Nine Lives(22)
“Huh?”
“Why nine people on the list, and why not ten? Isn’t ten standard practice for these sorts of things? What’s wrong?”
She noticed that Aaron was not so much listening to her as he was waiting to say something to her. She spun her chair the rest of the way around so that he was standing directly in front of her, both hands in his pants pockets.
“There’s been another death.”
“Who? Where?”
“Matthew Beaumont in Dartford, Massachusetts. He was shot while on his morning run.”
“It’s the same Matthew Beaumont—”
“Who got the letter? Yes. He works … worked in Boston. That was where his letter was collected from, yesterday.”
“Jesus,” Jessica said.
“You said it.”
“How was he killed? You said shot? At what time?”
“I don’t know what time he was shot, exactly, but I know that the body was discovered about ten in the morning. A local officer was able to identify him even though he wasn’t carrying any identification, and since we’d flagged the name …”
“So whoever is doing this is a few hours from that location.”
“Which could be almost anywhere,” Aaron said.
“I know. It’s just … that’s two in two days.”
“I think there was a part of me that still wondered whether there was just some massive cosmic coincidence at work. Nine random people wind up on a list, and one of those people is murdered. And then nothing more would happen. No more deaths, and we’d forget all about it.”
“It’s the second plane,” Jessica said.
“What do you mean?”
“On 9/11, I remember watching the news after the first plane hit, and the world just thought it was a terrible accident. Then the second plane hit, and everything changed.”
“Right, I remember that. This is the second plane, and now we need to get protection for everyone on that list. You included.”
Jessica nodded. “I wish we could find everyone. I’ve been trying all morning. Do you know how many Alison Hornes there are in this country?”
“How do you know the Alison Horne you are looking for is even in this country?”
“I don’t, obviously. But we need to find her. And we need to go to Dartford, Massachusetts.”
Aaron took a hand out of his pocket and put it on the partition that separated the cubicles. “I’m assuming by ‘we’ you mean someone in the FBI. You know you can’t be on this case.”
Jessica knew that, and even though she was shaking her head, said, “I can at least keep looking for the people we haven’t found, right?”
“Don’t look at me. This is up to Ruth. That’s really why I’m here. She’s briefing us all in ten.”
“Right,” Jessica said. “Shit, she’s going to put me on leave, isn’t she?”
“She should. Send you on a secret vacation until we catch whoever’s doing this. That’s what you’d do if you were her, right?”
“I guess so,” Jessica said, standing up, getting her phone from her desk. “Where was he shot?”
“Matthew Beaumont? In the back, apparently. He didn’t see it coming.”
“I just spoke with him yesterday. Jesus. I guess this is real.”
Together they walked to Ruth Jackson’s office.
4
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 9:48 A.M.
Jay woke up in a filthy mood, the memories of his failed audition two days earlier fresh in his mind. He felt hungover, a dull headache behind his eyes, and he counted his drinks from the night before. A few light beers at his local bar, then two—or was it three?—hefty vodka rocks back in his apartment. He’d been on Craigslist, hunting through the personals for someone he could fuck, or, preferably, fuck up. He’d even messaged for a while with some straight-up prostitute, negotiating fees. She’d stopped writing him after he asked her what it would cost for him to fuck her from behind and then punch her in the kidneys. That had been the highlight of his evening, picturing her face when she received that message, but even then, he’d been thinking about the woman at the Brentwood Country Mart who he’d followed back to her apartment in Koreatown. Maybe he really should pay her a visit. He’d been thinking that last night, and he was thinking that again this morning. He found her on Instagram and scrolled through her pictures, thinking that they looked like every other Instagram feed from every other hot piece of ass. There she was curled up with a book to show everyone how smart she was. And there she was drinking prosecco with her girlfriends at brunch. And, of course, there were about three hundred pictures of her in a bikini because that’s all she really wanted to show the world. Look at this body, and don’t you wish you could fuck it. That’s what it was all about, and he’d love to take her down a notch, or maybe two.
He put the phone down for a moment, and the dream he’d had the night before swam up briefly into his consciousness. It was a recurring dream, one he’d had for as long as he could remember. He’d killed someone and he needed to hide the body, and he was terrified of getting caught. Or else he’d already hidden the body but he knew it was going to be found. He tried hard to unpick the strands of last night’s dream, wondering who he’d killed. Was it the blonde from Brentwood? He didn’t think so. It had probably been Olivia Bauer, his high school girlfriend, the girl he’d lost his virginity to, and it wasn’t the first dream in which he’d beaten her to death and hidden her in Eel Pond, that swampy, shallow pretend lake in the shitty town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in. No, he’d had that dream before, and it was always the same; he kept trying to weigh her down under the green surface of the pond by covering her body with rocks, but she kept bobbing back up to the surface.