A buzzing pain thrums in my ears as my heart kicks into gear past the residual cloud of sedation.

“Let me fucking go,” I yell to the seemingly empty house, rattling the chair. My tongue feels too thick in my mouth, slurring the hard edges of my words. The plastic bruises my wrists as I pour all my dampened strength into twisting my arms in a futile attempt to free myself.

“I’m sorry about this, Isobel.”

Hayes enters the room from the kitchen. He looks apologetic. But also resolved. Whatever plan he’s put into motion, he’s determined to see it through.

“You fucking tased me. And drugged me. You aren’t nearly sorry enough.”

Breaths saw in my chest as Hayes slowly closes the distance between us, a bottle of water in his hand. He makes a point of cracking the sealed lid to show he hasn’t tampered with it. I loathe the thought of him holding it to my lips like a father would for a child, but I’m desperately thirsty. I down half the bottle, glaring at him the entire time.

“I know this seems excessive,” Hayes says as he wipes rogue droplets from my chin. “But trust me when I say that it’s for your own safety, and that of many others.”

“I do not feel safe at all right now, Mr. Hayes,” I seethe, pulling at my bonds until my skin burns. “You need to let me go.”

His gaze passes over my face with a patronizing look of sympathy. I can almost read his thoughts through his slate blue eyes. Poor girl, she doesn’t even know which way is up. 

Hayes’s thick thumb sweeps across my cheek and I flinch away. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Isobel. This is the only way to flush him out.”

Blackness eats the edges of my vision and I close my eyes, trying to slow my breathing.

Focus. Stay right here. 

When I open my eyes, I pin them to Hayes, the only thing here that might be able to keep me from slipping into the past. The darkness clears, but its presence hovers like the threat of a distant storm. “Flush who out, Mr. Hayes? The Silent Slayer? Good luck.”

“Jack is not the Silent Slayer,” Hayes says as he replaces the cap on the water bottle and turns away.

“No shit. I’ve been telling you that all along.”

“Jack is the Tri-City Phantom.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then my incredulous laugh fills the room. “This is madness, Mr. Hayes. What the fuck is the Tri-City Phantom? Jesus Christ. You just kidnapped a woman to catch a ghost?”

Hayes sets the bottle down on the floor and grabs a folding chair that leans against the wall, setting it up to sit in front of me. His attention snags on something on the floor beyond my left shoulder. I turn as much as I can and follow his gaze to a wide monitor and black box on the carpet, the screen displaying the feeds from nine different cameras, including the room we’re in.

When Hayes looks back to me, he rests his forearms on his knees and laces his fingers. “I realized what we got wrong when I reviewed the footage from one of the bars in downtown Ashgrove. The Scotsman. We’d been tracking a few potential suspects, all in the construction business. One was a handyman who frequented the downtown bars, and The Scotsman was his favorite.”

I swallow, the haze of chloroform lifting with every pulse of adrenaline that flows through the chambers of my heart. “So, what you’re saying is that you knew who you were after, and where he went, and you didn’t catch him. And then he killed my family, and nearly me in the process. And, shocker, none of that has anything to do with Jack. Is that correct?”

“Isobel—”

“Kyrie, for Christsakes—”

“You know nothing is that simple when it comes to the FBI, Kyrie. There are procedures to follow, potential alternative suspects to rule out. The profilers knew we were looking for a drifter, the type to not even stay in the same residence for more than a few days at a time. Someone paranoid about keeping a minimal footprint. But I was sure I knew who it was. Trevor Winters,” Hayes says, shaking his head as his gaze turns away across the living room, to the place where my parents’ bodies once lay lifeless on the floor. He seems lost in memory, his voice thin when he says, “Winters was the primary suspect. We received intel that a man fitting his description was booked to stay at the Treasure Motel. The FBI were going to raid it. I had convinced my boss that I had an alternative plan, to set a trap in his most likely hunting ground. He’d been seen at The Scotsman where the college students liked to go for cheap drinks, and I had the staff set up a trivia night there that evening with cheap drinks to attract the local kids. But Winters didn’t go to The Scotsman that night, and the team raided the hotel anyway.”

When Hayes focuses on me once more, there’s both remorse and conviction in his eyes. “I was positive the raid had scared him off,” he says. “It seemed obvious that we’d run the Silent Slayer out of town, that he’d changed his methods to remain hidden. I kept looking for a sign of him, anything that would tell me where he was. But it wasn’t until I came here that I understood what had eluded me all those years. The devil was in the details. Dr. Sorensen.”

Hayes pulls several black and white photos from his jacket inseam. It’s a grainy image of a man in line at the bar, a still shot taken from a video feed. Even with the poor resolution and the lack of color, I recognize Jack right away.

“September seventh, the same year that you were attacked,” Hayes says. He shows me another. Then another. Another. Jack is present in each one. “September thirteenth. September fourteenth. October fifth.”

Hayes presents me with the final photo. In this one, I see another familiar face in profile in the foreground, with Jack sitting a few tables away.

Trevor Winters. The Silent Slayer.

Don’t react. He’s watching. He wants confirmation that his theories are true.

Sweat mists my brow and the back of my neck. I curl and release my toes in my boots. I dig my nails into the worn wooden armrests.

These things you can touch are real. That man in the photo is dead. Jack gave you proof. His last remains are a treasure in your cabin. 

The steel edge in my voice surprises even me when I say, “Get to the fucking point, Mr. Hayes.”

“After you aged out of foster care and changed your name, I kept tabs on you, just to make sure you were okay. But when disappearances started mounting up in the Tri-City college region, all of them men with seemingly little or no connection, their bodies never found, and all in a wide radius around you, I started believing that the elusive Slayer had surfaced. When I heard about the disappearance at the university, it was too close. I started looking into everyone connected to you. Imagine my surprise when I went back through every scrap of evidence I’d collected on the Slayer and found Jack Sorensen in the videos from The Scotsman.”

“What exactly is that supposed to prove? That Jack lived in the same city as I did and had a social life? I already knew that. It proves nothing. Besides, Jack was at West Paine University before I was.”

Hayes settles back in his chair as he shuffles the photos into the inner pocket of his jacket. “I thought at first that perhaps we’d been looking at a false profile for the Slayer all along. It made sense. Jack is a brilliant man. He could have been covering his tracks by splitting his MOs in Ashgrove—one to lure us away, maybe even placing the blame on a drifter, and one for the victims he really wanted to take. But the real explanation is far simpler, isn’t it. There were two serial killers.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“Jack killed Winters, the Silent Slayer. Once the threat to his territory was taken care of, he moved on. Perhaps he didn’t even realize you’d survived at first. But when you showed up at West Paine all those years later, it was an opportunity he couldn’t walk away from. And all the while, he’s been killing in the Tri-City area, keeping himself entertained until he gets whatever he wants from you.”