“Sunlight in your hair. Morning light. You’re standing there, working on a piece of plywood, sunlight all over you, and I feel like someone kicked me off a damn cliff. So you’re not going anywhere, just check that off the list.”
“It can’t work.”
“You should try to balance out that Pollyanna attitude of yours, season it with some cynicism. It has been working,” he added. “For both of us. I know what the hell works and what doesn’t. We work, Naomi.”
“That was before . . .” When his eyebrows lifted, she dragged a hand through her hair, tried to find level ground again. “Can’t you see what’s going to happen? I pray, and I’ll keep praying Mason’s right. They’ll find him, they’ll stop him. And I’ll hope with all I have they do that before he kills again. But when they do find him, it’ll all fall apart again. Me, my father, whoever this maniac is, all tied together. And the press—”
“Oh, fuck the press. You’ll stand up to it.”
“You have no idea what it’s like.”
“You’ll stand up to it,” he repeated, without a hint of doubt. “And you won’t be alone. You’ll never have to be alone again. You can count on me.”
“Oh God, Xander.”
When he crossed to her, she tried to back away, shook her head, but he simply grabbed her, pulled her in. “You can count on me. And you’re damn well going to.”
He tipped her head back, kissed her more gently than he ever had. “I love you.” Kissed her again, drew her in, just held. “Get used to it.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“You don’t know until you try. We’re not going anywhere, Naomi.”
She felt herself breathe in, breathe out. “I’ll try.”
“That’ll do.”
BALANCE
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Twenty-six
It felt like an interrogation. She knew better—she knew—but when Mason came into her studio in the morning, set up a folding chair, and sat, he turned the sanctuary into an interrogation room.
“You didn’t sleep well,” he said.
“No, not very well. Neither did you.”
“Well enough, just not very long. I worked late.”
“You didn’t come down for breakfast.”
“Because it’s at dawn.” He smiled a little. “I grabbed a bagel, had coffee, talked to the tile guys. The room you’ve earmarked for the uncles is really coming along. They’re going to love it.”
“I’m not sure they should come.”
“Naomi, I know it has to feel like your life tipped sideways, but you have to keep living it.”
“If something happened to them—”
He cut her off. “The unsub’s not interested in men.”
“He’s interested in me, and they’re mine. So.”
“They’ll come anyway. Put that away for a while. I’m heading into town shortly, meeting the team. We’ll work out of the police station. He’s never had an investigation focused on him like this, Naomi. It changes things.”
“Whatever we do, it doesn’t change what’s already happened.”
“No.”
“And I know, Dr. Carson, dwelling on that, brooding on my part of it, however involuntary, isn’t healthy or productive.”
Knowing that, knowing he thought it, irritated the crap out of her.
“But I might need a couple days to dwell and brood.”
All understanding, he simply nodded. “You should play to your strengths, and you’ve always been a champion brooder.”
“Up yours, Mason Jar.”
“Another strength,” he went on, “is your power of observation. You see the big picture and the small details. It’s going to be an advantage. It’s going to help.”
“My keen powers of observation didn’t clue me in that I’ve been followed by a serial killer for a couple years.”
“Longer, I think—and being clued in now, you can go back, remember things and people you noticed. You can go back, refresh those memories by going through pictures you took—the where, when, what was going on around you.”
Longer, she wanted to dwell on longer, but pressed her fingers to her eyes, ordered herself to deal with it. “I don’t pay attention to people when I’m working. I block them out.”
“You have to pay attention to block them out. You know more than you think, and I can help you bring it to the surface.”
Though she had to stifle a sigh, she decided if she had to take another trip into a therapy session, it might as well be with her brother in the chair.
“Let’s go back first, and tell me how much longer you think this has been happening.”
“Did you know Eliza Anderson?”
“I don’t know.” Already battling a vague headache, Naomi rubbed at her temple. “I don’t think so. Mason, I’ve brushed up against dozens and dozens of people. On shoots, at the gallery on trips to New York. There are motel clerks and waitresses and gas station attendants, shopkeepers, hikers. Countless. The odds of remembering . . .”
But suddenly she did. “Wait. Liza—I think they called her Liza. I remember hearing about her at college, my sophomore year, after she was killed. But, Mason, it wasn’t like this. And everyone said it was her ex-boyfriend. He’d been violent with her before, which is why he was an ex. She was beaten and raped, but she was stabbed to death, wasn’t she? And—God—they found her in the trunk of her own car.”
“What do you remember about her?”
“I didn’t know her. She was a year ahead of me. But I recognized her when I saw her picture on the news, on the Net, after it happened. We didn’t have any classes together, didn’t socialize, but she came into the restaurant where I worked the first two years of college before I could intern with a photographer. I waited on her enough times to remember her face.”
Now, she brought that face back into her mind. “Blonde, short, swingy blonde hair,” she said, waving her hands just under her own ears. “Very pretty. Polite enough to actually speak to her waitress, say thanks. I understand she was blonde, killed where I went to school, but she wasn’t held for any length of time, wasn’t strangled.”
“I think she was his first. I think he panicked before he could attempt strangulation. It was messy and quick, even sloppy—and he was lucky. If the investigation hadn’t zeroed in so completely on the ex, he might not have gotten away with it. She’d had a fight with the ex that night.”
“I remember reading that, hearing it around campus.” She found her calm, pushed back for memories. “He—the boyfriend—tried to get her to come back, and they fought, he threatened her. People heard him tell her he’d make her sorry, make her pay. He didn’t have an alibi.”
“And they had no physical evidence, and no matter how hard and long they worked him, he never came off his story of being alone in his room, asleep—when she was grabbed and killed and put in the trunk of her car.
“She looked a little like you.”
“No. No, she didn’t.”
“You wore your hair longer then, not dissimilar from hers. She wasn’t as tall as you, but she was tall, slim.”
And the way he paused, the way those warm brown eyes fixed on hers, Naomi knew worse was coming.
“Say it.”
“I think he used her as a surrogate, his first, because of those similarities. It may be he couldn’t get to you, so he substituted. And then found the high of the kill, of taking those substitutes. Along the way he evolved, he learned, he refined.”
“Mason, that’s ten years. You’re talking ten years.”
“Initially, his kills would be more spread out. Months, even a year between. He’d experiment with method, study you, study Bowes. He may be competing with Bowes, and Bowes had a twelve-year streak—that can be verified. You and I know it might have been longer.”
Couldn’t sit, couldn’t, so she pushed away from the desk, paced to the window, drank in the view of the water.
The peace of it, the colors blooming in light and in shadow.
“I don’t know why, but if I believe it’s been ten years, it makes it less intimate. This isn’t about something I did, something I didn’t do—Xander was right. I’m the excuse. God, I asked myself so many times in the first couple of years after that night in the woods what I’d done or didn’t do to make my father hurt all those girls.”
“I did the same.”