Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

Until then, he couldn’t resist reading over the entry from last Wednesday night. And the one from the week before. And the week before that. All the way back to the article warning about so-called finance ministers offering to make people rich.

He tsk ed. “They really should listen to you, darling.”

He’d certainly paid close attention. Close enough to know how to word his lure and cast his reel. He’d hooked quite a few prospects, but only one, young Mr. Todd, had followed the bait all the way into the net.

“Youngsters. Can’t teach them anything.”

Ahh, well. If the fools were incapable of appreciating the advice to be gained and the lessons to be learned on this, his favorite Web site, he himself was not. After all, how better to test the intelligence of his prey than by seducing them with a promise that could be easily disproved with a few flicks of the fingers on a keyboard?

Those too gullible to spend two minutes searching for the information that could save their lives didn’t deserve to live.

As he gathered his things to leave for the day, he smiled in anticipation of tomorrow night’s column. The “deposed royalty” dating scheme was progressing nicely, but should be coming to its inevitable conclusion soon.

After that it was anyone’s guess. He mightn’t find anything to amuse him for weeks, perhaps months. Or he could receive inspiration for his next project tomorrow at midnight. Not knowing simply heightened the excitement.

Carefully choosing his destination to ensure safe distance from his real life, so he could cast his lures and toy with his online friend, Wendy, he drove into the cold winter evening. Though the car radio remained off, his fingers tapped on the steering wheel in time to an internal melody. It was classical and refined, nothing like the filth the people around him every day chose to listen to. The kind of music a woman with a brain would appreciate. Too bad he knew so few.

Except her. A woman both smart and beautiful, she had become his muse, providing inspiration, quietly whispering suggestions through her articles.

She was a kindred spirit, an inquisitive mind in a lovely physical package.

He found himself thinking about her often. Dwelling in the memory of the softness of her skin when they touched. The slenderness of her hand in his own. The sheen of her hair. The lyrical sound of her voice.

He knew everything about her-where she lived, whom she socialized with. Knew she was often alone, intelligent enough to know she needed no company. Oh, yes, he knew it all. He would, in fact, call himself her number-one fan. A devotee.

She had but one fault: her girlish desire to do good. But she could be cured of that, reformed. He knew a bit about curing the soul without crushing the spirit. He didn’t want to crush her; he wanted to free her. Release her from all the societal constraints that said she had to be nice, had to be good, had to help those who were too stupid to help themselves.

He would mold her until they became a perfect pair, an ideal couple.

It would happen. Someday he’d teach her. With his help, she would escape from her bonds and she would realize, as he already had, that she was his. The one woman he had ever really wanted.

Samantha Dalton belonged to him.

In the five months since members of her own team had stopped the monster known as the Reaper from murdering an innocent child, IT specialist Lily Fletcher’s nightmares had grown more violent. More extreme. Much more disturbing.

The Reaper, Seth Covey, had added a new dimension to the horror taking place in her head every night as she slept, but he wasn’t entirely responsible. She had been tormented long before that case, the first she’d worked after joining Blackstone’s team.

Lily’s dreams had grown dark on the night she’d caught a fleeting glimpse of her nephew’s face through the window of a stranger’s van as it disappeared down the street.

They’d become bloody on the night his body was discovered.

And vicious when her sister, her only other living relative, had killed herself rather than live with the loss of her little boy.

There was no befriending the dead. No whispers of love and sorrow could make their bodies any less brutalized, their expressions any less terrified. No matter how many happy memories she focused on, or smiling pictures she cherished, at night, her loved ones always appeared the same. Ravaged victims who lived in her subconscious, emerging the moment she fell into a restless sleep.

Now the horrific crimes Covey had committed played out in her head too. She’d seen them firsthand, witnessed the atrocities he’d recorded and uploaded to the Internet for the viewing pleasure of his sick, deviant friends at a sick, deviant Web site.

The site was gone now. And so was Covey, dead by his own hand. Yet she still saw him night after night. Just a young punk, barely more than a kid himself, but so filled with hatred and rage he’d become a monster in human skin.

Sometimes his face replaced the one of the bastard who’d killed Zachary. Or she beheld her nephew in place of the little boy who’d been saved. Saving Zach was a common theme. She always came so close, only to be devastated all over again when she failed.

Those dreams broke her heart.

They said you could withstand anything if you prayed enough, hoped enough, loved enough. But Lily no longer believed it. Prayer, hope, and love could never bring Zach or Laura back. Nor could they give her the kind of peace she longed for during the sweat-filled nights when she twisted and writhed in her bed, running, chasing, trying to stop the insane sequence of events before it started.

She never could. She never would. The result would always be a dead child in her arms and her sister’s thin, wasted body in a bathtub full of reddish water, blood still slowly trickling from her slashed wrists.

“Stop,” she told herself. She needed to get her mind off last night’s torment and back into the here and now. There were other things to worry about. Namely, the one thing she had left to live for. Because, even though she’d realized love, prayer, and hope weren’t enough to ease the pain, with the help of a pretty good therapist, she’d found other things that were.

A thirst for justice. The need to stop any other family from going through what hers had. Stopping one monster from luring another boy like Zach into his van.

Those things helped. They were enough to live for. Enough for her to get up every morning and put on her clothes and walk through yet another lonely day.

The job was enough.

“Did you say something?”

Lily shook her head, flushing as she realized she’d lapsed into such dark musings right in the middle of a case. She and Brandon-the coworker and office mate who had also become a friend-were at the computer forensics lab. Hoping Jason Todd’s hard drive might hold a clue to the identity of his killer, they were watching while a computer forensics expert ran it through ACES, the Automated Computer Examination System.

“Sorry. Guess I was muttering to myself.”

“Okay, but make sure nobody answers. You know the bureau frowns on agents who hear voices in their heads,” he said with a grin.

She managed a weak smile. “Deal.”

Usually Brandon could tease her out of her darkest moods. There was something irresistibly charming about his big green eyes and spiky bleached-blond hair. He looked more like an underwear model than an FBI cyber nerd, and she suspected, judging by some of his hacker knowledge, that he’d had a little larceny in his soul as a teenager.

Today, though, she could find nothing to smile about. Her heart was heavy, filled with sadness for the families of Jason Todd and Ryan Smith. She was also a bit uncomfortable being here. Though she trusted Brandon, she didn’t want to have to answer his inevitable questions if they ran into any of the forensics guys she’d been working with on another case.