Somewhere in Duluth, a killer had looked at Monica Hayes and seen something worth preserving.Worth posing.Worth treating with a terrible, tender care.
The question that haunted Isla wasn't whether they'd catch him.
It was whether they'd catch him before he found someone else who reminded him of what he'd lost.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The cold hit Amanda Pierce the moment she stepped out of Serenity Yoga Studio.
She'd stayed late, lingering in savasana while the other students rolled up their mats and filtered out into the February night.The instructor—a wispy woman named Greta who always smelled of sandalwood—had given her a knowing smile as Amanda finally rose from the floor.
"Sometimes we need a few extra minutes," Greta had said."The body knows what it needs."
What Amanda's body needed, apparently, was to delay walking into the parking lot at seven o'clock on a Monday evening when the sun had been down for hours and the temperature had dropped into single digits.
She pulled her parka tighter and started across the lot toward her Subaru, her yoga mat tucked under one arm, her keys already in her gloved hand.The lot was poorly lit—just two sodium lamps casting pools of orange light that left most of the asphalt in shadow.Her car was at the far end, near the strip of trees that separated the studio from a shuttered hardware store.
That's when she saw him.
A man, standing near the tree line.Not moving, not walking toward a car, just...standing there.His face was lost in shadow, but she could see the bulk of him—broad shoulders, heavy coat, hands in his pockets.He was maybe fifty feet away, positioned at the edge of the light where the darkness began.
And he was looking at her.
Amanda's heart kicked up a notch, but she forced herself to keep walking at the same pace.Don't be paranoid, she told herself.He's probably just waiting for someone.Probably stepped out for a cigarette.People stand in parking lots all the time.
But she didn't look at him.Some instinct, ancient and female, told her not to make eye contact, not to acknowledge that she'd noticed him at all.Keep your head down.Keep moving.Get to the car.
Her boots crunched on the thin layer of ice that had formed over the pavement.The sound seemed too loud in the quiet night, each footstep announcing her position like a beacon.Twenty feet to her car.Fifteen.
She risked a glance in her peripheral vision.He was still there.Still watching.
Ten feet.Five.
Amanda pressed the unlock button on her fob, heard the comforting chirp of the Subaru responding.She yanked open the door, threw her yoga mat into the passenger seat, and slid behind the wheel in one fluid motion.The locks engaged automatically the moment she pulled the door shut, and she let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
You're fine, she told herself, jamming the key into the ignition.You're fine.He was just some guy.This is Duluth, not Detroit.
But her hands were shaking as she started the engine, and she didn't look toward the tree line as she backed out of the space and pointed the car toward the exit.
The drive home was only six minutes—she'd timed it once, back when she first started taking the Monday evening class.Six minutes through quiet residential streets, past houses with their windows glowing warm against the February dark.Amanda kept her eyes on the road, her hands tight on the wheel, her breath gradually slowing as the distance between her and that shadowed figure grew.
By the time she turned onto her street, she was already feeling foolish.The man in the parking lot had probably been exactly what he appeared to be—someone waiting for a ride, or taking a break from the cold inside the coffee shop next door.She'd let her imagination get the better of her, let the dark and the cold turn an ordinary stranger into something sinister.
Her house sat in the middle of the block, a modest Cape Cod with blue shutters and a detached garage.Amanda pulled into the driveway and pressed the button on her visor.The garage door groaned upward, spilling light across the snow-covered lawn.She pulled inside, killed the engine, and watched in the rearview mirror as the door descended behind her, sealing her safely inside.
Home, she thought, letting her shoulders drop from where they'd been hunched around her ears.Safe.
She gathered her yoga mat and her purse, opened the car door, and stepped out into the garage.The space smelled of motor oil and the faint mustiness of cardboard boxes she'd been meaning to sort through for months.The overhead light flickered—she'd been meaning to replace that bulb, too—casting the concrete floor in stuttering shadows.
Amanda was reaching for the door that led into her kitchen when the hands closed around her throat.
They came from behind—strong hands, impossibly strong, wrapping around her neck before she could process what was happening.Her yoga mat fell to the floor.Her purse followed.She tried to scream but the pressure on her windpipe turned the sound into a thin wheeze, barely audible even to her own ears.
The overhead light flickered again, and in the stuttering illumination she caught a glimpse of a man's arms—dark sleeves, work-worn hands.She clawed at them, her gloves making her fingers clumsy and useless, her nails finding no purchase against the fabric of his jacket.
No, she thought, or tried to think—her thoughts were fragmenting, scattering like startled birds.No, no, no—
She kicked backward, her boot connecting with something solid, but the grip on her throat only tightened.Black spots bloomed at the edges of her vision.The garage spun around her—the boxes, the tools hanging on the pegboard wall, the concrete floor rushing up to meet her as her knees buckled.
