before they reach the evidence of his crimes throws off Cole’s endgame. In a perfect scenario, tonight will end with Cole’s ground team drugging Mattingly and leaving him surrounded by the evidence of his killings. They don’t just want Mattingly to go down for his awful crimes; they want him to be a babbling lunatic by the time the authorities arrive, raving about the woman who overpowered him in the language of drug-induced madness.
Mattingly’s no longer standing over her, she realizes.
The next sound she hears is so strange she can’t place it at first, a light spray accompanied by a tiny metallic rattle. A breath of cool air fires across her nose and lips. The coughs are instantaneous. Violent enough that they would have awakened her from a dead sleep had she been in one. At first, she thinks he might have gassed her, but the coughs are dry and irritating, and she smells a strange combination of noxious scents—a hint of bleach and pepper and other smells that don’t belong together and that make the back of her throat burn. When she starts sneezing, she sits up. Against her will, her eyes open. Mattingly has dropped down out of sight, probably pressed to the floor on the other side of her bed.
Oh, I get it, she thinks, amazed to have such neutral thoughts about the workings of a serial killer.
Charlotte does what any person in her situation would do. She reaches for the glass of water on her nightstand, the same one Mattingly just spiked.
One swallow, two swallows, then three.
Only once she’s nestled back into the covers does she realize the implications of surrendering to his little trick. She’s allowed him to drug her before she’s triggered. And that means darkness will be on her soon. A part of her resists this, but she needs to stave off a trigger event. So she tries banishing the images that might bring her closer to it—her mother’s face, a wild collage of a dozen different photos used for her MISSING posters after the Bannings abducted them—and reaches for the ones that will delay it. Luke. Kissing my neck. Singing along—badly, but who cares?—with “Angel of the Morning.” That goofy smile he makes when he pulls so hard on the jar lid it snaps off unexpectedly and he spills artichokes or tomatoes or who knows what else on the kitchen floor because he’s just so goddamn strong after all the training they’ve given him.
She’s still thinking of Luke when she feels the weight of a heavy, unnatural sleep descending on her, and before it takes her completely, she thinks, All right, Mr. Mattingly. Let’s hit the road.
Charlotte is sixteen years old and holding the gift from Uncle Marty on her lap. She’s still known as Trina then—she only changed her name after her grandmother’s death—and she’s only been free of her father for several weeks. Her brand-new bedroom, the one her grandmother made for her out of the house’s old sewing room, is immaculate but mostly bare. It’s waiting to be filled with knickknacks and curios and posters, the stamps of an ordinary teenage life she hasn’t been allowed until now. The sunlight here in California seems so much clearer than the light back in Georgia, cutting through the part in the bedroom’s ruffly sky-blue curtains with cleansing power.
Does Uncle Marty know how special this gift is? Does her grandmother? She visited them a few times over the years, but always strictly under her father’s supervision. Do they know she’s never had a computer of her own and never been allowed to use the internet unsupervised? Now she has her very own laptop, her very own connection to the world.
It makes her head spin.
Given who she was, given what she’s been through, her father believed letting her surf the net by herself was the same as letting her walk alone through a bad neighborhood at night. Several times, they’d been hacked by true-crime conspiracy theorists convinced that little Trina Pierce had played more of a role in the Bannings’ crimes than she’d let on and that there was proof of this on her father’s hard drive. The truth was, her father’s insistence that she keep performing for horror movie fans all over the country placed her in more danger than any Google searches.
But what does that matter now? She’s free of him, free of those speaking engagements he’d always schedule to coincide with the release of a new installment in that ridiculous