Michael Prescott - Last Breath

The BMW screamed forward, plowing into the lumber, scattering it like kindling, but she was already up and sprinting along the side of the garage.

The coupe reversed, then swerved toward her in pursuit. She picked up her speed. Brightness flared behind her.

She reached the corner of the garage. Looking back. she flung the screw at his windshield. It cracked the glass, leaving a starburst of fractures.

Running again, legs pumping hard. Childishly she felt better. He was so proud of that stupid car.

She ran faster, and behind her the coupe turned the corner, its high beams closing in.

“Get a load of this,” Cellini said. She’d been thumbing through Gavin Treat’s journal with gloved hands while she and Walsh sat together in the mobile command post.

“A lead?” Walsh asked. He’d told her to skim the book in the hope that Treat had jotted down a reference to a hideout. So far the patrol units combing the neighborhood had found no sign of him.

“No. It’s just… weird. His connection with C.J. Osborn. Remember how we couldn’t account for it in terms of the computer-repair scenario? Well, it turns out he didn’t make contact with her that way. He tracked her down.”

“Why? They have a prior relationship?”

“You could say that. Take a look.”

She held the journal open before Walsh. His hands weren’t gloved, and no prints had yet been lifted from the book. Ninhydrin would be used to pull any recoverable latents off the pages. Cellini, knowing this, was careful to handle the journal only by the edges.

Gavin Treat’s handwriting, every t crossed and every i dotted, slanted in graceful cursive down the page.

December 21.

Today I found her, she who had been lost, the prodigal. She thought she could hide from me, did Caitlin, or perhaps she thought I had forgotten her after all these years. Or is it that she assumed my tastes ran exclusively to children? But we who are connoisseurs and esthetes in matters of Thanatos must continue to mature and to acquire more sophisticated tastes. Stagnation is the death of soul. As for me, I have put away childish things.

Still, it is true that I had forgotten her, or to put it more precisely, I had not made her the focus of my thoughts for a considerable time. I have been otherwise engaged. One must not dwell on the past.

It was by mere chance that I rediscovered her. Today there was a television report on a local shooting, and one of the patrol officers interviewed was a young brunette who looked so hauntingly familiar. Only after the newscast had ended did I make the connection to my past. Still, I wasn’t sure. I waited for the replay of the report on the late local news, and this time I video-recorded it. Though the officer was unidentified on screen, when I freeze-framed the tape I could read the nametag on her uniform.

OSBORN.

Now there is no doubt.

Naturally, work remains to be done. I must learn her home address-unlisted, of course, like any police officer’s. But I anticipate no insuperable difficulty about that. The shooting took place in Newton Division, logically implying that she works out of the Newton station house. Were an inconspicuous individual to watch the station’s parking lot for a day or two, said individual would be sure to see Officer Osborn enter or leave. Then it would be only a question of following her, or of tracing her license plate.

After so many years, to be reunited with Caitlin! I’m all a-quiver. I believe I’ll make her Miss January-she’s certainly attractive enough. She’ll be such a lovely specimen on display. Yes, give her another month or so to breathe the air. Come late January, she’ll breathe no more.

P.S. Today is the winter solstice, turning point of the year. How apropos. Happy Saturnalia to me! Here’s to a rich harvest of a fine young crop.

“Christ,” Walsh said, looking up from the journal. “What the hell do you make of that?”

“It sounds like this creep has been active for a long time,” Cellini said. “And he used to be into kids.”

“And one of those kids was Osborn.” Walsh frowned. “Her ex said she’d been through some painful childhood experience. He didn’t know the details.”

“And now her past has caught up with her. Damn it.” Cellini closed the journal. “The son of a bitch wasn’t even looking for her. It was just a fluke. A sound bite on the news.”

“And now she’s dead,” Walsh whispered.

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Donna. Or yourself. Treat snatched her and killed her, and we let him get away so he can keep on doing it… again and again and again…”

His cell phone chirped. Walsh pulled it from his pocket and stared at it, thinking emptily that this had better be good news.

“You gonna answer that?” Cellini asked.

He clicked the keypad. “Walsh.”

“Morrie, we’ve got something here.” It was Rawls, his voice crackling over a long-distance connection.

Walsh couldn’t imagine what Rawls could have come up with in Baltimore that would be relevant now. “Give it to me,” he said curtly, in no mood to be affable.

“We got to thinking about whoever sent us the e-mail that tipped us off to the Bluebeard site. Decided to trace it. Linked it to an ISP-that’s an Internet service provider-and obtained the identity of the person who owns the account. He lives in LA. He’s somebody you’d better talk to.”

“What’s his name?” Walsh asked, and then suddenly he knew. He knew even before Rawls answered the question. He knew, and he could have killed himself for not seeing it sooner.

“Adam Nolan,” Rawls was saying. “Spelled N-O-L-”

“ God damn it.”

Walsh uttered the profanity so loudly that one of the radio technicians from the communications room leaned into the command center to see if things were okay.

“I gather you don’t need me to spell it,” Rawls said dryly.

“No.” Walsh swallowed hard, ignoring the stares of both Cellini and the technician. “No, I don’t need you to spell it. I’ve met with him. I was in the same room with him three hours ago. He’s her ex-husband, damn it to hell. He set this whole thing up”-he was speaking half into the phone and half to Cellini-“played with us, used Treat for cover. Used a goddamned serial killer as a diversion. That’s why Treat was home tonight, why he didn’t have her. He never had her. Nolan did-and still does, if she’s alive.”

Cellini took out her cell phone and speed-dialed.

“Any idea where Nolan is now?” Rawls asked.

“No, but we’ll find him. We’ll find the son of a bitch.”

“You sound like yourself again, Morrie.”

“Who’d I sound like before?”

“Somebody who’d given up.”

“Fuck no. Not me. I’m on the case, Noah. And if it’s humanly possible, I swear to God I’ll save that woman’s life.”

C.J. lay in a shallow ditch, flat against the ground, while headlights swept over her head.

The ditch had been excavated for the purpose of planting hedges. Heaps of dirt rose up on both sides. She had seen the depression in the ground and taken cover there, and now she waited, praying the car would pass by.

The car. Absurd to think of it that way, but on some level she saw the car itself as her enemy, the demon car with its shining halogen eyes and its engine’s guttural purr. Its tires were paws that meant to maul and savage her. Its exhaust was an animal’s panting breath. Its stops and starts, its pivots and reverses, were the maneuvers of a predator on the prowl.

More than once it had come close to grinding her under its wheels. But in the chase she’d had certain advantages over her pursuer. She could take shortcuts a car couldn’t use. She could cut down narrow alleyways, climb over piles of debris, dive into foliage and lose herself in shadows.