Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(8)

But Charlotte Rowe is alluding to another possibility without saying so explicitly.

Tonight, she will be posing as the same type of sex worker they believe Davies has abducted and murdered five times over the past three years. Which means that to make his introduction, Davies will first pay for access to her body. What she allows Davies to do and for how long will be entirely up to her. Which means, in order to accomplish tonight’s mission, she’s being forced to think of herself as a piece of meat. Literally.

“If you don’t wear the earpiece,” Ed says, “then we have no audio connection to you.”

“So?” she asks.

“It means we can’t warn you if we see something you don’t.”

“You weren’t in my ear last time and things went OK.”

“Define OK,” Ed says.

“Ask Frederick Pemberton. He’s on death row.”

“And you’re a free bird, thanks to the cleanup job we did,” Ed says.

“Define free.”

“Ed,” Cole says.

“What?”

“Step out.”

Ed just stares at him, then his eyes widen, and he sits forward with his elbows on his knees, frowning at Cole as if he’s a cat who just dragged a dead animal inside the house. “Excuse me?” he whispers.

“I said step out of the room. Now.”

The emotion drains from Ed’s face, then he gets to his feet and leaves. If it were possible to slam the bank vault–style door behind him, he might have, but it’s far too heavy. Once Ed’s gone, Cole feels a pang of regret. But just a pang.

Ed just drove them dangerously close to an uncomfortable truth at the very moment Cole needs peak focus from everyone.

For Cole’s security director to express any opinions on Charlotte’s past performance was colossally stupid. For starters, five months ago they’d been monitoring her without her consent. Worse, she’d been deceived into taking Zypraxon by Bluebird 1.0’s lead scientist, who decided to start posing as Charlotte’s therapist after Cole shuttered the original project and denied him access to his labs.

When the dust finally settled and the full consequences of Dylan Cody a.k.a. Noah Turlington’s betrayals became clear to everyone involved, Cole gave Charlotte what he considered a reasonable deal, with a pretty good exit plan, if she chose that option.

But he’d hardly call it fair. Reasonable, but not fair.

Fair is for kindergarten.

In the end, she’d agreed to keep working with them. So he wasn’t about to let Ed’s former-cop ego and loose lips screw up the fragile peace he’d established with the woman the world once knew as Burning Girl. The same woman who now happened to be the only human on the planet in whom Zypraxon actually worked.

“Ed’s going to sit this one out, Charley. I apologize for his . . . insensitivity.”

“Your call,” she answers. “And thank you.”

“And the earpiece is your call.”

“Good, ’cause I’m not wearing it.”

Cole pulls his iPad from his satchel and opens the PDF of Richard Davies’s case file.

“How about we do a little quiz to get you ready? I assume you’ve read Davies’s file.”

“Five times.”

“OK. Then spell his last name for me.”

“Really?”

“Just a little verification that you’re doing what I asked. That’s all.”

“D-a-v-i-e-s. Not David. Davies.”

“Excellent. And where was his father’s farm located?”

“Cashmere, Washington. It’s east of the Cascades.”

“Correct. And what happened to Richard’s family when he was nine years old?”

“His father shot his mother three times in front of him and then turned the gun on himself. Richard was doing his homework on the other side of the motel room they were living out of. Police believe that after they lost the family farm his mother’s meth addiction became worse and his father forced her to start prostituting herself on Aurora Avenue North. The night of the murder-suicide, Richard told police his father was angry because his mother came home with less than her usual take.”

He listens carefully for any sounds of sympathy in Charlotte’s voice, but she sounds like she’s reciting sports statistics. And when her voice does waver, it seems due to distraction, like she’s studying her reflection to see how convincing her costume is.

“It’s a sad story,” he says.

“A lot of us have sad stories. We don’t have to turn them into horror shows.”

“Good point.”

Charlotte clears her throat, then starts speaking again. At first, Cole’s got no idea what she’s saying—until she gets to the third name. “Shayla Brown. Deborah Clover. Maryanne Breck. Patrice LaVon. Janelle Cropper. Shouldn’t you be asking me about them? Given that, you know, I’m about to become one of them?”

“You’re not going to end up like they did.”

“Missing, you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Still, it might be a good idea to quiz me about the victims instead of trying to figure out if I’ve developed some sort of identification with a psychotic killer just because we both had shitty childhoods.”