Page 53 of Just Now

Standing close to the car, she texted him her location.

“Building site. Place looks empty,”she wrote.“Waiting for you.”

She didn’t expect a reply, because Connor would be speeding to help her. In the meantime, it would be better to lie low.

Except, then the questions began flooding her mind, clamoring for answers.

Why would the killer have left his victims at a building site? As she huddled next to the car door, staring nervously around her, Cami started puzzling over that fact. It didn’t make sense. This building site might be deserted now, but it wouldn’t be during the day. People would be here, working on it. It would be a hive of activity. The raw concrete smell was strong. It didn’t seem like an abandoned site.

And in that case, Cami wondered with a chill, what if it was a trap? Had the killer lured her here?

Or maybe not a trap. Maybe it was a cutoff strategy.

He might not have expected Cami to arrive, but he might have expected the police to be on his trail.

Now her brain was racing ahead. If the killer had heard Vera speaking on the phone, he could have realized she was being warned. Perhaps he’d picked up enough of the conversation to get the gist of that. And that might have been why he and the phone had come here. The aim was to mislead the police and to provide a false trail for them to follow.

If he was doing this, then he might be planning to dump the phone somewhere in this building site and then leave. That way, the police would be searching this site for hours and days, looking for Vera in the ditches and foundations and underneath all that freshly poured concrete, and he’d be free and clear.

She’d gotten here more quickly than the police. Cami didn’t think that he would have expected to be so closely followed. Maybe that gave her the edge she needed.

Dump the phone and run, taking his victim to her planned location. Had that been his objective? If he was here and he was doing this, she needed to see where he went next. It might be the only chance she got. If he was still here, and she glimpsed him leaving, she could follow.

Summoning all her courage, knowing that if she was fast, it might make all the difference, Cami tiptoed away from the car and started walking quietly around the building site. Fear bubbled inside her and she did her best to suppress it, trying to cling to logical thought instead.

She didn’t have a flashlight, only the light on her phone, but she didn’t want to use it because it might draw attention to her and she didn’t want that.

The tracking app on her phone was still working. It was telling her the phone was here, somewhere in this site, and that she was getting closer to it with every step.

Now, she was heading inside the building, through a rudimentary entrance that was no more than a concrete archway, and down a passage. Ahead, a bridge of two long steel planks led over a massive gap that seemed to plummet for stories below. For that, she had to use her phone’s light. There were no railings, nothing but the planks and the abyss yawning, and as she crossed, one of the planks shifted and her foot slipped.

Her entire stomach lurched and she felt as if it plummeted down the abyss. Her arms windmilled, adrenaline flooded her so sharply that it was sickening. And then she regained her balance and finished crossing, with her heart pounding, shaking all over when her feet touched solid ground again.

“I’m going to guess he came in another way,” she whispered to herself, in an effort to pull herself together, but still feeling utterly shocked by that near miss.

Now she was in the depths of the building, with a concrete ceiling shutting out the sky and pillars at intervals. It was light enough to see where she was going—just.

And it was light enough to see something else beyond, in exactly the direction that the phone locator was taking her.

A crumpled form, lying on the ground. She caught the bright flare of a blue jacket, an arm flung over the head.

She’d been wrong. Totally wrong.

This wasn’t a cutoff. He’d left her here!

Was she alive?

Cami rushed forward, anxiety flooding her as she wondered whether she’d be reaching an unconscious but alive victim, or kneeling down to discover a cold, lifeless corpse.

The answer was neither.

As she bent, the figure on the ground turned around, shifted its arm, and cold, implacable eyes stared into hers.

Men’s eyes. This was no woman! It was a blue business suit that he was wearing, and a lime-green tie. And his face had scars on it, fresh scrapes and scabs on the cheeks. He raised his head and the next moment, impossibly swift, iron hands closed around Cami’s throat.

It hadn’t been a cutoff. That was her last thought, as her world was swallowed by a pounding darkness.

It had been a trap.

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