Louisville, Kentucky
Richard Devin Basque was hunting when he heard the news about his sister.
For the last two months he had restrained himself from acting on his urges. He’d been out to meet women, yes, had even brought a few home with him—yes, he had. But ever since the night Patrick had shot him, Richard had not killed anyone, not eaten anyone, not even forced anyone to come back to his place against her will.
He’d heard about a magician who’d died from cobra venom while trying an elaborate escape in the Philippines last winter and it had made him curious. Consequently, he’d become interested in cobra venom—it was surprising how easy it was to acquire.
Monocled cobra venom and ten vials of antivenom.
Ordered online.
Who would have thought?
But he hadn’t used it on anyone yet. It would have made it impossible to eat them afterward.
It was true that he’d been bold in his visit to the Supermax facility in Colorado to help free a prisoner there, and he’d needed cosmetic work done on his teeth since Patrick had shattered some of them when they fought in April, but other than that he’d made sure he didn’t leave any tracks that Bowers or his team would be able to pick up.
Now he was at a roadside bar twenty minutes from the place he was staying.
He wasn’t sure if he was going to kill the woman he was sitting next to—the woman who’d told him her name was Tiffany—and he wasn’t sure if he was going to eat her.
He really didn’t know. Maybe it was time to end his streak.
Hunting.
Predator and prey.
He bought her another drink.
Richard was in his early forties but looked a decade younger, with stunning aquamarine eyes that he had learned to use to his advantage. He had some scars from an encounter with a young woman who’d lit his hair on fire, but they only served to make him look more rugged and stalwart. Picking up women had never been a problem for him. Sometimes he chose a disguise. Tonight he had not.
The place was veritably empty: only the bartender, Richard, and the woman.
Prey.
A television mounted on the wall behind the bartender was broadcasting some highlights from a baseball game earlier that night.
“And then . . .” Tiffany was telling Richard a story about how she got her apartment, “I was, like, are you serious? Seven hundred fifty dollars a month? That’s it? I’m telling you, you should see the place.”
“I’d like to.”
She laughed lightly at that. “Maybe I’ll let you come over and take a peek.” As she reached for her drink she brushed her arm against his. “That is, if you have a little time to kill.”
The irony of what she’d said was not lost on him. “Actually, I do have a little time to kill.”
Playing things right, he might have taken her hand in his, but that’s when it happened.
The sports show went to commercial and the bartender tapped at the remote, surfing through the channels: sitcom reruns, more commercials, news, another game somewhere, some sort of science fiction movie with exploding space ships and—
Hang on.
“Hey,” Richard said to the bartender. “Flip back a minute. Please.”
The guy, early twenties, disinterested, reversed order and paused at the game.
“Keep going.”
One more channel—the news.
“Yes. There.”
The bartender set down the remote and started absently drying some glasses that didn’t need to be dried.
CNN was covering a developing story about a woman who had been killed that afternoon in Charlotte, North Carolina.
But people get killed every day and don’t make it onto the news.
This woman, however, was special, memorable, newsworthy. Because of who she was related to.
She was the sister of one of the most wanted men in the country.
Apparently, she’d been missing for the past couple of days.
Richard didn’t watch the news much. He hadn’t heard. He just—
Her name was Corrine Davis.
His sister.
And they were saying that she was dead, but that couldn’t be right.
No, she couldn’t be dead. They had to have the wrong person. She was okay.
Corrine was fine.
But then, they were reporting that Kurt Mason had killed her, that he was the leading suspect in an explosion earlier in the week that’d taken the lives of five FBI agents, and that he was also the prime suspect in a related homicide of an agent at his home in the DC area.
Kurt Mason was the man Richard had helped escape from prison. Richard had posed as his lawyer and smuggled the Mikrosil in to him, gotten him the paper clip he’d used to pick the lock on his cuffs.
They’d been in touch twice since that day and Richard knew of Kurt’s plan for this weekend.
But nothing had ever come up regarding his sister.
She’s not dead. No. She can’t be.
“What are you . . . ?” Tiffany’s voice was stark and strained with concern. “Are you okay?”
He looked at her, then down to where she was staring, at his hand. He’d crushed the beer glass he was holding and the shards were digging into his palm. Beer had splattered across the bar and onto his pants and blood was seeping out around the jagged glass that was embedded in his flesh, but it all seemed so unreal. He hadn’t even noticed.
Beer. Blood. Glass in his palms.
She’s dead?
Not Corrine.
Patrick Bowers’s name came up on the broadcast. That was not entirely surprising, but it was informative.
Richard noticed the bartender peering at him with concern, but also with a hint of admiration. “I’ve never seen anyone . . . Dude. That’s sick.”
He handed over the towel he’d been using and Richard wrapped it around his hand.
Tiffany just stared at him. “Are you alright?”
“Yes.” His attention was on the television screen, and now he watched as his own face came up—the most recent photo the FBI had of him, taken in April after Patrick had apprehended him at his home an hour outside of Washington, DC. It was the photo that’d been taken right before he escaped from FBI custody.
Your sister is dead, Richard.
Corrine is dead.
“Randy?” The woman was waving her hand in front of his face, using the name he’d given her. “Are you sure you’re . . .”
But then her gaze shifted past him to the television screen.
His picture was still up there.
It took only a moment for recognition to light up in her eyes, and when the bartender saw her staring at the screen, he glanced up there too, then at Richard.
His hand snuck beneath the bar.
Richard stood.
“Hey, buddy,” the guy said. “Hang on a sec.”
Richard was turning toward the door when the bartender whipped out a shotgun that’d been hidden under the bar. “I said hang on. That’s you, isn’t it?”
Richard stopped and faced him. “You don’t want to do this.”
“There’s a reward, isn’t there?” He was pointing the barrel directly at Richard’s chest. Less than ten feet separated them. “I’m guessing there’s a reward.”
Tiffany was still seated but looked dismayed, confused, overwhelmed.
Afraid.
Richard unwrapped the towel and laid it on the bar. He pried a large piece of glass loose from his palm, licked the blood off it, then set it on the towel.
Both the bartender and the woman watched him in dead silence.
“I’m going to walk out of here now.” He pulled another piece of glass loose. “Don’t try to stop me.”
And another.
Licked the blood off them both.
“Call the police if you want,” he said, “but I would suggest you don’t try to follow me.”
When the bartender spoke he seemed intimidated, even though he was the one who was armed. “I have a gun.”
“Yes,” Richard said simply, then he turned to go.
Corrine is dead.
Mason did this.
The bartender called out once for him to come back, but his voice cracked as he did. Richard walked out the front door to his car.
Every FBI agent and police officer in the state of North Carolina was going to be looking for Kurt Mason and, even knowing what Richard did about him and about what he had planned, it wasn’t going to be easy to track him down before the authorities did.
Charlotte.
From here it would be at least a seven-hour drive.
No, Richard hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t eaten anyone since April.
But that was about to change.