silence, she said, “I sometimes regret going after Glover.”
O’Donnell blinked, looking surprised. “Why?”
“After he got away, things weren’t the same for me. Some people thought I’d made it all up. I didn’t have a lot of friends. And it hasn’t changed since. I didn’t have to do it, not really; I was just a teenager. I could let the police do their job. It’s not like he was arrested because of what I did. He stayed free. Kept killing. So I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I just did nothing. Grown up to do something else. Hanging around with friends, maybe have a family like you. Without this thing hovering over me. Without getting creepy letters from him, without putting my sister in danger.”
Neither of them moved or said anything for a few minutes.
“I’m done feeling sorry for myself,” O’Donnell said.
“Okay,” Zoe said. “Let’s go. I need to go over your transcripts of the interviews with the men from the list I gave you, in case you missed something.”
CHAPTER 67
Sunday, October 23, 2016
His phone rang, making him jump. He’d been sitting in the kitchen staring at the morning sunlight filtering through the window. For how long? An hour? Two?
He vaguely recognized the name on the phone’s screen. He needed to answer that call, just like he’d needed to answer the previous four, but he couldn’t find it in him. Answering that phone meant wearing his “normal” costume. It meant that he had to contain all those emotions and impulses and fears behind a facade of calm.
And he couldn’t. He had lost control.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Daniel asked.
Daniel had returned last night, his face sheepish and apologetic. He’d taken one look at his friend’s eyes and had seen it really was Daniel, not the tumor, in control. So he’d let him in. Daniel had apologized, and he’d said there was no need to be sorry. He knew the tumor had done that, not Daniel. Besides, the woman was still alive. Daniel had been happy to hear that.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. They’ll call back later.”
But it mattered, he knew. He was letting his life fall apart. At some point, someone would notice. Daniel had told him over and over to make sure he maintained his routines.
The phone stopped ringing.
“Want to go for a walk?” Daniel asked.
He gaped at his friend in surprise. Daniel never went on walks with him. It was too dangerous. “What if someone recognizes you?”
“That picture doesn’t look anything like me.”
That was true. Cancer had consumed Daniel’s body. His face was almost a skull, the skin stretched on it like shrink-wrap. His hair was falling out in clumps. He looked terrible.
But at least no one would recognize him.
He got up and opened the door to the bathroom. “We’re going out for a little while,” he said.
The woman gave him a beseeching look. She didn’t look too great herself. He tried to recall when he’d last let her drink. That morning? The night before? He’d have to do that when they returned.
They walked side by side, passersby ignoring them. He was relieved. When he was on the streets alone, people always stared at him. But when he was with a friend, they didn’t pay him any attention.
Maybe people just thought that a man walking alone was strange. Maybe they liked everyone to be paired up. A man and his wife. A couple of friends. Boyfriend and girlfriend. A man and his dog. A mother and her child. Things had to come in twos. Just like in Noah’s ark.
“We need to go hunting again,” Daniel said.
“I know. But . . . can it wait? Just a few more nights?” He didn’t like the idea of leaving the woman alone in the house just yet.
“You know we can’t.”
It was true; they couldn’t. Daniel’s time was running out. And besides, he had stopped drinking the woman’s blood, giving her time to get better.
They strode by a kiosk, and his gaze was drawn to the familiar face.
Catherine, her eyes following him, a real-life Mona Lisa. He paused, transfixed. She knew his secrets. All his dark secrets.
“She’ll tell everyone,” he murmured. “She knows.”
“Not if we stop her,” Daniel said, just like he’d said two weeks ago. “Buy them. Buy them all.”
The man in control approached the kiosk owner. “The Chicago Daily Gazette,” he said. “How much?”