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)
The hospital, at least, was safe.
Or as safe as I could be with a potential rapist who had a score to settle with me now.
As I was jostling around in the back of the ambulance, I had a thought that made a pained little groan escape me.
I was going to be on somebody’s true crime podcast now.
CHAPTER TWO
Detective Wells Vaughn
The call came fifteen minutes after I finally crashed for the night, jarring me awake, my heart hammering, knifing up in bed before I was even aware of what had woken me up.
Then the ringing and vibrating from the nightstand had reality slowly coming back to me.
“Vaughn,” I barked into the phone, my voice rougher than usual from sleep.
“He struck again.”
“Fuck.”
I didn’t need to ask who struck again. I didn’t have any ongoing cases that would warrant waking me up instead of handing a case off to an on-duty detective.
“She’s alive.”
“What was that?” I asked, sure I’d misheard, that sleep was clinging to me a little more tightly than I realized.
“She’s alive, Wells,” he said, and I was on my feet and moving toward the pile of clothes I’d discarded not long before.
“She’s alive?” I asked, yanking pants up my legs. “How?” I asked, mostly speaking to myself.
“You’re gonna have to ask her yourself.”
“Which hospital is she at?” I asked, putting the phone on speaker, so I could shrug into my shirt, then my jacket.
“She’s still at home.”
“What?” I barked, a little louder than I’d intended.
“The officer at the scene said she’s a little bruised and blooded, but didn’t need to be rushed to the hospital. Everyone figured it would be best to get her report at the scene.”
She was not only alive, but she was able to give a report of the event?
How was that possible?
“What’s the address?” I asked, kneeling down to lace my shoes with impatient fingers.
This was the first lead we’d gotten on this sick sonofabitch.
He’d raped and murdered two women already, each event twelve months apart. Long enough for the news to die down, for people to forget the victims’ names.
Not me.
I didn’t forget them.
Ashley Moore. Aged twenty-eight. Brown hair, warm brown eyes, killer smile. She was a first-grade teacher. She loved complicated jigsaw puzzles and hosting small dinner parties for friends.
Madison Silvo. Aged twenty-five. Brown hair, green eyes. She’d been in tech. Had just moved into the house she would be raped and murdered in two weeks before. She hadn’t even unpacked her kitchen yet. She didn’t have a big social circle, but she had a tight-knit family who loved her.
I remembered them.
I always would.
Both their before pictures, happy and excited about their lives. And the ones after what that bastard did to them. Sliced them up. Tortured them for hours.
Leaving not a single goddamn bit of evidence to help us nail him.
I’d been counting down the days since Madison’s murder. The twelve months closing in minute by minute.
I guess the clock had run out.
I knew the call would come.
Guys like this, they didn’t look at their two victims, nod their heads, say they’d done a good job, then hang up their rapist and murderer caps.
Some continued the exact pattern until they screwed up and got caught.
Others escalated.
It seemed this guy was particular about his pattern.
Which I guess was good, in that it didn’t mean an increase in victims. But also bad because it meant he was careful and controlled enough not to screw up.
Except, of course, he had.
This woman was alive.
I wondered, as I drove down the familiar streets of Navesink Bank toward the little starter home community where her house was nestled, if she knew how lucky she’d been.
If she didn’t yet, she soon would.
The news was going to go nuts with this.
Then she would learn what she’d so narrowly avoided.
The victim’s house was the center one in a cul de sac, a small white ranch that couldn’t be more than a thousand square feet. The front porch looked like it was all but crumbling, but the front flower beds had been lovingly cared for.
We had to check them for shoe prints.
We didn’t even have that much so far.
“How she doing?” I asked, nodding at the female police officer as I walked up the driveway. It was cracked and needed to be repaved, but weeds weren’t poking out of the spaces.
“Kind of withdrawn into herself,” she told me.
Maggie Judd was one of only two female police officers we had on the force. From what I understood, one was on during the day, one at night, on the off-chance we needed a female officer.
Maggie was tall and lean with her blonde hair pulled back from a Barbie-doll pretty face with ice-blue eyes.
“Not surprised. She didn’t need to go to the hospital?”
“They want to take her,” Maggie said. “Looks like she was hit pretty hard. But she wasn’t raped. She has some cuts, but nothing like the other women.”