Page 17 of Deathtoll
“Got offered the guest room at a friend’s place.” Asael walked around her.
“Oh, okay. Maybe I’ll see you at the festival!” She kept up that cheerful-to-the-point-of-grating tone that someday someone should choke out of her. Again, not Asael’s job on this trip.
He drove the Altima to the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour grocery store on Route 1, switched to his other rental, an unmarked van, then drove that back to Murph Dolan’s girlfriend’s street.
He passed the two police cruisers in front of Betty Gardner’s house, the female officer snapping photos where Betty had smacked her head against the cement block, her skull breaking with a wet crack.
She’d been kind and sweet, a small-town fool to the end, utterly unsuspecting of the man who’d knocked on her door and said he was with the county, administering a program that helped senior citizens with home upkeep. Did she have any need? Why yes, she’d offered nothing but the most grateful smile, then walked out with him and around to show him where the siding needed repair.
He’d hoped she would invite him in and show him a leaky shower or an uneven bit of floor that was a tripping hazard. He would have preferred working in private. In the end, the narrow gap between two houses hadn’t been much worse. The tragic accident required only a few seconds.
Afterwards, he’d ducked into her home long enough to pull the key from the back door and drove straight to the hardware store. He’d made himself a copy, then returned the original before the body was even discovered.
Damn, he was efficient.
Katherine Concord—her friends called her Kate—bugged him. The more he watched her, the more he thought she looked familiar, reminded him of someone, a face he knew but couldn’t place.
He could have let Betty live and killed Kate, but he didn’t like unsolved riddles. First, he was going to figure out who Kate was,thenhe was going to kill her and her ex-cop boyfriend.
Asael wasn’t in Broslin for revenge, but hewashere. He’d been thinking about an extended vacation for years, but now that he was on one, the idleness of it left him restless. His brain preferred to be busy, laser focused on planning and execution. He missed the adrenaline wave—the rise, the crest, the afterglow.
Betty had given him a moment, the sound of her skull cracking, then the first flash of red. But Betty hadn’t been enough to take off the edge for more than an hour or so. Asael craved a real hit.
As he reached the end of the street, Anthony Mauro, Kate’s other neighbor, shuffled around the corner. His face was ashen, drawn with grief. He looked a decade older than that morning, the last time Asael had seen him. Yet not stricken enough to stay the hell home instead of walking the neighborhood again with his cane and that painfully slow gait, the self-appointed neighborhood watch, that one. Asael despised people who couldn’t mind their own business.
The geezer had no idea how close he’d come to vacationing at the morgue right now instead of Betty.
Chances had been fifty-fifty on which neighbor Asael would eliminate. He wanted an outpost as close as possible to Kate’s place. The final decision had come down to Kate’s bedroom window facing Betty’s house.
One of those stupid quirks of fate, Asael thought as Tony Mauro looked right at him.
“Don’t be a fool, old man.”Or do.
But Tony Mauro turned, his attention on the three kids who burst from the garage across the street with a football.
Asael moved on, right at the intersection, toward the center of town. In his khaki pants and shirt, he was invisible behind the wheel of his nondescript white van. Now that everyone ordered everything from the internet, deliverymen like him—freelancers in unmarked vehicles—were so common, nobody noticed them.
Nobody would pay attention to him at the diner either. His makeup took off twenty years, putting him at late twenties. An average guy with slightly greasy brown hair and dull brown eyes. Someone who’d just moved back to his parents’ basement and made ends meet by running deliveries. Not so repulsive that they’d recall him for being the creepy dude who came in for lunch, yet not nearly attractive enough to draw the attention of the younger waitresses. There was a sweet spot he’d perfected where the eye just slid right on over him.
The cops would dick around for another hour, he figured. He had time to eat before returning to take possession of his new lodgings.
Chapter Six
Kate
“Good to see you back, Scott.” Kate glanced at the open file on her laptop screen as her first patient walked through the door Tuesday morning.
Scott Young. Age: 35. Former Marine. Violent physical trauma. PTSD. Second visit.
Kate forced herself to be cheerful and positive and not to think about poor Betty, not to drag like she’d spent the night without sleep, which she had. To best serve her patients, she checked her own problems at the front door. She needed to be fully available to the people she treated.
Scott nodded at her, a head taller than Kate and heavy built, with a military haircut still. He’d never cracked a smile that she’d seen. Everywhere he went on the property, he always entered tense, scoping out the room as if he was stepping into enemy territory.
“You can go in and hop on the table,” she told him.
She already had her blue scrubs on, so she did a few minutes’ worth of paperwork while she waited for him to call out that he was ready for her.
When her phone rang, the display showing Shannon O’Brian, Kate picked up. She could always spare a minute for a friend. “Hi, Shannon. Everything all right?”
