01 A Cold Dark Place Read Free Page B

Janelle’s car still in the parking lot but the woman herself nowhere in sight, she’d called the cops.
    Now Janelle was sleeping quietly with a local sheriff ’s deputy guarding the door to her room—more as a protection against members of the press than any unknown attacker. If the person who’d killed Meacher had wanted Janelle Ebert dead, he—or she—had had ample opportunity.
    Janelle was a very lucky woman.
    Mallory wanted to leave. Wanted to help search the house of horrors and see exactly who Edgar Meacher had killed. But she needed her job and pissing off her boss topped her list of things not to do if she wanted to keep it. She took another scalding mouthful of coffee and then watched her breath freeze on the exhale. The sun was rising over the eastern horizon lightening the gray of twilight to pale mauve and pink of dawn.
    It made her pause.
    Her twin sister Payton had loved watching the sun rise over the woods that surrounded their West Virginian home. At the time, Mallory had resented being poked awake with the birds, but nowadays she found it oddly reassuring—another fragile connection to the sister she’d lost. No matter what happened, the sun always rose. And until the day the solar system decided to implode and take this galaxy with it—it always would. It reminded her exactly how small a speck in the universe she really was.
    Her colleagues had found photographs of twelve victims so far—one was even a former pupil of Meacher’s—but no mention of anyone who resembled her identical twin.
    Pay ton had been nine when she’d disappeared without a trace from the bedroom they’d shared in their West Virginian mansion. Mallory hadn’t really expected to find evidence of her at Meacher’s house, but there was always a tiny flicker of hope she and her parents would eventually get closure. The sheer number of monsters she’d encountered since she started working for the FBI stunned her.
    Footsteps approached. A man ambled toward her.
    She turned to face him, mentally mapping out her surroundings. Even though it was early there were too many people and too many cameras for him to be a real threat but her right hand slid closer to her weapon anyway. Cataloging the man’s big wool overcoat, nicotine stained fingers, and razor sharp eyes she knew exactly what he wanted.
    He held out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”
    “ Thanks, but I don’t smoke.”
    “ You a fed?” He’d accurately assessed her bullshit meter to be in the red zone and decided to be direct. Small mercies. “Know anything about this whole serial killer business?”
    “ You with a paper?”
    “ Charlie Fernier. The Post.” He held out his hand, which she pointedly ignored.
    She slugged back her coffee, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Silence was her best friend when it came to the press.
    “Hey, don’t I know you?” He angled his chin to get a better look at her face, his gaze lingering on her eye which had darkened overnight to form a nice blue-rimmed socket. “You look real familiar.”
    Mallory held her ground even though she wanted to run. Ice formed inside her chest. That old familiar cracking sensation when someone recognized her from her mother ’s annual campaign to keep her sister’s disappearance in the public eye. Who needed computer generated aging software when you had a readymade replica on hand?
    Well, not this year. She was done with pretending Payton might still be alive, and done giving her abductor a thrill as she begged for information. She wanted to see him begging—for mercy as she held her Glock to his head. The image startled her out of her reverie. Too much coffee; not enough sleep.
    “ No. You don’t know me.”
    “ Are you sure, Special Agent...?”
    She started to walk away. “I’m sure, Mr. Fernier.”
    “ Hey!” His voice boomed off the glass and concrete of the hospital behind them. “You’re that girl”—every muscle in her body flinched—“the one whose twin