When she lay beneath him, feeling his heart trip against hers, the beauty flooded her throat with tears.
“I like your version of normal,” she managed.
“I was hoping.” He brushed his lips over the curve of her shoulder. “I could spend a couple lifetimes being normal with you.”
Not yet, she thought. Not yet. “Does normal include dinner?”
“Right after I Google how to grill chicken.” He levered up, looked down at her. “Hey.” Brushed a tear from her lashes.
“They’re the good kind,” she told him. “The very good kind. You make me feel more, Reed. I’m still getting used to it. Let’s do this. You figure out how to do the chicken, and I’ll hang the mermaid. I suspect we’ll both be playing to our strengths.”
“Let’s see if you feel that way after you eat the chicken. The good kind?”
“The very good kind.”
He fed the dog and grilled chicken that was pretty damn okay. He admired the sexy mermaid on the bathroom wall. They took a walk, and he studied the spearing green of his emerging lupines, before they wound through the woods and down to the beach.
They gave each other normal.
He tried tossing the ball for Barney, to no avail. Then Simone picked it up, threw it. Barney trotted after it, snagged it, brought it back.
“Why does he fetch for you?”
“Because he’s a gentleman.”
“Throw it again.”
She obliged with the same results.
“Let me have that thing. Go get it, Barney!” Reed tossed it. Barney stared up at him. “Well, for—”
“Barney.” Simone pointed to the ball. “Get that for me.”
He wagged his tail, raced down the beach, and brought the ball back to her.
“He’s messing with me,” Reed decided. “I can get him to sit. We’ve got about a ninety percent success rate on that. But he gets his head caught in the stair rail a couple times a week. And he’s getting bigger, so it’s not as easy to get him out again.”
They walked on, and he tried a new tactic. Reed tossed the ball back over his shoulder. Barney ran back for it.
“I’ve got his number now.”
With Simone’s hand in his, and his dog trotting along with a red ball, he watched the moon come up over the water.
“Can you stay tonight?”
“I have to leave early. It’s a timing thing, but I can stay.”
He brought her hand to his lips, watched the moon, and thought he couldn’t ask for better normal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Summer came to the island, and so did the summer people. Day-trippers with their sunscreen and beach blankets, weekenders prepared to pack fun and sun into their two days. Others flooded in to spend a week or two, a month, or the season.
The ferry ran every hour on the hour with cars, bikers, hikers lined up at the dock on both sides of the bay.
Every hour on the hour Reed himself or a team of deputies stood watch.
He’d checked on a scatter of bookings by single females, but none panned out.
He worked every day, on the roll or off, he walked the village, the beaches, cruised by rentals.
Sooner or later, he thought.
*
On a lovely June evening at a well-attended fund-raiser in Potomac, Maryland, Marlene Dubowski—victim’s advocate attorney, political activist, DownEast Mall survivor—gave a short speech, raised her glass in a toast.
She sipped, mingled, sipped, schmoozed, sipped. And began gasping for breath. As she collapsed, Patricia, in the guise of a wealthy donor, dropped down beside her, quickly snipped a lock of hair. “Oh my God, call nine-one-one!”
“I’m a doctor,” someone shouted. “Let me through!”
In the confusion, Patricia slipped away.
She drove by the fine homes, sweeping driveways, to the post office she’d already earmarked. Humming to herself, she slipped the lock of hair into the bag and the bag inside the card she’d already signed, addressed, and stamped.
She’d chosen:
JUST BECAUSE
YOU’RE YOU!
After sealing the card, she slipped it into the mailbox in front of the post office.
Pleased with herself, she took the Beltway, cruised off the exit ramp to the mid-level hotel she’d prebooked, as she’d considered the crowds of vacationers.
She only needed a night, a good meal.
In her junior suite—the best she could do—she pulled off the ash-blond helmet wig, took out the blue contacts, the device that pushed her jaw out to prominence.
With a grunt, she removed the matronly designer cocktail dress and the body padding beneath. She took the lifts out of her evening shoes.
She ordered room service, took a long shower to start fading the self-tanner she’d used.
In the morning, she’d dump the car she’d rented in long-term parking at Dulles airport, rent another. A change of plates somewhere along the way, and she’d be off again.
She set the photo of Reed on the table beside her bed—she’d bought a frame for it.
“We’ve got a date, don’t we? Just because.”
*
Jacoby sat in Reed’s office, frustration in every line of her body. “We had an agent at the damn fund-raiser, and she slipped through. People panicked, crowded in, cut him off. He got a look at her, and gave chase, but … He believes she fled in a black Mercedes sedan, but he couldn’t get the plate. No plate light.”
Reaching in her bag, she took out a sketch. “Artist’s rendering.”
“She added some years, some weight, changed the jawline. And she went back to cyanide.”
“She stayed to see her target collapse, and even got down beside her for a moment when keeping back, leaving would be smarter.”
“She’s gotten more arrogant, and she didn’t know how close you were.”
“Not close enough. She’s going to send you another card.”
“I’m counting on it. Her time between kills is compressing.”
“Another sign she’s losing the control that kept her under for so long. It goes back to you, Reed, and putting a bullet in her. Initially I thought, and our analysis agreed, she might string you along. Play it out because, for her, it must be torturing you. I don’t think that now. She needs to right that wrong.”
“Agreed. If she wants to take out another on her way here, and at the rate she’s escalated, I think she will, you need to put Mi-Hi Jung and Chaz Bergman under some protection. I think Brady Foster falls in there, too. She won’t go after Essie yet. Essie’s too high up the chain. She wouldn’t go after Simone yet if I didn’t live on the island. But she won’t be able to resist a doubleheader. But…”
He rose, wandered over for a Coke, held out a second.
“Have any Diet?”
“Hold on.” He went out, through the bullpen, into the break room, took a Diet Pepsi out of the fridge.
“I owe you one,” he said to Matty, and took it to his office, closed the door.
“Thanks. ‘But’?”
“She’s escalating, and she’s devolving, but she’s still smart, she’s still cagey. We saw just that in how she played us with and after McMullen. She knows, has to know, you’re following her route, connecting dots.”
“You think she’ll veer off, take another detour.”
“If she needs another kill before me, she’d be stupid to take a direct route to Maine. She’s not stupid.”
Jacoby rose, walked to the map he’d pinned to his wall, studied the pushpins that represented Hobart’s kills since she’d started the journey.
“Any instincts on where she might detour this time?”
“I have to think about it. Would she stick to driving, book a flight? Will she stick to fame and/or fortune, or go off pattern there, too? I have to think about it.”
“So will I, and the rest of the task force. I had a man in the same room with her, and she killed her target, drove away.”
Reed picked up the sketch. “Do you see Hobart when you look at this?”
“I probably wouldn’t have, and witnesses confirmed a Southern accent—a good one. She mixed with people, Reed, made small talk, and worked up tears when she spun a story about her daughter and what she went through after a rape. She paid the five thousand to be there.”
“She lives the role while she’s in it. She’s good. Crazy good.”