“That would make this hell, Richard.”
“I’d believe it. How else would you know my name?”
“How many people have you killed?”
“You think I’m gonna answer to you?”
Charlotte stands and snaps a branch the thickness of her arm from a nearby tree with one hand. She snaps it in two, then clears the twigs from both halves with a single quick slide of her fist. Both motions sound like popcorn popping in a microwave. If that wasn’t enough to frighten Davies into compliance, she takes both broken halves of the branch and begins rubbing them together. She’s practiced this move countless times in the lab but never out in the frigid air like this. She did a version of it the second time she was triggered, only she used steel rebar and the goal was to create sparks, not flame. Now, both ends of the branches are glowing; then the embers turn to flames.
Goggle-eyed, jaw slack, and spilling drool, Davies looks up into the fire.
“How many women have you killed?” she asks.
“Five,” he says. “Was gonna be six.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not what you expected, am I?”
“I ain’t talking about you.”
“Who are you talking about, Richard?”
Davies’s leering, drooling mouth crooks into something close to a grin.
She holds one torch close to his face, blows the other out with a puff of breath strong enough to rattle the branches nearby.
“I said who are you talking about?”
It’s a slight gesture, maybe the best he can do. He nods in the direction of the woods behind her. Was going to be six. Was. Which means . . . Memories from five months ago assault her as viciously as the bear trap did. There’d been some hope that she could rescue the captive Frederick Pemberton was holding, but they’d been too late, and the images that greeted her inside his walk-in freezer would never leave her. But now . . .
If she’d been wearing the earpiece, no doubt Cole would have ordered the ground teams to move in as soon as he heard Davies mention anything like a captive. But TruGlass offers no audio, and since no one’s bursting through the trees behind her, they’ve got no mics planted in the area. In short, they’ve got no damn idea what Davies just told her. The plan was for her to confirm his kill site, then locate evidence linking him to the other murders, not just the attempt on her. Once she did both, Cole would order the ground teams in so they could move her out and drug Davies within an inch of insanity. That way, he’d look and act like a babbling fool by the time the authorities arrived and discovered him badly injured, paces from gruesome evidence of his long murder spree.
But a live captive? This changes everything. Cole will insist on leaving her where she is for the police to rescue, she’s sure. He certainly won’t want anyone else seeing what Charlotte can do.
Which means who knows how many more hours of terror for the poor woman. Of darkness. Of anticipating further torture. A fate just like the one suffered by her mother before Abigail Banning cut her throat.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
“Promise not to move?” she asks.
“Fuck you, demon bitch.”
Charlotte reaches out and presses ever so gently against the exposed tines of the bear trap jaw; it’s enough force to drive it deeper into the tree trunk behind him. In response, Davies moans like a frightened cow.
“Where is she?”
Davies mumbles something inaudible amid his groans. She drives the flaming end of the torch into the earth, right in front of his crotch. He cries out, then realizes she’s suffocated the flame.
“Where is she?” She’s eye to eye with him.
“T-tannery . . . by the house. Not the barn. Far-farther away. She’s in the cellar.”
When she starts digging inside the flaps of his waffle-print coat, he lets out a series of stuttering whines. “Be still or you’ll hurt yourself,” she says.
She doesn’t find a key ring in his pockets; instead she finds it attached to a hook on his belt. With a slight tug, she pulls the entire hook free.
She’s on her feet now, running past the deer blind. After another minute or two, she comes to an access gate in the electric fence. She rips the cover off the power box, revealing a switch. She’s had extensive lab practice on performing small, everyday maneuvers after a trigger. So far, it’s proven to take a mixture of deep breathing and visualization. Thread the needle, thread the needle, thread the needle. It works, and she’s able to cut the power to the fence with a gentle flick of the wrist that doesn’t tear the switch plate in half.
The woods beyond the fence are much thinner than inside Davies’s hunting ground. After a few minutes, she spots his house, which allows her to orient herself on the map she memorized. The property isn’t technically a farm, even though that was the shorthand Cole used for it; the region’s too sloping and mountainous to allow him to seed anything beyond a few winter-stripped vegetable gardens and a greenhouse that looks far too exposed to contain the implements of murder.
As she runs toward the tannery—a converted garage—she feels a slight sense of alarm that she’s put so much distance between herself and Davies so quickly, but the words that keep thrumming through her head are, Not another minute. If he’s got a woman held captive, she’s not living in terror another goddamn minute.
The worst that could happen is that Cole’s men might come streaming out of the woods to intervene before she can reach the captive. Which, in the end, wouldn’t be so bad.