Page 35 of So Dark

They were too late. Instead of rescuing Lisa Blackwood, though, they only stumbled upon the hunter’s freshest kill.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Over three thousand miles away from the agents, Lillian Martin sat at her table and wrote a letter. It was the ninth such letter she'd written since being discharged from Freedom Falls Psychiatric Hospital. The other eight were organized in chronological order in a shoebox Lillian kept under her bed. One day, she'd send the letters. Maybe she'd even hand-deliver them.

Her heartbeat quickened at the thought, and her pen paused while she bit her lip and imagined the rush she’d feel if she met Franklin West face to face.

“When,” she corrected. “When I meet him face to face.”

Reason asserted itself when the flush of emotion passed. She couldn’t send the letters because the letters incriminated her. She couldn’t hand deliver them either, because those thugs at the prison would take them from West, and she’d be incriminated again. She couldn’t even visit him because conversations at the prison were recorded, and if she saw him, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from telling him all about her plans for Faith Bold and how she would avenge West of that scheming bitch. She didn’t really mind the idea of prison as long as she got sent to the same place West was, but she couldn’t get caught until she finished with Faith Bold. She owed that to West. So for now, all she could do was write these letters and dream of the day she could tell him all about it.

She resumed writing.It’s like she doesn’t even care. I mean, I put the woman right in front of her door with her eyeballs ripped out of her head, and the same damned night, she’s on a plane to… I don’t even know where.

She stopped again to relish the memory of the murder. It was sohardnot to be angry, and it felt sogoodto let that anger go for a little while.

She looked at her bandaged hands and grinned. She’d told her manager that she fell off of her bike, and the stupid dick had bought it. What she’d really done was hit that old bag until her knuckles bled.

God, that felt good. To just release all of that pent-up energy andhurtsomeone. That’s all they deserved, anyway. Pain and death.

She kept writing.You should have seen it, Frank. By the time I ripped her eyes out, she was so out of it all she could do was whimper. But she twitched though. It was so…she stopped there and thought again. What she was going to say was that it was so hot to watch the old woman jerk around in pain, barely conscious from the beating but alive enough to know that something even more horrible than the beating had just happened to her.

Lillian almost wanted to leave her like that for a while. She wanted to drink up her victim’s suffering, to relish that pain for as long as she could. But it wasn’t safe. The woman had neighbors, and at any moment, Faith Bold could return with her damned dog. Lillian wanted to hurt Faith, but it wasn’t the right time. She needed Faith to panic first. She needed the walls to close in around her.

So she put the old woman out of her misery, cutting her throat and satisfying herself with watching her last failed attempts at breathing. Then she put the body in front of the door, wrote her message and left.

And she still isn’t paying attention! I don’t get it. Why did she pay attention to you and not to me? I mean… you’re awesome, butI’mawesome too! I’m a scary and dangerous killer, so why is she ignoring me? Why, why, why, why WHY WHY WHWYWWHWYHW…

The tip of the pen snapped, and a blotch of ink smeared underneath her words. Lillian watched it spread, covering upthe gibberish that ended her letter. Her nostrils flared as she breathed, and her bandages flexed around her palms as she curled her hands into fists.

She tossed the pen into the trash and used a paper towel to carefully blot the ink she’d spilled. She read the letter again, then fetched a pair of scissors and carefully cut off the end of her note pastwhy is she ignoring me?

Then she folded the note, placed it in the envelope and carefully sealed it. After neatly writing West’s prison address on the front of the envelope, she placed it at the bottom of her shoebox and returned to the kitchen to make herself dinner.

She’d chosen the wrong victim, that was all. Who talked to their neighbors anymore? Faith wouldn’t care that some woman who lived a few apartments down was dead. Old people died all the time.

No, she needed to pick someone important to Faith. But who?

She loved her job. That was clear. She’d captured West and a bunch of other serial killers with her colleagues at the FBI.

That’s what she would do. She would kill an FBI agent. Ooh, that was good! Then Faith would know that she wasn’t safe either!

Lillian giggled and clapped her hands. That would be so exciting! FBI agents were like cops. They thought they were badass and invincible. It would be fun killing one of them and watching them slowly realize that they died just as easily as any other animal.

She’d spy on the Philadelphia Field Office and pick a target. Then Faith would know. Then she would look at Lillian. She would see that she had finally met her match.

And Lillian would finally have earned her audience with Franklin West.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dawn came as a surprise to Faith. She'd lost track of time after getting the call from Wyatt about Lisa going missing. Apparently, they'd spent the entire night talking to Robert, learning about the blackmail message to Lisa, finding her body, scouring the place for more traps, and getting emergency services out there to recover the body. Now they were back in the Blackwood house, sipping coffee that Wyatt had made and trying to hold back the despair that threatened to overwhelm them.

This happened in every case. Every damned case. They would work their asses off to find the killer before he got anyone else, but he always got someone else, sometimes two, before the case was over. Faith had seen numerous bodies, numerous people she couldn't save, but it never got easier. One of her old mentors warned her that if she wasn't careful, she'd become desensitized to death. Dead bodies would begin to mean as much to her as paperwork did.

Eleven years and counting with the Bureau, and Faith had yet to look at a victim and not take it personally. It was her job to save Lisa Blackwood’s life, and she had failed. Never mind that she had done everything she could. Never mind that by the time they learned Lisa was missing, she was probably already dead.

Turk slept in a corner of the room. Faith felt just as exhausted as he did, but she couldn’t rest. Even if she were in their hotel room in bed, she wouldn’t have been able to rest. Not with their killer out there reveling in the joy of his most recent victory.

Robert, of course, was inconsolable. He was on his front porch talking with Wyatt. Or rather, Wyatt was talking with him and also making sure that Robert didn’t jump into his truck and go off to God knows where to do God knows what. It wasn’tunheard of for distraught spouses to break with reality for a while after losing their loved one. Faith had never seen a suicide or an accidental death resulting from such an event, but she’d heard of many.

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