No Darker Place

His phone sounded a warning. Nick reached for it and checked the status of the tracking device he’d planted on Gentry’s car. “Can’t sleep either, eh?”

He snatched up his keys and headed for the door. Apparently neither of them was going to get any sleep tonight. He wasn’t surprised. She went for middle-of-the-night drives several times a week. Detective Gentry went to great lengths to make herself available for the taking. Nick suspected Perry wanted her to suffer a little more before he obliged her and made a move.

“You won’t get away this time.” However else he had screwed up on this one, Nick would see to it that Perry didn’t escape.

The streets of Montgomery were quiet. Most of the bars and clubs would be closed by now. He checked the blinking dot that represented Gentry’s progress and took the necessary turns. When he spotted her black Challenger, he shook his head. The police cruiser was right on her tail. He thought of the neighborhood—a neighborhood known for serious drug and gang problems—where she currently resided.

“You like punishing yourself for surviving—don’t you, Bobbie?” He didn’t have to wonder how she explained that one to her psychiatrist. He’d slipped into the doctor’s office and read over his notes more than once. I need the space to get back to who I am.

“Liar.” She still owned the house she and her husband built before their son was born. She had closed the place up four months ago. The cars she and her husband had driven were still in the garage. A lawn service kept the exterior maintained. Gentry had taken nothing, not even her clothes from the home. She’d bought a new muscle car and moved into the Gardendale house to “find herself.”

He shook his head as he watched her taillights in the distance. “I’ve got you all figured out, Bobbie.”

Trouble was, learning her so well had cost him. Too early just yet to tell how much.

She made a left onto Commerce Street. After parking on the Dexter Avenue side of Court Square, she emerged from her car. The cruiser parked a few yards beyond her. Nick eased to the curb half a block away. Gentry walked to the fountain in the center of the square. Montgomery’s historic downtown district centered on the 1880s fountain, but the fountain’s historic significance and the goddess of youth statue that topped it weren’t the reasons she had come.

It was in this cobblestoned square that Perry had left his last victim before abducting Gentry. Alyssa Powell’s body had been posed at this fountain on December 3. Perry’s decision to make a second abduction in one year and to leave that victim here had forever changed Gentry’s life.

She walked around the fountain, once, twice, and then she surveyed the deserted square. Nick 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.

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