Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(9)

He considers arguing with her but decides against it for two reasons. One, he’d then be guilty of the same thing he just gave Ed the boot for doing. Two, she’s right.

“Touché,” Cole mutters.

“A suggestion from your lead scientist perhaps?”

Cole feels his chest tighten and the pit of his stomach go cold.

“We will never solicit suggestions, tips, or advice of any kind from Noah Turlington when it comes to you and your psychological well-being. And I can assure you, he’s not present in this room right now, nor will he ever be.”

“Noah, huh?” she says. “Not Dylan?”

“A condition of his reemployment is that he’s to use his birth name at all times.”

“You call me by the name I picked.”

“You’ve earned the right,” Cole says. “He’s done quite the opposite.”

It never occurred to Cole that Charlotte might assume Noah would be present in the control room. Maybe that explains her quick temper with Ed. Or maybe it’s the fact she’s about to do something no human being should be able to do, and for the second time in five months.

The baby-faced male tech says, “Her TruGlass feed’s coming online.”

A few seconds later, a previously dark screen lights up with a jerking point of view on the cargo bay of a container truck that’s been soundproofed and carpeted. There are several flashes of darkness—blinks, Cole realizes—then a few glimpses of Charley’s ground team members scuttling to get out of her eye line. Costume racks flash across the screen, then a vanity and makeup table.

She takes a seat, and a second later, thanks to a prototype on loan to their operation from a family friend, Charlotte Rowe is staring into the mirror—and directly at everyone in the control center—by way of a pair of contact lenses that broadcast crystal-clear images of everything their wearer sees via an encrypted satellite connection.

The costuming job is perfect.

It helps that Charlotte lost fifteen pounds for tonight’s performance, introducing sharp angles to her face that suggest the first stages of a serious drug habit. Her eye makeup’s so heavy a john will assume she’s trying to hide dark circles or a full-on black eye left by a vicious pimp. But it’s what they’ve done to her hair that Cole finds most striking. He figured they’d opt for some shiny costume wig. Instead, they’ve thinned out Charlotte’s actual hair unevenly and then sprayed it down so that it looks like she’s been clawing at her scalp for days and is just now trying to hide it with some cheap hairspray.

Cole’s only direction to the ground team was to costume her in keeping with the other missing women. And apparently that’s exactly what they’ve done. Charlotte Rowe, a healthy, fresh-faced twentysomething, has been turned into the kind of haunted, prematurely aging streetwalker you’d see in a grainy black-and-white photo shot by a photojournalist.

“Well?” Charley asks.

“I think we’re good,” he answers.

As soon as it’s out of his mouth, he expects her to make a biting remark about his inappropriate use of the word good. Instead, she gives him a thumbs-up, suggesting she considers the two of them teammates.

For now, at least.

“Cole?”

“Yes, Charley.”

“How’d you find this guy?”

The same question that encouraged him to kick Ed out of the room.

With her, he doesn’t have the same luxury.

“Trust me,” Cole says, “he’s a bad, bad man.”

It takes her a second to grasp the significance of his last four words. They’re the same ones Charlotte said to Frederick Pemberton five months earlier, right before she squeezed his right hand hard enough to crush every bone in it.

The stern look she gives him doesn’t quite indicate trust.

But it doesn’t indicate a desire to quit, either.





6

It’s cold out, but Charlotte’s grateful for it. She’s been practicing the symptoms of drug withdrawal for weeks now. The shivers are the hardest to fake. Now she won’t have to.

Her pantyhose are new, but they’ve got precisely placed runs made by a razor blade, so they do little to protect her legs from the damp chill. The tiny jacket they’ve put her in—dark denim, stained with cigarette smoke and some dabs of spilled beer—barely covers her lower back, much less her butt.

As for the rest of her outfit, maybe it’s a skirt. Maybe it’s shorts. Maybe it’s that thing they call a skort. She doesn’t care, so long as she doesn’t stick out from the other women working Aurora Avenue North.

It’s not her first time in Seattle. Her father made her do a couple of public appearances here as a girl. But it’s her first time in this part of town, a desolate stretch of urban eyesores that prostitutes and law enforcement call a track, a place where motorists can still summon a streetwalker to their car window with a wave.

In this digital-driven era, when sexual connections both legal and not so legal can be made at the press of a button, only the most desperate sex workers still prowl the streets—the ones who move from payment for services rendered to their latest fix with the speed of basketball players crossing a court.

This is the group Richard Davies has been targeting for three years.