I freak out. Thrashing, kicking, arching my back, grunting the word no—doing all the things I was too afraid to do fourteen years ago. But I feel as if I’m three years old again.
Stephen sets me down in a hurry. I’m flat on my back on the ground, a rock digging painfully into my spine. But underneath me there’s dirt, not snow.
“Olivia? Are you all right? Can you hear me?”
He kneels over me, running his fingertips over my scalp, his fingers snagging in my hair. He looks scared.
I roll onto my side and throw up. In my mind, I again see the scarlet blood spotting the snow, feel the rough fabric of a coat scraping my cheek, hear the voice muttering above me. My stomach convulses again, but all that comes out is strings of bitter yellow bile.
“What just happened?” I say, more to myself than to him.
“I think you just had a grand mal seizure. All of a sudden you went stiff, and then your arms and legs started jerking. I’m just lucky I was able to set you down before I dropped you.”
I push myself up to my elbows and then sit up.
He presses his lips together. “Your eyes were moving, but they were unfocused. Have you ever had a seizure before?”
I’m not going to tell him it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. “No, sir—I mean, Stephen.”
His mouth twists as he regards me. “I can’t feel any injuries to your skull, but you must have hit your head when you fell. We need to get you to the hospital ASAP.” He pronounces it ay-sap, and he’s already gathering me back up, getting to his feet with a grunt. He starts walking much faster than he did before, fast enough that I’m bouncing against his torso.
“I’m already feeling better,” I tell him, pushing back my memories. “I don’t think anything’s really wrong. It was probably just, like, shock. From finding that bone.”
“Right now I don’t think it’s up to you or me to decide what’s wrong with you,” he says as we move into the open. “I’ll feel a lot better after you’ve had an MRI or a CT scan or something.”
Past his shoulder I see my car, with his cop car parked right behind. “I’m pretty sure I can drive.” The Mazda is the most valuable thing I own. I don’t want to leave it here to be stolen or vandalized.
“No way.” Stephen half rests me on the hood of his car while he digs for his keys.
“It’s not like my ankle’s broken. It’s just I can’t put my full weight on my foot, that’s all. My car’s an automatic, so I don’t even need my left foot. And I promise”—mentally, I cross my fingers—“that I’ll drive straight to the hospital.” I’m pretty sure it’s a $250 copay for an emergency-room visit. Probably a bunch more if it involves a CT scan or an MRI.
“And I would be liable if you ended up plowing through a light because your foot decided not to cooperate or you had another seizure. I can see the headlines now. ‘Police chief abandons injured girl in woods.’” He opens the door to the back of the police car and plops me down on the hard seat. I hiss a little as my ankle brushes against him. “See if you can put your leg up and still get a seat belt on.”
I turn sideways. The seats are formed with weird dips that I realize are shaped like the prisoners who must normally ride back here. There are indentations for their butts and shoulders and heads. But I manage to stretch out my leg and still buckle up as Stephen watches, shaking out his arms and massaging his biceps. He no longer seems like the rigid cop who would never color outside the lines. His fear for me has softened him, made him more a person than a cop.
Maybe there’s a way I can use that. “So what do you think really happened with Naomi and her boyfriend?” I ask after he gets in the car and pulls out onto the road. The police radio has been turned down, but little voices drift back to me. “Do you think it was Benjy?”
“We’ll interview him, sure, but in my opinion, that guy’s just mentally ill. He’s not a killer. You have to feel sorry for him. He was going places, but then something that wasn’t his fault sent him off the rails. Yesterday, everyone was so busy pointing fingers, but there’s a strong possibility it was actually a serial killer.” We’re already on the main road.
“A serial killer?”
“About a year after your parents died, a girl in Grants Pass was murdered. Stabbed to death. She had long dark hair, just like Naomi’s. Sometimes the first crime in a series is worked as a single case and then closed, and no one realizes it’s related until years later.”
He’s talking about Angie Paginini. “Wouldn’t there be more than just one or two girls if it was a serial killer?”
“Not if the killer kept moving.” Stephen’s hair is cut so close I can see the little white dots of his scalp between the bristles. His eyes never leave the road. “If you kill someone in one state and then kill someone else in a different state, chances are pretty good no one will ever put the two murders together, especially if you don’t leave evidence like shell casings or fingerprints or DNA behind.”
“Jason’s a trucker,” I say. “That means he’s always moving on.” I decide not to mention what I know about the FBI task force.
“Jason Collins?” He shakes his head and makes a sound like a laugh. “I don’t think so.”
“He said some weird stuff to me last night. About how people are tapping his phones. And about how you’re watching him.”
In the rearview mirror, I see Stephen’s eyes widen. “Who? Did he mean me? That I’m watching him?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm.” He looks thoughtful. “Of course, we’re going to be reinterviewing Jason along with everyone else who was a friend of Naomi or Terry. We’re following up all possible leads. But my money’s still on it being a stranger.”
“But why? Why would someone just randomly kill people?” My stomach clenches. How can you ever let down your guard if there are monsters walking around who look like people?
He sighs. “Some people enjoy killing. They don’t have any more reason than that. Thankfully, it’s a very small percentage of the population.”
“But why kill a couple?” I shift on the hard seat. “Don’t serial killers usually kill either all men or all women?”
“It could be he killed Naomi and then killed Terry when he realized she wasn’t alone. And some killers are jealous of people who are capable of forming relationships, so they’ll target couples.”
Like the couple on the Northern California beach that Duncan told me about. “But whoever killed her and that Terry guy took their car,” I protest. “And Naomi’s kid.”
“Boy, you really have been reading up on it.” Even though he doesn’t have his lights or sirens on, Stephen is still driving about ten miles an hour over the speed limit, his hands tight on the steering wheel. I wish I could reassure him about my “seizure” without telling him the truth. “Anyway, the two still might be related. He didn’t keep the truck. Maybe he only took it so he could easily transport the kid.”
“But why didn’t this guy just kill the kid?”
He looks pained. “Even a serial killer might balk at killing a toddler.”
I realize that it’s more than that they simply couldn’t bring themselves to kill a little kid. They still could have left me there in the cold woods with the bodies of my parents. They could have walked away and let chance decide whether I died from exposure or whether some other person venturing out in the wintry forest found me in time.
But instead they took me somewhere safe, a place where they knew I would be found. And then they let me go.