“Yes, sir.” This time, Varden waited patiently in silence.
Duran looked absently back toward the window for a moment, his pale eyes distant. When he returned his attention to his lieutenant, his voice became brisk. “Is Mason ready for them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He understands what I want him to do?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Duran made a slight gesture of dismissal. “See that he follows his instructions precisely.”
Varden nodded a reply and left the room.
Duran returned to the window. This time, his gaze roved, studying the lights of various buildings as if searching for a particular one. Following the neatly laid-out streets, scanning the dark patches of parks and woods. Softly, as if to someone he expected to hear his voice, he said, “I feel you out there. Nearby. You think you can save her. You think you can save them all. Sometimes…you even think you can save me.”
After a moment, he laughed very quietly, a sound that held little amusement.
Sarah came awake suddenly, heart pounding. She was sitting up in bed, her hands reaching out for…something. Someone. She tried to recall her dreams, but all she remembered was the uneasy sensation of something missing. Something wrong.
A glance at the bright display of the clock radio on her nightstand told her it was just after midnight, which meant she had been asleep only a couple of hours. The pressure inside her head was…different. And she didn’t have a clue what that meant.
The almost-closed connecting door to the parlor showed a sliver of light, so Tucker was obviously still up. Feeling too restless to attempt sleep again so soon after waking, Sarah slid out of the big bed. She turned on the lamp and blinked a moment in the light, then found and shrugged into the thick robe provided by the hotel.
When she went into the parlor, it was to find Tucker seated at the small desk frowning at his laptop. But he looked up alertly as soon as she came in.
“What is it?”
Sarah shook her head and sat down on the couch. “Nothing. I just can’t sleep. Have you found anything?”
He hesitated and then, reluctantly, said, “There was a woman’s body found in Richmond a couple of days after the fire.”
Sarah felt her throat tighten up, but said steadily, “A body that could have been mistaken for me?”
“The police description is of a white female, age thirty, five foot four, about a hundred and five pounds, dark hair, brown eyes. The ME thinks she died sometime last Wednesday. The day of the fire.”
“How was she killed?”
Again, Tucker hesitated. “Sarah—”
“How was she killed?”
“Smoke inhalation—though there were no burns on her body and she was found in a shallow grave in an empty lot. Some kids playing baseball found her there.”
Sarah swallowed to fight the queasy sensation rising in her throat. “Kids. Great. What do the police think?”
“Reading between the lines of the reports, they don’t know what to think. The woman lived alone; her neighbors claim nothing unusual happened around the time she must have died. The man she was dating has a solid alibi, and nobody thinks he did it anyway; he was, according to everyone who knew them, devoted to her. So far, they haven’t found any enemies. She was not sexually assaulted, and was apparently laid out in the grave with some care, identification by her side. No sign that she fought or even struggled; the ME thinks she may have been asleep when the smoke got her; he found slight traces of a sedative in her body.”
If Tucker thought Sarah found that last a comfort, he was wrong.
“What was her name?”
“Sarah, let it go.”
She drew a breath. “What was her name?”
“Jennifer Healy.”
Sarah repeated the name in a whisper, committing it to memory. She was reasonably sure the police would never solve the murder of Jennifer Healy. Reasonably sure that the media would accord the crime scant attention. Reasonably sure that in time the boyfriend would get on with his life and the friends would think of her less and less. Reasonably sure that the people responsible for her death had already wiped her from their minds.
But Sarah was certain that she, at least, would never forget.
“There’s no way to be sure they intended to use her body,” Tucker pointed out reasonably. “She could have been the victim of a garden-variety killer who was motivated by reasons we’ll never know and wouldn’t understand if we did.”
“Right.”