Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,55
it was clear across the country, and the other half thought it was a wake-up call for me to get on with my life.”
“And?” she asks.
“And?” I shrug. “This is my life. I can’t let it go. I track serial killers. Knowing they’re out there and that I’m capable of stopping them if I work hard enough, if I look at one more data set, if I plug a few more statistics into my algorithm—I can’t stop.”
“So you made your choice,” she says.
“It feels more like it chose me,” I say. “But it’s time that I face reality. I’d love to have a relationship, but this has to come first. It just does.”
I confidently deliver this speech as if I have all the answers, as if I have taken all the jagged pieces of my life and turned them into a neatly completed puzzle, but I feel a catch in my throat, and heat rises to my face.
I’ve just delivered a eulogy at a funeral. It’s real—Books and I are finished.
53
I WHEEL MY SUITCASE into my cubicle, and my two partners, Bonita Sexton and Eric Pullman—Rabbit and Pully—pop their heads up. I huddle with both of them in Rabbit’s pod.
“This is for your ears only,” I say.
Rabbit draws back. That’s the code we’ve always lived by, always keeping one another’s confidences, our team against the world. So the fact that I’m making a point of reminding them has the intended effect.
“The bombing in Chicago wasn’t Citizen David,” I whisper. I give them a brief rundown of my side venture tracking my killer; how the murderer of the homeless man, Mayday, tracked those murders; how he must have hacked into my personal computers to learn the specifics of Citizen David’s work so he could imitate David.
“So—what?” Pully asks, looking like a teenage boy who just rolled out of bed, clumps of his hair sticking up. “He knows you’re onto him, so he’s trying to hide behind Citizen David?”
“And kill the same kind of people—the frail, the weak—but by a factor of a hundred,” I say.
Rabbit brushes a strand of gray hair from her face, her eyes intent. “So we have a body of work,” she says.
“Yes. Scottsdale. Los Angeles. Vienna, Virginia. Indianapolis. Atlanta. Charleston. Dallas. New Orleans. And now Chicago. But I’m not sure about the we part.”
“Why not?” she asks. “We’re a team.”
I put a hand on her forearm. “If I so much as suggest that Chicago wasn’t the work of Citizen David, I’ll catch hell. They’ll redirect me. I have to do this under the radar.”
“But we’ll help you,” Pully insists.
“No. I’m not taking you down with me. If this blows back, I can’t let it blow back on you.”
“I hereby volunteer,” Rabbit says, raising her hand.
“Me too,” Pully chimes in.
“No, guys. No.”
Rabbit grabs my hand. “Now, you listen to me, Emmy Dockery. This man just killed two hundred homeless people. I’m working this whether you like it or not.”
Pully starts in. “And so will I—”
“Uh-uh-uh,” Rabbit clucks, her finger wagging back and forth like a metronome. “No, boy. You have a long career ahead of you. You don’t need to get crosswise with the brass. Me? I’m closer to sixty than you are to thirty. I have my time in. I’m fully vested. What can they do to me?”
I thought I was supposed to be the boss.
Pully sits back, brooding.
“Focus on Chicago, Eric,” Rabbit says. “There’s plenty to do there. Emmy and I will cross-reference with those other crime sites.”
My phone buzzes. I pull it out and check the message. “Shit,” I mumble.
54
WHILE ERIC PULLMAN mines the data from the Chicago bomb site, I hole up in my cubicle with Bonita Sexton and bring her up to speed on the killer I’ve been tracking.
“Senior citizens in Scottsdale,” she says to me, summarizing what she’s learned. “Homeless people in LA. Then a series of one-off murders spread around the country.”
“Let’s start with the one-offs,” I say, showing her a chart I printed out from my laptop. “Each of them was an activist or an advocate for the poor, sick, or elderly. Each was found dead at home. Each lived alone in a one-story house within a block or two of mass transit. Each either had the house up for sale or had recently bought it—”
“So there was a real estate agent’s video or at least some photos of the house online,” she says. “Something Darwin could use to stake out the place from a distance.”