Her voice was hoarse when the operator picked up.
“This is Special Agent Kate Valentine,” she said.“Badge 0914-BQ.I need immediate local deployment to an address in Lake Forest.Possible imminent threat to life.I need units there now.”
She pressed her palm hard over her eyes, willing the pounding in her skull to stop.
Please, she thought.
Please let me not be too late.
*
The hire car skimmed along the two-lane road like an afterthought, a red speck flicked against the soft sprawl of northern Illinois.Even at seventy miles an hour, the landscape seemed to unspool in slow motion around her: wide, rolling fields that hadn’t yet surrendered their last pockets of spring green, barn roofs sun-bleached to a pewter sheen, the early summer haze trembling just above the grass.Wind curled over the car’s hood, warm as breath, and surged through the half-open window, carrying hints of lilac and cut hay.
Late May here was lush in a way Kate had forgotten.Portland’s springs were wet and stubborn; Maine’s, more generally, tended to be thin and hesitant, a season more suggestion than reality.But Illinois—this part of it, at least—was generous, almost as theatrical in its greening as it was in its apocalyptic winters.
Big-bellied oaks anchored the fields.White fences split the meadows like chalk lines on a teacher’s blackboard.The sky stretched so broadly you could imagine falling upward into it.
For a moment—just one heartbeat—the scene almost seduced her.Pulled her toward nostalgia.A trick.A trap.
She tightened her grip on the wheel until the faux-leather creaked.
Don’t romanticize it,she told herself.Don’t you dare.
The GPS screen glowed mutely beside her, its route a simple arterial line tracing north toward Lake County.Toward Forest Lake.Toward the place she had once called home but had never truly reclaimed, not even in memory.Not even in nightmares.
Her phone, face-down in the cupholder, buzzed again—its frantic, insect-wing vibration muffled against the rubber lining.The screen flashed once against the reflected sunlight.She didn’t have to look to know the name.
Marcus.
Before that: Winters.
Before that: Marcus again.
Before that: her mother.
She didn’t check any of them.Couldn’t.The thread of thought tugging her forward would snap the moment she allowed another voice into the car.
She’d been through this before—this spiraling gravitational pull toward the next act in Cox’s grotesque gospel.The sense of being part of something she neither endorsed nor understood, as if simply by having witnessed him, she was now tied to the spreading shadow of his work.
Every other Commandment killing has gone the same way.
That was the problem.The pattern exacted its own hunger.Every time she had tried to pretend the echoes of Cox’s theology were fading, the world found a way to prove her wrong.And now, after months of believing that chapter was closed, here came the tremor again.A note in the dark.A resonance.
Every time, a two-hander.A confrontation involving the killer and me.
But she had to know if that was truethistime. That’s why, all the way here, from the mad rush to the airport to the awful, twitching, anxious flight and the agonizing wait at the Hertz desk and beyond, her thoughts had been stuck in the same repeating cycle.
This is crazy.Why are you doing this?I’m doing this because I have to know.Is he still playing with me?Still making it all about me, about my past?Am I meant to find the body?Or am I the body?Is that why the crow was looking out at me in the last drawing?Ok, if I’m in such danger, why the hell am I driving straight towards it?Why am I giving him the reaction he wants?Because I’m crazy.Yes, this is crazy, Kate.Why are you doingthis?
On and on, round and round, across the sky, along the miles.Without relief.She felt, at times, as if she’d lost her will. She wasn’t a person, a woman, an FBI agent, Kate Valentine.She was an object, inanimate, a tin-tack being drawn towards a magnet.She had no choice.No power to resist.
She accelerated a little—as if trying to demonstrate that she had any scrap of free will.The highway narrowed as she left Route 41 and slid onto the smaller county road that meandered toward Forest Lake.Traffic thinned until the world felt almost private: a handful of long-haul trucks rumbling south, a pair of cyclists drafting each other along the shoulder, a battered pickup loaded with mulch and potted plants.Ordinary life, oblivious and benign.
But the closer she drew to Lake Forest, the more the atmosphere changed.Wealth here wasn’t flashy or eager to be noticed; it was old, settled, confident, the kind that believed itself inevitable.Houses were set back from the road behind stone walls or hedges clipped into rectangles so strict they looked like topiary soldiers.Driveways wound like private lanes toward mansions obscured by trees.Every mailbox seemed both overbuilt and understated—no chrome, no whimsy, just gravitas and good taste.
She hadn’t grown up in one of the mansions.But neither had she lived in anything like poverty.Her parents’ house—Mulberries, though she’d never used the name except ironically—had been one of the older properties built back when Lake Forest was little more than an outpost.A clapboard Victorian painted a thoughtful shade of cream, with a porch that wrapped around like an embrace.Her father had loved that house.Her mother had made it liveable.
Kate had run from it at eighteen.Not in a dramatic way.Just… a time-to-go way.Too big for her old bedroom, the gymnastics rosettes on the corkboard.
