“AND THEN THE article came out,” I almost screamed at him. “They identified Abbie Henshaw a month before they captured you. Why? What—”
“You’re still not listening, are you?” Jasper said.
“How did they stop you?” I needed to get him talking. So I played to his ego. “You were perfect. An expert. Like you said: patience, practice, purpose. Was it evidence from that case?”
But that made no sense. They had linked the two cases four years before that. If they’d learned anything useful, they would have caught him long before. Identifying Abbie Henshaw should not have mattered.
“Jasper! What happened? How did they get you? How did they find that woman in your cabin?”
“Cabin?”
“Yes! Cabin!”
“Passion leads to mistakes,” he said, pausing while he continued to laugh softly. Then his voice expanded with anger. “And they never found that woman. I told them where she was.”
My heart missed a beat. “What?”
“They would have never found her. And she would have died of dehydration. I could never let that happen.”
“Wait! You told them where she was?”
“Of course.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I failed. I gave in to the hunger, just like that first night after my father’s death. I thought I could control it. I thought I was in control. I got careless, and they caught me.”
I felt so light-headed. None of what he said made sense. I ignored the glaring irony of it. That he’d saved Barbara Yost from certain death. Instead, the high coursed through my veins. I had been right. I’d known something didn’t add up.
“If you had to tell them where she was, then they didn’t find you at the cabin. And they didn’t find her first.”
“Of course they didn’t,” he said, offended. “No one was going to find that cabin unless I showed them where it was. I’m about to hang up, Theodore. I told you, after the first … one, I never made a mistake. I planned everything. I was a hundred steps ahead of them. I had them focusing on all the wrong things. Not just the flower. I planted DNA. I wore oversized shoes. I was astronomically better at their jobs than they were. Always.”
“But they captured you.”
The line went silent. I could not even hear the sound of his breathing.
“Jasper? Are you there?”
“They didn’t do anything,” he said, pronouncing each syllable like it burned his mouth.
His words came back. The ending of his little story.
“It was a Miracle!”
“Good-bye, Theodore. I’ll see you soon.”
The line went dead. My fingers gripped the phone so tightly that I thought it might snap in two.
“Jasper!”
But there was nothing. Though I didn’t know it at the time, soon we would stand face-to-face, and I’d feel the Halo Killer’s fingers around my throat.