Already Gone (A Laura Frost FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1) by Blake Pierce (notion reading list .txt) 📗

something, hedid. “Well,” he said, taking his time over the words. “You know you’re lookingfor someone who wanted to send you a message. But now you’re not sure if youhave the right guy. Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Laura said, impatiently.

“Do you remember step number nine?”

There was no question as to which stephe was referring to. It wasn’t as though there were any other steps that reallymattered in an alcoholic’s life. He was talking about the steps of AA, howaddicts were supposed to progress toward healing.

“Of course,” Laura said, mildly annoyedthat he would question her memory. “That we have to make direct amends withthose we have wronged.”

“So?”

Laura thought for a moment, trying todig into what Garth was trying to say. “You’re talking about the killings—thatwhoever is doing this was wronged by me. But that doesn’t make any sense,Garth. They all deserved to be put away. They were criminals. They broke thelaw. I’ve never put away a single suspect that I didn’t feel absolutely surewas guilty.”

Of course, he couldn’t know why she wasso sure. That she had seen each of them with her own eyes, breaking the law,red-handed. Sometimes she’d seen things she really wished she hadn’t, and sheincluded Dockhand in that. He deserved to be in prison. The fact that he’d beenreleased was concerning, frankly; she wished he could have been inside forlonger.

“That’s not the point,” Garth told her. “You’renot the one doing the killings. What you feel doesn’t make a lick ofdifference.”

What he was trying to say slowly dawnedon her. “You’re saying that the killer—he feels that I wronged him.”

“Right. Nobody goes ahead and takesrevenge on someone they don’t think did them wrong. It’s not like antagonizingyou would take away the past. It’s pure hate that drives something like this.They want you to suffer. That’s not the actions of a man who knows he wascaught dead to rights.”

“It would be someone who doesn’t thinkthey deserved to be put away,” Laura thought out loud. “Someone who feels thatI interrupted their grand plan, maybe, or that they weren’t to blame for theiractions. Or even that they did nothing wrong.”

“Does your suspect seem to feel thatway?” Garth asked.

Laura sighed. “No,” she admitted. “Ifanything, it’s the opposite. He told us that he’s been trying to be a betterperson, that he knows he did wrong in the past. He wasn’t even angry when wearrested him. He said he totally understood. And I believe him. I’ve been onthe job long enough that I can usually tell when someone’s trying to play me,but I don’t get that impression from him.”

“That doesn’t sound like the right guyto me,” Garth said, with confidence. “So, you’ve got to take a real look atyourself now. Look at your past. You’ve got to find someone who would feel thatyou wronged them, from their perspective—not from your own.”

“I get it,” Laura said, closing her eyesand pressing her fingers against her forehead for a moment. She was going tohave to start again, and it was going to be a lot. “Thanks, Garth.”

“No problemo, Laur. You just give me acall again if you waver, okay?”

“Okay,” she promised, before hanging upthe phone and staring off into the distance, not seeing a thing.

Someone who had been wronged.

There had to be someone like that in herpast.

If she needed to, she would go throughevery single file she had ever worked on until she found them. But she wasgoing to have to do it fast—because if the man in that room with Nate wasn’tthe real killer, then he was still out there, and he was still going to strikeagain tonight.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Laura stared at her own record on thescreen, and tried not to let utter despair completely take over.

How had Nate faced down this list beforeand not just given up? It was immense. The cases built up quickly when you wereworking one a week, maybe more. There were cases that she had had onlysecondary involvement in, such as providing backup to a larger team. Caseswhere she’d been a junior agent assisting someone else. Cases she’d covered onher own. Cases with Nate.

So many crimes, and so many criminals.Any one of them could have the potential to be a killer. Even the ones who werearrested for less violent crimes—as much as Laura hated to admit it, thejustice system didn’t always put out reformed citizens back into the world.Sometimes they were hardened, more ruthless. Sometimes they got their firstkill on the inside.

She pushed herself back from thecomputer screen, holding her hands to either side of her temples. Nate had beenchecking through everything one by one, and he’d only gotten through a fewyears before she intervened. She wasn’t about to waste time in the same way.

She had to think about this logically.This wasn’t just a random selection of an agent who happened to be helping onthe case. This was someone whose life she had impacted in a very direct way.

So, who would be angry with her for heractions against them? Angry enough to trigger a rampage of killing?

She recalled a particular case. A guywho had battered his wife to death, then staged it to look like a break-in. TheFBI had been called in after the local PD made no headway at all on the case.It was Laura, with her outsider’s perspective, who had managed to see that theman was guilty as hell. He’d gone to prison for life.

He could have been one of the potentialsuspects on her list, if it wasn’t for the fact that she knew he was stilllocked away. Maybe it was someone like that, someone who could directly pointto her as the one single person responsible for their incarceration. But a fewyears in jail wasn’t really enough to justify murder, was it? And those who hadgone to jail for life, well, they were still there.

A family member? She’d had that ideaearly on. She remembered one woman who had killed her own husband, shooting himright in the face. She had tried to use the battered woman defense, althoughthere had not been enough evidence for it to stick. Laura had felt bad for