Wanted (18 page)

Ray felt a stir of further conviction deep inside him. Because he’d worked out what this new pattern – this unexpected variation in the PSS Killer’s signature – was.

The rips and the nails. The only explanation for their presence – and for there being no blood – was that the PSS Killer had laid down plastic sheets before he’d begun his sick game.

But why? Why had he wanted to keep the place clean? In each and every one of his North American attacks, he’d always left the blood, and so much of it, there for all who came after to see. He’d revelled in so doing and not only that. It was Ray’s firm belief that having other people witness what he’d done was part of his motivation, his
need.

Just as Danny Shanklin, the only man to have survived such an attack, had told the FBI: the PSS Killer needed others to
see
what he was capable of. Which also explained why, each time he’d killed, he’d left the families he’d butchered arranged in the same way: mutilated and blood-drenched in their chairs, so that those who came after would know that he had done it.

Why keep this crime scene clean? Why dispose of the plastic sheeting, which had nowhere been mentioned in the cops’ reports? Why go to so much trouble to deceive the police about where the family had died? What, carry – for if they’d been dragged, the police would surely have noticed the marks – the bodies outside and burn them? And why deliberately disguise how the girl had died? Why rip out her throat and lungs?

The answer to all these questions dropped into Ray’s mind like a pebble into a well, sending ripples through everything he’d been certain of before.

The PSS Killer had done all this because, far from wanting police attention, he’d wanted them not to realize he’d come back.

But what could possibly be so important to him that everything about
who he was
had suddenly realigned?

Ray used the tweezers to grip another piece of torn plastic and held it up before the flashlight beam. And, as it glinted in the light, another question entered his mind. If the PSS Killer had indeed changed his method to disguise the fact that he’d become active again, why had he left behind this evidence of it?

Because of all the serial killers Ray had ever hunted, the PSS Killer had always been the most precise. In fact, until he’d run into Danny Shanklin, and Danny and his daughter had survived, he’d not left the FBI a single lead, forensic or otherwise.

Bagging the plastic and continuing to edge sideways as he scanned the floor, he cast his mind back through the police report and newspaper articles he’d read, racking his brains, not for the gory facts of the ‘Clan Killings’, but the incidental details that had surrounded them.

The night of the murders, a neighbour had called round and rung on the door, but had not received an answer.

Which meant any killer inside the house might have been disturbed. And might have panicked. And might not have given himself sufficient time to clear up as thoroughly as he otherwise would have done.

In other words, Ray concluded, perhaps the PSS Killer
hadn’t
overlooked or forgotten these tiny rips of plastic.

And if he hadn’t forgotten, he might have also realized that they remained loose ends, capable of giving away that he was killing again.

And if he had realized that, then a killer as precise and as thorough as he was would have no choice but to return and remove every trace.

Tap.

Ray’s heartbeat spiked.

More rain?

He looked up at the skylights, but the raindrops had stopped.

He switched off his pen torch. He froze.

Scuff. Scuff.

Not inside. No. But near, dammit. Just outside the back door.

What was it? A footfall? Or nothing? Just some creature? The flap of a wing against a wall? Some kind of a rodent? A rat?

His eyes turned slowly to the door. It still looked shut. But was it? Had he locked it behind him? Had he? Had he even shut it? Shit, he couldn’t even remember that.

Another
scuff.

His heart thudded hard. No doubt about it: someone –
something
– was there.

Ray slowly edged backwards, first one foot, then the other, telling himself to keep calm, concentrating desperately on mapping the room in his head, forcing himself to think back and remember its contours. There was nothing behind him, right? Right? Not for at least another three feet? And then there should be that door leading through to the hallway and living room? Right, goddamn it?
Right?

Slowly he rose into a crouch. He took two more steps back. Then half a pace more, all the while staring fixedly towards the kitchen door he’d come in through.

Scuff. Scuff.

Right there – magnified to a monstrous size by the light of the moon – stamped black as a gateway to hell against the pale, drawn kitchen blind, he saw the unmistakable silhouette of a human torso, and a head.

Danny Shanklin was still gazing at his iPhone screen, where his InWorld™ avatar, Jackal, remained idling at a table in the Rest Cure café in the city of Steem.

None of the nearby players had yet approached him. Neither had Danny been sent any direct messages from other off-screen players who might be on their way to meet him.

Jackal was being ignored by the players in the immediate vicinity but that came as no surprise. The more time players spent in InWorld™, the richer they became, at least in terms of Inwad™, the virtual currency they accrued either by working for richer players who owned cafés like this, or by questing for plunder across the game’s four virtual continents and twenty-eight virtual cities.

The wealthier players were, the more they tended to advertise it by splashing out on customizing and accessorizing their avatars. Which was why even the waiters and waitresses here were ignoring Jackal, on account of the generic way in which he was attired: they had rightly guessed he didn’t have enough money to buy himself a virtual coffee, let alone leave a tip.

Fact was, Danny wouldn’t normally have given a damn that no one wanted to talk to him, but the exhaustion he’d felt earlier as he’d walked to the camp site from the edge of the village was now threatening to suck him into sleep.

And that was something he couldn’t risk. Not only might it cost him his one chance of hooking up with Crane, but possibly his liberty and life too, if he’d already been betrayed.

Just damn well stay awake . . .

He gouged at his eyes with his knuckles and took another swig of Coke. But even that wasn’t touching his exhaustion.

A shot of bourbon would do the trick, he thought. A little something to sharpen you up . . . A smoke, too . . . A Marlboro Red, your old poison of choice. Or even one of Lexie’s . . . Hey, maybe she’s left them lying around.

But even as his eyes set about raking the kitchen surfaces, he shook his head and turned away. Jesus, he had to be bordering on delirium to be thinking about going back on the drink and the smokes.

He knew where this kind of thinking led. Smokes and drink. Smokes and pills. Drink and pills and smokes. Every time Danny had fallen off the wagon, he’d ended up back where he didn’t want to be. And every time he’d thought he wouldn’t. He’d thought it would be temporary. And he’d been wrong.

Biting the inside of his cheek, he tasted blood. It was an old trick he’d learned way back to stop himself dozing off. A nasty little habit, he knew, but one that sometimes helped.

He gazed into the tiring glare of the iPhone at the virtual café’s door and the system status grid at the bottom of the screen, where any incoming DMs would arrive, and where any of his other email accounts could be accessed if he so desired.

He thought back to the many other times he’d come to InWorld™ to meet up with Crane. Whenever Danny had been left waiting, he’d used to toggle between his various email accounts – business and personal – ticking off bits of admin that needed doing as he went along, checking in with people he knew.

But since this whole shit grenade had blown up, with him at its epicentre, he’d resisted checking his email. Not because he’d been worried that his accounts might have been hacked by journalists or government agencies because that was almost impossible: anything reaching his master email address, from which he could access all the others, would already have been automatically filtered through a number of unhackable torrent sites, which would have deconstructed, then reconstituted, all mail sent to him.

No, the reason Danny had steered clear was because he’d dreaded what he’d find: emails from just about everyone he’d ever known, via the various email addresses he’d given them for whatever identities they might have known him as or worked with him under – bombarding him with questions, wanting to know what the hell was going on.

Anna-Maria: when he’d left her on the morning he’d been set up in London, he’d hoped to meet her for dinner later that night.

Frank De Luca: when Danny had left Lexie with Frank’s wife, Alice, later that afternoon, he’d done so because he’d thought the pair would be safe; an error that had cost Alice her life.

And the Kid – would the Kid have been in touch? To taunt? To see if Danny would respond? To see if he could bait him into giving away his whereabouts?

And maybe it was tiredness, or frustration. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps it was just plain old curiosity, or a need to get away from himself, to reach out into a wider world where normal people still lived.

But whatever it was, something made him do it. Something made him tap the icon at the bottom of the screen to trigger the phone’s search app. Something made him shuffle this new window across his screen so he could still monitor what was going on in InWorld™. And something made him log into a previously set-up email account – he’d delete it as soon as he’d checked what had come in – and trigger it to feed off his master email account.

He took a deep breath, regretting his impetuosity: hundreds, maybe even thousands, of emails, which had accumulated in his master account since the worldwide manhunt for him had begun, waterfalled down the mail window.

Changing his mind, unable to summon the energy necessary even to begin processing this amount of information, Danny moved his thumb towards the corner of the window to close it down.

But his thumb froze and his heart juddered. It wasn’t any of the people he’d been wondering about whose name appeared at the top of the list of emails. The last email had been sent to him from a contact he’d almost given up hope of ever hearing fresh news from, news of a kind he dreaded and yearned for in equal measure.

The name was Ray Kincade.

And the email had been sent only minutes ago.

Sweet Jesus, you’ve got no gun . . .

That’s what a voice inside Ray’s head was screaming repeatedly at him, like an alarm, as he stayed in the farmhouse kitchen, locked in a half-crouch –
For how long now? A whole minute? Maybe more?
– his calf muscles practically shrieking from the pressure, feeling as if, at any second, he might overbalance and fall with a thud onto the bare wooden floor.

But he couldn’t move. He
mustn’t
move. Not with that hulking silhouette of a man continuing to stand outside the farmhouse back door. Move and the man might hear him and know that he was there.

At least now he had the hope that his presence had not yet been detected. Because whoever was out there, they couldn’t see in,
right?
The blinds were drawn. There was no way they could know that he was there unless . . . Oh, shit, Ray thought. What if whoever this was
had
been watching him outside, as he’d cased the joint and broken in?

Ray still had the ice pick in his hand. He gripped it tighter – so tight that his tendons felt like they were going to snap.

Still the figure didn’t move. Sweat blistered across his brow. His mobile phone was right in his inside coat pocket. But who the hell was he going to call? He didn’t even have a number for the local cops. In any case, they were probably miles away. Plus, how the hell could he call them when he was breaking the law? When whoever was out there might just be a civilian? Or even a cop on the snoop?

The silhouette still hadn’t moved.

Yeah, Ray told himself. Maybe that’s it. Could be it’s just some farmer, some goddamn nosy neighbour. But then why aren’t they moving? Why are they just standing there? Why would they be doing that unless they were listening as well? And what the hell would they be doing here at this time of night in the rain?

Ray couldn’t handle the pain in his calves any longer. He’d cramp up, he just knew it. Instead he decided to risk another half-step back.

Concentrating again on remembering the room’s layout, desperately trying not to make a sound, he made his move. And –
there!
– he felt it, the back kitchen wall right where he’d guessed.

Which meant there should be that doorway leading to the rest of the house, just behind him, to his left. He could move through it into the dark embrace of the hallway, where he could crouch in the darkness, watch, and make his next play – whether to stay put or perhaps sneak out through the front door. It would buy him some breathing space. It would mean that, even if whoever it was decided to enter the property via the back door, they’d still not see him right away.

Not that they’d yet given any indication that they were planning on coming in. Not that they’d even moved.

A drumming sound. The rain was back, falling harder than before. And yet the man – oh, yes, Ray was convinced it was a
he,
all right – at the window still failed to move. Who wouldn’t take shelter?

Only someone who already had good reason to stay. But why weren’t they coming in? Because they’d already called for back-up? It was a possibility Ray couldn’t ignore. He needed to get out of there. And quick.

But even as he continued edging back towards the hallway, even as he felt a stirring in the stillness around him, a minuscule change in air pressure that sent a sudden shiver chasing down his spine, Ray thought of another reason why the man outside might not be coming in. Because he didn’t need to.