Page 19 of Girl, Sought

But his legs wouldn't move. His brain kept trying to rationalize what he was seeing. A collector's roleplay? Method acting taken to extremes?

‘What the….?’

And then man lunged in a blur of motion too fast to follow. One moment Alfred was standing, the next he was on his back, the breath knocked from his lungs. The case flew from his hands, hit the floor and shattered into a thousand glittering pieces.

Alfred screamed. Or tried to. The sound was cut off by a searing pain across his throat. His hands flew up, scrabbled at the thin wire cutting into his flesh. He kicked and thrashed, but the man's weight pinned him like a beetle on a card.

Black spots swarmed Alfred's vision as his pulse roared. This couldn't be happening. It had to be a dream, a delusion. Any moment now, he'd wake up in his bed, shaking and sweat-drenched but alive.

But the pain was real. The blood dripping down his neck was real. And the dead thing staring down at him through compound eyes was the realest thing of all.

CHAPTER NINE

Ella kicked a pebble out of the way as she and Luca walked back into the precinct.

The Chesapeake PD might as well have been on a different planet compared to the gleaming glass tower of the FBI headquarters. Ella had grown accustomed to a certain baseline of chaos - the din of ringing phones, the constant foot traffic, the sense that everyone was hurtling toward some unseen finish line. But this was like stepping into a time warp where the clocks ran backward.

Luca, of course, looked right at home. He strolled through the precinct with the easy grace of a man who knew he could charm the venom out of a rattlesnake. Ella had to admit, it was a good look on him. The whole ‘local boy made good’ thing played well with the small-town cops. They saw one of their own.

Not that it had worked on Dolores at the library. Ella hid a smirk, remembering the icy glare the librarian had leveled at Luca's most winning smile. Apparently, the Hawkins charm had its limits.

‘What's so funny?’ Luca asked as they wove through the maze of desks.

‘Nothing. Just thinking about your new girlfriend at the library.’

‘Dolores, my future wife? I thought we had a connection.’

‘Sure, if you call frostbite a connection. I think she was immune to your talents.’

‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Luca said. ‘Maybe I'm losing my touch. Or she was just shocked about Eleanor.’

It was strange, this easy rapport they'd slipped back into. Like no time had passed at all since their last case together. Ella knew she should be warier, should keep those professional boundaries firmly in place. But with Luca, it was just so damn easy. Easy to talk and laugh and let herself believe that they could have this again. This partnership or whatever it was.

She shook off the thought as they approached the broom closet the local PD had generously labeled a ‘conference room.’ They had work to do. A killer to catch. Anything else was just a distraction.

‘What did you make of her, anyway?’ Ella asked.

‘Reliable witness. No reason to lie. Plus she actually noticed details - the hands, the shoes. Most people just give you 'average height, average build' and call it a day.’

‘True. What about our mystery man?’

‘I don’t know. Could be nobody, but we know Eleanor had no family around here, so that rules out brothers or cousins or whatever. Could be a friend, but do women in their forties have platonic male friends?’

‘Some do, but Eleanor doesn’t strike me assomewoman. I think she kept to herself, and there’s more chance of this mystery man being a potential lover than a friend. And potential lovers are more likely to kill than friends.’

‘Right, so our next step is to find this guy. Dolores said he was average height, brown hair, crap shoes and drove a blue sedan.’ Luca glanced at the officers on the other side of the glass. ‘That’s like one in ten guys.’

‘Yup. Our killer can hide in plain sight. He won’t be some twitchy freak withmurderercarved into his forehead. He'll be, God forbid, good-looking.'

‘Gross.’

‘Yup. But anyway, until we get the CCTV footage, I’ve got…’

Before Ella could finish, Detective Reeves practically fell through the door. His face had the pasty sheen of a man who'd just seen his own ghost.

‘Dark! Hawkins!’ he gasped. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Interviewing Eleanor’s colleagues. We need to get someone down there to check out…’

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