It's One of Us(104)

“Okay.”

“Oh, Mr. Bender?” Osley tosses something to Park. “We found this. Figured you’d want it back.”

Park dangles the small thumb drive in the air. “Thanks. Did you look at this?”

Osley flashes that lazy grin. “Only to make sure it was yours.”

Park smiles back. “Thank you, Detective. You’ve saved my career.”

Darby sees them out, returns to the back yard. Park has assembled the food for them; Scarlett is already digging in.

“Can you eat?” he asks quietly, and she shakes her head. “Come here, then.” He opens his arms, and Darby collapses into them, grateful, so grateful, that he’s here.

It is later, after she’s promised they’ll be safe, after he’s gone home and she’s finished the wine and cried herself into an almost state of sleep, that she remembers what the cops said about Jillian. “He drugged her.”

She gets out of bed and goes to the linen closet in the hall. On the top shelf, she keeps an emergency kit, much more complete than your average first aid kit. It’s surgical, has the tools for field dressings and pain relief, IV antibiotics, the works. It seems smart to have something so complete in case of the zombie apocalypse, or some other sort of emergency. With as many tornadoes and floods as Nashville suffers from, she never knows when it might be needed.

She has to get the stool, but she reaches into the dark recess of the closet to find the space where she knows the kit lives, and finds it empty.

A tiny bubble of panic forms inside her. When did Peyton take it? Before he started his killing spree?

Or after?

There are all sorts of things in the kit that could be used to drug a woman, but if she’s going to guess, he’s been using the midazolam or propofol. It will not only knock her out, but she’ll have no memory of anything that happens while she’s under the influence of it.

This is your fault, Darby. You’ve given him the tools to prey on these women. You packaged it up with a bright red bow.

She snaps off the light and sits back in the chair. What can she do? Can she fix this?

“Mom?”

Scarlett comes into the office, ghostly in the darkness.

“You okay, honey? That was some pretty heavy news they delivered.”

“No. Do you think he really did these things? That he’s murdered all those women?”

She puts her arms around her daughter and holds her close. “I hope not, love. But I’m afraid he might have.”



45


THE MURDERER

When he woke, to the trill of birdsong, the sun was climbing the sky like wisteria on a trellis, and the woman was gone.

There was a gash on his temple and blood had poured down his face, onto his shirt, pooling in the dirt beneath his body.

His time was running out.

He managed to get himself off the ground, crawled into the barn, dizzy, so dizzy. The rusty smell of the dried blood turned his stomach, as did the view of the wound in the mirror. It needed stitches, a horrible process he barely managed, the numbing shot done awkwardly with his left hand, the line of black zigzagging and crooked. His eye on that side was swollen nearly closed. Once he’d covered the wound with a bandage, he broke open the chemical ice pack and applied it. Getting the swelling down would help.

He had to leave. If she’d gotten to the police, they could come at any moment.

He changed, packed what he needed—food, clothes, the emergency kit, the gun—and left the rest. He felt a pang leaving his trophies, but they served no one at this point. Maybe he’d come back for them one day.

He drove the van to a truck stop, left it in the corner of the lot, stashed between two eighteen-wheelers on their sleep break. With luck, it wouldn’t be found for a while. Long enough for him to get to Olivia’s house. Long enough to see her again.

A sketchy trucker let him hitch a ride back to town. With the bandages over the chisel cut, Peyton figured he was safe from exposure so long as he kept the baseball cap on. The guy driving seemed as disinterested in him as Peyton was with the trucker. He dropped him at the exit into Bellevue and didn’t glance back.

It took him three hours to make it to Forest Hills. He wanted to go home, wanted to curl up on the sofa in the living room and let his mom make him hot chocolate like she used to, let her clean his wounds and fix him properly, but he couldn’t face her. He couldn’t face Scarlett, either. Things were too complicated, too out of control. Better to leave his family, the people he loved—if he can ascribe the strange fullness he feels when he looks at them as an emotion people know as love—and finish this the way he started it, with Olivia.

So he hoofed it to the Benders’.

Olivia’s Jeep was in the driveway. The sight of it lifted his heart. She was home!

He still had a full set of keys, to the house, to the cars, to the shed, though he wondered if by now, they’d had them changed. The cameras were running again; he could see the small red power light. Going up to the house would be harder. But he didn’t care. He wanted things to end. He wanted to die with Olivia’s arms around him.

He was about to scoot around the hedge to the porch when the garage door started up. He could hear Park Bender talking. Shit. He rolled to the ground by the hedge and froze. He’d been so careful, but had he been seen? Had someone called the police? Was this going to end right now, with Peyton covered in blood and muck, lying on the ground like a wounded squirrel?