Page 122 of I'm Watching You

‘Two teenagers came upon the killer as he was dumping the body. He shot them both.’

Zack felt sick. Damn it. ‘How are they?’

‘One is dead and the other is in a critical condition at Mercy Hospital. He’s the one who called in the shooting from his cell phone.’

‘Can he give us a description?’

Warwick shook his head. ‘He’s in surgery right now. It’ll be a couple of hours.’

Tension tightened the muscles in Zack’s back. ‘I’ll drive us to the park.’

‘Fine.’

Zack tried to call Lindsay several times on her cell but she didn’t pick up. He called his parents’ house and got Eleanor, who told him Lindsay had just left in a cab. ‘Damn it. Can’t the woman listen just once?’ he muttered.

He covered the ten-plus miles to Deep Run Park in rush-hour traffic in less than twenty minutes. He wove inand out of traffic, one hand on the steering wheel and a cell under his ear as he called Ayden.

He pulled into the park entrance and rolled down the hill to the back parking lot near the soccer fields, where ten police cruisers were parked.

Zack got out of the car. He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it on the front seat. Rolling up his sleeves, he moved toward Sara, who was squatting by Greenland’s body as she photographed it. She stood and moved to the edge of the yellow crime scene tape.

Sara looked pale and grim. Any death involving a kid shook everyone to the core. She pulled rubber gloves and booties from the pocket of her white jumpsuit and handed them to Zack and Warwick. They put them on and ducked under the yellow tape.

Zack yanked off his sunglasses and squatted by Greenland’s body. Greenland’s dark skin had turned a pasty gray and his lips blue. His eyes were half open. The tarp had been partially removed and he could see that Greenland’s right hand had been chopped off.

‘He didn’t finish his job,’ Zack said.

‘The boys interrupted him.’ Warwick muttered an oath as he glanced at the covered body of the teenager. ‘Sara, did he leave anything else behind?’

Sara pointed to an orange flag sticking from the ground. ‘A forty-five shell casing. And I found traces of blood on the tip of a stick the dead boy was holding. I’ve already bagged it and sent it to the lab.’

Zack rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. ‘Let’s hope he’s in ourDNAdatabase.’

‘Any sign of the hand?’ Zack said.

‘None.’

Zack glanced at Warwick. ‘The last two hands were delivered to Lindsay. We need to find her.’

Warwick nodded. ‘Right.’

Dressed in yoga pants and a tank top, Kendall had been up half the night listening to the police scanners. There’d been nothing out of the ordinary. The piece she’d done on the killer had been priceless. The fact that he was mutilating his victims and sending the hands to Lindsay was more than she could have hoped for.

She’d received five times the usual number of e-mails from viewers. But there’d been no response from the killer or the network producers to whom she’d overnighted tapes.

Exhausted and hungry, she’d reached her limit of listening to the routine police calls: loud music, drunk teenagers, an overdose in a convenience store parking lot, and a speeder on the interstate.

She rose from the varnished kitchen table and opened the refrigerator. Eggs, a half carton of milk, and a salad left over from the salad bar at the grocery store. When she’d been a kid, her mother had kept this refrigerator stocked.

Crap.She needed to get out of this house and start fresh away from Richmond.

She set a pan on the stove, clicked the burner dial to medium high, and cracked a couple of eggs in the pan.Eat first and then catch an hour or two of sleep.She and Mike needed to be at the station by noon.

‘Dispatch, this is 8021.’

Kendall was only half listening now. ‘Dispatch, over.’

‘Dispatch, the mutilated body found in Deep Run Park – ’

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