Fatigue zaps through me, taking my need to convince him with it. “I don’t have the energy to explain. Believe me or don’t. Take it or leave it. It’s all I’ve got.”
As much as his logic begs him to hold out against me, his expression is more resigned than angry. He’s caving with every encounter. The allure plays a role, sure. But the allure isn’t the only thing drawing him to me. There are deeper things forming there now—respect, admiration, feelings. They tell him I am worth listening to, even when everything else says he shouldn’t.
“Why do you care so much?” He looks around the empty parking lot as if he’ll find the answer there. “No one else is out here at oneA.M. risking their ass.”
I sniff. The cold has stiffened the tip of my nose and it tingles. “If I tell you, you won’t believe me.”
“Try me,” he dares.
“Not here.”
He pulls a hand free and grabs my elbow with it, leading me to his truck. When we get to it, he opens the passenger door.
“Where are we going?” I ask him.
“Where do you want to go?”
I stare into his eyes until my own burn and tear, until the reticence leaves me like a virus vacating the body, until I am as certain of my answer as I am his. “Your place.”
IT’S TIME FORthe truth. As much as I can reasonably give. Here, in his space, with the rest of the world shut out, I feel it pressing against my teeth. I cannot continue to hold so much back. Not when we are alone, when the tender shape of him lies against me, when those eyes brush against my heart.
“I was married before I came here,” I tell him as I walk slowly around his living room, scanning the varnished cypress wall clock, the brass brads on the arm of the suede sofa, the places we made love. I turn and sit down across from him, perched on the edge of an armchair. “I told you that already.”
“You did,” he agrees. “You implied it.”
I smile, but it skates off my face like snow on glass. “He wasn’t a kind man.”
“You implied that, too,” he tells me, leaning forward on his sofa, elbows to knees.
“Did you know that it only takes ten seconds of cutting off someone’s airway to cause unconsciousness? That fifteen seconds can cause a stroke and thirty, cardiac arrest? Within minutes a person can die. But even if they don’t, lasting damage—fatal damage even—can be done. Permanent damage to the brain—vision changes, seizures, memory loss, tears in the arteries—these are just a few of the side effects someone might experience for years to come after one, seconds-long event. And even with all of that, there are rarely glaring signs of injury. Bruising can be minimal, visible only under the skin, or take days to show up.” I level my gaze on him, green on gray, and wait for a response.
“We learn some of this when we go into law enforcement,” he says quietly. “Those aren’t facts the average person is aware of though. How do you—”
“Seven hundred,” I say, cutting off his question. “Domestic violence victims who have been strangled areseven hundred timesmore likely to be killed by their abuser.”
He’s quiet, but his brows raise in the middle, giving a sad slant to his eyes. His hands rub together slowly because he doesn’t know where to put the energy cresting inside him, the anger he feels, the useless desire to protect when it’s already too late.
“It’s funny, because I remember when I first read that statistic. I was in a coffee shop with Wi-Fi and a couple of free-for-use laptops zip-tied to a hickory-wood bar. I don’t know what possessed me to typestrangulationinto the search engine. Maybe the burn in my throat from the night before, or that one tiny vessel that ruptured in my eye. But I didn’t actually need a website to know that Henry would kill me, that he wanted to. He’d already made that clear so many times before.”
“Jesus.” Regis rubs his hands over his face, tries to absorb what he’s hearing.
“He’s brilliant, my husband,” I tell him. “Really. I’m not just saying that. He’s tactical. He’ll think of things you never will. Ithink that’s what drew him to me in the beginning—my eye for detail. He liked that I noticed. He didn’t want his particular brand of genius to go unrecognized. It’s hard when you specialize in destruction because so often you must operate in the shadows. I was his shadow for two years. He practiced on me. It made him feel strong, omnipotent. But my time was running short.”
“How did you break free?” he asks, barely able to speak.
“I took a leap of faith, you could say.” I look down at my hands, knotted in my lap. “And now I’m the one who operates in the shadows. You asked why I care so much about the Saranac Strangler. I care because I know him. HeisHenry. He is every man who needed to squash the life in a woman in order to feel like a man. I left Henry behind—he is my past—and I came here to start again. But Henry will never stop being Henry. Another woman will take my place. She will suffer and she will pay for my escape. I can’t go back and bring Henry to justice; there is no justice for men like him. But I can stop this man, this killer, because I understand him in a way you never will. I am that woman you found on the pavement behind the Drunken Moose. And the one along the trail. And the countless others men like this have left in their wake of self-discovery. And I have the power to make sure there are no more after me. I intend to use it.”
He doesn’t fully understand what I’m referring to. My power, he likely thinks, is akin to parlor tricks, a keen eye for the little things, honed by years of interior design experience and the bad fortune of being married to an exacting, inhuman man. He doesn’t know a huntress lives within me, a predator born of untold magic and unspeakable violence, who must kill or die. He doesn’t know that when I say I can stop the Saranac Strangler, I don’t mean it euphemistically, but literally. That I will take him in hand, lips to lips, and watch him as he convulses, the existence draining out of him, sinking into the forest floor.
But he doesn’t need to. He only needs to know that I have ample reason to be interested in this case. That I am here to help.
Regis stands and moves toward me slowly, kneeling at my feet.He looks up into my eyes as he kisses one knee and then the other, taking my hands in his, placing the palms to his lips. “I will never hurt you,” he tells me.
And I know it’s true. I feel it in him like a nougat center, how soft he is for me. My eyes flood with tears. “What about Ed?”
He looks at me, the fear he once displayed abandoned. “What about Ed? Ed is not here. But you are. And I am. What happens out there, it can’t touch us in here. In here, there is no past, no future. In here, we’re no one.”
He leans toward me, kisses me slowly, waits for me to unzip the pullover he is wearing, slip it over his head. Piece by piece, we shed our identities until we are nothing but skin and bones and heat. We press our bodies together like pages in a book, a story unfolding line by line, each in the telling of the other. And when we are done, we lie in the dark a long, fragile while, listening to our breathing, praying the night will never end. Because out there we are hunters, and a killer is waiting, hoping we will make a vital mistake.
