Page 36 of The Survivor
Her peripheral vision caught a flash of movement. Turning her head, she found Blake leaning against the doorframe. It only took one glance in his direction to bring a rush of reassurance through her body.
“Yeah, I believe it’ll be okay. The FBI will protect me.”
“They’d better. Tell that agent you’re staying with that if one hair on your head is harmed, I will come after him.”
She smothered back a grin. “I’ll pass the message along.”
She hung up the phone and fixed her gaze on Blake. He looked dead serious, the graveness of his eyes causing a small wave of alarm to wash over her.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
He hesitated for a moment. “Something’s happened.”
“What is it?”
“Someone paid a visit to your house this morning.”
Her heart stopped. “The farmhouse in Wellstock? I thought that location was supposed to be secure!”
“Not the farmhouse, Sam. I’m talking about the house you lived in before your, uh, death.”
“But it was sold two months ago. Someone broke in?” Her anxiety escalated faster than a fighter jet in takeoff. “Were the new owners hurt?”
He shook his head slowly.
The alarm in her chest deepened to full-blown panic, constricting her airways. “Tell me what happened, Blake,” she squeaked out.
He spoke in a flat tone. “The new owners are vacationing in the Caribbean and aren’t due back for a couple more weeks. The neighbor who’d been collecting their mail called the police reporting that the front yard is covered with roses. Hundreds of them.”
Her body shook so hard it was almost impossible to get out the next words. “He was there…at my old house?”
A grim look darkened Blake’s eyes. “It seems the Rose Killer has decided to deliver a message.”
* * *
Blake’s gaze swept over the endless carpet of roses. The lush red petals covered the snowy lawn like an enormous pool of blood, the crimson display contrasting sharply with the clean white snow gracing the neighboring yards.
The bastard had been here. He’d approached Samantha’s old home—the one he’d once broken into, the one where he’d attacked her—and sprinkled these flowers on the lawn in broad daylight. The sheer nerve of the madman slammed into Blake like a sledgehammer to the chest. And yet the reason for this sick demonstration hadn’t become clear yet. Was the son of a bitch taunting them? Did he think Sam still owned the house? Or perhaps this wasn’t the handiwork of the Rose Killer at all. Perhaps someone familiar with the case had decided to indulge in a twisted prank.
Although the latter would be a hell of a lot less terrifying, Blake’s gut was screaming that this wasn’t the work of a prankster.
Rick came up beside him. “You should’ve stayed with Sam.”
“Melanie is with her.” He exhaled slowly. “I had to see this for myself.”
“You think it’s him?”
“Don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s him,” Rick said grimly. “My instincts are telling me he was here.”
“Mine, too.”
“The uniforms just finished questioning every resident on the street,” Rick added. “Nobody saw a goddamn thing.”
Blake wasn’t surprised. Most of the people he’d spoken to in the past hour had admitted to being indoors all morning. A few ten-year-olds had been tossing snowballs at each other near the house earlier, but they insisted the roses hadn’t been in the yard when they were out there. The boys had headed indoors around eleven. And just past noon, the elderly neighbor across the streethad phoned the police, which meant the Rose Killer had been in the vicinity between eleven and twelve.
One hour. That’s all it had taken for him to dump several hundred roses on his former victim’s lawn. Unfortunately, the snowplows had come through the neighborhood sometime within that same hour, eliminating the hope of finding any usable tire tracks. And the front path leading to the house was devoid of footprints; from the shapeless streaks, they’d deduced that the Rose Killer had kicked the snow as he’d walked to avoid leaving a distinctive mark.
