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Glen Fisher had been sexually abused. Claire couldn’t visualize it happening, but it was vividly part of his wife’s consciousness. Suzanne hadn’t been part of his life when it happened. That was many years ago, when Glen was in middle school.
A math teacher. Redheaded. Petite. Beautiful. Perverse. She’d taken an already twisted adolescent and screwed with his body and his mind. She played into all his sick fantasies and dragged him into all of her own.
The control had been hers, the scars his.
He never actually discussed it. Instead, he revealed snatches of it when he was in a rage, venting. Suzanne had put together the pieces. And they made her sick. How could she fault him for the residual effects? His tightly leashed rage, his hatred toward women who reminded him of her?
She couldn’t. She feared who he could sometimes be. She hated what she knew in her gut he did. But she understood it.
She’d helped him in ways she could justify to herself—starting with supporting Jack when he needed her. He couldn’t do it alone; he didn’t have his uncle’s strategic brilliance. But he did have a flair for the creative. So Suzanne had put her touches on that.
The lip gloss. Claire envisioned Suzanne standing several yards away from Casey in the department store that day, listening. Casey had asked for the lip gloss by name, and then purchased it. Suzanne had waited until she was gone, after which she’d bought five tubes of the same product and had them delivered to a post office box for Jack.
Claire tried to visualize the address on the package, or the post office it was mailed to. Nothing. She then tried to see Jack with the package in his hands. Mentally, she groped for an image of his face, his build—anything. But she kept coming up empty. The only psychic connection she seemed able to make was with Suzanne.
What else did you do, Suzanne? she asked herself, tightening her grip on the wig.
Surveillance, of a sort. Claire could see Suzanne driving her dark sedan to the Columbia campus to watch a particular girl—Kendra Mallery—as she joined a bunch of kids eating pizza. That wasn’t Suzanne’s only visit. She’d returned to the campus on the night of Kendra’s vigil to take pictures of the attendees, and then to text the pictures to Glen—along with a dozen other pictures of different girls he’d asked her to watch.
Suzanne didn’t want to think about the reasons he requested the photos. But she knew. God help her, she knew. He was hunting down potential victims.
Potential victims.
Claire’s breath caught in her throat, and she was plunged into that same terrifying place she’d been in before, during the time she’d been holding Glen Fisher’s pen. Vulnerable. Panicked. Gasping in air. Crying out. Screaming.
This time she could feel herself being stared at by two pairs of eyes—eyes that were filled with evil. Cruelty.
She was lying on a concrete floor in an industrial building. She was cold. So cold. She couldn’t get warm. Couldn’t escape.
Abruptly, the image changed, and it was Casey who was living the nightmare. Only it was worse, more violent. There was a physicality taking place that hadn’t existed for Claire. They were hurting Casey, forcing her to the concrete floor, striking her when she fought back. And Claire had to watch the whole thing.
The scene was dizzying. Claire alternated between being an active participant and an observer. First, she was right beside Casey, flat on her back, her head turned toward her friend. Casey was bound, nude, thrashing her head from side to side as she
was held down. Then Claire was floating above the scene, watching it as a viewer.
The two men were hovering over Casey now, binding her wrists and tying a rope around each ankle, keeping her legs apart. They were fumbling at their own clothes, readying themselves for a long-awaited vengeance.
And Claire was once again removed, fighting with all her might to get to Casey, to free her, to somehow help her escape.
But escape was impossible.
In the midst of Claire’s vision, a beam of light sliced through the room she was seeing, illuminating the face of one of the attackers.
It was Glen Fisher.
Claire willed the light to expand, to include Fisher’s accomplice. But it wouldn’t. His face remained in darkness. Why?
The images were fading. Despite her own sense of dread, Claire battled to hold on to them. She needed to see more, to find something to focus on that would provide her with a clue. Something she could give to the team to stop this heinous occurrence.
Her efforts were futile. She was back in the office, huddled on the carpet. Tears were coursing down her cheeks, and terror was pervading her body. She sank onto the floor, shaking violently, dragging huge gasps of air into her lungs.
She had to think. To make sense of what she’d experienced. Now. While the images were still vivid and fresh in her mind.
With the backs of her hands, Claire dashed the tears off her face, focusing hard on what she’d just gone through as well as what she’d just witnessed. As an active victim, it was like being a bug under a microscope. She’d felt the probing scrutiny. But she hadn’t felt any hands on her. No contact whatsoever. Why? If she was being attacked, why were her attackers just staring at her?
That hadn’t been the case with Casey. They’d struck her, brutalizing her body. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in Claire’s mind that they were preparing to rape and kill her. The image had been as powerful as any reality.
Why had she and Casey been lying side by side during that brief period of time? Had this been an actual premonition or was it a symbolic apparition meant for Claire to interpret?
