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

her,partly believing her and partly not. She’d ultimately been convicted. Lauraremembered how the woman’s teenage son had screamed in the courtroom, until hewas taken out and forcibly restrained. Could it be him? Did he hate Lauraenough to try to get his revenge in this way?

No. She couldn’t believe it. Grief andfear for a parent were not the same thing as killing intent. The tears that hadstreamed down his face told her that he was at least empathetic. These killings—theywere cold. Ruthless. They weren’t the actions of someone who could feel thatemotional pain.

A thought struck her. A memory from acourtroom, of a man who seemed to feel no remorse whatsoever for what he haddone. In fact, he had tried to pretend that he was insane at the time of thekidnapping he was eventually sent down for. But that had all been a story.

Laura had been a junior agent then,nowhere near as experienced as she was now. She hadn’t been able to distinguishthe truth in his eyes when he said he didn’t remember anything that hadhappened, that he had been in some kind of fugue state.

That was back in Brooklyn. Years ago. Itwas a missing persons case when she was brought in as an extra body to helpwith the hunt. She remembered long nights searching through the city,accompanied by police dogs and even local volunteers, all of them combingthrough abandoned buildings and back streets and looking for some kind of sign thatwould tell them where the young woman had gone.

She’d had a vision. One of the first timesthat a vision had actually led her to solve a case. She’d followed it right towhere the woman was being held, passing it off as pure luck, and found them.The man who had kidnapped her, and his victim. He had been standing over herwith a knife, ready to end it all. But Laura had pulled her gun, stopped himwith the threat of death, and arrested him. She had saved the woman’s life.

In fact, it was the first time that shehad earned the reputation of having such a lucky touch on these cases. Thestart of her lucky streak, something that was infamous enough within the agencyfor Nate to have known about it before they were partnered up. That was whereit all began.

Laura had gone to court to see thekidnapper enter a plea of insanity, and that night at home she had had aterrible vision. She had seen this same man going on to murder several women,strangling the life out of them and then abandoning them in their own homes fortheir families to find. She had seen the vivid colors, felt the last exhalationof the women’s breath on her cheek, watched their eyes as the life drained outof them. She had awoken shaking, terrified that he was going to get away withit.

It was simple. If he was judged to beinsane, he would be sent for mental treatment. Then, once he proved himself tobe sane—which the physicians would think was a result of their treatment—hewould be released. He would be free to kill again.

Laura couldn’t let that happen.

So she had gone into the courtroom andpresented herself as an expert witness. She had spoken to the killer’s state ofmind when she arrested him. She had embellished it a little here and there,just enough to make him sound absolutely sane and rational, to show that he hadhad every intention of killing the woman before she interrupted. That had putpaid to his insanity plea. Even so, the fact that he had only kidnapped andtried to kill someone, rather than actually doing it, gave him a lightersentence.

Attempted homicide. It didn’t exactlycarry a short sentence. But he must have gotten out early, probably on goodbehavior. Some kind of reform program.

Laura didn’t have to look it up. Therewas no point. She knew now. She knew why the feeling of déjà vu had been sostrong when she walked around the apartment in which Caroline Birchtree losther life. She knew why she had looked at the body in the kitchen of Nadia andPaul Frost’s house, and felt that same tingling feeling. She knew now.

She had seen all of these victimsbefore. Years ago, she had seen them in another vision. She had watched themdie the first time. She just hadn’t been able to put it together until now,because of all of the awful things she had seen between now and then, both inperson and in her mind. She had managed to partly block them out, believingthat she had seen a future which no longer existed.

But it did exist. It was real. It washappening now. What she had seen wasn’t what would happen if the killer wasreleased early because of an insanity plea. She had seen what was going tohappen all along.

No, that wasn’t quite right, sherealized. Horror shot through her veins, making her hair stand up on the backof her neck. No, if she had let him enter his insanity plea, he would neverhave needed to kill these women. He would probably not even have rememberedLaura’s name, because she would not have personally testified against him. Shewould have just been the anonymous agent who caught him. It wasn’t as thoughthey’d had time to introduce themselves to one another while she was arrestinghim.

She had been right all along. Her visionhad been correct. But her actions taken to prevent it had actually been whatcaused it to come to pass. She wasn’t the hero who had saved a woman’s life.

She was the woman who had damned severalmore to death.

And they had the wrong guy in custody.Brent Dockhand had nothing to do with this. The killer was still out there.

He was going to kill in her name again.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Laura looked up as Nate walked in,almost jumping out of her skin. Just for a single moment, she was so scared shealmost reached for her gun. Her nerves were going haywire, so many terriblethoughts about the revelation she’d just had going around and around in herhead.

“I’m not getting anything out of him… whoa,are you okay?” He paused halfway to the board, frowning