down and thought about what made me happy and realized I didn’t have a racial preference. Māori, Tongan, Italian, Indian, I found pictures of women with the right look and imagined… playing with them. The joy, the release of tension I felt was the same.”
Anahera curled her fingers into her palms, flexed her feet.
“I favor nicer girls and spend the most time with them”—Vincent’s eyes skimmed her body with a chilling kind of warmth—“but the right whore will do to plug the gap, especially if she’s young and relatively unspoiled.” Roughness in his voice there, before it smoothed out to calm control again. “Age can vary from nineteen to a young-looking thirty-five or so. I did kill younger teenagers, but that was when I was a kid myself. You’d be surprised how many nice girls will meet a good-looking rich boy for a secret date.”
He shrugged. “Once I understood all that, it was easy to vary things up so I was satisfied, but no one would see a pattern. Take a good churchgoing girl, follow it up with a cheating soccer mom in another town, throw in a hell-raising runaway—no pattern, nothing to see.”
“Except you,” Anahera pointed out. “Someone should’ve noticed a boy whose name kept turning up again and again.”
“I told you I got clever,” he replied. “I did my research before each kill, had a place to dispose of the body.” Pride now, iridescent beneath the golden smile. “The churchgoing girl went into a fenced-off geothermal pool so hot she’s probably sludge by now. I drove the soccer mom’s SUV into a lake—it wasn’t found for years. Runaway’s buried in the woods on a friend’s farm. We met in town and I convinced her we’d smoke dope together if she snuck into the barn after lights-out.”
Vincent had been smart, scarily so. No signature, no attempts to play with the police. For him, the hunt wasn’t an act of blinding rage. Neither was the body dump. No, the rage came in between, after he had the women under his control.
A man like that could hide his crimes for decades.
But his intelligent choices had left him with no way to tell the world what he’d achieved. Anahera, however, was a captive audience he planned to silence.
Fuck him.
She’d use his arrogance to save herself. The arm with which he held the stun gun had to be getting tired. All she needed was a second’s inattention as he readjusted position and she’d take her chances. It had to be harder to hit a moving target than a stationary one, especially if that moving target was weaving and dodging in an unpredictable way.
“How many?” she asked, not looking in the direction where she’d seen movement. If someone was out there, she wasn’t going to give them away to Vincent.
“You know,” he said after a long pause, “I’ve never counted, but I think it must be something like twenty-seven.”
He was lying.
Whether it was the low number for a man who’d killed three times in a single blistering summer, or that he hadn’t counted, there was a lie in there somewhere. But then again, Vincent was a psychopath who’d successfully fooled people his entire lifetime. Lying was part of his oeuvre.
“Stop pulling my leg, Vincent.” His arm had to start quivering soon. “You were the best of us at keeping track of things. That’s why we always asked you to be the judge in any challenge.”
He gave her that beatific smile with no hint of evil to it, and moved the Taser from one hand to the other so fast that she had no time to react.
Keep him talking, she told herself instead of panicking. Give yourself time to think. It wasn’t hard to follow the instruction—because even though she was standing face-to-face with him while he threatened her, she still found it difficult to believe that the boy she’d once raced across the sands had turned into a monster.
Her questions were infinite.
“Busted,” he said with a huge laugh. “But the number is my special secret. No one will ever know what I’ve done. Not the whole of it.”
“Were you always like this?” The question came from deep inside her. “When we played as children, did you go home and torture animals?”
He tilted his head partially to the side. “Could be I was born this way,” he said and his eyes were laughing again, his amusement inexplicable and slippery. “Or could be it was the third bedtime tuck-in or the thirtieth that did it.” Another