Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(13)

Someday this kind of technology will be implanted in anyone who can afford it, alerting them to see a doctor the minute they show even the slightest sign of heart attack, stroke, or generalized pathology.

For now, no one can afford it. Except Cole, which is why he injected it into Charley a few months before. So far, the data compiled has proved one remarkable fact again and again—Charlotte’s body remains unchanged even after multiple exposures to Zypraxon.

“She’s breathing deeply,” the med tech says.

“Yeah, I figured.”

“No, I mean she’s making an effort to. It’s not her usual pattern. It’s almost . . . meditative.”

“She’s meditating. In a car. With a serial killer.”

“So she can stay focused maybe?” The female tech speaks more confidently now that Ed’s out of the room.

Charley’s trying not to trigger, Cole realizes, and a chill goes through him.

She’s alone in a car with a psychopath, and she’s got something in her veins that allows her to tear through five boa constrictors at once with her bare hands, but she’s making sure not to use it until the time is right. The last time Charlotte did something like this, she got so caught up in her strategy for hooking a killer she forgot the most important thing she needed to do—be afraid. Frederick Pemberton had knocked her unconscious before he could scare Zypraxon into working its magic. Now, Charlotte’s trying to re-create her old mistake for a very simple reason: she doesn’t want to burn up her three hours of Zypraxon time before she gets to Davies’s kill site.

For maybe the hundredth time in the past few months, Cole thinks, You really are something, Burning Girl. Even though he’d never use that dreaded nickname to her face.

The microphone they implanted in Richard Davies’s steering column is giving pretty decent audio. But he asks them to check it anyway. The connection’s good.

Davies and Charley aren’t saying anything.

Good, Cole thinks. Breathe, Charley. Just breathe.

Davies turns the truck into an alleyway.

The truck slows to a stop, but the engine’s still running.

On the TruGlass feed, Cole watches the truck’s headlights wink out.

“How’s this?” he hears Davies ask.

Davies appears on the monitor. A dark shadow, one side of his angular face fringed by a distant streetlight.

“Yeah,” he hears her say.

Davies makes a subtle jerk of the head.

A nod, really.

A gesture.

Directed at his crotch.

The TruGlass feed jerks slightly, then it begins to slide down Davies’s shadowy torso.

It’s so quiet inside the control center suddenly, Cole’s sure he can hear the earth settling outside the room’s subterranean walls. The female tech lowers her gaze from the displays overhead to the monitor in front of her—just stats and metrics for all the surveillance devices involved in tonight’s op. She’s looking away without looking away.

Cole wishes he could do the same.

He wanted to talk about this part with Charlotte. Come up with some sort of game plan. But Charlotte refused. We need an abduction, she’d said. I’ll do whatever gets us there.





9

Shayla Brown’s mother used to collect Beanie Babies.

She died when Shayla was seven, Charlotte remembers, leaving Shayla only some credit card debt and her collection of big-eyed stuffed animals. Right after the newly minted orphan moved in with her aunt Margot, her only living relative, Margot installed some shelves right next to Shayla’s new bed so the girl’s tiny inheritance could watch over her while she slept.

On the one-year anniversary of her last phone call from Shayla, Margot posted a picture of the stuffed animals on her Facebook page alongside a school photo of her niece taken when the girl was fifteen, a year before she shot heroin for the first time and became hopelessly lost to everyone who loved her.

Charlotte runs these details about Davies’s first alleged victim through her brain again and again as she undoes the top buttons of his plaid shirt with her teeth. She’s not just trying to delay the inevitable; she wants to frustrate him so he accelerates the proceedings.

Maybe he makes his girls blow him, but she doubts it. A killer as methodical as he is, she can’t see him wasting a bunch of time in this dark alley. And she can’t see him getting off on something as simple as a blow job.

He grips the back of her head and pushes her gently toward his crotch. But he hasn’t unzipped his jeans. That’s her job, apparently.

She breathes deeply.

There’s no tingle in her skin.

No tremor deep within her.

No bone music—the sure and unmistakable sign that the Zypraxon in her system’s been triggered.

She unbuttons his jeans.

Janelle Cropper was a C student. But she’d memorized the name of every type of bird that passed through her uncle’s neighborhood. She’d bird-watch from the front window of his house outside Portland for hours on end while her mother turned tricks. Until she became old enough to fight off her uncle when he’d come to her bedroom drunk. Around then, her uncle made it clear she couldn’t live there anymore. That was the last time any of Janelle’s friends ever saw her. When they were interviewed by the local paper for a piece after her disappearance, they all agreed they hoped she was watching birds, this time in peace. But to the reporter writing the piece, Janelle was just another local girl lost to drug addiction, not the victim of a serial killer.