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

the one who wasgoing to die. It was him. But this time he was not sitting in front of hertelevision. He was walking, heading to a refrigerator , moving across a shabbykitchen. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of beer, coldenough that he pressed it to his forehead with an audible sigh of relief. Hewas still wearing his coat. He must only just have come in from work.

A phone rang out, loud and startling.Laura felt the noise ricocheting around inside her skull, reminding her yetagain that pain was the price of seeing the future. Even here, she could notavoid it. She watched as Alex, or whoever he was, headed toward the landline,frowning at it as he picked it up. It was on a low table.

“Hello?” he said.

Laura could not hear what came next onthe other end of the line, could only see Alex frowning. The table, she couldsee, was scattered with envelopes. Unopened mail. One of them was stamped witha red “URGENT.”

“Yes,” he replied. “Why?… What? I justtold you, yes. This is he. What are you talking about? Hello? … Hello?”

And then he hung up, putting the phoneback on the receiver with an audible sound of disgust.

Laura strained to look at the envelopes,to try to read more. There was a set of keys sitting on top of the pile, carkeys and house keys. They had landed right on the clear window of the topmostenvelope, obscuring almost everything. Almost everything, but she thought shecould read the name… Thomas…?

The man paused for a moment, looking atthe phone as if expecting it to tell him more—but then he shook his head tohimself and moved away, back through the same house. Jettisoning his coat as hewent, he switched on the television and settled into an armchair with a thump,groaning as he worked his back into a comfortable position against thecushions. He relaxed, flicking through channels until he chose something funny,turning it up loud enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear anything else. Andthen he reached for his beer…

A car horn behind her startled Laura outof her vision, making her blink her eyes and try to focus. The light was greenabove her. It must have just been turning when the vision started, and eventhough she had only been gone for seconds, it was enough to make the driverbehind her impatient. She started the car again and pulled forward, trying tothink.

She had seen something. She knew shehad, even if it didn’t make sense to her. Her visions never lied, though therewas always the possibility that they showed something that would not actuallycome to pass. Still, this didn’t seem like one of those times. Not if she didn’tget there in time to stop the killer.

But how was she going to find the nextvictim in time, if the killer was going after someone random?

Because that was the only thing shecould think of that made sense. The only reason why there might have been thename Thomas on the envelope that she had seen. Thomas was not Alex, and thoughshe had not seen the full last name, she thought she had seen the very edge ofa letter. A straight line, not a diagonal. Not an A. This wasn’t some cleverruse where the man’s name was Thomas Alex.

But if this victim’s name was Thomas,then he was categorically not Alex. Not the same name as Laura’s father. Therewas the possibility that he had recently moved, or was getting mail that hadcome to the wrong address, but that wouldn’t help her. She could pass it off asthat and move on, but ignoring anything she had seen in a vision was always amassive risk. She had seen it for a reason. She had to cling on to that.

So, Thomas. But what connection couldthere be between Thomas and Alex? Or, for that matter, between Thomas andherself? There was no one in her family with that name, at least as far as sheknew. It didn’t ring any bells at all.

Bronston was going after a man now,changing his method. Did that mean he was changing everything? Changing eventhe reasoning behind picking his victims? Was he done with Laura and now movingon to victimize someone else who he thought was behind his incarceration?

If that was the case, she had literallyno hope of tracking him down.

But then, she still really had no ideaif this vision had been of the killer she was looking for. The pain throbbingbehind her eyes told her it was something that would happen imminently, but thelocation and the killer were still hidden to her. She hadn’t actually seen Ed.He didn’t have any kind of marking on his forearms that would give him away.She had noticed his hands in the other visions, of course, but in the one whereshe’d seen Thomas being killed, the arms had not been clear enough to her. Justout of shot, dark and muddled, hidden behind Thomas’s head as it tilted back.His hands covered with gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, meaning she hadnothing to go on there.

She carried on driving in circles,looking in vain for somewhere to pull over. What she really needed now was adark parking lot where she could stop the car and give in to despair. Maybe onethat adjoined a liquor store—that would have been ideal. But the brightness ofthe streetlights boring into her eyes from above seemed to have her trapped onthe city streets like a fly under a magnifying glass.

A link to someone else… who would it be?Laura racked her mind, trying to think back to that case. The DA? The defenseattorney who hadn’t done a good enough job at getting his client off the hook?She didn’t know them well enough to know anything about them that would help.

It was all so long ago, and not thatlong ago at all in other ways. Laura had been through so many cases since then.How was she supposed to remember tangential details from a case that had beenjust one of many, in the end? Yes, she had stepped in—but even the visions hadfaded enough in