Page 57 of Catching Fire

“You didn't find anything else on the farmland?”

“No.” She could almost hear Watson shrugging. “It appears he was accessing the building from a back road and dragging the victims through the woods. So anyone watching the front wouldn’t have seen him coming or going. He's either stopped killing because he has nowhere to do it, or else he's setting up a new location.”

“Or he's on a break,” Seline filled in, thinking that was maybe the dumbest thing she could have ever said, except that it was true. Sanders often went on a “break.” It was his standard pattern, enough for Seline to feel confident that it would be a while before they heard from him again. “Do you have any idea where he is?”

“We don't have anything,” Watson admitted softly. “We didn't know where he was before this. We saw him when Geller took Maggie Willis and after that we thought Sanders was gone. We were confident he'd left the area at that time … But now we have four more bodies to tell us how wrong we were.”

Yes, Seline thought,they'd been so very, very wrong. What she said out loud was, “Well, thank you for your time.”

She said it as though the agent had called to see if she wanted home insurance, not as though this woman had been in her house, peering through her drawers and checking her bank account and learning the kinds of things that even her closest friends didn’t have access to.

They said polite goodbyes and Seline hung up the phone.

She was running out of options.

It was past time to make her move.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Hello?” Kalan had used his key, maybe a little too quietly? So he called out as he pushed open the door tentatively, looking around as he stepped inside.

The problem with these old houses was the foyers—he didn’t step directly into the living room, and his sight was still limited by the narrow entryway. So he couldn’t see if she was home or not.

“Seline?” Kalan called when she didn’t answer his first question.

“I’m in here.” Her voice rang back clear. She didn’t sound at all worried that she hadn't heard him knock three times.

Not a good sign. She needed to be paying attention.

Then again, the second option was that shehadheard him knock, or she'd seen him on her camera, and had simply decided to ignore him. When he pushed open the door, she’d no longer been able to keep to that plan.

Taking a deep breath for fortitude, Kalan headed around the corner toward her voice. He had no idea what was going on between them.

She was right that the FBI had pushed them together, but it hadn't been anything he hadn't wanted in the first place. He would have to come to terms with the idea that maybe she hadn't wanted it.

He intended to come in with a smile and ask her how she was doing. If things went well, he’d ask her out on areal date, and let her know the FBI wasn’t involved at all. But none of that came out of his mouth. “Are you cleaning your guns again?”

Hadn't she just done that?

Seline looked up from her work, her expression making it clear that he was interrupting and that his question was dumb. She faced him where he stood in the living room, seated with her back to the wall. Was that coincidental or was she positioning herself for safety?

Kalan didn't know, and he had bigger fish to fry. He opened his mouth to say … anything, but she beat him to it.

“You clean your guns as often as you think you might need to use them.” Her hands still moved mechanically, though almost lovingly, through the task.

Crap.He’d had an idea a while ago, one that he hated. Kalan had figured he'd keep it in his back pocket as a last-ditch effort. Now, instead of asking her out, he found himself playing his very last card. “This can't go on, Seline.”

Though she smiled, the barking laugh that came out of her mouth was as cynical as it possibly could be. “Thank you for clearing that up for me.” She looked back down to the pieces she had laid out on the stained towel.

“I think you need to go back to France.” The hated words spewed forth, the idea as distasteful to him as anything. While he wanted her here, he needed her alive. She needed a job—since she wasn’t anywhere near letting him pay her bills, or at least trying to help. This was his last resort.

Again she barked the same cynical laugh. “Where in France would I go?”

“Home,” he stated the obvious. He knew her mother had passed when she was young, twelve. His understanding of her loss was that was about the worst possible time in development for a child to lose a parent unexpectedly. So he didn’t ask about her mother. “Where's your father?”

Surely, her father would want her home safe with him. And Seline loved her father. Surely, she would want to go home and be with the man, protected under the wing of his army experience she always spoke of. Kalan wondered if the man knew what his daughter was going through. How had her father not turned up on her doorstep yet?

As he wondered all of these things, he saw her cold stare, and his heart turned to stone. He didn't know what was coming, but it couldn't be good.

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