When he’d stopped—when he’d completed his ninth and disappeared from the FBI’s radar—he’d have needed something to fill that void.
There were days when I couldn’t draw the line between profiling and guessing. Hovering on the verge of sleep, I wondered how much of my understanding of Nightshade was intuition and how much was imagination, making mountains of molehills, because molehills were all that I had.
Even now, even after everything, Judd still wouldn’t let us touch the Nightshade file.
Exhaustion wore at me, like the elements biting at a body as it decomposed. I hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours. In that time, I’d received confirmation of my mother’s death and been made aware of the fact that the man who’d killed Judd’s daughter was watching us all.
I fell asleep like a drowning man making a conscious decision to stop coming up for air.
This time, the dream started on the stage. I was wearing the royal blue dress. My mother’s necklace sat like a shackle around my throat. The auditorium was empty, but I could feel them out there—eyes, thousands of eyes, watching me.
My skin crawled with it.
I whirled toward the sound of footsteps. It was faint, but I could hear the footsteps getting louder. Closer. I started backing away, slowly at first, and then faster.
The footsteps came faster, too.
I turned to run. One second, I was onstage, and the next, I was running through the forest, my feet bare and bleeding.
Webber. Daniel Redding’s apprentice. Hunting me like a deer.
A twig snapped behind me, and I whirled. I felt a ghost of a whisper on the back of my neck and a hand trailing lightly over my arm.
I scrambled backward and went down hard. I hit the ground and kept falling—down, down into a hole in the ground. Up above, I saw Webber, standing at the edge of the hole and holding his hunting rifle. A second person stepped up beside him. Agent Locke.
Lacey Locke née Hobbes looked down at me, her red hair pulled high on her head, a pleasant smile on her face.
She was holding a knife. “I’ve got a present for you,” she said.
No. No, no, no—
“You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin.” Those words came from my right. I turned. It was dark in the hole, but I could just barely make out the features of the girl next to me.
She looked like Sloane—but I knew, deep in the pit of my stomach, that she wasn’t.
“There’s a sleeping cobra on your chest,” the girl wearing Sloane’s body said. “What do you do?”
Scarlett. Scarlett Hawkins.
“What do you do?” she asked again.
Dirt hit me in the face. I looked up, but all I saw this time was the glint of a shovel.
“You’ve been buried alive,” Scarlett whispered. “What do you do?”
The dirt was coming faster now. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe.
“What do you do?”
“Wake up,” I whispered. “I wake up.”
I woke up on the banks of the Potomac River. It took me a moment to realize that I was back in Quantico, and another after that to realize that I wasn’t alone.
There was a thick, black binder open on my lap.
“Enjoying a bit of light reading?”
I looked up at the person who’d asked that question, but couldn’t make out his face.
“Something like that,” I said, realizing even as I did that I’d said these words before. The river. The man.
The world around me jumped, like a jarring film cut.
“You live at Judd’s place, right?” the faceless man was saying. “He and I go way back.”
Way back.
My eyes flew open. I sat up—in bed this time. My hands grappled with the sheet. I was tangled in it, shaking.
Awake.
My hands worked their way over my legs, my chest, my arms, as if looking for assurance that I hadn’t left part of myself back on the Potomac, in the dream.
The memory.
The stage, running, being buried alive—that was the work of my twisted subconscious. But the conversation on the riverbank? That was real. That had happened, right after I’d joined the program.
I’d never seen the man again.
I swallowed, thinking of the envelope Nightshade had left for Judd on the plane. I thought of the message he’d signed from “an old friend.” Nightshade had known all of our names. He’d made the ticket arrangements, because he wanted Judd to know: you could have gotten to any of us, at any time.
If I was right about that—about why Nightshade had left the note, about his fixation on Scarlett as his crowning achievement and, through her, on Judd—it was all too easy to believe that Nightshade might have dropped by to say hello when a new person arrived in Judd’s life.
The rules are specific. Nine victims killed on Fibonacci dates. Normal killers kept killing until they got caught—but this group was different. This group didn’t get caught.
Because they stopped.
Judd was in the kitchen. So were two of the agents on our protection detail. “Can you give us a minute?” I asked them. I waited until they’d left to speak again. “I need to ask you something,” I told Judd. “And you’re not going to want to tell me the answer, but I need you to anyway.”
Judd had a crossword in front of him. He laid down his pencil. That was as close to an invitation to continue as I was going to get.
“Given what you know about the Nightshade case, given what you know about Nightshade himself, given whatever was in that envelope on the plane—do you think he came here for our killer and just happened to spot you while he was here, or do you think…” My mouth went dry. I swallowed. “Do you think that he’s been watching us all this time?”