CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Watching his victims was the most important part of all. He wanted to understand them before he struck, wanted to know every facet of their lives.
Currently, he was watching from inside the van he’d outfitted for exactly that purpose, with a wealth of audio and visual devices feeding information back to him about the outside world.
“…telling you, Marcy, everything’s going to be fine. So, do you want to go out Friday night?”
There was a breathy note to Cindy’s voice that he’d always disliked, even from the start.
“I can’t. I’d have to get a new sitter. Kelly’s gone off to college, now.”
Of course, he could hear the hesitation in that, the small lie to spare feelings. It was amazing what you could hear, when you only listened hard enough.
“It isn’t hard to get a sitter, girl!”
He’d bugged his target’s phone, of course. That was simply standard, even if it meant having to put up with banal conversations about whether her friend could get childcare.
He had more bugs in Cindy’s handbag, around her house, even placed carefully in one of her shoes, so that wherever she went, he would be able to hear her. Her whole life filtered in through his headphones, focused and amplified until he could pick apart every nuance. The crunch as Cindy ate her morning cereal, the small sound of annoyance as she hung up, telling him exactly what she thought about her friend bailing on her. Since he’d begun his surveillance, he’d heard every tiny sound in her life, come to know her as intimately as a lover.
He could see her too, of course. He’d managed to get a pinhole camera into each of the rooms of her house, letting him watch her movements as well as listen in. Currently, Cindy was sitting in her pajamas, eating cereal and flicking through a well-worn textbook. The rustle of the pages came to him each time she turned them.
She was pretty, he supposed, in that way that youth could so easily be mistaken for prettiness. Cindy had delicate features, a slender frame bordering on the fragile, hair that was getting out of hand already in spite of her having it cut a few days before. He could remember the delicate snick of the scissors then, the harsher sound of the hairdryer, and the music in the background.
She went to get dressed, and he looked away from the screen for that part, relying only on his ears. He wasn’t a voyeur.
Now she was on the move, and he switched to the driver’s seat of the van, keeping his headphones in place. Of course, he had the means to track her by GPS, but sometimes it was better to do things the old-fashioned way.
There was an art to following someone in a van, when they were on foot. Crawling along behind Cindy wouldn’t have worked. She would have noticed, would have wondered why there was a creepy van following her so closely. Probably, she would have gotten the license plate, or even made out his face, in spite of the tinted windows.
If she did that, he would have to kill her there on the street, and he didn’t want to do that. That wasn’t the plan, at all.
The plan was important. The plan was what had kept him safe, doing this.
Instead of creeping along, he skipped ahead of Cindy, starting and stopping, pulling in like he was making deliveries. He actually had a fake ID from a fake delivery company, just in case anyone asked. Not that anyone had. This wasn’t a world where people actually asked, rather than assuming that it was none of their business. He made a game of it, driving ahead, stopping, listening for Cindy’s footsteps as she got closer.
He watched her walk past, letting her go on like an angler playing out the line, then leapfrogged her again in the van to watch and listen once more.
It was hard to stick to the plan on a day like today, when there were so many obvious ways that he could take her. She was barely paying attention to the world around her, certainly didn’t notice him or the van in which he sat, except as part of the normal scenery of the city. There were a dozen spots on this route where he could wait for Cindy if he got ahead of her, and where it would be easy to-
No, he had to control himself. It was bad enough that that the chances of discovery were too great here, in daylight. Anyone might walk up. Anyone might catch him in the act, ruining all the secrecy that he’d put so much time and effort into. If they did that, what was he going to do? Kill them too?
Well, yes, obviously. But that depended on them being someone he could overpower; and even if he did so, the commotion might attract still more people to watch. Soon, there would be no chance of containing things, and he would be unveiled, when he’d managed to remain invisible for all this time.
That wasn’t all of it, though. There was another layer that mattered almost as much as the simple risk of discovery, perhaps even more. There was a ritual to it by this point, a way of doing things that had worked out perfectly in the past, one that had felt right, and that made sure that no one would ever come close to catching him. It wasn’t just sensible to stick to that by this point: it was necessary in a way that even he couldn’t fully articulate.
So he let Cindy walk past on her way to work, safe for now, possibly safer than she had ever been in her life. He wasn’t going to let anything happen to her now, not before it was his chance to act. He would wait, and watch, and listen. He would learn everything there was to learn about her.
It would be the full moon soon enough.
