Before I Wake (3 page)

“Ticket.” He slapped the packet on the table. “Your flight leaves in two days.”

Be there, or be square.

Ten-four, Eleanor.

“Don’t worry. We aren’t on the same flight. I’m taking off tomorrow morning.”

“You bought a ticket without consulting me?”

She wasn’t somebody they could push around. She wasn’t the kind of person to come running at the snap of someone’s fingers. That was one thing she knew about herself. “You’re assuming a lot.”

“Look at it this way. You can come back, or you can keep hitting on strange men and eventually end up a statistic. The choice seems obvious.”

“Don’t you get it? We’re all statistics.”

“Some just sooner than others?”

“Do you work in Behavioral Science?”

“It’s called NCAVC now, remember? National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime.”

She could smell him again.

The odor of secret things locked up in storage. Boxes of paperback novels that had grown moldy from the dampness. A leather ball glove. Incense and half-burned candles. Faded jeans and flannel shirts.

Someone else’s past.

His past, not hers.

She wanted to go back to fifteen minutes ago.

Erase and rewind.

She wanted to forget this conversation had ever taken place. They would go to bed together. He would kiss her. Hold her. Pull her away from the edge.

“French was executed,” the man suddenly announced.

“I know.” Was he trying to shake her? “The whole country knows.”

“Did you watch it?”

She wanted to lie in order to stop the direction of the conversation, but she had the idea he already knew the truth. “Yes.” Some people said that seeing the killer die never brought closure, but she’d felt relief when French had taken his last breath. The man who killed her parents no longer existed. Maybe now he would get out of her head.

He nodded. “Thought you would.”

She hadn’t wanted to. But she couldn’t
not
watch it.

“Something interesting happened a week later,” he said casually.

“Oh?”

“A murder.” He paused. “Of a rural family in northeast Oklahoma. Killed with French’s MO.”

She looked up sharply. “Copycat? Someone carrying on his work?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s why you want me back?”

“Yes.”

Fear fluttered in her stomach.

Fear.

She’d forgotten what fear felt like.

The worst feeling in the world.

As she watched him, she got the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t done, that he had another card to play. “Why me?” she asked.

“You were one of the best.”

“
Were
.” Her mouth was dry. She swallowed. “Past tense.”

She couldn’t go back. Or maybe more to the point, she couldn’t make herself leave the safety of the desert. “Arden Davis no longer exists.”

Most people would have said, “Yes, she does. She’s in there somewhere.” Instead, he watched, silently acknowledging that she could be right.

She picked up the small folder and pulled out the ticket.

A flight from Albuquerque to Charleston, West Virginia.

A line from an old TV show popped into her head:
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it
…

What was the name of the show? Something her father had liked…

Her mind clicked shut.

She returned the ticket to the folder and handed it to him. “No, thanks. I’ll have to pass.”

“One more thing about French.” He stared hard into her eyes, issuing a challenge. For a fraction of a second, something flitted across his face, and she got the idea he didn’t want to tell her what he was about to tell her. “He recanted.” He paused. “He denied killing your parents.”

Nausea washed over her, and her heart flopped in her chest.

No.

She didn’t want to believe it. She stared into the stranger’s blue eyes, looking for some sign of a lie. She saw none. “But he confessed.”

The agent slowly blinked. “I know.”

“What about evidence? There must have been evidence.”

“The crime scene was compromised by the local cops. It was chaos. They’d never seen anything like what they found that day.”

What they’d found was what she no longer remembered. What had been erased from her mind.

“And we didn’t need it. We had him on the Virginia homicides. We knew Virginia would take care of him and make sure he didn’t kill again.”

She could taste her fear. It was metallic. Or maybe she’d bitten her tongue.

Make it stop. Make it all go away.

Arden had been instrumental in catching French. The first time. Her profile had led detectives to him. From there, a DNA match and the murder weapon—a butcher knife—had sealed the case.

By that time, the FBI was feeling pretty proud of Project TAKE, and the media was touting Arden as a superprofiler.

She’d been there for the arrest. With French’s hands cuffed behind him, he’d smiled broadly, his pupils glazed and flat. “You’re next on my list, sweet pea,” he’d said before being roughly tucked into the backseat of the police car.

Two months later, French escaped while being transported to a hospital for treatment of what they thought was a massive heart attack.

He wasn’t caught for three months.

That’s when Arden really began to study him in depth. That’s when she slipped under his skin and saw the world through his eyes. That’s when he came after her family—or so they thought. Shortly after the Davis killings, he was recaptured and confessed to the murder of Arden’s parents.

Now he was dead—and the killer was very possibly still out there.

Her palms were sweating. “Maybe he was lying.”

“Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the webcast set off the real perpetrator, and now he’s killing again.”

The agent was watching her closely again. She couldn’t stop staring at his blue eyes.

“What if French didn’t kill your family?” he asked.

“You want me to come back to work on my parents’ case?”

Were they insane? Were they trying to drive her completely, wrist-slitting mad? That was like asking a doctor to perform open-heart surgery on his wife. Or a mortician to embalm his own kid.

The agent just stood there watching her, suddenly looking sad.

I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough.

“I’m sorry.”

He really did seem sorry.

His sympathy, whether false or real, made her eyes burn. “There has to be someone else.” She blinked. “Harley. What about Harley Larson?”

“You were better than Harley.”

The agent claimed to know all about her. Evidently, he didn’t know everything.
I’m broken now. Don’t you get that? Don’t you understand
?

The murder of her parents was
her
fault. She’d brought the killer to their house. Her parents would still be alive if she hadn’t been involved in the project.

But if French hadn’t murdered them…? What did that mean?
What the hell did that mean
? Their deaths still had to be somehow connected to him. And connected to her. It was too much of a coincidence to have been random.

She put out her hand. Her eyes were swimming with tears, and she could hardly see. “Give me that damn ticket.”

Nathan Fury lay on his back across the double bed, computer on his lap, all the while aware of Arden Davis just a few doors away. He’d hoped to be able to convince her to return without revealing Albert French’s final denial. He hadn’t wanted to dump that on her. Not now, anyway. Not so soon. He would have preferred to wait until after she’d had time to adjust to being back on the Hill.

But in true Arden Davis fashion, she’d refused to budge, and he’d been forced to take her all the way.

He didn’t think he’d soon forget the look on her face when he’d told her. Disbelief. Pain. Denial. Acceptance. Then pain again.

Everybody in the Bureau thought she was a lost cause. A casualty of war. He hoped she’d prove them wrong.

He knew the basics of Arden Davis.

He knew she was thirty years old, five feet, ten inches tall, 140 pounds, with red hair and green eyes.

He knew who Arden Davis used to be.

Favorite books:
Catcher in the Rye
and
Stranger in a Strange Land
.

Favorite movies:
Midnight Cowboy
and
The Birds
.

Favorite music: the Pogues, the Waterboys, Neil Young. She used to know all the words to “Heart of Gold” and “Fairytale of New York.”

He knew about childhood injuries like the broken arm she’d gotten while ice-skating on the pond behind her farmhouse. How close she’d been to her grandmother, and how her grandmother’s death had sent her into a deep depression that had lasted over a year.

Davis liked both cats and dogs, but was more of a dog person. She’d had a black dog named Zeke that had slept on the end of her bed and kept her company when she had chicken pox. The chicken pox was caught at Sunday school from a girl named Molly. Molly’s mother had claimed her daughter was no longer contagious, but she’d arrived in the church basement covered with scabs and smelling of fever. While Molly was in the basement passing the infection around, her mother was caught screwing a guy in the bathroom of a nearby gas station.

Ah, nothing like small-town living.

At one time, Davis could run like hell. She’d won high school track team long-distance awards. She’d always been athletic, and it made sense that she would choose a sport and event like long distance that relied more on the individual than a team. No basketball or volleyball in her history. Group sports wouldn’t have appealed to Arden Davis then or now.

He had copies of poems she’d written during times of duress and loss.

First boyfriend. Second and third boyfriends. When and where she’d lost her virginity. A date rape in college.

Copies of the diaries she’d kept on and off through junior high, high school, and a little bit of college. Last December’s murders that had led to her present decline.

And then volunteering to be bleached.

She was either extremely gutsy or extremely desperate. Probably a little of both.

If Fury could have been selective, there were things in his past he would have liked to erase. But you couldn’t choose what to take out and what to leave in—although he had a theory that Arden Davis’s bleaching had something to do with her own subliminal desire to forget, like amnesia brought on by shock and trauma.

She’d forgotten what and who she’d wanted to forget—with a sprinkling of a few additional holes.

His briefcase held photographs of Arden, along with her family, friends, associates, pets—some of the visuals courtesy of the FBI.

He sifted through the photos.

Birthday shots. A photo taken in the front yard of her rural Ohio home, a two-story white farmhouse, an immaculately clean John Deere tractor in the background. Arden at age one wearing a ruffly dress with matching socks. Such a green, direct gaze for such a young child.

Arden at age thirteen posing with Zeke.

An idyllic life. The kind of life Albert French or Albert French aficionados liked to snuff.

In a more recent shot, snapped through a telephoto lens just a few months ago, Arden’s straight, chin-length red hair was so vivid it looked as if it had been colorized.

He stared at the photos, trying to connect the child to the woman from the bar.

Two different people.

He always said, You are what you remember. If that was true, then who was Arden Davis?

He pulled out another photo.

This one of Arden and a dark-haired man, taken near a mountain stream. They were sitting on a blanket, a picnic basket nearby, wineglasses in their hands. They’d set the automatic timer and put the camera on a tree stump. Shortly after the photo was taken, they’d made love.

Fury knew they’d made love because he was the man in the photo, the man with Arden Davis. The man she’d erased.