She did a cursory check of the room with her flashlight but saw no other person nearby. Picking her way around the folded chairs on the floor, she went to where Barnes had been strung up from a wooden rafter with ropes and a metal hook. “Barnes,” she said in a loud whisper. “It’s Annalisa Vega. Are you okay?”
His eyelids fluttered open, and she saw his pupils were huge and dark, unfocused. She dragged one of the chairs over and stood on it next to him. She had to temporarily holster her gun and put aside the flashlight to fish out the army knife she carried in her pocket. She used it to cut through the rope hanging Barnes, at which point he crashed to the floor. Quickly swapping the knife for the gun again, she knelt next to him as he began to stir. She pulled the tape from his mouth and felt his breath on her hand. “Wake up,” she urged, keeping one eye on the double doors as she tugged loose the rest of his binding. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Detective Vega.” He gave her a weak smile. “You came.”
“We’re getting out of here,” she said with grim determination.
“I can’t. I don’t have my chair. You go.”
“I’m not leaving you.” She shifted so he could grab hold of her shoulders. “Get up. Quick.”
He looped his arms around her neck and she used all of her strength to pull herself and his deadweight up from the floor. “You’re a hero,” he murmured from behind her.
“Not unless we make it.” She started for the door. “Do you know where he is?”
“I heard him upstairs a while ago. Then I passed out.”
A fierce wind came through the towers, making the building shudder. Annalisa halted to listen at the double doors. He could be hiding anywhere, ready to ambush them. She pushed through the doors and cast the flashlight beam on ahead of them. Debris littered the floor. The doorways provided ample places to lie in wait, if he should choose. She pressed onward gingerly, trying to retrace the path she’d taken to find Barnes. Barnes lay heavy on her back, his breathing unsteady. “Can you find the exit?” he asked.
“I think it’s this way,” she whispered to him, but she wasn’t sure. Had she passed the green-tiled bathroom with the broken toilet?
“It feels so far.”
“We’re going to make it.” She picked her way through the fallen tiles and the piles of rotting paper. Periodically, she had to pause to adjust her weight so Barnes didn’t slide off.
“You’re very strong,” he said admiringly. “But also light on your feet. Like a cat.”
“Mmm,” she replied, trying to concentrate on the next turn. She didn’t know whether to go right or left. Light on your feet like a cat. His words penetrated her fog and gave her a chilled, eerie feeling. She remembered them from the killer’s letter, the one to her that had not been made public yet. She halted, breathing hard, and the flashlight beam slipped down, catching his feet at her sides and pooling on the floor in front of them. “What did you just say?”
“You’re strong,” he repeated. “Stronger than you look.”
She glanced at his sneakers. The sides had the same mud on them that hers did, from the muck outside. The tips were worn smooth from use. Shoes, Nick had said. She recalled him in Barnes’s apartment, dropping an old worn-out pair of sneakers to the floor of the closet. A man who couldn’t walk would not wear out his shoes. Horror shot through her as she realized she wasn’t looking for the killer; she was carrying him on her back.
He must have felt the tension in her spine. “Are we not getting out of here?”
“Just—a minute. I need a rest.” She would set him down and go for the gun at her back. Just as she prepared to let go, his hold tightened around her neck.
“Ah,” he said, his voice tinged with regret. “The game is over, then.” His voice turned into a familiar rasp as she started to choke. “I knew you would come.”
The pressure on her windpipe took her breath away, and her head started to swim. She’d be unconscious in seconds if she didn’t get him off of her. She crouched lower and used his unbalanced weight to flip him over her head. He dragged her with him and they landed with a painful crash on the floor. Her flashlight skittered away down the hall and hit the wall with a thunk, winking out as it did so and plunging them into total darkness. His hold on her loosened enough for her to wrest free. She kicked at him with her feet as he tried to grab her again and connected with his ribs. Frantically, she scrambled away and reached around for her gun.
He got up and ran. She fired several shots in the direction of his footsteps. The flash illuminated his retreating figure, but she missed hitting him. He disappeared down one of the hallways and out of sight. Annalisa rose shakily to her feet and patted her pockets. He’d lifted her car keys and her cell phone. She felt around until she found the flashlight, which turned on again when she twisted it back together. She shone it all around, looking for an exit. She tried kicking at the nearest door, but it was locked and of course nailed shut with boards from the other side.
Cautiously, she moved against the wall, her ears cocked for any sound from Barnes. He had ropes and other weapons hidden somewhere. He’d bragged of an escape hatch, and at that moment, she prayed he took it. Now he had a name and face, so he wouldn’t get far if she got the chance to report him. If. She turned the corner and found a staircase. She heard shuffling farther down the hall in the direction she’d been headed and decided the stairs looked like a better option. The higher-level windows were not all boarded, she recalled, and some of them connected with fire escapes. He would not be looking for her up there.
She turned with her shoulder against the wall and crept up the stairs. Paint chips fell like rain around her. The gun was sweaty in her hand. Just find an exit, she told herself. Find an exit and get the hell out of here. The asylum sat just three-quarters of a mile from the main road; she could reach it easily on foot if she could just get out of the building. She went up to the top floor to put as much distance between herself and Barnes as possible. The stifling heat had collected at the top, but the few unboarded windows provided slanting moonlight to the hall. She passed bird skeletons, empty bedrooms with wire frames left for beds. Ghosts of humans past hung on the walls in magazine clippings and personal photographs. She tried several of the windows but couldn’t make them budge. Peering out, she saw no sign of a fire escape from this vantage point, so she continued down a different hall.
She didn’t hear him coming. She heard only the gunshot as the bullet blew by her. She ducked into the nearest doorway and returned fire twice. Heart pounding, she listened for his footsteps. Nothing. She turned off her flashlight and ran down the hall toward a room that had a comparatively large amount of moonlight spilling out of it. Lots of light meant a large window.
She turned the corner into the room and gasped. A noose hung from the ceiling. She saw more rope on the floor. She heard footsteps coming down the hall and didn’t have time to search further. She shot out the window panes, taking the rotted wood frame with them. As Barnes entered the room, she fired at him, forcing his retreat. She scrambled out the window, slicing her arm on the broken glass as she did so but not slowing down. She found herself six stories high, on a narrow ledge that connected with one of the high peaks. With no choice, she edged along it and climbed over the pointed tower. There was a relatively flat section in the middle part dominated by skylights. She had no alternative but to walk over them and pray they held. She carefully hurried over them and checked the roofline. She was on the other side of the steep towers now, which offered some protection, but she could no longer see the sides of the hospital to know where the fire escapes were located.
“There’s nowhere for you to go,” Barnes called to her from a distant part of the roof. She saw him standing back at the point where she had emerged from the windows. He had a gun in one hand and a coil of rope in the other.
She braced herself behind one of the towers. Blood dripped from her right arm and landed on her shoes. “You’re under arrest, you son of a bitch!”
He laughed. His voice sounded closer. “By whose order? Yours?”
She came around and fired almost blindly in the direction of his voice before ducking back into hiding. When she peeked again, she saw he was still standing. She eased backward, out of his line of sight, putting more space between them. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he called.
She edged as far as she dared to peer down off the side of the building. The fire escape was fifty yards still behind her. She had a large pointed tower between there and here, and she’d be exposed to him if she tried to climb around it. She had no choice but to confront him.
“My dear Annalisa,” he said, his voice carrying on the wind. He sounded very close now. “Come out and fulfill your destiny.”
She waited, counted to three. “You first,” she said, whipping around the edge and firing at him multiple times. He yelled and she saw him collapse into the shadows on the rooftop. She went back into hiding, her heart thundering in her chest. She listened in vain for any noise from him. Maybe he was dead. Maybe it was over. She waited as long as possible before coming around the corner with her weapon at the ready.
He was there. Standing upright again, this time on the same skylights she had crossed.
She had hit him. She could see blood shining on his left shoulder. He trained a gun on her even as she aimed hers at him. They were separated by about thirty yards, just outside of her range of accuracy. She knew the clip, and she didn’t have many shots left. From the way he was looking at her, like she was captive prey, she knew he’d done the same math. “Ready to give up?” he asked her.
Just come a little closer, she thought. Her finger trembled on the trigger.
“You’ll have to shoot me first,” she replied.
“You know I can.”
She knew. She also knew he didn’t want to. He was still dragging those damn ropes. “Do it, then.” She inched forward. He eased back.
“Aren’t you curious?” he asked. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like?”
“No,” she said, her voice steady. “I thought you were going to shoot me.”
He scowled. “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m not your sniveling boyfriend or inept partner. Your choice in men is pathetic, Annalisa.”
She took a step forward. Almost in range. Almost. “You want to talk about pathetic? Where have you been for the last twenty years?”
“Right here,” he hollered back, crowing now. “Right fucking here, and no one had a goddamned clue. How’s that for pathetic?” The gun wavered on her.
“Grace found you though, didn’t she? She figured out the weather connection. It was only a matter of time before she pieced everything together. You were working for a utility crew.”
He jerked at the sound of Grace’s name. “She had nothing. That whole group of imbeciles just circle-jerked each other, imagining what it was like to be me. It was laughable how far off they were.”
“Sure,” Annalisa said, sounding bored. “That’s why you had to kill her.”
“She said she’d spit in my face! Well, I spat in hers.”
The DNA on the body, Annalisa realized. He’d made a mistake. She took another half-step forward. Another step or two and she’d be in range. She wouldn’t miss. “She found you,” she repeated. “She forced you out from your hidey-hole, the place you went when things got too hot. Maybe you were getting rusty? Maybe the cops were closing in.”
He snorted with derision. “The cops. The cops only know as much as I give them. Look at you. You’re here because of a private invitation. Otherwise, you’d be as lost as the rest of them.”
“Lost.” She licked her lips. “Yes, you have.”
His eyes went wide at the first shot. She took out the skylight under him in rapid fire with her last three bullets. Glass shattered. He screamed her name on the way down. She heard a whack and then a distant crash. Her calculations had been correct—he was standing over a six-story stairwell, and she’d sent him plunging down the center of it. She started shaking uncontrollably as the enormity of the situation hit her. No phone. No keys. She’d have to leave him while she hiked on foot. Just then, she saw over the trees, in the distance—a line of blue lights heading toward her in the darkness. They must have traced her cell.
She cradled her injured arm against her body and walked to the roof’s edge so she could watch the parade of cars growing closer. A chopper appeared in the sky over her head, its spotlight searching the ground for any sign of life. Annalisa felt tears stream down her face. “Here,” she called hoarsely, although she knew they couldn’t hear her over the spinning blades. She waved her uninjured arm in the air and the spotlight veered in her direction. Finally, it captured her and she fell to her knees in the circle of bright white light.