casual, like a man trying to convince a friend to try a new type of dessert. “It was easy for me. I had no choice. I went to prison. There were bars and cuffs and big walls to teach me who was in control. Harry, I’m in control of you. I’ll give you your gift when it’s time.”
I said nothing. The couple across the river strolled safely out of sight.
“I’m going to send you another address,” Regan said.
Chapter 63
THIS WAS BAD. Whitt was putting everyone in danger now, his colleagues, members of the public, Vada in the car beside him. She was in command, and had been all day, feeding him the pills seemingly whenever he asked for them, and sometimes when she said she thought he looked strung out. She was giving him more than he needed, but he didn’t say anything. It wasn’t her job to know the dose. And the boost he got when he tucked the pill into the space between his lips and gums, not just chemical but emotional, had become essential to his life. Three days high, and he was already a slave again.
Whitt was sure no one had noticed yet, but there were signs. He kept checking the safety on his weapon. Over and over, pushing that already pushed-down switch harder, until the grooves bit into his thumb. He kept hearing his phone ring, but it wasn’t ringing. Kept spacing out when Vada was talking to him. And now he was climbing out of the car in a heady rush, the street blocked by patrol cars, the blue lights painful and blinding. Locked and loaded. Whitt pulled his weapon just as everyone else did, ready to go in, a walking time bomb unable to defuse himself.
An anonymous tip to the Bombala police station fifteen minutes earlier had brought much-needed energy to a mindless day of checking roadblocks, coordinating air searches, responding to possible sightings, the most recent in Bega, south of Nowra. Whitt and Vada were going to be there with the first responders. He was trembling with tension. Was it Regan again? They had an address. They were on.
Whitt followed the responders to the front door now, trying to be just a face in the crowd. He half-listened to the commands coming from the men in front of him.
“Who is it?” he asked Vada, who was there at his shoulder. Zinging memories of her body on top of his every time he looked at her, making his stomach clench. “Do we have any intel?”
“An old couple,” Vada said. “That’s all I know.”
Whitt and Vada followed two huge men in tactical gear leading the charge. The door went down in a thump. All of a sudden he was inside, on his own, turning left and sweeping his torch and gun over darkened rooms. He could almost feel himself accidentally shooting someone. The gun bucking in his hands, an old woman falling as his bullet tore through her.
The front rooms were empty, painfully neat. Books on shelves, hand-stitched pillows sitting on antique furniture. Through the lace curtains, Whitt could see officers running down the sides of the house, doing a sweep of the perimeter. He backed out of the front rooms and called out the clearance, heard a heavy gasp toward the back of the house.
The victims were in the dining room. Whitt caught a glimpse of two people sitting in ornate wooden chairs before one of the tactical officers pushed past him, heading for the front door, a gloved hand up against his mouth.
Chapter 64
RED. BRIGHT, ALMOST luminescent, a halo of it on the wall above their heads, blood sprayed as the killer worked. Their bodies were both drenched in it, sitting tied in the chairs back-to-back, his woolen slippers soaked in blood. Their deaths had been a drawn-out affair, maybe hours long. There were already flies, and a glass of water sat on the circular table, fingerprinted with pink, the killer having become thirsty midway through his task. Her robe was in a pile on the floor, boot-printed. She had been the focus of the attack. The old man was slumped forward, a necklace of dark blood running from a neat slit in his throat. Whitt couldn’t see much of her from where he stood, but he knew she’d been worked on. Her angles weren’t right. The foot nearest him was turned outward, the bare toes curled.
Whitt was following Vada through the tidy kitchen and out the back of the house, the