The Obsession(142)

“I’m not sure they should come.”

“Naomi, I know it has to feel like your life tipped sideways, but you have to keep living it.”

“If something happened to them”

He cut her off. “The unsub’s not interested in men.”

“He’s interested in me, and they’re mine. So.”

“They’ll come anyway. Put that away for a while. I’m heading into town shortly, meeting the team. We’ll work out of the police station. He’s never had an investigation focused on him like this, Naomi. It changes things.”

“Whatever we do, it doesn’t change what’s already happened.”

“No.”

“And I know, Dr. Carson, dwelling on that, brooding on my part of it, however involuntary, isn’t healthy or productive.”

Knowing that, knowing he thought it, irritated the crap out of her.

“But I might need a couple days to dwell and brood.”

All understanding, he simply nodded. “You should play to your strengths, and you’ve always been a champion brooder.”

“Up yours, Mason Jar.”

“Another strength,” he went on, “is your power of observation. You see the big picture and the small details. It’s going to be an advantage. It’s going to help.”

“My keen powers of observation didn’t clue me in that I’ve been followed by a serial killer for a couple years.”

“Longer, I thinkand being clued in now, you can go back, remember things and people you noticed. You can go back, refresh those memories by going through pictures you tookthe where, when, what was going on around you.”

Longer, she wanted to dwell on longer, but pressed her fingers to her eyes, ordered herself to deal with it. “I don’t pay attention to people when I’m working. I block them out.”

“You have to pay attention to block them out. You know more than you think, and I can help you bring it to the surface.”

Though she had to stifle a sigh, she decided if she had to take another trip into a therapy session, it might as well be with her brother in the chair.

“Let’s go back first, and tell me how much longer you think this has been happening.”

“Did you know Eliza Anderson?”

“I don’t know.” Already battling a vague headache, Naomi rubbed at her temple. “I don’t think so. Mason, I’ve brushed up against dozens and dozens of people. On shoots, at the gallery on trips to New York. There are motel clerks and waitresses and gas station attendants, shopkeepers, hikers. Countless. The odds of remembering . . .”

But suddenly she did. “Wait. LizaI think they called her Liza. I remember hearing about her at college, my sophomore year, after she was killed. But, Mason, it wasn’t like this. And everyone said it was her ex-boyfriend. He’d been violent with her before, which is why he was an ex. She was beaten and raped, but she was stabbed to death, wasn’t she? AndGodthey found her in the trunk of her own car.”

“What do you remember about her?”

“I didn’t know her. She was a year ahead of me. But I recognized her when I saw her picture on the news, on the Net, after it happened. We didn’t have any classes together, didn’t socialize, but she came into the restaurant where I worked the first two years of college before I could intern with a photographer. I waited on her enough times to remember her face.”

Now, she brought that face back into her mind. “Blonde, short, swingy blonde hair,” she said, waving her hands just under her own ears. “Very pretty. Polite enough to actually speak to her waitress, say thanks. I understand she was blonde, killed where I went to school, but she wasn’t held for any length of time, wasn’t strangled.”

“I think she was his first. I think he panicked before he could attempt strangulation. It was messy and quick, even sloppyand he was lucky. If the investigation hadn’t zeroed in so completely on the ex, he might not have gotten away with it. She’d had a fight with the ex that night.”

“I remember reading that, hearing it around campus.” She found her calm, pushed back for memories. “Hethe boyfriendtried to get her to come back, and they fought, he threatened her. People heard him tell her he’d make her sorry, make her pay. He didn’t have an alibi.”

“And they had no physical evidence, and no matter how hard and long they worked him, he never came off his story of being alone in his room, asleepwhen she was grabbed and killed and put in the trunk of her car.

“She looked a little like you.”

“No. No, she didn’t.”

“You wore your hair longer then, not dissimilar from hers. She wasn’t as tall as you, but she was tall, slim.”