“Don’t forget he left your business card at a scene. This is starting to make so much more sense now.”
“Call Philip Trudeau. Confirm he knows Cal,” Wren directs. “Actually, John, maybe try the name Jeremy. The other victims, they called him Jeremy.”
Leroux nods, taking this latest detail in stride after the conversation they’ve just had. “Are you okay?” Leroux asks plainly. “It’s okay if you’re not.”
She smiles with her mouth, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.
“I’m not. But I will be once this is finally over.”
For a moment, they stay silent. It’s a comfortable and safe silence.
“Hey, did you ever find out what the chapter from that book was about? The one you found at the Seven Sisters Swamp scene?” She doesn’t look at him, instead keeping her gaze on Emma.
Leroux purses his lips, realizing the significance of this question now. “We did,” he answers as she finally meets his gaze again.
“What was it?”
“The Most Dangerous Game.” He answers directly, never letting his eyes stray from hers.
She smiles, shaking her head. “Cliché little bastard.”
Leroux can’t help but laugh lightly too. He clears his throat.
“We will sort this out, Wren,” he says gently, using her first name pointedly. “I’ll talk to Trudeau and see what I can find out about Cal-slash-Jeremy’s current whereabouts.”
He walks over to his suit coat and plucks it from the counter.
“In the meantime, if you need to put someone else on this case, do it. This could get really personal, really fast.”
“Normally, I would fight you on this,” she sighs, clicking the blade off the scalpel and flicking it into the red sharps container. “But I think you’re right. I need to do what’s best for Emma, and I’m not what’s best for her right now.”
Leroux crosses the room and squeezes her arm. Wren pulls a glove off her right hand with a snap. She grabs the phone from the wall and calls in another tech to finish Emma’s autopsy.
CHAPTER 27
IT’S RARE FOR JEREMY TO feel out of control. He has patience. He has discipline. He has plans. But tonight, he has none of that. Tonight, he just has anger. He’s sitting in his car outside of O’Grady’s Pub, staring ahead at the only real path left for him tonight. He can’t get his last egregious miscalculation out of his head. Now he’s buzzing, like a pressure cooker. It was supposed to work. It was supposed to be theater, his victory lap. But the girl took his moment away from him, and it hardly matters she succumbed to the hemlock. If he could, he would go back in time to hack her head clean off and release the rage inside him, but he can’t.
And so, he hunts.
It’s 1:30 a.m., and last call is near. This is the ideal time to get someone to come home with him. It’s late enough for even the most cautious to cast their inhibitions to the wayside but still early enough to catch people coherent and aware. He isn’t looking for a target practice dummy. He’s looking for another rabbit that can run.
He quickly checks his reflection in the rearview mirror. His eyes are bloodshot, but in a darkened bar he knows they won’t betray his state of mind. He carefully pushes a strand of hair that has fallen onto his forehead back into place and makes his way inside.
The bar is still packed. The air is thick with cheap perfume and even cheaper cologne. The lights give off a red tint that makes the one-room bar resemble the lower rings of hell. The remaining patrons are split into two camps. There are lone wolves who sit toward the ends of the bar with their shoulders hunched forward in a defensive lurch, inexplicably wanting to be left alone in this crowded room. He’s not here for them. And there are the people who are still hopeful if not desperate for someone to notice them. Most of them don’t even need compliments or even the veneer of decency. They just need the promise of pleasure to drown out their own self-loathing. Jeremy can work with that.