“And not fall off the damn mountain,” Kendra called after her.
“There’s always that.” She turned and looked back at Kendra. She held out her arms. “Come here, brat.”
Kendra ran toward her. She was immediately enveloped in her mother’s arms.
Love.
Security.
“Thank you, Mom,” she whispered as she held her close. “I know how hard this is for you. I promise it won’t be for long.”
“The only promise I want from you is that you won’t let that monster touch you. Not even a hair on your head.”
“I promise.” She gave her a final hug and stepped back. “Now go and take care of Olivia.” She smiled mistily. “Or that FBI agent, whoever needs it most.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what to do.” Diane’s voice was throaty as she moved up the path toward the front door. “Get going. You always did dillydally.”
Kendra turned and quickly headed for Lynch and the Ferrari.
“Okay?” His gaze was studying her expression as he opened the passenger door for her.
She nodded jerkily. “I don’t want to leave them. I want to stay and take care of them.”
“Nelson is a good agent. I checked on him.” He got into the driver’s seat. “And I just made a call to an ex–Special Forces buddy who lives in LA and hired him to come up tonight and guard the perimeter. He’s hell on wheels.”
“You did?” She swallowed. “That was very kind.”
“Yeah. That’s me, brimming with the milk of human kindness.” He shrugged. “And I didn’t want to have you worrying and gnawing your fingernails if I could prevent it. It would be counterproductive to the investigation.”
“Heaven forbid.” She smiled. “Still, it was thoughtful even though you don’t want to admit it.”
“Of course I want to admit it. It makes you believe I’m a sterling character.” He tilted his head as she laughed. “No, you’re too intelligent to fall into that trap. But it can’t help but soften you a little.”
Soften … Yes, she did feel an undeniable softening toward Lynch. But she would have felt a softening toward anyone who was trying to protect Mom and Olivia, she told herself. She looked back over her shoulder at the lovely house on the mountain. It looked very solitary from this distance.
“You’re scared,” Lynch said.
She nodded. “I’ve been scared since I saw that poor woman on the floor of the bathroom.” She straightened in the seat and looked straight ahead. “But I’ve done all I can for the time being. Now the only solution is to get Myatt before he reaches out and destroys anyone else.”
* * *
SHE THOUGHT SHE WAS SO CLEVER, Myatt thought scornfully as he watched Kendra get back into Adam Lynch’s Ferrari after leaving her mother. Not that she wasn’t clever, or she would never have been able to trap Colby and throw him into that prison. But she hadn’t been able to touch Myatt yet, and he’d see that she never did. He’d learned so much from Colby during these last months that he felt as if he was invulnerable. Sometimes he wondered if he had risen to be even greater than Colby.
No, he scurried away from the thought as disloyal.
Colby was the master. Myatt worshipped him and had been lucky to have him for a teacher.
But Colby was lucky to have him here on the outside, too. Myatt had been able to do his bidding and yet still give himself the satisfaction of displaying a razzle-dazzle talent that even Colby had praised. They were two of a kind that formed a magnificent whole.
Kendra and Adam Lynch had now passed the tree-shrouded byway where Myatt had pulled in when he’d seen that the three vehicles had reached their destination on the forest’s edge.
Follow her? Or stay and stalk her mother and the blind woman?
He would stay here and scope out all the details on the setup for when he wanted to make a move here. He’d plant a GPS bug on the mother’s car similar to the one he’d placed on Lynch’s when he’d realized that Lynch would be constantly with Kendra. Then he would go back to the city and keep Kendra in his sights.
But first he had a few other things to do.
Time was flying, and he had to make certain nothing could go wrong at the last minute. He took his notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. Colby disapproved of notebooks. He thought Myatt should memorize everything. But what Colby didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Colby had rattled off these details so quickly that Myatt had barely had time to absorb them. He wanted to get this right, and his memory wasn’t as keen as the master’s. He could always destroy the notebook after the plan was in place.
For instance, he had to be accurate about all these difficult names that Colby seemed to have at his fingertips. That tetrodotoxin and Vecuronium Bromide that he’d used on that cop at the Harvey house had been Colby’s idea.
So he had to be sure that nothing got in the way of Myatt’s fulfilling every aspect of Colby’s plan for Kendra Michaels.
He looked back at the house on the hill. Two people Kendra cared about were within his reach.
So very tempting …
FBI Field Office
San Diego
THE DOORS OF THE ELEVATOR SLID OPEN at the still-unfinished floor of the FBI field office, and Kendra and Lynch stepped off. The bulletin boards detailing Kendra’s previous cases were now surrounding two long folding tables pushed end to end. There were even more freestanding bulletin boards and whiteboards than before, now adorned with crime-scene photos and note cards detailing the latest rash of killings.
She gazed straight ahead and tried not to look at the photo of the bathroom at the nightclub. She stared instead at Griffin, Metcalf, Reade, and several additional agents and support staff who were there.
“Everyone safe and sound?” Griffin asked her.
“I just left my mother and Olivia. They’re not happy, but they’re safe.” She added, “I hope.”
“Since I assigned an agent to protect them, at some point I’ll need to know where they are.”
“I have an address. I’ll give it to you before I leave.”
“Good. You know that Agent Nelson was most anxious to hold on to this assignment. I told him it was for your friend and mother, not you, but he was still insistent.”
Kendra hurriedly looked away from him at one of the bulletin boards. “Oh?”
Lynch nodded solemnly. “You have to admire an agent who throws himself into his work like that. Good man.”
Griffin looked as if he might have picked up on the sudden awkward vibe, but he didn’t pursue it. “Yeah, Nelson’s coming along.”
While Kendra had been pretending to look at the bulletin board, something really did catch her eye. “What’s this?” She pointed to a whiteboard labeled ‘Myatt.’
Griffin walked toward the board and angled it toward her and Lynch. “This is the profile we’re building. If he has been somehow working with Colby, it puts him in a unique category of serial killer.”
“The tag team.”
“Yes. Most serial killers are loners who feel powerless in their everyday lives. Carrying out these types of specific, meticulously planned murders is their means of exerting control and gaining a sense of power that’s missing in everything else they do. The tag team is a different animal, especially when the partner is someone as notorious as Colby.” Griffin gazed at the list of characteristics that had been written on the board. “Assuming Colby is the dominant partner, Myatt is most likely someone who’s comfortable taking orders, perhaps ex-military. He’s extremely detail-oriented. These people tend to be obsessively focused on a very narrow range of interests.”
Kendra turned toward the agents behind her. “Kind of like you and your comic books, Metcalf.”
He shrugged. “Or you and your music therapy.”
“Point taken.” She studied the whiteboard. “I can imagine there could be an element of hero worship in Myatt, but he may also enjoy one-upping the serial killers he copies.”
Lynch nodded. “If he’s really working with Colby, what do you make of the fact that Myatt hasn’t reproduced his murders?”