“Everything turned out all right, didn’t it? I’m just glad you were wearing that vest. I’ll buy you a new one for Christmas.”
“Nothing says Merry Christmas like ballistic armor.” Peter sighed. “I just don’t get why he wanted to kill her to begin with.”
“Well, he ended his little adventure by shooting himself, so he probably wasn’t quite right in the head. I’ll plug him into my databases and see what I can come up with. Hey, remind KT to send me what she’s working on. I’m coming to Seattle tomorrow, but I want to use the flight time to see if I can help figure out what triggered Reed.”
Peter lowered the phone and raised his voice. “Hey, KT, did you send those files to June yet?”
“Working on it now,” KT called.
Peter passed the message. “Also, why did Reed bother to write that threat letter if he was going to try to kill her later that day?”
“That’s actually a good question,” June said. “We tend to think thatdisturbed people are just crazy, but usually there’s an internal logic to their actions, even if we can’t see it.” In order to write a book about a Nebraska serial killer, June had studied up on abnormal psychology. She joked that it helped her deal with Peter, too. Now she said, “Did you have anything to eat?”
“Pizza’s coming.” He glanced at the time. “Should be any minute now.”
He heard a faint knock from the adjoining room. KT shouted, “Eleanor, dinner’s here!”
Through the opening between the rooms, he saw KT walk toward the door, hair wet, wearing leggings and an oversized Minnesota sweatshirt. To June, he said, “I’ll call you back,” and stuffed his phone in his pocket. Then he called out to KT, “Wait, let me get it.” He’d told Ellie to give the pizza guy his room number, but evidently she’d forgotten. He hauled himself off the bed, feeling the adrenaline hangover. He was still barefoot. “Katelyn, wait, please.”
“I’m just going to peek through the curtain.”
Then he heard the sound of breaking glass.
9
Peter didn’t understand. Had someone thrown a rock through the window? There was no sound of a gunshot. “KT? What’s going on?”
He ran for the connecting door and saw her on the floor in a boneless crumple. The back of her head was a red mess. Then rounds started coming through the door. Whoever was on the other side was trying to shoot out the lock. Where the hell was that cop?
And where was Ellie? She wasn’t behind the bed. Peter ran to the bathroom and shouldered open the door. Ellie was dressed in enormous gray sweatpants and a black tank top, leaning toward the mirror and applying lotion to her face. “What the hell? Listen, meatball—”
He grabbed her around the middle like a sack of potatoes and ran for the connecting passage, keeping his own body between her and the gunman, holding her close so she wouldn’t see her mother lying like a rag doll on the reddening carpet.
As Peter ran, the shooter kept firing at the lock. The door was splintered, but still holding because the bolt was bound up in the metal jamb. Then he must have kicked the door because it popped open hard, but bounced back from the end of the security chain.
Looking over his shoulder, Peter saw the end of a sound suppressor poke through the opening and push against the metal links. He wasn’t waiting for the outcome. Unless he changed the equation, he knew how this would end. He sprinted into the adjoining room, then closed and locked the door. The only weapon he had was the folding knife clipped to his pocket. Ellie was screaming at him and pounding him with her fists.
Still holding her, he crouched down and peeked through the window curtain. He couldn’t see the police cruiser. A small pizza delivery car idled in the parking lot’s aisle. They had to move.
At the connecting door behind him, rounds began to punch into the lock. Ellie was still screaming. He grabbed her shoulder and put a hand over her mouth. “Eleanor Grace Thorsen. Listen to me. Somebody else is after us. We need to run. Can you do it?”
He uncovered her mouth. She stared at him with Bambi eyes. “Did…? Is…?”
“Later.” He met her eyes. “Now we run. We’re heading for the pizza car. Got it?”
She looked down helplessly. “I’m barefoot.”
Peter was, too. There was a loudchunkas a round made hard contact with the deadbolt. “You’re tougher than you think,” he said. Hoping it was true. “I’ve got you. It’s only a few yards. But we have to go now and run fast. Ready?”
She nodded. She was already breathing hard. He put his finger to his lips, then quietly unlatched the outside door and took off the chain. He wanted to take his knife from his pocket and ambush their attacker when he came through the door, but that was no guaranteeEllie would leave the room alive. The last time he’d told someone to shelter in the bathtub, it hadn’t ended well.
He heard a thump. The gunman kicking at the ruined wood, trying to free the deadbolt. Peter pulled open the outside door and peeked. Nobody there. Either nobody had noticed the suppressed gunshots or they were too scared to do anything. The rain had started again, harder than before.
He took Ellie’s hand and pulled her outside, closed the door behind her to buy any time he could, then turned left on the covered walkway to make it harder for the shooter to spot them from the doorway. Two rooms down, the cruiser was no longer in its parking spot. The cop had already left.
Peter turned right and slipped between two parked cars. Rain pounded on their roofs. He kept pulling Ellie forward, speeding up. Time was not their friend. His bare feet were cold on the gritty wet pavement. His T-shirt was already soaked. Then they were out in the open parking lane, creeping toward the rear of the pizza car.
It was a tiny gray Nissan with a rooftop sign and a logo on the side. The driver’s door stood open, the engine was still running. It wasn’t until Peter made it past the back bumper that he saw the body on the blacktop. Murdered for a damn pizza, just to make the killer look harmless.
