So Close the Hand of Death. J.T. Ellison

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СКАЧАТЬ at it, the whole scenario flooded into her brain. She really should. But she wouldn’t.

      Colleen stood and stretched, then slipped into the kitchen, past the cabinet that needed some work—it was practically hanging off its hinges—to the refrigerator with its broken ice machine. She cracked the lid on her fourth Diet Coke of the morning and started thinking of the angle for the next installment of the story. Teenage boys from upscale Nashville neighborhoods didn’t go missing every day. But if she was going to make this story sing, she needed a scoop, something major. Something official.

      Settling back at her desk, she set the soda down and opened her internet browser. She tried to post five original stories a day, with attendant follow-ups as they happened, so combing the net and working her sources took the vast majority of her time. The minute one good story was in the can, she was off to the next.

      Where was Peter Schechter?

      Her message icon was flashing, so she toured through her new email first. She received tons of tips from true-crime buffs across the country, so many that she could barely handle them all. To help her sort through the mass quickly, she’d coded some of her best sources in the major metropolitans so they would stand out. There were three messages blinking red and marked urgent, one each from San Francisco, Boston and New York.

      She popped up San Francisco first; it had come in the earliest. All thoughts of a local boy going missing disappeared when she read the message. Her heart began to beat a bit harder. She read it through twice, then closed it and sat back in her chair. Could it be? And was she the only one who had this?

      She tried not to get too excited. A diversion was in order; she opened the message from New York.

      A buzz began in her ears, the rush of adrenaline sparking through her system, bringing every nerve ending alive. She opened the message from Boston and nearly passed out.

      If this was for real, this was huge. This was so huge.

      She flew into activity, responding to her three contacts, asking the most relevant questions she could think of. Then she went to her bookshelf, her reference material, her background. Nestled on the left-hand side of the third shelf was a book she’d opened so many times that the edges were frayed and the binding broken. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

      She stroked the cover reverentially, then flipped it open. The book was organized alphabetically by proper name, not the nicknames given to the men and women whose crimes were housed in these hallowed pages.

      She had to take this in steps. She debated for a moment, then decided. San Francisco first. She turned to a dog-eared page at the very end, to one of the few killers who was categorized by a nom de plume, one of the all-time majors. The man who remained anonymous after all these years. The man who hadn’t been caught.

      She started with the Zodiac.

      Four

      The Outer Banks, North Carolina

      Taylor was only allowed to spend twenty minutes catching up with Fitz before Renee Sansom knocked on the door and told them it was time to transport him to Duke for his afternoon surgery.

      Taylor had tried asking questions, but Fitz was surprisingly evasive about the crimes he’d endured. He kept repeating the same lines: “I was drugged, I think.” “I really don’t remember anything.” “All I know is what I told you.” “He said to tell you ‘Let’s play.’” “He said you’d know what that meant.”

      She’d expected him to be forthcoming with her, but after ten minutes of trying and failing to get him to open up, hearing him reiterate his apparent memory loss, she stopped. She hoped he wasn’t suffering from full-on PTSD, that he was just overwhelmed by the situation, that he remembered more than he was saying, or would remember when the shock wore off. But that was probably wishful thinking, considering what he’d been through.

      She switched tactics. She asked if he wanted to go back to Nashville for the surgery and was surprised to hear he’d rather stick to the plan they had for him, go to Duke and get the surgery there. She wondered if he wanted to stay close to Susie, lying in the morgue.

      Pushing the worry and concern from her voice, she filled him in on what had been happening in Nashville. How much his fellow detectives Lincoln Ross and Marcus Wade were looking forward to getting him back to work, about the new member of the Homicide team, Renn McKenzie, and their latest boss, Commander Joan Huston. Fitz seemed to appreciate the distraction. He held her hand tightly through the time they spent together, and Taylor could feel the frisson of fear that coursed through his body on a regular loop. He was scared, and that freaked her out.

      The Duke Medical Center Life Flight helicopter landed in the small parking lot in front of the police station. Fitz was loaded in, walking slowly, head down. Taylor and Baldwin waved wildly until the sophisticated chopper was out of sight. Taylor hated like hell not going with him, but promised to be by his side tonight, after he was out of surgery. She and Baldwin would take the Gulfstream up, and as soon as Fitz was cleared, they’d take him home.

      The snow was whipping harder now, the storm in full gear. They trooped back inside the station, shivering. The door closed against the blustery day, they made their way to the conference room Nadis had evacuated for their purposes.

      Sansom eyed Taylor and said, “Okay. It’s time for your debrief. I need to know everything you have about this creep. Your boy there didn’t want to talk to me, but I assume he told you quite a bit. Let’s have it.”

      Taylor shook her head. “Fitz didn’t tell me anything, actually. He says he was drugged, that he doesn’t remember anything, and I believe him. Like you said, he’s been through a lot. I’m not inclined to push him too hard. If he starts to remember, or seems more open to discussion, I’ll be there to hear the story. In the meantime, I can give you enough background to get you started.”

      Sansom looked at her for a moment. “Our initial blood work doesn’t indicate drugs in his system.”

      Taylor stared her down. “You know a complete toxicology will take weeks.”

      “Perhaps. Perhaps your sergeant is trying to hide something.”

      That got under Taylor’s skin. “You can’t possibly think he had something to do with this. He lost his eye, for Christ’s sake. What do you think, he murdered his girlfriend, scooped his eye out with a spoon and drove it on up to Asheville?” She was breathing heavily, fists clenched, and barely felt Baldwin’s hand on her arm. Restraint. But come on. Accusing Fitz of any involvement in Susie’s murder was ridiculous.

      Sansom continued to bait her. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. It’s awfully convenient. He wouldn’t be the first to have a relationship go south and blame it on the local bogeyman.”

      “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

      Sansom had the audacity to smile.

      “Taylor,” Baldwin said, the note of warning clear, “let’s just cover what we know so far, and take it from there.”

      “Fine,” Taylor replied, biting off the comment she really wanted to make. She tried to see the case from an outsider’s perspective. While she and Baldwin knew, in their bones, that this was the work of the Pretender, people who hadn’t been privy to the earlier cases might be led astray by the crime scene. Any good investigator would look at all the possibilities. That was all Sansom was doing.

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