer in the thick of it,more likely because of the unfortunate van accident that prevented Hartung’sbody from being properly catalogued.
Still, he had hoped that the creativity of his work, combined with theunusual coincidence that both victims shared her initials, “J.H.,” would havedrawn her attention. But they hadn’t. Now he would have to up the ante.
That’s why he was sitting in a car down the block from her house now,the one he’d only found after visiting her campus, sitting in on one of herprofiling seminars, and eventually following her home. Without that stroke ofluck, he might still be searching for her home, as her ability to hide herownership of it was as prodigious as her mentor’s had been.
He’d arrived before dawn, as he had for the last several days. He watchedas her boyfriend, the hobbled former detective, Hernandez, left early thismorning, likely off to the police station in a vain attempt to recapture hisformer glory. The Night Hunter had initially considered using him. But the manwas such a pathetic shell that it hardly seemed like a challenge.
With him gone, that left only Hunt and her sister, Hannah, in thehouse. Neither had so much as poked a head out yet today. Part of him hadwanted to enter the home one day while everyone was out, to explore; toprepare. But knowing Garland Moses, the modest-looking home would have an arrayof security measures he was unequipped to navigate.
He was an expert at taking life. But at seventy-five, the Night Hunterhad to admit that his mastery of modern technology was a weakness. The mostcertain way to enter this house was to be invited in. He chuckled silently tohimself. Apparently he
