Page 3 of Long Way Down

“Funny you should say that.” He pulled out his phone as they walked, and after a few taps with his thumb, passed it over.

“Tribute,” she read aloud. He’d offered her the IMDb entry for a film that had released in 1996, one with an eerie black poster that featured the shadowy silhouettes of two different faces. “I’ve heard people talk about this.”

“Yeah, it never got the fanfare and award nods that other movies in the genre did, but it’sspooky. The premise is that someone starts stalking and assaulting women in the same way a convicted rapist did ten years prior. The current rapist is meticulous – never leaves so much as a single skin cell behind – but he does leave notes, without fingerprints, of course, declaring his deeds as tributes for the rapist who’s locked up. The detectives hunting him end up having to interview him in order to catch the current guy.”

She felt her brows go up. “Knock-off Thomas Harris?”

“Essentially, yeah. It wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as his stuff. Obviously, the rapists aren’t evil geniuses. But…I dunno. There’s something about it that gets under your skin. My wife didn’t sleep for a week after we watched it. She said the fact that the vics were still alive got to her. Now, to my mind, that made it easier to take: those women were still alive and they could still get justice and, hopefully, move on afterward. But the way Maria saw it, those women all had to live with the memory of it every day, afterward. Lots of trauma there.”

“Yeah.” It was difficult to swallow, throat suddenly dry. Melissa did a quick scan of the webpage…and her pulse leaped. “Wait. This was produced by Jack Waverly?”

“Yeah. Go figure, huh? The guy who turns out to be a rapist scumbag made a movie about rapist scumbags.”

A couple stood arguing in the middle of the sidewalk ahead of them. The woman had mascara tracking down her face, and was stabbing the air in front of the man’s face with a trembling finger. “…I can’tbelieveyou would–”

“Babe, I’m sor–”

Melissa dodged around them and fell back into step beside her partner. Her pulse was still quick, an unsettling thump-thump-thump in her wrists and temples. Waverly was dead. She’d watched the video just like everyone else in America. Had seen all the headlines confirming his “murder” – and she used that term loosely, because people like him needed eliminating – but she felt the urge to glance back over her shoulder and check for him anyway.

Why was it always the most powerful and influential?

Why was it always someone trusted and revered who proved the most depraved?

She didn’t look back; took a deep breath, instead, willing her sudden flurry of nerves to settle…and swore she could smell swamp water.

“Who wrote this movie?” she asked, in an effort to distract herself. “Waverly himself?”

“Nah. But no one really knows. That was kind of a scandal: apparently, the writer used a pen name. Some poor dude in Utah named George King had to get a restraining order against the press. He said he’d never written anything in his life.”

“Wow.”

He held out his hand and she placed his phone in it. “Thanks. In the movie, the original guy’s name was Jack.”

“There’s a Freudian slip.”

“Right? And the second guy, the copycat, would leave a note somewhere on the vic that saidThis one’s for you, Jackie.”

“This one’s for you, Davey,” she echoed the note they’d just read. “Shit – I mean…” She trailed off when he grinned.

“You don’t gotta keep it PG on my account, Dixon. I raised two boys: I’ve heard every word in the book. In EnglishandSpanish.”

“It’s a bad habit,” she mumbled, face warm. “I keep meaning to quit.”

He snorted. “It’s not cigarettes.”

A smile threatened. She said, “So the guy we’re looking for right now is a fan of thisTributemovie, I take it.”

“Safe bet.”

“Which would mean…” She frowned. “Who is he copying, then? It’s not just the movie, because he dedicated” – she shuddered at the word – “his…what he did…to someone named Davey.”

They’d reached the car, an unmarked, blue Charger parked under a streetlamp, and Contreras rested his forearms along the top of the driver-side window so he could meet her gaze across the roof. His face had grown serious, the streetlamp throwing stern shadows down his cheeks. “It was at least a decade ago, maybe even before you came to New York.”

Damn it, but there was no disguising her accent. You could take the girl out of Mississippi…

“My old partner worked it,” he went on. “Guy’s doing thirty in Sing Sing. Name’s David Osborn.”

The name pinged an alarm in the back of her mind.

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