She didn’t let herself think about it. The girls might have been asleep, but Chris wasn’t. She found his number in her contacts list and pressed dial, waiting for it to connect.

  It rang five times before she lost her nerve and put the phone down.

  Maybe he was busy, or even asleep after a long shift. There could have been many reasons why he didn’t answer. The fact that he didn’t want to talk to her was only one of them.

  Right?

  Laura scrubbed her hands over her face, remembering the last message he’d sent her. That he would be there when she was ready to talk. And she wasn’t, was she? If Nate’s advice was to be taken, she never would be. She could never tell him the truth. But was that fair?

  Or was she doing him an injustice if she didn’t just end things now, before he got in too deep?

  The terrible truth of it was that she already was in too deep.

  So deep that thinking about all of this gave her a heartache, and she actually found it preferable to think about their horrible case—with no leads, no idea of motive, and not a single viable suspect despite all this legwork.

  But at least tomorrow, she had a chance of changing that.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Alana took one last look around the museum, reassuring herself that everything was in its place. She liked to leave everything where it was supposed to be. Get it ready late at night, rather than first thing in the morning.

  She gave herself a satisfied nod and reached for the keys hooked onto her belt, pulling them out so she could head home.

  She looked out from the doors as she always liked to at this time of night, out over the town below. In the distance, the swell of the sea was promised by the moonlight glinting on the waves, but from here, she could barely hear it anymore. Instead, what she saw was the twinkling lights burning in homes and businesses open late, like so many tiny lighthouses guiding her on her own way home. She took a deep breath of the fresh air.

  Alana turned to lock the doors, shoving her hands back into the pockets of her heavy felt coat as soon as she could to stay warm. She was glad that it wasn’t a long walk home. The nights were so cold at this time of the year, and it looked like there would be a storm tonight, too, but so long as the wind didn’t whip up any faster and drive the clouds her way, she thought she would be able to get home and warm before it hit.

  She turned the familiar route, as always going on the defensive. It wasn’t that she was paranoid, but she thought that wariness was a good trait for a woman to have when she was walking home alone in the dark. In the summer, this route was just beautiful. But in the winter, it was a horror show every single night. Every shadow looked like someone waiting to lunge at her. Every car that passed seemed to, quite obviously and reasonably, belong to a mass murderer.

  Although, with the way things were going down there in town, right now she had less reason to poke fun at herself than usual.

  Alana increased her pace to a brisk walk, thinking it would serve the double purpose of helping her to warm up and also getting her home faster.

  When she heard a heavy step somewhere behind her, someone stumbling over something in the dark, her heartbeat increased to double time as well.

  Alana fingered her keys in her pocket, selecting one of them and pushing it between her middle and forefinger—the longest one, the one that locked the big, heavy wooden doors of the nautical museum. It wasn’t sharp, but it would go into an eyeball or up a nose pretty well if she got a chance. She tried to think fast. She’d prepared for this on hundreds of dark night walks, but it had never actually happened before.

  It might not be happening now. Maybe it was just someone out walking a dog, or taking in the night air, or going to meet a lover with no interest in her at all. Maybe it was only because she’d thought of this happening that it seemed like it was going to.

  But if it really was…

  Alana had thought about it enough times. She had enough strategies in her head. Now the problem was figuring out how to choose one.

  But she thought she had an idea—and it was one that required her to act immediately, before the other person could get too close.

  It was lucky that this was her home route. She knew it like the back of her hand. She had walked over these hills above the town to and from home, to and from the views of the sea, to and from meetings with friends. All different directions were hers. She could go as far away from the light as she needed to and still know her way.

  Alana darted to the left and down a hidden gully, knowing that she could follow it to the end and then come out not too far from home at a right-angle. It would add maybe five minutes to her walk. But it was much safer than staying on the path.

  She held her breath for a few steps and then stopped, listening, trying to be as quiet as possible. It wouldn’t help to go down this steep and uncertain path if she was going to be followed anyway. She strained to hear a footstep or the breathing of someone else, watching the air above the place where she now stood—back at the elevation of the path—for telltale white steam. But there was nothing. The whole place was still and quiet. She could only hear gulls, far off in the distance the crashing of the waves, and somewhere down below the dim movement of a few cars that hadn’t yet returned to their homes for the night.

  Nothing else.

  Maybe she’d been caught up in thought and imagined it.

  No, she was sure about the noise she’d heard. It was either a person or a very large animal, and if it was an animal, hopefully they weren’t interested in her anyway.

  Alana decided to continue along the new route she’d taken, not giving it much thought other than the fact that she was already spooked by the normal path. She’d already taken a few steps this way. There was no point in turning back just to return to the way she’d thought she was going to return home. She’d get there either way. And this route was just fine, too, so long as she stepped carefully and didn’t get too overconfident about the placement of the rocks she knew could jut out from the sides of the thin path down the middle of the ravine.

  She tried to focus on her breathing. There was no light from any human source out here, but there was faint light from the moon—even fainter still where the storm clouds kept passing over the surface of it, but enough for someone very familiar with the area to get by. The thought of the storm made Alana tut at herself out loud. How had she let that escape her mind? Now she was going to take longer getting back. If she ended up getting soaked in the rain, it would be her own paranoid fault.

  She took a deep breath to sigh it out—

  And felt the wind knocked out of her, something jerking around her neck and pulling her backwards off her feet, like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been yanked back.

  Alana tried to cry out but found her voice strangled by whatever it was around her neck still, sensations and sounds and smells and sights jostling in on her stunned brain all at once. There was something around her neck that was rough and tight making it so that she couldn’t breathe. Something was against her back. She could smell the sea. A shape was blocking what little light there was above her. The sky—she was looking up at the sky. Her legs were lying across the ground, a large rock under one of her knees. Her hands gripped the thing around her neck and her brain returned the word rope. Her lungs hurt. Her throat hurt. Her fingertips hurt. She kicked the ground hard, and her heel sank into the soft earth.

  She couldn’t see a thing. Everything was black in front of her eyes. Her fingers scrabbled at the rough texture of the rope, but it made no difference. She managed to gasp one last time, but no air made it through. She thought about the keys in her hand that she must have dropped as she fell backwards, about how she was supposed to have stabbed him with them but hadn’t. She thought about the fact that she was supposed to be in the warmth of her home. She hoped it wasn’t going to rain before she could get home.

  Alana thought about the sea, all she could hear, all she could smell, and then she stopped thinking about anything at all, her hands and feet going limp at her sides.

  And the only sound was the breathing of her killer, panting heavily above her, his arms finally going slack on the rope.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Laura looked him in the eye and took a deep breath.

  “Chris,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”

  Chris was wearing pajamas—blue checkered pants and a long white shirt, the kind of cream-white like something from a commercial. A shorthand for men’s pajamas. The kind of thing that real people couldn’t possibly wear because everyone was being told all the time that they did.

  He folded his arms over his chest and leaned on the doorframe, rubbing his eyes.

  “Laura, it’s the middle of the night,” he said. He sounded tired. Laura wanted to grab him and hold him and have him hold her and go to sleep together, which would be much easier than what she needed to do. “I thought you were on a case.”

  “I was,” Laura said. “I am. But this is too important.”

  “Alright,” Chris said, shrugging and stifling a yawn. “What is it?”

  “Won’t you let me in?” Laura asked, glancing around. It was night, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be anyone around to hear her.

  “No,” Chris said, his easy standoffishness taking her aback. “What do you need to say?”

  “The thing I’ve been hiding from you,” Laura said, taking a breath. “I know you know that I’ve been hiding something. To do with Zach. To do with me. And I’m ready to tell you what it is.”

  “What is it?” Chris asked. That same straightforward manner had her stumbling.

  “I…it’s…” Laura took a breath and started again. “It’s me. I have these…powers. Psychic visions. I get visions of the future, or sometimes the past. It’s what makes me such a good FBI agent. It’s what helped me to save Amy’s life.”

  Chris looked at her for a long moment. “You’re serious?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Laura insisted. “I’ve seen so many things. I don’t even know where to start telling you. But when I see things, sometimes they come true and sometimes I manage to change the future before they happen. I can see where a killer is going to be. That’s how I stop them.”

  Chris heaved a huge sigh and looked down at the ground.

  That wasn’t the reaction she had been expecting—out of all the different possibilities, this wasn’t one of them.

  “Chris,” she started, hoping to prompt him into saying something.

  “Laura,” he said, shaking his head sadly as he looked up at her. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this. Your boss and Nate, they told me you had delusions and that I needed to be careful around you. I didn’t want to believe them. But I guess it’s true.”

  “It’s not a delusion,” Laura insisted. “I can really do it. Honestly, I can. It’s not really working properly at the moment, but—”

  “I’m sorry, Laura,” Chris said, stepping back inside the house, his hand on the door ready to close it.

  Someone from behind grabbed her arm from both sides—two people. Laura looked up to see two huge orderlies in white uniforms holding her back.

  “Chris!” she shouted, desperately.

  “I’m sorry, Laura,” he said, again. “They’re going to make you better. You’re going away until you get better.” He shut the door in her face as they dragged her backwards, away to the waiting ambulance that would take her to the hospital.

  He thought she was crazy.

  Chris thought she was crazy.

  Laura struggled, but there was no way she could escape, the two men were holding her far too tightly. “Let go!” she shouted, but the only response was the ambulance’s siren coming on, sounding like a ringing phone instead of an alarm—sounding like her ringtone, actually—sounding just like—

  Laura woke up, opening her eyes to the motel ceiling. There was a sound ringing out close to her head. Her cell phone. Her arm shot out to grab it and she fumbled, dropping it to the floor before cursing and managing to lean over and grab it.

  “Agent Frost,” she said down the line, not having had even enough time or presence of mind to check the caller ID before answering.

  “Agent, this is Sheriff Landyn,” he replied. “It looks as though we have another body.”

  Laura sat straight upright in the bed, her brain already kicking into the mode she needed to get up and out of there fast. “Where?” she asked. The light of dawn was just starting to hit the curtains in her motel room. It was early, and she still felt tired. The quality of her sleep probably had something to do with that. But any chance for rest was gone now.

  “Just on the hill above the town, there’s a nautical museum,” Landyn told her. “I’m there now with my men securing the scene.”

  Laura swore mentally, wishing they had been called when the discovery was made and not when the Sheriff had arrived. “Sheriff? Whatever perimeter you were planning on setting up, do me a favor and double it,” she said, then hesitated as she thought about the scene at the docks. “No, triple it. I’ll be there as soon as physically possible with Agent Lavoie.”

  She dropped the call and rose to rush to the other side of the room, banging on the thin wall between her room and Nate’s to wake him up.

  ***

  Laura squinted out of the windshield as she drove up the road to the museum, leaning forward so she could see the whole building in one view. It was impressive, that was for sure—and she could see why it was connected to this case.

  It just meant that everything she had been thinking so far was gone out of the window.

  Laura parked with a churn of the tires against the gravel forecourt, pulling up the hire car between two cars from the Sheriff’s department. As she and Nate got out of the car, Sheriff Landyn was already walking toward them with his hand raised in greeting.

  “Where is she?” Laura asked, looking at the obvious spot. But there was no body there—only some ropes hanging limply down from the front of a ship, as if they had been slashed open. She was baffled. She had assumed that they would at least have the sense to leave the crime scene intact.

  “She’s been taken to the hospital,” the Sheriff said.

  “What?” Laura frowned, looking at Nate. “Is she still alive?”

  “Well, that’s kind of the question,” the Sheriff said.

  “Explain,” Nate said impatiently, shaking his head in confusion. “Didn’t you tell Agent Frost on the phone that there was a new body?”

  “We thought there was, but apparently, it’s too soon to say,” the Sheriff replied, apparently not done with speaking in riddles. “Well, a hell of a storm blew through here last night.”

  Laura nodded. The wet ground told that story, even if she had been out like a light so much last night that she hadn’t heard any rain or thunder. “What difference does that make?” she asked, not seeing the connection yet.

  “She was put up there last night sometime,” the Sheriff replied, gesturing upward and tilting his own chin to look up at the ropes. “She was the head curator here at the museum and was usually the last one to close up, so we think it would have been as she was leaving work here that she was strangled and tied up to the figurehead. Then the storm came. She was in the cold wind and rain all night long, drenched to the skin. The EMTs told us they can’t declare her dead until she’s been warmed up to normal body temperature.”

  Laura stared at him. “You’re telling me that we can’t tell whether she’s alive or not?”

  “With that level of hypothermia, it turns out you can’t make out vital signs too well,” the Sheriff said, scratching the back of his neck. “We’ll know more once they’ve treated her. It’s a long shot, though. She had the rope marks around her neck, same as the others.”

  Laura rubbed her forehead. This was complicated. A victim who was dead but not dead.

  “Is there a chance she might survive?” Nate asked, which was really the meat of the question they needed to answer. It was good luck that he was there with her, because Laura was having trouble getting around all the mental roadblocks this early in the morning.

  “I suppose so,” the Sheriff said, although he looked completely confused about it himself.

  “Right,” Nate sighed. “Then let’s get to this crime scene. Any cameras, witnesses?”

  “The cameras only cover the interior of the museum,” the Sheriff said. “Unfortunately, there were no witnesses until the other employees came up this morning and found her hanging there. The storm will have washed away any physical evidence that was left too. I do have my deputies looking all the same!”

  Laura got the feeling that he’d only added the last part to ward off their accusations of his incompetence—and he had just about saved himself. “Why is there a ship’s hull attached to the front of the museum?” she asked, looking up at it again. It was life-sized and lifelike, as if a giant ancient ship had genuinely crashed through the front of the museum and was pushing out of the other side.

  “It’s a special boat for this area,” the Sheriff said, looking up at it with her. “It’s the real thing, not a replica. It’s preserved here. It was one of the boats that brought the first settlers to this shore.”

  Laura moved a little closer, standing right below it. “How did he get up there?” she asked, more musing aloud than really asking anyone. “Could you climb this?” She put a hand gently against the wood of the ship to feel its texture, a headache spiking behind her eyes as she considered it, and saw where there could be a handhold a few planks up—

  She was there in the room again, looking down at the table. There was the book, open in front of her. She squinted at it. Things were getting a little clearer. Maybe there was something…maybe something she could make sense of…

 

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