Chapter 51
"The police will findus tomorrow morning," Sarah told Tommy, her voice carrying the practiced warmth of a mother reading a bedtime story. She knelt in the center of the room, uncapping a piece of chalk with deliberate care. "They'll find you first, right here." She drew a child-sized outline on the wooden floor, her movements precise and almost tender. "Poor Tommy, killed by the deranged FBI agent who'd been stalking his mother for months. Such a tragedy." Her tone conveyed none of the horror her words described, as if discussing a minor inconvenience rather than the murder of a child—her child.
From my hidden position in the hallway, I watched Sarah rise smoothly from her kneeling position, the gun held casually at her side as if it were nothing more threatening than a TV remote. Tommy's eyes followed her movement, his small chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow breaths.
"After they find you," Sarah continued, moving to another spot near the fireplace, "they'll find me." She began drawing a second outline, larger this time. "Right here, executed by the same woman who killed poor Richard Collins, Alice Mercer, and that nasty Wells woman." She glanced up at Tommy with a smile that belonged on aPTA volunteer, not a woman mapping out a double murder. "And do you know what the best part is, sweetie?"
Tommy shook his head, his lower lip trembling.
"The best part is that evil Eva Rae will be found right there." She gestured toward the cabin's front door, marking a third chalk outline. "She'll have my—I mean her gun in her hand, having turned it on herself when she realized what she'd done. It's the perfect ending to our story."
My fingers tightened involuntarily against the wall as Sarah's plan unfolded before me. The precision of her staging—the positions, the narrative she was creating—revealed a mind that had studied crime scene analysis extensively—my crime scene analysis. She'd read my books and my case files, and learned how I interpreted physical evidence. Now she was using that knowledge to create the perfect frame, right down to the spatial relationships between bodies that would suggest a specific sequence of events to investigators.
"See these marks?" Sarah set down the chalk and picked up a small spray bottle. "This is for the blood spatter. It has to be just right." She spritzed liquid in an arc that caught the firelight—water now, but intended to show where real blood would land. "I studied Eva Rae's Lakeside Killer case very carefully. She testified about blood spatter patterns for three days during that trial."
She returned to Tommy, crouching before him with the gun dangling between her knees. "The medical examiner will determine that you were killed instantly—a single shot to the temple." She raised the gun, pressing the cold metal barrel against Tommy's head. "You won't feel a thing, I promise."
Tommy jerked away from the touch, a broken sob escaping his lips. "Please, Mom. Please, don't do this."
"Shhh." Sarah stroked his hair with her free hand. "I'm not your mom anymore, remember? Today I'm Eva Rae Thomas, troubled FBI agent, unable to distinguish between her cases and reality." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "It's method acting, Tommy. I have to become her completely."
I shifted my weight, calculating distances and angles. Sarahstood approximately twelve feet from my position, the gun alternating between casual gestures and deliberate threats to Tommy. The main room offered little cover—a coffee table, an armchair, and the wooden chair to which Tommy was secured. If I rushed her, she'd have time to swing the gun toward me or, worse, toward Tommy. If I announced myself from a distance, I'd give her time to take Tommy hostage. She was expecting me, yes, but not so soon. She thought there was still time. Tommy had to go first, then me as I came through the door, and then she’d kill herself if she ever followed through with the last part. I had a feeling she was going to hurt herself instead to make it look like I shot her and Tommy. But I wasn’t going to wait around to see if I was right. I had a small advantage now, a very small one.
But there were no perfect options—just varying degrees of risk.
Tommy's eyes darted around the room, searching for escape or help. For a moment, I thought he might have sensed my presence, but his gaze moved past the hallway entrance without pausing.
"Did you know she has four children and a granddaughter?" Sarah's tone shifted again, envy threading through the forced pleasantness. "A perfect little family. And a partner who looks at her like she's the center of the universe." She picked up a framed photograph—one I recognized with a jolt as having been stolen from my home. My family. "She didn't deserve any of it. I tried to be her friend. Tried writing to her, email after email, message after message on Facebook, but she never answered. I even tried calling her, but she rejected me. Can you believe that? Me?"
I swallowed hard. I received thousands of emails and messages every month and didn’t have time to answer them all. People from all over wanted to know about profiling stuff, and I couldn’t reply to all of them. I tried to do as many as I could, but it was simply too much. I didn’t remember the call, but I might have thought it was spam if I didn’t know the number.
I now realized this was why she was so mad at me. Once again, she had felt rejected by someone who was her obsession.
The gun waved carelessly as Sarah paced, her movements becoming less controlled, more erratic. "But I fixed that. I took it allaway from her, piece by piece. Her reputation. Her freedom. And now, her future." She smiled at Tommy with genuine warmth that somehow chilled me more than her anger. "And you helped me, sweetheart. My perfect little helper."
Tommy strained against his restraints, the rope cutting into his wrists as he struggled. "I want to go home," he whimpered. “Please, Mommy. Let me go home.”
"This is our home now," Sarah replied firmly. "Our final home." She checked her watch—an expensive men's model that looked out of place on her slender wrist. Matt's watch, I realized with a surge of anger. He hadn’t been able to find it for months. Another trophy stolen from my life.
I shifted position for a better view. The wound had reopened at some point during my approach to the cabin, blood seeping through my makeshift bandage to stain my shirt. The pain created a red haze at the edges of my vision that I pushed aside through practiced compartmentalization. Pain was information, not an obstacle. Not when Tommy's life hung in the balance.
Sarah returned to Tommy's side, the gun trailing along his cheek in a grotesque caress. "Just a little longer now. I need to finish setting the stage." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I need it to be perfect. She deserves a perfect ending."
I weighed my options one final time, recognizing that each passing moment increased the risk to Tommy. Sarah's behavior was becoming more unpredictable, and the transitions between her methodical planning and emotional outbursts were coming more rapidly. The window for relatively safe intervention was closing.
I could wait for Matt and Juan, but their arrival might trigger Sarah's endgame immediately. I could attempt to create a distraction, but in the confined space of the cabin, that carried its own risks. Every option carried the possibility of catastrophic failure.
But doing nothing guaranteed it.
Decision made, I eased away from the wall. I needed her focused on me, not Tommy. I needed her obsession to override her murder plan, even briefly.
I took a steadying breath and stepped from the shadowedhallway into the main room, keeping my hands visible at my sides. Sarah's back was to me as she adjusted Tommy's position in the chair, murmuring something about sight lines and body positioning.
"That's not how this story ends, Sarah," I said, my voice steady and clear in the cabin's close air.
Sarah froze, her spine stiffening at the sound of my voice. Tommy's eyes widened, hope and terror warring in his expression as he looked past his captor to where I stood.
The game had changed. Sarah's carefully orchestrated murder scene had just acquired an unplanned element—the real Eva Rae Thomas, not the fiction she'd created in her fractured mind, had made her entrance too early.
