Mirror Me Read online

  And while Abby had wanted law enforcement, she’d also known her limits. She knew what made her feel safe in the beginning and what didn’t. But even when the Black Magic Killer disappeared, she couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder.

  She was as much in WITSEC as Kayla. Because at one point, Abby had been Kayla, protected by Hoss.

  “You’ve got to stop beating yourself up,” Jacoby told her sharply. “Talk to someone about it—get it out and let it go.”

  “Right, sure,” she said absently. “And who do you turn to?”

  Jacoby pressed his lips into a grim line. “I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time.”

  Abby cleared her throat. “Yeah, me too. I don’t think it’s working very well for either of us.”

  Jacoby surprised her then by laughing, a deep belly laugh, and she joined him. Soon they were both wiping their eyes.

  “We’re pathetic,” she managed through laughter.

  “Totally,” Jacoby agreed. Just then, both their phones beeped, almost in unison. They both cursed under their breaths, because that was never good.

  “From Diane’s house,” Jacoby said. “Let’s go.”

  They got into Abby’s car, Jacoby behind the wheel as Abby dialed Teige. “Come on, pick the hell up,” she muttered into the phone. When she got his voice mail, she cursed loudly, hung up and texted him several times. “No response.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. They’re probably busy,” Jacoby said.

  Abby stared at the message again. Activity at Diane’s house. That could mean anything. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “No fucking clue. That bitch could just want our attention,” Jacoby muttered. “Or Teige’s.”

  When they got there, everything seemed calm. The police officer stationed outside the door ambled up to them with an easy nod. “Everything okay?”

  “We got a call that there was activity here,” Jacoby said, and the officer frowned. He immediately radioed inside and got the other officers to radio back. “Stay here,” he told Abby. “I’ll go check.”

  Abby nodded, said to the officer, “No strange cars going by? No phone calls?”

  “No ma’am. It’s been radio silence, and I’ve got the calls forwarded to my number. Diane wouldn’t hear them coming into the house. We figured it was better that way, mainly because she’s sedated.”

  Abby frowned. “Did the doctor come by?”

  The officer looked disturbed. “No. She was agitated for a while, walking around the back patio. We finally got her inside. Before we could stop her, she’d taken a couple of Ativans to calm down. But she’s easier to deal with asleep.”

  “Most women are,” she deadpanned and he nodded in agreement for a second before realizing he maybe shouldn’t have taken that as truth and adding, “No comment.”

  “I’ll put in for the office to trace where the hell that message came from—maybe they can pinpoint if someone’s bouncing signals,” Jacoby said. “Unless it’s Diane, doing it in her drugged state. I’ll check her phone.”

  “Good—you do that and I’m going to look around back,” Abby told him, and when Jacoby hesitated, she waved him inside the house and began to march herself away. He obviously relented, because she heard the door close as she reached the side of the house.

  Diane’s backyard was mainly concrete patio that extended almost to the wooded section behind her. Abby surveyed the area but everything appeared to be in order—although it was so quiet it made the hair on her arms stand on end.

  There was something wrong in her life when quiet was a bad thing.

  She took a step down off the concrete patio onto the grass and that’s when she noted the paper on the lawn. It was half hidden by the flagstone stepping stones that led ostensibly to the woods, framed by flowers and maybe extended twenty feet.

  She glanced down and saw the page of a book, ripped out—a page she recognized immediately. “Goddammit,” she muttered, because she’d almost yelled, and no, she wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of that.

  It was a picture of the crime scene at her childhood home—a picture of her father’s body, unauthorized and grainy, a tabloid shot that had been shown over and over. They’d never discovered who’d taken it or sold it.

  Abby grabbed the paper up and shoved it into her jacket pocket, even as she spotted another page. That one held part of her story from that night, culled from interviews with the press and hospital employees. The next one, a few feet away, at the edge of the woods, was a picture of her, again, grainy, but Abby knew she’d been covered in blood and soot, on the verge of unconsciousness and hysteria at once.

  Her hand shook as she picked up the page, shoved it in her pocket with the others and took a few steps into the woods.

  “Who the fuck did this?” she asked, her voice shaking with anger.

  Of course, no one answered. She walked back toward the house and went inside—Jacoby was talking with one of the officers and Abby wandered around the house, looking for a bookshelf. She found one in the small den—the only books seemed to be about Teige…and that one fucking unauthorized biography of the Black Magic Killer. She pulled it off the shelf and paged through.

  The pages she’d found had been ripped out of this book.

  Diane knew the family history—and Diane had always hated her. Abby recalled that every time they’d been in the same place, which Abby made sure didn’t happen often, Diane would attempt to grill her about what happened that night with the Black Magic Killer. After the second time, Abby told her in no uncertain terms to never bring it up again. So Abby could definitely see the bitch doing something like this, for either Abby or maybe even Teige to find.

  If the bitch was awake, she’d have dealt with it now, but there’d be time for that later.

  “Hey.” Jacoby came into the den as she shelved the book. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” she lied, not wanting to have to relive her past, or be asked if she was going to be okay, or if this case was too personal again. “How’s Diane?”

  “The text came from her phone. She’s pretty out of it—doesn’t remember texting but she’s slurring and not making much sense. Maybe she was dreaming.”

  “Do you think Mara could’ve come in and out without anyone noticing?”

  “Anything’s possible, but to what end?” Jacoby asked.

  “To prove she can.”

  *

  After canvassing the house and property thoroughly and finding nothing amiss, Abby and Jacoby reasoned that it was most likely a false alarm from Diane. But they both kept the other possibility in the forefront of their minds as they headed to the diner, and, at a corner booth, went over the old files on Mara and Kayla for the umpteenth time. Abby focused on the pictures from CPS from their visit with Mara and Kayla’s biological parents, taken two weeks before the double-wide burned to the ground.

  The pictures from their home showed the absolute squalor in which Mara and Kayla grew up. Kayla might’ve blocked it all out just for that alone. “They should never have been allowed to stay in this place with their parents,” she murmured.

  “They moved around too much. CPS would start to get a handle on them, because they noted what they believed to be possible abuse, although they never got as far as getting the girls to the doctors. They would get the hell out of Dodge when the authorities came sniffing around. The father was a drunk—he didn’t work, just collected disability. He never married the mom, so she continued to collect welfare—reports have her drunk a lot of the time too, but the neighbors tended to mind their own business. He probably threatened them,” Jacoby surmised.

  “So what did he spend money on, then? Certainly wasn’t his kids,” Abby said angrily.

  “Gambling, prostitutes, who knows? There were reports the wife drank. Mara maintains she was molested by her adoptive parents,” Jacoby said slowly, with a pained look on his face. “She kept saying Kayla was a murderer too.”

  Abby didn’t want to explore the po
ssibilities of that…why Kayla didn’t remember. She rubbed her palms to her forehead in an attempt to stave off the inevitable, stabbing headache. “I hate this.”

  Jacoby gave her a sympathetic smile. “When you’re profiling, you always find out things you wish you didn’t know.”

  She recalled her dad saying the same thing, many, many times over. “Jacoby?”

  “Yeah”

  “Do you believe in curses?”

  He stared at her. “Are you trying to put one on me?”

  “No. Well, maybe a little in the beginning.” They both smiled at that, first ones in a while for both, but that only lasted a while because she added, “My family’s cursed. I think I believe—I have to, because I’ve got the evidence right in front of me.”

  Jacoby considered that. “I believe.”

  “We have it the worst. Because the dead are dead. It’s the survivors who are really, truly cursed. No one knows that or thinks about it. We’re the brave, strong positive ones. But we’re also the cursed ones. Goes hand in hand.”

  She noticed that Jacoby didn’t disagree with her.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  To Kayla, the morning’s events had been like a nightmare, something she still couldn’t really believe happened.

  It became more real later that afternoon when the police found Penny’s body dumped under an overpass on a highway just outside of Georgia.

  Georgia. And close to where Kayla—and Abby and Teige—had been. Penny had been near them when she was dying. Which meant…Mara had been so close to them too.

  A sinking stone of dread tore through Kayla as she thought about how Penny must’ve suffered, how she must’ve thought Kayla had been the one to hurt her, or at least set her up. How Mara took Penny from New York to Georgia, possibly terrorizing her for the entire ride.

  It should’ve been me. But for Mara, this was better—it was her way of ensuring Kayla suffered enough. For what crimes, Kayla still didn’t know.

  “What’re you thinking about?” Teige asked, brows raised.

  “She can’t die until the job’s done. Until I remember.” Kayla held a hand to her throat. “If I never do…”

  Teige couldn’t stand to hear the pain in her voice. He put his arms around her and she rested her head against his chest as she stared out the window to the woods below.

  “She’ll come for me if I tell her to.”

  “Kayla—”

  “Maybe she’ll tell me.”

  “And then kill you.”

  “Diane’s next,” Kayla said in a quietly strangled voice.

  “I’m glad you had the good sense not to say that out loud when the police were here,” Teige growled.

  Kayla nodded mechanically. She wasn’t truly processing anything he said. Whether she was feeling Mara’s intentions or it was the next logical train of thought, it didn’t matter. Teige knew she was right. So did Abby, Jacoby and the FBI team who showed up at Abby’s office, at Kayla’s house and who were currently demanding an audience with Kayla.

  And in the state she was in, Kayla would most definitely repeat, “Diane’s next,” to them. Which was why Abby and Jacoby agreed to keep them at bay. Teige’s house was set up to the nines with perimeter alarms. He’d thought about explosives but there were too many factors involved that could become problematic. Hanny was a better perimeter alarm than anyone, which was why Teige was taking her out on a leash and bringing her right back in and putting her upstairs with Kayla. He wasn’t going to let anyone fuck with them, and Hanny would be a target for Mara, in order to break in without being seen or heard. So those two needed to be connected at the hip. Even though he could tell Hanny missed her runs with him, she was also on high alert. She knew something was up and she kept strolling to the window to check on things.

  “Where is she?”

  “Diane? She’s in protective custody. Or she will be.” Right now, she was no doubt surrounded by marshals and FBI and police, telling her story over and over again, getting more dramatic with each telling.

  *

  She’s next.

  Teige hoped the marshals placed Diane far enough away so as not to draw Mara here to prove something. They’d kept it quiet as to who killed Penny—that was their only hope. So while the town remained in mourning, they didn’t realize there might be a killer among them who looked like someone now considered one of their own.

  Teige was getting pulled in by Kayla, by his past. He’d fought like hell to extricate himself from it, but the net held him fast.

  He woke up with a hard start on the couch, Kayla curled next to him, both of them having dropped off from sheer exhaustion. The house was quiet, the TV flickered. Hanny was calm, the most reassuring sign there was. He trusted her more than any security camera.

  Still, he patrolled the house quietly, and when he returned, Kayla was waking up, blanket pulled around her, Hanny in front of her.

  “You okay?”

  “None of the detectives believed me,” she said quietly.

  “I did. So do Jacoby and Abby. That needs to count.”

  “It does,” she insisted. But the night of her adoptive parents’ murders kept playing over and over on a continuous loop in her head. She’d been gone overnight, partying and sleeping with her boyfriend of the moment, and she’d come home to police tape and a frantic detective. Her adoptive parents were dead and Mara had been arrested.

  Kayla remembered the questioning, even though her lawyer told her later that Mara’s prints were found on the weapon and she’d been covered in blood. She tried to say she’d been performing CPR but no one bought that.

  Kayla had witnesses—guys she’d been partying with, and that made her look horrible. And Mara was trying to get her to lie.

  In Mara’s eyes, Kayla had betrayed her.

  Forget the ‘through Mara’s eyes’ part—you feel that way too. And guilt’s not a good look on you.

  “Are you going to keep beating yourself up over this?” Teige asked, yanking her out of her reverie.

  “Penny’s dead because of me, so fuck you, Teige.”

  “Get over this, Claire. Stop the pity party. Mara’s a master manipulator and you’re letting her control you and your life.”

  “I told you I wanted that to stop. I want her to come for me,” she protested.

  “You want her to kill you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Bullshit. You think it’ll be over, and so much easier to let her do what she wants to do.”

  “You don’t know anything about it. You weren’t the hunted one.”

  “But Abby was, and you’ve told her she doesn’t understand either. The problem is, she understands all too well, and so do I. You can’t get away with your shit anymore, and that scares you. And it should. But once you let it go, you’ll be stronger. And, in turn, freer.”

  She wanted to believe him, had been chained to Mara and her crimes for so long it seemed impossible to break the bonds. “I could be a killer.”

  He stared at her. “Kill anyone in recent memory?”

  “No. But just because I say no doesn’t mean it’s true? Why should you believe me? Not all that long ago, I was almost charged with Mara’s crimes. I look at the evidence and I can understand why people don’t always believe me.”

  He tilted his head to examine her. “What do you want me to say? That I think you were a cold-blooded murderer before the age of eight? Do you expect me to walk away?”

  “I was ready to run. From Hoss.” She whispered it, even though they were alone. “The police found my packed bag. The marshals weren’t happy. A lot of them said it threw suspicion on me.”

  “So why were you going to run?”

  “Because the walls were closing in. I felt her. And I figured, if I could make her chase me…” She shook her head. “I should’ve warned Hoss. But I didn’t want to believe it myself for a while. And then I thought I’d been too late. Turns out, I was right.”

  “Why do you want me to believ
e you’re a killer?”

  “I don’t,” she protested. “Everyone just does.”

  “I’m not everyone,” he growled. “So if you have anything to admit to me…”

  “I don’t remember anything from before my eighth birthday.”

  “So when does your memory start?”

  “It’s spotty. I remember waking up in the hospital. I thought I was dreaming about this pretty woman who always seemed to be there whenever I’d gather up strength to open my eyes. She and her husband were the ones who’d been chosen to foster us. They started the adoption process almost immediately. Turns out, she was a twin who’d lost her sister when she was younger, and she refused to separate us.” Kayla gave a sound like a cross between a sob and a laugh. “I wish she had. Maybe things would’ve been different.”

  “Or maybe Mara could’ve framed you more efficiently,” Teige reasoned and she winced. “Abby showed me the evidence. It was pretty obvious what she’d tried to do.”

  “She was young. She’s gotten much better, much more sophisticated,” Kayla told him, mimicking the FBI language she’d heard far too many times. “They also told me there are very few true female serial killers.”

  Teige shook his head. “I never believed that. I think women are just better at covering their tracks.”

  “Am I supposed to find that comforting?”

  “Absolutely not. But I’m not going to sugarcoat things, babe. If I’m not honest, you could die.”

  She blinked. “Can you handle this?”

  “Can you?” he shot back.

  “Yes. If you’re with me, I feel like I can deal with anything.”

  His expression softened slightly. “I will be.”

  “I don’t want to be weak.”

  “You’re not. That’s admitting you need help. Big difference.”

  She nodded. “I don’t want to be anyone’s burden. I don’t want to bring danger to anyone.”