Just to be extra safe, she reset the alarm system, this time on the highest security setting she had, the one that would send a silent alarm to the police station the second someone even touched her door or window. She secured the drapes, checked on Flynn, who’d finally tired himself out and was sound asleep, breathing deeply, his little chest rhythmically rising and falling. Her heart filled with love and dread watching him, so innocent, so pure. She closed his door almost all the way, leaving a crack so she could hear him if he cried out in the night, then went back to the laptop.

I know who you are.

She started scrolling through the messages, fear choking her. There must have been a hundred entries, all with those five words. All left anonymously, between half past noon and 1:30 p.m. today.

She opened her web stats and looked up the IP address associated with the comments. Nashville, Tennessee.

A few more clicks showed her it had come from a private server at a temporary internet hot spot, but that was as far as she could get.

She chewed on her thumb, teeth catching on a hangnail. She worried it until the skin tore away, leaving a fresh bloom of red blood across the bed of her nail. She sucked on the cut until the pain forced her to stop. She’d received threats before, but they’d always been silly, empty, designed to piss her off more than anything else. Always diatribes, rants against her and her purpose. Sometimes family who hated what she was doing, or an irate fan. But nothing like this. For some reason, this felt real.

She checked the other posts she’d done today. It was there. On every post, the same five words, so seemingly innocuous, that made sweat break out on her neck and her flesh crawl.

I know who you are.

No one knew she was Felon E. No one. She’d been so careful to protect her identity. She’d even started completely separate mail and phone systems for contacts that were meant for the blog. The cell was disposable, only charged when she used it, which was never, and the P.O. Box was registered under a completely different name. Nothing that could be traced back to her, Colleen Keck. Neither the phone company nor the post office had the capability to put two and two together. The only way was if someone followed her to the post office and caught her checking the Felon E mailbox, then followed her home.

Unless there was someone in her system checking her phone bills against her IP address. That was a true long shot; she routed through multiple servers so she wasn’t easily traced back and created new IP addresses every time she logged in. She clicked a few keys and engaged a search, was relieved to see that wasn’t the case. No one had been in her system. There were no tracks.

So why did she get the feeling that this crackpot wasn’t lying?

I know who you are.

She started looking frantically through the rest of the comments, and found something even more disturbing.

A short exchange, buried in the middle of the mess, from one of her regulars, @texasmassacre. It read:

“Hey, did you hear about @kittycrime and @chaosmaster? They got themselves shot out in San Francisco.”

The responses varied from horror to smug nastiness. Colleen felt the fear tear at her stomach, a gnawing, aching terror. She checked the forum, saw the conversations going on about the two regular commenters who’d been gunned down last night. She fished through the forum’s registration information until she found their real names: @chaosmaster was Ike Sharp and @kittycrime was named Vivi Waters.

She didn’t have to check her notes. She knew the names. They matched the names of the victims in this morning’s Zodiac killing in San Francisco.

I know who you are.

Colleen didn’t know whether to panic or stay calm, but two words escaped her lips with utter sincerity. “Oh, shit.”

She couldn’t keep this to herself anymore. She needed to go public. Not on the blog, not speculation and reporting. She needed to go to the cops.

Twenty

The dark water lapped languorously at the bank, and Taylor could hear the small stirrings of animals in the surrounding woods. It was quiet on this boat dock, isolated. That was why the killer chose this place. It was out of the way. Off the beaten path. Private.

A familiar chirping noise came to her ears, playing in the background behind the murmurs and joking conversations of the crime scene techs.

Crickets. Crickets in winter. Surely there was some old wives’ tale that addressed that phenomenon? The world was probably going to stop spinning on its axis, or Sam was sure to have a boy, or a cat was going to walk over her grave. She should ask Ariadne, the witch would have the answer. She always did.

Taylor watched Sam get the body into the M.E.’s van, her instructions reverential yet efficient. Marcus was handling the investigation; Taylor didn’t need to be at the scene anymore. She decided to stay a few more minutes anyway, feeling a false sense of responsibility. More guilt, if she was being honest. That was crazy, she wasn’t responsible, for the Schechter boy’s death or for this case, but the simple fact that another kid had died was too much for her.

When was this going to stop? Was it something she’d done, some wrong she’d committed? And why, if the Pretender was so fucking omniscient, wasn’t he taking his chance? He’d get off on the thrill of having cops around. She’d walked the perimeter of the crime scene alone purposefully. If he was watching, maybe he’d take a chance. From a distance, in the dark, the best he could do would be a body shot, her vest would stop that in a heartbeat.

She realized she was assuming that the Schechter boy was just a ploy designed to distract her, and sharpened her senses even further. Death was not a finite commodity.

Anger burned through her. Come on, you motherfucker. Let’s go. The dark greeted her with silence, broken only by crickets and the grunts of the investigators behind her.

Over the past few months, the murder rate on the whole had risen in Nashville. While her team’s close rate was still in the eighty to eighty-three percent range, much higher than anyone else’s in Metro and across the country, too, the fact that there were more murders to solve meant resources were stretched thin, and emotions running high. She knew the Pretender had contributed to the mess, amplifying the murder rate almost fifteen percent all on his own, but she’d had other cases this year that contributed. Nashville was much more likely to see an uptick in lowbrow crime—drugs, prostitution, gangs—than these unique serial cases. Yet the crazies kept finding her.

Another reason she needed to resolve the problem, and soon. If she eliminated the Pretender, the crime rates would drop. The chief would be happy with her, Delores Norris, the head of the Office of Professional Accountability, would quit breathing down her neck, Fitz would come back to work and her whole team would be back together, and life would go on.