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.Within a few moments, he’d created a small opening.Vonnie couldn’t hold back, immediately sucking in a deep breath.The oxygen hit her lungs and shot through her blood, her heart sending it in every direction to nourish all the starving cells of her body.She grew light-headed but didn’t care.Nothing in her life had ever felt as good as that one long inhalation.He watched approvingly from behind the mask.Lifting one hand, a hand she didn’t recognize, that could belong to any white man she knew, he carefully poked the hole a little, widening it.He took his time, blocking her oxygen again with his finger, just to fuck with her, she had no doubt.“Ready for your drink?”She nodded, for the first time wary of the plastic cup.There could be anything in it.It’s water.Just the same nasty water he was bringing you before.Or it could be drain cleaner.She prayed that whatever it was it didn’t hurt as he slid the opening of the straw into the hole.Live or die, she just didn’t want to hurt anymore.“Sip slowly.You don’t want to throw up.I don’t know if I’d be able to stick around to get the tape off before you suffocate.I have somewhere to go and will be out late.”She did, tentatively drawing the fluid up the straw.It hit her mouth, cold and sweet, and she realized he’d brought her some kind of energy drink.Just as that one deep breath had been the best she’d ever inhaled, so, too, was this mouthful of liquid the best she’d ever tasted.As difficult as it was, she sipped slowly, feeling the icy relief slide down her scratchy throat.It landed in her empty stomach, which churned but didn’t rebel, and then she sipped again.With every taste of that sweet drink, a truth hammered home in her brain, causing her both hope and despair.He could have given her water.Instead, he was giving her something with nourishment.Something that might help fend off starvation for a little while longer than mere H2O would have done.Which confirmed what he’d been telling her all along.He wasn’t ready for her to die yet.Because he wasn’t finished playing with her.Friday, 7:40 p.m.Aidan arrived at the local high school about twenty minutes before his arranged meeting time with the reporter.Parking where she had told him to, he watched as cars poured in, many of them spilling laughing teenagers out into the evening.Many also, however, contained adults.Middle-aged couples, corpulent businessmen, entire families with young children.Alexa Nolan hadn’t been kidding when she’d called this one of the social highlights of Granville’s year.The stadium looked well on the way to being packed.Something else he noticed.For every upscale-looking Lexus driven by a stay-at-home soccer mom came a rusty, smoke-belching rust bucket owned by someone who lived in a completely different world.These, he assumed, were the residents of the Boro, who ranged in ethnicity but not in economics.Poor didn’t have its own color.Sitting behind his tinted windows, he was able to see the way the groups eyed one another with wary mistrust.There were no jovial greetings between fans of the opposing teams.And he doubted it had anything to do with what was about to happen when their sons and brothers came face-to-face on the field.This looked more like an example of class warfare, the have-nots of Granville resenting the haves.Only, in this case, the have-nots did have something: a slew of murdered girls and a community full of fear.While the other half of the town had remained immune, protected, safe in their cocoon of money and a close- knit society with their oblivious police chief and their complacent officials.Until Vonnie, the girl who’d somehow managed to straddle the line between them.He only wondered whether her disappearance would make things better or worse.Hearing a tapping sound on his passenger’s-side window, he glanced over and saw Alexa standing outside, hunching close to the vehicle as if not wanting to be seen.He flipped the automatic lock and she got in, quietly closing the door behind her.Her curvy form had barely landed in the seat when he hit her with his first question.“How did this start? Go back to the beginning.”“Well, good evening to you, too.”He cleared his throat, suitably chastened.He hadn’t done the social thing in a long time and barely remembered the rules of it, one of which was, on occasion, to say hello.“Sorry.I don’t get out much these days.Guess my conversational skills are a little rusty.”“It’s okay.I’m a pretty no-nonsense person myself.”“Pushy one, too,” he couldn’t help muttering.“I’ll cop to that.Just don’t call me perky.Ever.I hate that word.”He gaped.“You? Perky?” He didn’t see that at all.Stubborn, tenacious, inquisitive, yeah, all of the above.But not perky.She was too dark and sarcastic to ever be something so cutesy.“I’ve seen perkier pit bulls.” He meant that as a compliment.Sort of.Maybe.“I know, right? Crazy.My mother always used to say if I wanted to get the right boys to like me, I needed to try to be more perky.Which, I think, is why I went out of my way to be a scowling bitch throughout high school.”Scowling bitch? That he couldn’t see, either.Despite her in-your-face toughness, the woman was soft underneath.She cared about people and took things personally.Still, part of her comment amused him.“Not interested in boys, huh?”“Not the ‘right’ ones.”He didn’t doubt it.He suspected Lexie had rebelled at anyone who tried to put her in a nice, good- girl box from the time she was old enough to ask Why? “Yeah, I somehow picture you as a bad-boy magnet.”“You got it.And bad boys aren’t interested in perky chicks.”“Got it.Perky is right out.No problem.If I had to choose an adjective that starts with the letter P to describe you, I can come up with several more.Pushy is a much better one.Or persistent.”“Persistent I can deal with.You could even have called me a pain in the ass.”“The evening is still young.”“Fair enough; consider me warned.” She shifted in the seat to look at him, bending one leg and tucking it under herself.“As it happens, I think of persistence as a good quality, especially when someone as no- nonsense as me is willing to go begging for help from a guy who dabbles in the supernatural.”“I don’t dabble in anything,” he replied flatly.“What I do is just part of who I am.”“What do you do?” she asked.“I mean, exactly?”He should have known that by opening the door an inch, she’d kick it in and storm through.Not knowing this woman for long didn’t mean he couldn’t figure her out.And it didn’t take any psychic skills to know she would be like that pit bull after a buried bone when it came to getting at a bit of juicy information she wanted.Like all her kind.She’s not like all her kind.He needed to keep reminding himself of that.Because after reading through her files, he knew this story was more than a big-news feature to Alexa Nolan.It had become personal—he could read that in every line of her articles, in her hand- written notes and in each question she’d asked.Especially her jotted speculations about the unanswered ones.The files had changed his perception of her.Before, he’d seen a tenacious, incredibly attractive young woman.Now he saw that same woman—with a heart.It was a stunning combination.He’d spent a long time this afternoon thinking about it, about all the different sides to her.Though a stranger to him two days before, she had succeeded in doing something even his oldest friends had been unable to do: get him involved again.That alone made her pretty unique.When combined with all the rest, she became fascinating.“I mean, you know, the psychic stuff?” she prodded [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]