No Darker Place. Debra Webb

exhaled a heavy breath. She was doing all within her power to draw out the Storyteller, and obviously she no longer cared if anyone knew. The surveillance detail hindered her efforts toward her goal, but that was only temporary. She was a smart, determined lady. When she was ready to ditch the detail, she would make it happen. Nick had to make sure she didn’t do the same to him.

      The first time he saw her she had given up. Perry had murdered her husband, and her child had died as a result of the abduction. The torture Perry had inflicted left Gentry vulnerable, but it was the loss of her family that had destroyed her, and she simply hadn’t possessed the wherewithal to go on.

      Nick had just finished a hunt. He’d been physically and mentally exhausted, but the news that a victim had survived the Storyteller was too significant to ignore. The Storyteller had been on his top-ten list already. After seeing Gentry and hearing her story from her partner, Nick had made his decision. The Storyteller would be next. He’d been tracking him since.

      Gaylon Perry wasn’t the most intelligent serial killer he’d hunted, but he possessed incredible willpower. He allowed himself one theatrical event each year, and then he returned to school in the fall and carefully maintained his seemingly normal persona until summer rolled around again. Last November his mother’s death had caused him to act out of character, to make a move beyond his meticulously maintained boundaries. Then a second trigger had prompted a dangerously impulsive move.

      That trigger had been Bobbie Gentry.

      Since Perry had taken several broad steps outside his established MO, maybe Nick should move his grid search closer into the city. Perry would want to be near her. He would need to see Gentry often. To relish her flagrant actions of invitation. Her every move was like foreplay to the serial killer who had already come so very close to ending her life.

      Nick wanted to shake her. She had to know she couldn’t do this alone.

      As if she’d felt his censure across the night, she climbed back into her Challenger and drove away. Her official shadow rolled behind her. Nick allowed some distance and then he followed. She returned to her house on Gardendale and backed into the driveway. Nick watched until she was inside and the house went dark again before he returned to his motel.

      Once he was between the sheets, he closed his eyes and waited for exhaustion to take him. Between now and then one face and one voice would taunt him. He hadn’t slept a single night without thinking of Bobbie Gentry since back in February, when he’d held her hand in that hospital room and made that damned promise.

      She wouldn’t remember and he couldn’t forget.

      In that sterile room all those months ago he’d watched her sleep, absorbing the pain and desperation emanating from her weak and broken body. He had known then that Perry would come after her again. She would be the key to stopping the sadistic bastard. From that moment Nick had learned all he could about her. He’d searched the home she’d shared with her husband and child; over and over he’d watched the videos they’d made. He knew her every move, her every look, her serious side as well as her playful one. The nuances of her voice and the sound of her laughter. He understood her vulnerabilities, few though they were, and her infinite strength.

      The woman he had spoken to tonight was nothing like the one captured in those videos with her family and friends. He thought of the way she had smiled before...the way her eyes lit with happiness in the videos. The light was missing from her eyes now, and he was yet to see her lips form a real smile.

      Something about her—something he couldn’t quite name—haunted him. Reached a place inside him that no one had touched in a very long time. The longer he remained near her, the more powerful that inexplicable link became.

      He never permitted personal involvement to develop during his hunts. His life as well as his sanity depended on maintaining distance. Somehow in the past few months he’d lost the ability to distance himself from Bobbie Gentry.

      Something he and Perry had in common.