He picks up his pace, entering the dense trees and stepping off the wooden boardwalk toward the perimeter fence where he left her body. He’s anxious and excited.
“Emily, I hope you can forgive me,” he chirps, stifling a giggle.
He enters the open space near the fence and spots her. She’s leaning, almost completely horizontal, with her back against the fence. The wire fencing bends behind her, allowing a gaping hole to form. She’s motionless. For a moment, he wonders if she is dead.
No. No, that won’t do.
He picks up his pace, striding toward her with searching eyes. She can’t be dead yet. His entire plan would be ruined. She is supposed to be his message. She’s supposed to be his warning.
As he comes to her still form, he squints his eyes. Crouching down, he can see plainly it’s not Emily who lays before him. It’s Katie.
His heart quickens in his chest as he puts it together in his mind.
He missed.
He must have missed her spinal cord somehow. She was clearly still able to move when he left her last night. His mind races, as he places his arm through the hole. Emily bested him. She dragged Katie across the property and used her body to absorb the fence’s electric pulses. He touches the blood smeared onto the wire above Katie. Emily let Katie become a conduit and crawled over her to escape. The electric pulses would have barely affected her through Katie, if at all.
He stands, gazing out into the tall grass and expanse of trees outside the perimeter of his man-made arena. Emily is gone. As he closes his own eyes to the morning sun, he is at least thankful that he was overprepared. She won’t get far with her wounds and even if she does, still can’t see past her own blurred nose thanks to the tropicamide. He’ll be able to catch up to her soon enough. But this thought offers no relief. Everything has changed.
CHAPTER 22
WREN ALLOWS HERSELF ONLY A moment. Then she gets to work, reaching out her gloved hand for a pulse. She closes her own eyes and focuses on palpating for this woman’s carotid artery. She presses lightly into it and desperately tries to sense any kind of life. She feels it then, the slightest movement in the victim’s cardiac cycle beneath her fingertips.
Wren’s world brightens to vivid Technicolor. She looks up at the paramedics with wild eyes, yelling, “You’re up! She has a pulse!”
The two medics spring into action. They roll the victim slightly onto her side and discover the source of the dark blood staining her shirt behind her hip.
“There’s a wound to her cervical spine,” the medic reports, snapped out of his initial shock and regaining focus and professionalism. “Though it appears that it’s um … been tended to.”
Wren leans forward incredulously. “What?”
She peers at the bloodied bandages over the wound in this woman’s upper back.
“He bandaged her wounds?” Wren questions, brow knitted into a look of pure confusion. “He’s never done that before. Actually, I can’t think of any killer who has ever done that before.”
Leroux is shaking his head, trying to turn off the kitchen timer still blaring in his hands. An officer beside him takes it silently and clicks it off. Farther off, another officer is barking orders at the others to cordon off the scene and call for backup on the site.
“Let’s get her out of here. We have to get her stable before anything else,” a medic instructs.
With some help from Wren, they slide the woman from the coffin. They have already begun attaching various lifesaving equipment to her, years of training making for seamless execution. Wren takes a moment to look back into the casket and inhales a sharp breath as she notices a full human skeleton crumbled to the side of it. The victim had been interred with the casket’s original inhabitant. It’s hard to say right now whether she was conscious when she entered this coffin. Wren doesn’t ruminate on the nightmare of being buried alive for long. Leroux nudges her shoulder, and she is jolted from her thoughts.