Page 14 of So Wicked

“And she was pretty. Don’t hate me, Staff Sergeant, but it hurts more when it’s a pretty woman who dies.”

“And you’re still not married,” Faith quipped.

Her words came on instinct, the typical and nearly constant banter between Marines who served in the same unit. The active portion of her mind was instantly analyzing the information from the news report and trying to determine what sort of killer would murder a vet and then bury her in a pet cemetery.

“Fuck it. I’m putting the basketball game on.”

Jacob switched the channel. Faith got up to watch the news story on the tv in her room. She stopped herself, however, and instead headed to the kitchen for more beers.

First Sergeant was right. She wasn’t ready to face the consequences of defying her superiors. She had to trust that they were right, and she needed to spend this time resting. Watching a news story about a possible exhibitionist serial killer like theones she’d made a name for herself hunting would inspire her to take risks she didn’t want to take.

Not yet, anyway.

So, she watched the Indiana Pacers drub the Los Angeles Lakers and allowed Dr. Rachel Summers and her violent and untimely death to retreat to the back of her mind.

CHAPTER SIX

Dr. Lisa Patel wiped sweat from her eyes and sighed in exasperation. There was nothing to remind you that you weren't young anymore, like an eighteen-hour shift.

Her shift was only supposed to be ten hours, but the surgery had gone badly, and she’d spent six more hours fighting—and this time succeeding—in keeping her patient alive. Then she’d gone to her office, locked the door, and spent two hours weeping bitterly.

It wasn’t her fault. It couldn’t be her fault. She did everything right. She prescribed the correct medicines at the correct doses based on the patient’s medical history, age, weight, and sex. She’d made the incision beautifully and removed the tumor just as beautifully. So beautifully that she was confident that the cancer wouldn’t return.

Then the patient had coughed. He wasn’t supposed to do that. He was supposed to lie still on the bed until the anesthesia wore off, but instead, he had coughed, and when he had coughed, Lisa’s scalpel had nicked the posterior vena cava.

What followed were the second-most harrowing six hours of her life. She’d closed the wound, bound it, transfused three units of blood into an animal that could only hold four. Then she’d restarted his heart, six times.

And finally, the heart stayed strong. The patient stabilized, and Dr. Patel closed him up, calmly issued aftercare instructions, and then went to her office to prepare a report that she'd have to share with the owner.

At least Feisty had made it. Shooter hadn’t been so lucky.

She opened her car door, collapsed into her car seat and burst into tears again. Shooter was a service dog, a beautiful Golden Retriever who belonged to a patient of hers who sufferedfrom PTSD after his long years of service in the military. That dog was his entire life, and he’d died on the table during a routine operation to remove a cyst from his gallbladder.

That time, it had been Lisa’s mistake. She hadn’t been careful with her scalpel, and she’d sliced his liver open too deeply to close.

She wept, thinking only of the dog and not the fact that her car door—which she locked religiously whenever she parked it—was unlocked when she opened it. She begged Shooter for forgiveness and didn’t see the figure sitting up in the back seat. She wiped tears from her eyes, and when she lowered her hand again, she didn’t register the sting the syringe made as it injected fifteen cc’s of pentobarbital into her neck.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Faith didn’t end up donning a rucksack and quickmarching around the neighborhood, but she did take Turk for a walk first thing in the morning. The night had brought the usual slew of nightmares. Lately, those nightmares featured the leering images of Jethro Trammell—the Donkey Killer who had nearly killed Faith—and Dr. West—the Copycat Killer who had made her life a living hell for years—but they were no longer the central characters. Instead, they sat and watched while Faith battled silhouettes and ghosts, sometimes of killers she’d brought to justice and sometimes of innocents she’d lost.

And she lost those battles every time. The ghosts always overpowered her. Last night's ghost was that of the Boss. His head was misshapen, with the crown shattered and one eye hanging out of its twisted socket. He leered at her through bloodied teeth and demanded to know why she'd let the Messenger kill him like that.

Dr. Perth would say that her dreams were her mind’s way of grieving since Faith refused to allow for the natural process of grief. Dr. Perth would be wrong. She wasn’t often wrong, but she was way out in left field on that one. Faith had wept almost constantly for twenty-four hours after the Boss’s death, and when she was awake, she thought of him as he was in life: fierce, strong and proud.

No, these nightmares weren’t her way of grieving. They were a warning. Avenge me or carry this guilt for the rest of your life.

Turk barked a pleasant greeting at a nearby squirrel. The squirrel replied by freaking completely out and shooting to the top of an elm tree that rose eighty feet above the neighborhood. Turk cocked his head and tried to understand the meaning of the squirrel’s indignant shouts but couldn’t quite place it.

“Let’s go to the lake, Turk,” Faith said. “Maybe you’ll have more luck with the ducks.”

She turned right down a gently curving and sloping street that would lead from this subdivision to the next one over. The “lake” was only a few hundred square feet bigger than the “pond”—a similar body of water in the center of the loop that formed Jacob’s neighborhood—but it was stocked with fish and more popular with birds as a result.

The air was cool and crisp here, and as Faith’s boots crunched in the thin layer of snow that carpeted the sidewalk, her thoughts drifted to the veterinarian who had died two nights before. She wondered what her last moments were like. Had she seen the killer coming? Had death been slow and painful or swift and merciful?

Merciful? She scoffed. Death wasn’t merciful. Not even when it was swift. Death was the end. Death was nothing. Faith didn’t have a problem with religion, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe in an afterlife. She’d seen death countless times and nothing about the mangled bodies of the innocents she avenged or the tortured expressions of the killers who’d opted for justice on their own terms suggested that they were on their way to an eternity of joy and happiness or even an eternity of pain and suffering.

They were just gone.

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