“I considered choosing you, you know, as my first. I mean, you gave me such a gift, I wondered if maybe you had more to give?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and shuddered, and Rick squeezed me tighter. “But we both know I didn’t pick you first, Maddie. I wanted to, but I thought it might be too easy to trace your death back to me. So I watched your house and waited, and one day I followed a woman home. And wouldn’t you know it? In her house was the perfect little lamb.
“Oh,” Rick continued, sighing pleasurably at the memory. “He was so sweet. He took such a long time to die, Maddie. It was the greatest bliss I’ve ever known. I thought he’d be enough. And for a while he was, but then I started to have those cravings again. So I watched your house some more and followed the lady with the fur coat to the next little lamb. And, Maddie, he was even sweeter than the first.”
I was crying now in earnest, and it was hard to breathe. I desperately wanted to pass out, to shut my ears to the horrors Rick was whispering to me. How had I not seen it? How had I not guessed?
“I thought little Tevon would satisfy the cravings, but the opposite happened. They got worse. I kept thinking that you were the key, Maddie. You’d led me to this new freedom, and you kept connecting me to all the right lambs. I thought it must be kismet. Maybe if I got very close to you, I could find one that would satisfy me enough until I died.”
Rick was whispering into my ear, and he ran his cheek along mine seductively. I stiffened, and my stomach lurched. I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter and tried not to be sick, but I could taste the bile at the back of my throat.
He continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “That kid you hang out with, he looked interesting. So I followed him for a day, and he led me to the girl…Payton. She was so ripe for the picking that I couldn’t resist. I set up a roadblock and snatched her right off the street. But she died too fast—hardly worth the effort. The cravings started right back up. I thought again about taking you, but then I missed you that night at the park. So I decided to go back to the summer when I trailed you to your babysitting job.”
I stiffened again, and Rick laughed. “Ah, you didn’t know I was watching you back then, did you? It paid off when I grabbed Nathan. I wanted to take my time with him, stretch it out over a few days, you know? I wanted to get the most pleasure out of it, and I thought it’d be so easy to hide him in my hunting shack. Nathan was so scared…I didn’t think he was very smart, but he was. He got away from me before I could do much damage, but I doubt he’ll remember me.”
I shuddered. I was so petrified it was hard to think.
“Yeah,” Rick whispered, stroking my cheek again with his. “That’s it, honey. Be scared. Be terrified. I saw you downtown with the feds, and I knew you were working with them. Eventually you were going to lead them to me, but I only had a few days left to worry about. I thought I could control the cravings and wait for that heart attack, but every day the cravings got worse, even though physically I felt fine.
“I told my wife that I wasn’t feeling good. I called off work a few times and watched you and the feds as much as I could. That’s how I found the key to your house, Maddie. It was hidden in that fake rock by the back door. You were going to be my ultimate prize, but I didn’t think I’d be able to grab you with the feds watching your house while they closed in on me. And then, I remembered you said that my cousin was going to die on the same day as me. I know what you were thinking, that we’d be in some sort of accident. But I had a better idea.
“See, Wes wasn’t a very smart guy. In fact, he was pretty stupid. But he’d seen the blood in the back of the truck from that day I nabbed Payton. Wes had called off to go buy some weed, and I’d had to make the deliveries myself. He knew we were delivering in Jupiter that day, and when he saw the blood I could tell he’d put two and two together.
“So, this morning I went over to his house, and I shot him.”
I made an involuntary squeak, and Rick laughed. “Yeah, I shot him in the head and then I shot that FBI agent. I saw him through the window about a second after I shot Wesley. He was too slow with his gun. Then I rigged the house to explode, and took Wes’s body up to my hunting shack. I made sure to leave Wes’s suicide note and his confession to the murders next to his body. They probably won’t find him for months.”
“Anyway, after dealing with Wes, I went to my favorite fishing spot. I figured I’d be dead in a matter of hours, so I waited. And waited. And waited.”
Rick stopped talking for a long moment, and I was so afraid I didn’t think I could stand it. “Do you know what happened all day today and tonight as I was waiting, Maddie?” he finally asked. I didn’t answer, and he squeezed me tighter, hurting me. “I said, do you?”
I shook my head a fraction.
“Nothing happened,” he spat. “Nothing at all.”
With a jolt I realized what he meant. Rick hadn’t died.
“All those plans,” he snarled, squeezing my wrist. “All that extra life insurance, and making sure my family would be taken care of…all of it wasted. By eleven o’clock tonight I knew you’d lied to me. I knew you were wrong.”
I felt cold all over.
Rick tilted my chin with his arm, and I saw that he wanted me to read the clock above the mantel. “It’s two minutes to midnight, Maddie, and I’m not dead. My family isn’t getting their money, and now that I’ve had a taste of those sweet little lambs, I know I can’t stop. It’s only a matter of time before your FBI buddies catch up with me, isn’t it, Maddie?”
He snarled out my name and pulled up on my arm with a jerk. There was a loud pop, and I screamed as a pain like lightning radiated up and down from my shoulder to my fingertips.