Allegedly.

Two blocks away, a short, pear-shaped woman in a similar getup walks hurriedly along the sidewalk, a cheap glittery purse swinging at her hip. Charlotte slows her steps. Right now, she’s more afraid of having her cover blown by an encounter with a territorial working girl than she is of Richard Davies.

A plain brown Toyota Camry with tinted windows rolls past her and slows to the curb right next to the woman. The Camry’s passenger-side window powers down. The woman turns to it instantly, recognizing a familiar call. Charlotte takes a deep breath.

The brown Camry’s just one of several cars she was told to look out for—members of the ground team who will do their best to make sure that by the time Davies rolls up, Charlotte’s the only offer available. If they’re already at work, that means Davies is close.

She reaches into her purse and takes out the burner phone they gave her. It’s set to vibrate and she didn’t feel it buzz, but she checks the display just to be sure. It’s loaded with a series of fake text messages from a fictional pimp. They’re disguised as directions, some of them laced in vague threats that aren’t too over the top. None of them is meant to direct her movements yet. Those will be written in an agreed-upon code she’s memorized.

where u at? Slow your walk to a stroll.

R u working? Turn right at the next intersection.

Luv u girl, but need u to score. Turn left at the next intersection.

need intel. how’s the street? Cross the street immediately.

i’m talking 2 u. Davies’s truck is within sight. Stop immediately and hit a sales pose. Visible from the curb. Close to the nearest light source.

why u never listen? Start walking again in the direction you were headed until you get further instructions.

This strategy, combined with ground team members tying up all her competition, is intended to corral her and Davies into the same channel like cows to the slaughter.

Yes, the earpiece would have made it easier, but so what?

The worst thing that can happen tonight is she doesn’t get taken.

But if her cover is blown, there’s no getting close to him again. If he doesn’t abduct her, then she doesn’t get to lay eyes on his kill spot. Then she doesn’t have proof he’s anything other than a creepy asshole. So even if she does get triggered somehow, she won’t have cause to go full Zypraxon on him, other than Cole Graydon’s assurances that he’s a bad, bad man, and how good are those anyway?

Cole’s never lied to me, Charlotte tells herself. Manipulated me. Invaded my privacy. Treated me and the people I love like pawns in a chess game. Withheld information. But Cole’s never flat-out lied. Yet.

The next gust of cold wind brings drizzle that needles her legs.

If the rain starts up again, the microdrones can’t operate, and that’s not good at all.

There’s another gust, dryer than the last one.

That’s better.

She puts the burner phone back in her purse, alongside the fake ID for Sara Ann Wakeman, a twenty-six-year-old high school dropout and meth fan from Clarkston, Washington, who doesn’t exist except in Charley’s imagination.

Serial killers, for the most part, don’t interview their victims. Once they’ve got you in their clutches, you’ve become a prop in their sadistic fantasy. They aren’t interested in acquiring information about you that will distract them from the sick role they’ve forced on you. A john, on the other hand, might engage his chosen girl in a little preliminary chitchat. That’s why Charlotte had devised an extensive backstory for Sara designed to poke at Richard Davies’s psychological pressure points.

Sara’s father cramped her style, so she ran away from home after stealing some of his cash. She wants to be an artist; she’s always been good with a BeDazzler. Every now and then, when Sara’s running low on funds, she calls the old bastard and cries into the phone for twenty minutes until he breaks down and sends her some money. He always caves. What a loser! Men are so obvious. Especially dumb dads.

Over the past few weeks, Charlotte’s spent as much time researching the history of Washington State and towns like Clarkston and Cashmere as she has the lives of streetwalkers. In her heart, Sara’s got a longer story. A deeper, more complex story that put her on the path to victimhood by age seven. But Charley’s not out to change Davies’s thinking. She’s out to stop his killings in their tracks. So, the version she’ll present of Sara is shallow and crafted.

Weaponized.

At Cole’s request, she wrote up a dossier on her chosen alias—two thousand words, thank you very much!—a day or two after he gave her the file on Davies. For prep, the psychiatrist on Charley’s ground team had put her through a dozen interviews about Sara Ann Wakeman’s past.

They weren’t just interviews. They were rehearsals.

Acting comes naturally to her for someone who’d never spent a day in the high school drama club. God knows, when she was young she had to put on enough performances as the star of her father’s traveling carny show about her gruesome past. So many that the first thing she did after she fled to her grandmother’s at age sixteen was find ways to work with written words. In privacy and silence. She edited, but never wrote, for her new high school’s literary magazine and newspaper, two activities that cut down on her contact with other people and allowed her to use language to make the world seem more orderly and knowable.