“As long as you were number one, we did just fine.”
“Yeah, that’s true. I’m an egomaniac.” JD started the car. As soon as they pulled up in front of Ro’s house, Ben opened the door, but JD took his arm. “I want you to do me a favor, Vicks. For old times’ sake. For the last three years, I’ve been listening to the same shit from those morons day after day after day. I don’t mind being told I’m God, but occasionally, I’d like another opinion, if only to shoot it down. You’re at Remez, what—one day a week? Would it hurt your ass to sit at my table during lunch when you’re there?”
“Fine with me. You’ll have to ask Ro.”
“If you sit with me, she’ll sit with you.” A pause. “I know it doesn’t matter to you, but it matters to me. I like a posse. It’s all image, you know?”
“That’s the JD I remember and loathe.” Ben shook his head. “How does that work? Do I sit next to Ro or is there like hierarchy?”
“I’ll be on her right, you sit on her left. Give her something to tell her grandchildren about.” He made his voice high. “‘These two boys came to blows over me.’” Ben laughed and JD smiled. “That’s what she’s all about anyway. Attention.” He grinned. “So we’re really cool again?”
“Yeah, yeah . . . as long as you agree that we’re both taking her to prom.”
“Yeah, the vampire and the zombie.”
“I think it’s the vampire and the werewolf.”
“I don’t know anything about vampires or werewolves, but I do know a thing or two about zombies,” JD said. “Get your head out of the dead, Vicks. Come back and join the living.”
Windstorm
Prologue
He didn’t start out this way. He didn’t wake up one morning and decide to be a sadistic sexual killer. It was gradual . . . very gradual.
It didn’t have anything to do with the family (a “good” one) or being bullied in school (no one paid attention to him) or even the voices that he heard (he had learned to disregard them). It did have something to do with the screwed-up circuits of his brain. And opportunity.
He had always liked to watch. He began looking through windows in his early teens. Binoculars allowed him to see details up close, and for the longest time, he was content just to watch. Until one day when he saw her stagger home completely smashed out of her mind from some kind of early Christmas party. It wasn’t even rape because she didn’t know what was happening—only that she was on the ground, her eyes rolling to the back of her head until she coughed up vomit and eventually passed out. He finished up while she was out cold.
She was fourteen, and why should he feel guilty? Where the hell were her parents?
He left her there sleeping it off, unnerved by what he had done, but also exhilarated by it. It had happened on the winter solstice, and since he knew that he couldn’t routinely go around doing what he did, he decided to limit his obsession to those four days of the year—the solstices and equinoxes. There was something nice about breaking in the seasons.
The next one was also young, but not drunk. She had cut through the woods on her way somewhere. He saw her as he was driving, just as she ducked into a forested area rich with fall foliage. He wasn’t all that familiar with the neighborhood, but he salivated at the idea of tailing her. So he pulled over, parked the car, and followed her deep into the woods. She had fought him, but since she was young, he quickly overpowered her, tied her up, and gagged her. He fucked her. The whole thing took around ten minutes. And then he left her there, squirming in her own vomit and his semen while he ran back to the car and took off to the airport.
He had learned a good lesson, though. It was easier to do it when they were knocked out.
So the next time, in summer, he took a rag soaked in chloroform equivalent and threw it over her nose. After she went limp, he raped her and got the hell out.
And so it went from season to season to season until the inevitable happened. They weren’t supposed to die, but he got a little rough, so it wasn’t that surprising. But, still, those girls weren’t supposed to die. And it was getting out of hand. He had to be more organized.
And so the one in River Remez was his first planned attack. He spent hours digging the precise dimensions of the grave. He was meticulous, exacting, a little compulsive, and a very hard worker. He never shirked any assignment. He was the go-to guy if you really wanted something done, which made him very successful.
When he was finished burying her, he was careful to camouflage what he had done with leaves and detritus, and he even put some animal droppings on top of the site. The night was inky black, and if it hadn’t been for the river, he probably would have been hopelessly lost. But he stepped lightly and covered his tracks—literally—and eventually found his way back to civilization.
He left the area the next day by car, dropping off the rental in Dallas and eventually going home, if you could call where he lived home. Home was always the same—an extended-stay motel—but it varied from city to city, depending on his whims.
And he had a lot of whims. Whims were fun. They were the spice of life.
Chapter 1
They’d come full circle: starting out as a team, becoming a couple, then two individuals, and now they were a team again. It required some adjustment, but Ben remained focused even with the occasional wisps of sadness. There was still a chill in the air, so Ro had dressed in layers—a long pink sweater over black leggings and black Uggs on her feet. She blew on her hands. It was always freezing in Vicks’s room.
“The cold keeps my senses sharp and my brain firing,” he explained. Papers were spread out all over the floor. He was at his desk while Ro was sitting on his bed, going through one of the many lists of names they had culled from the reams of data she had given him two weeks ago. Years upon years of hotel guests, thousands of entries, but they had narrowed it down to a couple hundred names. From that point, their work involved checking and rechecking and making sure they didn’t miss anything.
“Who’s this guy?” Ben asked.
“What guy?” Ro was distracted, clicking on her keyboard.
“Meryl Horton. Did we check him out yet?”
“I think Meryl is a woman’s name. Hold on.” She clicked away. “Yep, Meryl Horton is a woman. A senior scientist at Bell Labs.” She looked up. “That doesn’t sound like a national lab.”
“Wrong lab, wrong sex.” Another name bit the dust. He crossed it off. If they found candidates that they liked, they studied their profiles and face images from the files they had created using Ro’s purloined information as well as the all-powerful Internet—and maybe a few files that Ben had hacked into. The names they were currently looking at involved a group that had come to Los Alamos around the time of the summer solstice about a year before Ellen’s murder.