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Old fool.
It was just another neighborhood cat.Shaking his head, he switched the kitchen light back on.He’d have to look at those garden sensors in the morning.Not much point having state-of-the-art security if the bulbs were gone.
But hadn’t he replaced them all, on Fourth of July weekend?
He padded back into the living room, shutting the kitchen door tight behind him.His first thought: check the camera feeds on the laptop again, just to be sure.
His second thought: why was the laptop shut?
He felt a prickling on the back of his neck.
Some things you did automatically.Closing doors.Switching off lights.Flushing the toilet.No need to think about doing them, no need to wonder whether you did them.You did them.Auto-pilot, muscle memory.
He never closed the laptop.When he went to bed, he took it with him, dulled the screen so it didn’t keep him awake.Not that that mattered at the moment.But he hadn’t shut it.He hadn’t shut it.And yet it was shut.
Trembling slightly, he lifted the lid.Pressed the power-up button.At that moment, everything else went black: the lamps on either side of the sofa, the TV screen.The house was plunged into darkness.Only the laptop screen provided a little light, the half-dozen separate camera feeds giving him a view from the front door to the street, of the side-alley and the garage, the garden seen from the kitchen window, the kitchen and the whole back of the house from the garden.
He jumped.Almost dropped the laptop.There was a face on the screen.Right up close to the camera.Two eyes in the darkness of a balaclava, staring directly at him.No.Staringintohim.
“You motherf-”
Palmer ran to the cabinet in the corner, fumbled in his pocket for the keys.
What was that smell?
He grabbed the gun, stubbed his toe as he groped his way out of the room, but barely felt it.Limped to the kitchen door and yanked it open.
It was as if all the air in the house was instantly sucked away.Instead of his kitchen, Palmer found himself facing a wall of flame and smoke; choking fumes lashed his eyes.He staggered away from the kitchen, made it down the hallway to the front door, his lungs burning, his eyes and nose streaming.He retched as he pulled at the door.
It was locked.Dead-bolted at the bottom.Hadn’t he heard a noise out in the hallway?Thought it was those kids, jumping the last few stairs like they always did.Pathetically, he thumped at the panels of the door.Steel-reinforced.For his own safety.A soft explosion sounded in the kitchen, something heavy sliding into the inferno, followed instantly by a further wave of toxic, throat-searing smoke.He made it to the hallway up the stairs before he passed out.
And in the garden, his killer watched.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
She waited for him in a Denny’s near to his gym.Marcus worked out late, a habit, he said, from his military days.And she was raw tired.She’d flown back from Pennsylvania, gone home, updated her notes.Finally returned his calls.She didn’t approve of that sort of game-playing, generally: long silences, making the other person do the running… She’d rather have an honest-to-goodness argument, say everything that was on her chest and move on.
But something was different this time.She’d been so shocked and hurt by Marcus’s response, by his obvious lack of trust in her.It had made her replay every conversation she could remember having with him, trying to see if he’d always doubted her, if he was permanently watching her for signs that it had happened again.Because it hadn’t.And it never would.
After Denton’s attack, she’d spent several weeks recovering, first in the hospital, subsequently at her mom’s house.But she’d been desperate to get back to work, to the camaraderie of the field office, the excitement of the role, to the sense of doing something worthwhile.And she’d aced every evaluation they threw at her – physical, psychological, the lot.She felt fine, in fact she felt great, and the only thing that got in the way of that was people being concerned about her all the time.The little looks she’d catch, the cautious handling of her, as if she was made of glass and might shatter at any moment.
But they were right.Because she did shatter.Her first case, post-Denton: a missing girl.Kate became fixated on the uncle, an unpleasant character but, ultimately, no child-killer.The uncle ended up lodging a formal complaint about her, and colleagues raised concerns as well.There’d been a review of the handling of the case and Kate had lost it, in full view of a roomful of extremely important people.
In the aftermath, everyone was very understanding and accommodating.And the experts provided her with all manner of handy explanations.In her subconscious mind, the psychoanalyst said, the wicked uncle was Denton, Kate was the missing girl (who actually turned up, in the end, unharmed, acting out some Bonnie and Clyde fantasy with her much older boyfriend, sticking up liquor stores in the Florida bayous).The psychiatrist said she’d had an isolated manic episode triggered by the trauma of Denton’s attack.
But the best explanation came from her mom after Kate had crashed and burned and returned to her childhood bedroom.
Your body has healed, but your mind’s taking longer.
And her mind did heal, slowly, with a lot of hard work, and support from people like Winters, who’d fought for Kate to keep her job, and won.She made a second return to the workplace, rebuilt relationships with most of those colleagues she’d alienated, and in most respects put the episode behind her.She had a list of things to watch out for.Obsessing on a particular topic.Skipping meals and sleep.Becoming convinced she didn’t need them.Irritability with colleagues, a sense that only she was seeing the truth.
Unfortunately, most of those symptoms were part of her average day.
Marcus slid into the booth opposite.He smelled of soap and shampoo.Suddenly, Kate felt oddly guilty about meeting him here, as if they were both cheating on someone else.She guessed he wouldn’t be telling Cheryl about it.And if there’d been anyone waiting at home for Kate, she, too, would have been economical with the truth.Why was that?
“Thanks for your message,” he said.“It was a frickin’ long message.”
She had decided to write it all out in an email: not just how she felt, but everything she wanted him to listen to and take seriously.She had this idea that if she wrote it down, it might seem less crazy.It was a technique her father had handed down to her.It was a way of pressing “pause.”It meant people could take your point or argument or explanation at their own pace, and think about it before they replied.
