Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

Sam shook her head slowly.

“This lawyer. How well do you know him?”

“Not well,” she murmured.

Not well at all .

Sam gripped the edge of the closest bookcase, shocked by a sudden, awful possibility.

“And he called you directly, this Carter guy. Told you to come here.” Myers unbuttoned his coat, revealing the service pistol strapped to his hip. “I don’t like this.”

“I don’t either,” she whispered, eyeing the door, still open to that long, deserted corridor, where anyone could be lurking. “I need to call Alec.”

She reached for her phone. But she hadn’t even touched it when a muffled pffft sound split the morning.

She didn’t even realize it had been a gunshot until Myers dropped like a stone.

After Wyatt left, Taggert and Mulrooney had buried themselves in the work, each lost in his own thoughts. They’d managed to shove aside their emotional reaction to Lily’s death for a little while, but something like that couldn’t be held at bay for long. Soon they were both muttering worried questions about Lily as well as Jackie and Brandon, needing to know more, needing more than a few minutes to grieve, despite the case.

Assuring them he was fine to continue going through the stack of files-damn this stuffy institution that archived actual paper rather than just keeping a computerized version-Alec waved them off. “Why don’t you take a break? I’ll dig through this last box.”

Taggert nodded; then both men departed to find the others.

It figured that the box they needed would be the last one they looked in. Almost immediately after opening it, Alec spotted the right file and tugged it out. It was thick, stuffed with registration forms filled out by each attendee of the event, and there were at least two hundred.

“Damn it,” he muttered as he thumbed a few pages. This was a waste of time. He needed to bring the folder to the hospital and ask Sam if she remembered any of these guys, anyone who acted strangely, asked a lot of questions, paid her personal attention.

Sam . She had called as Wyatt was walking in and he’d totally forgotten. Turning his phone on, he dialed his voice mail, doodling idly on a yellow legal pad as the call connected. Two messages. Shit.

When he heard the first one, he froze in disbelief. Jimmy Flynt dead? Talk about timing. The guy had looked pretty bad yesterday, but they certainly hadn’t left that hospital thinking he was breathing his final breaths.

“So call me when you get this, would you? I’d like to try to get down there; obviously I can’t go alone.”

Damn right.

He waited for the second message, surprised to hear Sam’s voice again. “It’s me. Look, I’m going to go ahead down to the prison.”

He almost dropped the pen.

“Before you panic, Detective Myers is escorting me.”

So she wasn’t taking chances. He had hoped she’d stay put until he returned, but he did see where she was coming from, especially when she said, “I saw no point in wasting a couple of hours after you return. This way, I’ll be back with the letters close to when you are and we save some time.”

She was right, not that he liked it. Cutting the connection, he quickly dialed her back to find out where she was. And to make sure Myers knew how serious this situation was.

He got no answer. It was possible they hadn’t even left the hospital yet and were in Tricia’s room. Or the phone might not have reception inside the iron fortress of the prison. Both plausible-but he couldn’t deny that a hint of concern crawled through him.

He wanted to hear Sam’s voice.

She’s fine. She’s protected.

Knowing she wouldn’t be there even if he took the file back to the hospital right away, he paused, unable to get Flynt off his mind. The man had known so much, especially if his note was to be believed. But how? How could he have realized Sam was in danger, that someone was using e-mails to “hurt” people? Was it possible the Professor had an accomplice, somebody who was now imprisoned and might have talked? He questioned whether the unsub would trust anyone, but how else could Jimmy know?

Though he thought about it, no answers came to him. He didn’t get that buzz he usually experienced when he was on the right track. And he didn’t have any time to waste.

“All right, enough,” he told himself. Alec shook his head and put his attention back on the task at hand. Glancing at his pad of paper, he realized just how deep in thought he had been. He’d been doodling all over the page and hadn’t even realized it. He’d written Sam’s name, Jimmy’s, the Professor’s, Darwin’s.

Darwin . He’d scratched the letters boldly, in all caps. For some reason, Alec couldn’t stop staring at it.

And just like that, the buzz started. Thoughts clicked in his head, as they often did when he sensed he was on the edge of something important.

He’d called their unsub the Professor for so long, it had been hard adjusting to the name he’d chosen for himself. The killer had never referred to himself that way until Wednesday night, when he’d posted those responses to Sam’s blog. Right there, in black and white, spelling out his motives, his philosophies.

Darwin .

Only… in one of those three posts, he had spelled it differently, hadn’t he?

Darwen . He wrote it down.

A typo? But the Professor didn’t make mistakes. At least, not often. The page from the book was the first, and it was pure luck the man hadn’t realized how that red ink would stand out. So why would he misspell what he considered his own name?

Alec stared at the letters, tracing them again with his pen, digging even harder until the paper tore beneath the pressure.

“Son of a bitch!” he snapped, suddenly seeing a possibility.

His hand moved, almost of its own volition, rearranging the unsub’s chosen name-not the correctly spelled version of it, the other one. And those six letters transformed into another word entirely.

The answer had been right in front of their eyes all along. “Dar wen . You bastard.”

Frantic, he leaped to his feet, grabbing the files, knowing he’d need proof but desperate to get on the road. Because Sam was headed to the prison.

Shoving everything into his briefcase, he cursed as one of the slick, glossy brochures for the legal symposium slid out. He grabbed it, spared it a glance. Then glanced again.

Right on the front of it was a paragraph describing the backgrounds of some of the speakers, though not naming them. One stood out. And when he flipped the brochure open to read the name that went with the title, he knew he had just identified the killer for certain.

The Professor had been toying with them.

No, not the Professor; Darwin. Or rather, Darwen.

Warden .

“My God, what have you done?”

Sam stared in horror at Warden Connolly. He stood in the doorway to his office, a gun in his hand, calm and cool, despite having just cold-bloodedly shot a police officer.

A police officer she truly liked. Sam started to bend down, to check Myers’s pulse, to stanch the blood flowing freely from his chest.

Connolly tsk ed and shook his head, reading her intent.

“Why?” she asked, unable to form another word.

He made a motion with the gun. “Turn to your right. About five inches.”

She did, until she was nose to nose with the book-laden shelf she had grabbed onto for support a few moments ago. Nose to nose with a copy of her own book. Reaching for it, she was not surprised to see the title page had been torn out.

No, not at all surprised. Sam had realized a few minutes ago that she had been lured here by the very man she had been trying to evade, the killer known as the Professor. She’d just been wrong in thinking he was Dale Carter.