Page 58 of Last Seen
“I have no idea. We did get that partial, and it’s still running in the system. Maybe it’s female, not male. Let’s see what else we can find.” Early hits play again, and five minutes later, Halley sees herself on the video, with Aaron and Kater by her side. They find her keys, chat for a bit. Then she’s off. When her taillights leave the lot, the video time stamp says 9:03 p.m.
The chief is talking, and Halley is trying to focus, but her mind is going a thousand miles an hour. Someone is paying attention in the most horrible way. She doesn’t like how that feels.
“What now?” she asks.
“Not enough to work with on the male, but the female—I’m going to call a friend in the BCI, see if their techs can help enhance this video so we can get a better look at them both. We need to know who we’re dealing with. And hit your Jeep, of course.”
“That seems eminently reasonable. Can I go now?”
Early shuts down the computer. He’s looking everywhere but at her: the paneled walls, the map of the city, the American flag in the corner,the photos of him shaking hands with President Bush and President Obama when they came through town for fundraising events. Finally, his eyes land somewhere above her forehead, but at least they’re trained in her direction.
“There’s another reason I wanted you here. We found a note with Kater’s body. On her body. Shoot, Halley, there isn’t a good way to say it. It mentions you by name.”
A cascade of fear flows through her, so intense that the hair on her arms stands up. Her heart thunders, and she shuts her eyes for a moment, practicing her square breathing, which is designed to tamp down the adrenaline rush that comes with the fight-or-flight response everyone has when faced with danger. She’s been trained for this. You can’t walk into a bloody crime scene and not have your prehensile tail curl. To know someone’s evil is directed at you?
“May I see it?” she asks finally.
Early shoots a glance at Meredith, then back at Halley. He opens his top drawer and pulls out a photo. Lays it on the desk gingerly.
Halley tries to process what she’s seeing, but it takes a moment. There is blood. So much blood.
The white carpet painted red. Mama will be so mad.
Gotta get it out gotta get it clean.
“Run.”
“Run, Halley Bear.”
Her mom called her Halley Bear. She hasn’t thought of that nickname in years.Focus!
She trains her eyes on the photo, prepared this time for its horrors.
The knife juts from what must be Kater’s sternum. She recognizes the fabric of the shirt she’d worn to Joe’s, a blue-and-white swirl that merged into a peony on the back. The paper is pinned between the knife and her friend’s body. Ripped out of a spiral notebook—same size and color paper as the one she’s been using. But no, that’s a bridge too far. Surely. The notebook’s been with her since she picked it up off the desk.
It’s the words scrawled in thick black marker that make her want to crawl in a hole and never come out. They’re all capped and followed with a lopsided smiley face.
You’re Next Halley Bear
Chapter Twenty-Three
Time has no real meaning anymore. Halley goes straight home from the station in a state of suspended animation, a drumbeat of thoughts propelling her.Kater is dead. You’re next. Kater is dead. You’re next.
It took a lot of convincing for Early to let her leave at all. He wants to put her in protective custody, but that feels like making herself a sitting duck. She wants to move, to be free to fight this battle head on instead of hiding behind the police.
What she really wants is to get the hell out of Marchburg. And in the morning, once she makes sure her father is going to be safe, that is exactly what she’s going to do. She refuses to sit back and wait for a stranger to visit her and shove a knife into her chest.
But she isn’t going to be empty handed.
Deep in the recesses of her father’s closet, there is a weapon, and after giving Ailuros a quick snuggle, she heads there. A personal-protection Smith & Wesson .38 Special snub-nose revolver is up in a box on the back shelf (something she discovered around the same time as thePlayboys), and she lifts it from its hiding place with appropriate care. It smells of gun oil; her dad has kept it cleaned and in good shape. There is no sense in having a weapon if you don’t treat it properly; he always told her that growing up.
Halley knows how to shoot. Using the ubiquitous southern hunting rifles of friends in town, they used to go deep into the woods and take target practice. Her dad would set up cans in a row along a fence post or rock outcropping, and she would take aim, pulling the trigger, hittingcan after can with metallic pings and whoops of excitement. She loved those outings. He’d offered to teach her to hunt properly—he grew up in the rolling hills of rural Tennessee and was more than familiar with the pastime—but she refused. She couldn’t see her way clear to take a life for sport. If it was their only source of sustenance, that was one thing, but they had a Piggly Wiggly right down the street, and there was no reason to go through the hassle of killing and dressing their own meat.
But the shooting itself ... that was something she enjoyed. It took concentration and practice, two things she excelled at. And being married to an ATF agent meant there were guns around all the time. She and Theo often spent Saturday afternoons at the range.
When she was younger, her dad claimed he didn’t have a gun in the house. But she’d found this one years ago and kept that from him. She felt better knowing he had one, truth be told, especially when she moved to DC. She has her own contingent of self-defense weapons in her bag—pepper spray, a shrill whistle, and a pocketknife—plus plenty of self-defense classes over the years, but that doesn’t feel like nearly enough now. This hunk of metal? It brings her confidence.
She doesn’t have a concealed carry permit, but the laws in Virginia allow open carry, so she isn’t terribly concerned. Granted, she will be transporting a weapon across state lines, and that might get her in trouble, but she isn’t about to make a move without that gun stashed in the main compartment of her purse for easy access.
