Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54836 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54836 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
“Hey!” I called, waving a hand.
“Er, hey,” he said, stiffening.
“Police,” I said, flashing the badge. “Detective Vaughn,” I added. “Did you see the woman who owns that house today?” I asked, gesturing toward Mari’s house.
His eyes immediately darkened.
“Sad, that,” he said. “No. I don’t live here,” he said, waving at the house. “Just stopped by after work tonight to work on it, so I can put it on the market,” he added.
I didn’t have time for this.
I had to see if anyone else had seen anything, if they’d gotten their own cameras after what happened to Mari. Nearby crime always tended to make people get extra cautious about their own safety. Especially if there were women or kids in the houses.
“Last rental left the place a fucking mess. Energy drink cans everywhere. And the fucking blood in the bathroom sink.”
“Blood?” I asked, head whipping back so fast that my vision swam for a moment.
“Yeah, looks like he got a bloody nose or something, and didn’t bother to wash it down before he just up and left.”
“Did you meet this guy?”
“It was a short-term rental,” he said, shaking his head. “Done through an app and shit like that.”
“How long had he been staying here?”
“Oh, I dunno. Longer than usual. A month or so.”
A month.
A month was plenty long enough to do some good stalking on Mari. See where she went, when she got home. What time she went to bed. All the kind of shit that would make his job easier. And it would feed his sick obsession. He could even speak to her, interact with her, and she’d be none the wiser, just thinking he was a neighbor.
“I need you to get me that information,” I demanded. “Right now,” I added, not caring how harsh my voice was sounding as I reached for my phone again, dialing Gawen as the homeowner clicked through his phone, brows pinched.
“Got something?” Gawen asked, and there was a lot of noise going on around him. Everyone scrambled, tried to find something, tried to make sure Mari wasn’t another dead woman at the hands of the Silent Sadist.
“Neighbor. It was a short-term renter. The owner said he was there a month. And there was blood in the sink…”
“Like from where he treated his stab wounds,” Gawen said.
“Exactly,” I said, silently urging the homeowner to move faster. How hard could it be to find such recent information?
“Here it is,” he said, thrusting his phone screen at me.
“Gawen. Name Brandon Honer,” I said.
“At least it’s not a Smith or Robinson,” Gawen mumbled to himself as he typed the information into the computer. “Brandon Honer. Thirty-three. Software developer. Unmarried, unsurprisingly,” he said as I nodded at the homeowner, who tucked his phone away.
“Got a picture?” I asked.
“Ah… yeah.”
“Does he have a mark in his eye?” I asked.
“Let me zoom… I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Where is he? Where does he live?”
“He… doesn’t. Not anything that seems recent,” he said.
“Rentals. Could he be doing short-term rentals all the time?” I asked.
“What company is it? I’ll do some calls. You need to get to the office.”
He was right.
I was useless here.
Even if I felt like I was leaving her behind to go in.
I rattled off the name of the rental place, gave the homeowner a distracted thanks, and rushed to my car, then sped to work, barely remembering to cut the engine as I ran inside.
“A woman’s life is hanging in the balance,” Gawen said, tone deadly serious. “He’s already killed twice,” he added, lighting a fire under the person on the other end of the phone’s ass.
I moved behind Gawen’s desk, looking at the tabs open on his screen.
Then there he was.
The Silent Sadist.
But he wasn’t some sensationalized news headline.
He was just a man.
Brandon Honer.
A pathetic, weak excuse for a man.
Someone with sick fantasies and too much free time to plot them out and execute them.
He wasn’t going to get to take Mari from me, goddamnit.
He was an average-looking man with wide-set eyes with that little telltale birthmark that Mari had mentioned.
Our captain walked over as Gawen was impatiently raking a hand through his hair, waiting for the person on the other end of the phone to likely try to find a manager to fulfill our request for information.
I filled in the captain as best I could, hearing a shakiness in my own voice as I did so, and praying he didn’t pick up on the professional lines I’d so readily crossed.
“I know you’re anxious to get this bastard,” he said, resting a hand on my shoulder, and giving it a fatherly squeeze. “He’s not slipping away this time. We will get that girl out of there,” he assured me.
“Yes, the addresses of any current short-term rentals,” Gawen said from between clenched teeth.
It wasn’t often you found him flapped. But he’d become intimately acquainted with the case file now. He’d seen the images. He’d read the report from the M.E. About what had been done to Madison and Ashley. He also had his own theories about how much worse this bastard would make it for Mari. So he understood the stakes, and the fact that this crime, this torture, was unfolding in real time.