Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

“Yeah. The stuff he and Nick stole from the campground.”

“Did you track down the owners of all these items?”

“Most of them. The credit cards, stuff with names attached were easy. After the news broke that we’d recovered stolen goods from the campground, a few other owners filed claims.”

“I’m interested in one item in particular. A sterling silver lighter with a name engraved on it.”

Barber said, without hesitation: “Nope. Never found the owner.”

“You’re sure no one claimed it?”

“Yep. I interviewed everyone who came in to claim property, just in case they’d witnessed something at the campground. Maybe saw Nick and Tyrone at the scene. No one ever came for the lighter, which surprised me. It’s sterling silver. Someone obviously paid a lot of money for it.”

“Did you try tracking down the name engraved on it? R. Renwick?”

Barber laughed. “Try doing a Google search on R. Renwick. You’ll turn up about twenty thousand results. All we could do was put it out on the news and hope the owner would call us. Maybe he didn’t hear about it. Maybe he never noticed he’d lost it.” Barber paused. “Why’re you asking about the lighter?”

“That name, R. Renwick. It turned up in another case. A victim, named Richard Renwick.”

“Which case?”

“Multiple murders, six years ago. In Botswana.”

“Africa?” Barber snorted. “That’s a stretch. Don’t you think the name’s more likely to be a coincidence?”

Maybe, thought Jane as she hung up. Or maybe it was the one thing that tied all these cases together. Six years ago, Richard Renwick was murdered in Africa. A year later, a cigarette lighter with the name R. Renwick turned up in Maine. Did it come to the US in a killer’s pocket?

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” said Frost as she dialed the phone again.

“I need to track someone down.”

He looked over her shoulder at the page displayed on her laptop. “The Botswana file? What does it have to do with—”

She held up a hand to silence him as she heard her husband’s usual brusque greeting. “Gabriel Dean.”

“Hey, Mr. Special Agent. Can you do me a favor?”

“Let me guess,” he said with a laugh. “We’re out of milk.”

“No, I need you to put on your Bureau cap. I want to find someone, and I have no idea where in the world she is. You’ve got that buddy at Interpol, in South Africa. Henk something.”

“Henk Andriessen.”

“Yeah, maybe he can help me.”

“This is an international case?”

“Multiple murders in Botswana. I told you about it. Those tourists who vanished on safari. The problem is, it’s been six years and I’m not sure where this person is now. I’m guessing she’s back in London.”

“What’s her name?”

“Millie Jacobson. The sole survivor.”

SOUTH AFRICA

EVERY MORNING FOR THE PAST FIVE DAYS, A CARMINE BEE-EATER HAS been visiting the bottlebrush tree. Even as I step into my back garden with a cup of coffee, the bird sits unruffled, a bright red ornament perched among the cheerful tangle of shrubs and flowers. I have worked hard on this garden, digging and composting, weeding and watering, transforming what was once a patch of scrub into my own private retreat. But on this warm November day, I scarcely register the summery blooms or the visiting bee-eater. Last night’s phone call has left me too shaken to think of anything else.

Christopher comes out to join me, and wrought iron scrapes across the patio stones as he sits down with his coffee at the garden table. “What are you going to do?” he asks.

I breathe in the scent of flowers and focus on the trellis, gloriously engulfed by vines. “I don’t want to go.”

“So you’ve decided.”

“Yes.” I sigh. “No.”

“I can handle this for you. I’ll tell them to leave you alone. You’ve answered all their questions, so what more can they expect?”

“A little courage, maybe,” I whisper.

“Good God, Millie. You’re the bravest woman I know.”

That makes me laugh, because I don’t feel brave at all. I feel like a quivering mouse afraid to leave this home where I’ve felt so safe. I don’t want to leave because I know what’s out there in the world. I know who is out there, and my hands shake at the mere thought of seeing him again. But that is what she’s asking me to do, that policewoman who called from Boston. You know his face. You know how he thinks and how he hunts. We need you to help us catch him .

Before he kills again .

Christopher reaches across the table to grasp my hands. Only then do I notice how cold I am. How warm he is. “You had the nightmare last night, didn’t you?”

“You noticed.”

“It’s not hard when I’m sleeping right next to you.”

“I haven’t had the dream in months. I thought I was over it.”

“That bloody phone call,” he mutters. “You know they don’t have anything solid. It’s just their theory. They could be looking for someone else entirely.”

“They found Richard’s lighter.”

“You can’t be sure it’s the same lighter.”

“Another R. Renwick?”

“It’s a common enough name. Anyway, if it is the same lighter, it means the killer’s far away. He’s moved on, to a different continent.”

Which is why I want to stay here, where Johnny can’t find me. I’d be insane to go in search of a monster. I drain my coffee cup and stand, the chair squealing across the stones. I don’t know what I was thinking, buying wrought-iron garden furniture. Perhaps it was the sense of permanence, the feeling that I could always count on it to last, but the chairs are heavy and hard to move. As I walk back into the house I feel as if I’m hauling yet another burden, heavy as wrought iron, fear-forged and anchoring me to this place. I go to the sink to wash cups and saucers, and tidy up a countertop that is already pristine.

You know how he thinks. And how he hunts .

An image of Johnny Posthumus’s face suddenly rears up in my mind, as real as if he’s standing right outside my kitchen, staring through the window. I flinch and a spoon clatters to the floor. He’s always there, haunting me, just a stray thought away. After I left Botswana, I felt certain he would one day track me down. I’m the only one who lived through it, the one witness he couldn’t kill. Surely that’s a challenge he can’t ignore. But the months became years and I heard nothing from either the Botswana or the South African police, and I began to hope that Johnny was dead. That his bones lie scattered somewhere in the wilderness, like Richard’s. Like the others’. That was the only way I could feel safe again, by imagining him dead. These past six years, no one has seen or heard from him, so it was reasonable to believe he’d met his end and couldn’t hurt me.

The call from Boston changes everything.

Footsteps thump lightly down the stairs and our daughter Violet comes dancing into the kitchen. At four years old, she’s still fearless because we have lied to her. We’ve told her the world is a place of peace and light and she does not know that monsters are real. Christopher scoops her into his arms, swirls her around, and carries her laughing into the living room for their Saturday-morning ritual of cartoons. The dishes are washed, the coffeepot rinsed, and everything is as it should be, but I pace the kitchen looking for new tasks, anything to distract me.

I sit down at the computer and see a batch of emails that have popped into my inbox since last night, from my sister in London, from the other mothers in Violet’s playgroup, from some Nigerian who wants to wire a fortune into my bank account, if only I will give him my number.