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“Yeah, the face. Mr. Watts was mutilated, stabbed a whole bunch, especially in the face. It’s why we couldn’t ID him right away. Mrs. Watts, on the other hand… she had her purse with her, with her ID. She had all of her jewelry on still, even her wedding band. But her face… from her jaw up to her hairline, she was skinned.”
“Skinned?” I repeated. “Reminds me of—”
“What Brianna was doing to that kid, when we found her. Yeah, I had the same thought.”
“She did say Brett made the comment that her art inspired him. Was the injury post-mortem, that you could tell?”
“The lines were clean, and there wasn’t blood on the body,” Rick rattled off. “I’d say it was done after the heart had already stopped beating. The only other wound we found on her was around her neck. Nothing to indicate she was being held somewhere alive. She was strangled. Strangled, tossed into a freezer somewhere to keep her fresh, and then dumped like trash.”
I shook my head once, not as if he could see it, though. “Not like trash. More like a doll. A toy. He’s leaving them for Brianna.” My free hand strummed along my desk. “Rick, I have an idea. It’s one you probably won’t like, but if it works… I’ll consider the arrangement between us over. That’s what you’ve wanted all these years, isn’t it?” I knew it was. I knew Rick wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of me and Gareth.
Although, now, with Brianna, things were a little more complicated than that.
Rick heaved another sigh. “Lay it on me.”
“Before I tell you, you need to swear on your life that you won’t speak of it to Gareth or Brianna. Neither one of them can know.” If we were being watched, everything had to go just right. It had to look right. Otherwise, Brett would suspect something was off.
“Like I have a lot of discussions with the asshole—” Rick stopped himself from saying anything more about Gareth, lowering his voice before saying, “I won’t speak a word of it to either of them, okay? So why don’t you just tell me what your idea is, and we can cut to the chase with me telling you how stupid it is?”
As I told Rick my plan, I knew how crazy it sounded. It wasn’t a safe plan, but it was crazy enough it just might work. It’d be the last thing Brett would expect from us.
When it was all out in the open, Rick was quiet for a few moments. He was slow in saying, “Are you sure about this, Alistair? We’d only have one shot.”
My eyes stared hard at the door, and my voice came out deadly, “One shot is all we need.” The best hunters never needed more than one bullet, more than one arrow or one bite… one attack was all it took for their prey to succumb. Brett thought he was the predator here, and it would only be after the tables had turned that he’d realize how very wrong he was.
“All right. I’ll start getting everything ready on my end,” Rick said.
“Good.” I hung up, setting the phone down on my desk. I laced my fingers together and leaned my mouth against them.
There was no point in wondering if this was the right move. It was either my plan or we let Brett have control—and I’d be damned if I let him carry out his plan and take down my family, the ones I cared for. He wouldn’t hurt Brianna if I had anything to say about it.
Of course, plan or no plan, regardless of what happened, there was something else I wasn’t telling them. Not Gareth, not Rick, and certainly not Brianna. She had too much to handle right now. The last thing I wanted to do was add to the weight on her shoulders. They were already too thin to carry the current weight of everything.
Brett didn’t have one more body to play with. I was ninety-nine percent sure he had two.
Chapter Thirteen – Brianna
I sat beneath an old oak tree, my sketchbook in my lap, my legs folded underneath my butt. The scene I was trying to sketch was being very obstinate. I couldn’t get it right, no matter what I tried.
My eyes flicked up at the gory scene, and then dropped to my current sketch. My nose wrinkled, and I shook my head. No, no, the right side wasn’t quite right. I flipped my pencil around and started to erase the fucked-up side, wanting to start over. The eraser left little specks on the paper, so I lifted the pencil and used my hand to push them off the page.
Except, when I did that, my hand smeared bright red all over the page.
My breath caught, and I was quick to lift my hand off the paper. For some odd reason, I didn’t have the pencil in my hand anymore; I was pencil-free. When I flipped my hand over, I saw my palm and my fingers were drenched in red.
Blood.
But I didn’t… I didn’t remember getting so bloody. How was this possible?
I glanced up, off my sketchpad and away from my bloody hand, to the scene before me in the grass. The green had been splattered with red, a naked boy’s body lying in front of me, his chest cavity open and exposed, his skin peeled back. He had a deep gash on his neck, a grotesque smile beneath his jaw.
As I stared at him, I swore I saw his head move.
And that’s because he did.
He sat up and stared at me. Only one of his eyes had an eyelid; the other had no skin around it at all. Half his face was bloodied and wet looking, like someone had taken a knife and carved away the skin and muscle beneath. He was missing half his lips too, half his teeth on permanent display.
It took me a few seconds to realize who he was: Neo. He didn’t look like the boy next door anymore. He looked like a prop straight out of a horror movie.
