Chapter 25
Three days felt like three weeks and three seconds simultaneously. She ran. The first morning, she almost hyperventilated in the first one hundred yards. Today wasn’t much better, but she knew Marcus was behind her, and she knew the net around the area had been constructed and was waiting.
She spent the days after her runs the way she spent every day, which was working.
They put together the evidence package for the DA's office.
Her supplemental statement, revised and expanded with the helium coolant identification, was formally documented as physical evidence linking the suspect to the assault and the positive ID.
The corridor matrix cross-referenced against Adrian Hale's complete eleven-year service history.
She'd read every page of his personnel file from every employer twice.
She'd read his certifications. His performance reviews were uniformly excellent because, of course, they were.
He was very good at his real work, and his real work was the cover for everything else.
* * *
The plan was refined six times because of her two previous runs.
Areas that weren’t covered, response times that wouldn’t be adequate.
Patrol vehicles that needed to avoid the area.
She ran the Shelby Bottoms east trailhead.
The section between the two-mile mark and the three-mile mark, where the tree canopy closed in and the path ran below grade.
The section she'd described in her incident report.
The section Adrian Hale had used once before and would recognize as viable.
She ran the trail at her normal time. 6 a.m. Her normal route. Her normal gear. Everything would be the same as it had been before the attack because he'd been watching long enough to know what normal looked like for her, and she needed to look like she'd gone back to normal.
Marcus would be one minute behind her. Not visible.
Not audible. Tactical units were positioned and ready to respond to block both access lots, the west connector, and the maintenance path.
Every entry and exit covered. A medical team was staged a mile from the greenway because Marcus had insisted, and Carver had agreed. Haven didn’t argue.
Reyes had argued against the whole plan for approximately forty-five minutes on day two.
His argument was sound, and she'd listened to it and agreed with most of it.
But it didn't change anything because Adrian Hale was back in Nashville, and he was going to look for another victim.
She was the one who got away. The controlled environment was better than the alternative, which was Baptist Memorial or somewhere else where they didn't control the variables.
On the morning of day three, she woke up at 3:30 a.m. and lay in the dark in the hotel room and looked at the ceiling.
Marcus was awake beside her. She knew because his breathing.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
They lay there for a moment.
“I need you to know something,” he said.
She waited.
“If anything goes wrong—”
“Nothing's going to go wrong,” she said.
“Haven.”
“Marcus.” She turned her head and looked at him in the dark. “I know what you're going to say. I need you not to say it. Not this morning.” She paused. “This morning, I need to be a cop. Just a cop. I can't be anything else for the next four hours.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Okay,” he said.
She looked at the ceiling.
“After,” she said. “You can say it after.”
“I will.” He kissed her temple, and she curled into him. “I’ll say it because you and I both know it’s true.”
She closed her eyes and rolled into his side. “It is, and we do.” Words weren’t going to be said this morning. They could wait. As long as everyone did their job … they could wait.
* * *
The trail was quiet at 5:55 a.m.
Haven stretched at the entrance bench. Left arm across the chest. Hold.
Release. Right arm. Hold. Release. Forward bend.
The same sequence she'd done a hundred times on a hundred mornings before everything had changed.
Her hands were steady. Her breathing was controlled.
The French manicure was fresh, done yesterday afternoon because she was not going to let him take that from her and because it was the marker, and it needed to be visible.
She was wired. The transmitter was small and taped to her sports bra.
She'd tested it twice in the parking lot with Reyes, who was in the tactical van a half mile from the east lot with four other people.
Everyone from Reyes to the tactical response teams to the medical team had a very specific set of instructions about when to move and when to hold.
Marcus was somewhere out there in the dark and had been for almost two hours.
She couldn't see him. She wasn't supposed to be able to see him. But she knew he was there the way she'd learned to know where he was in a room without looking.
She started running.
* * *
The first mile was quiet. No hyperventilation this time.
Running had always been her way to de-stress.
Still, her body's idea of the first mile was that this was an unreasonable request and management would be hearing about it, same as always.
She let those feelings happen because it was normal, and she needed normal.
By mile two, things smoothed out the way they always smoothed out, and she was in the space where the thinking happened sideways.
She was thinking about Adrian Hale's personnel photograph.
About the pale eyes. The average features. The forgettable face.
She was thinking about Lila Moreno and Erin Caldwell and Hannah Cho and Nicole Duvall and Dana Walsh and Rachel Iverson and Michelle Avery and Kara Bennett and Angela Porter and Grace Ellison and Jenna Callahan and the woman in St. Louis.
She was thinking about all of them.
She was at mile two point three when she felt it.
Not a sound. Not a movement. Something that her subconscious recognized. She didn’t stop this time. She kept running.
Her heart rate was elevated. That was fine. That was expected. She breathed through it the way she'd been trained, keeping her pace. She kept her eyes forward and counted her steps.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The transmitter was warm against her skin.
She kept running.
* * *
She heard him at mile two point six.
Gravel under a foot placed carefully. Not a jogger catching up. Not an animal. The kind of sound that took effort to be that controlled.
The same sound.
The exact same sound from six weeks ago on this same trail in this same low morning light.
She didn't turn. She didn't change her pace. She breathed, ran, and counted. She knew Marcus was near, and Reyes was in the tactical van. Everyone was set. This was the culmination of over two months of work. All she had to do was continue to run.
She ran.
He was faster.
She felt the air move behind her, and she had half a second to think of Marcus before the Taser hit her between the shoulder blades. The world went completely white, and every muscle she had turned to concrete simultaneously. She went down.
The ground came up hard. She couldn't catch herself. Her cheek hit the asphalt, and the white was still everywhere. Her body was doing nothing she was asking it to do. The sound that came out of her was not a scream because her lungs weren't cooperating.
She heard him.
Close. Right there. The movement of a man who’d done this before and was doing it again and had prepared for the variables.
She heard something else, too.
* * *
Marcus heard her go down.
He sprinted full out before the sound finished.
He covered the distance quickly.
He came through the tree line at a dead run.
Adrian Hale was crouched over her.
He was reaching for her hand.
The same motion. Marcus had read it in her incident report. He knew exactly what it was. The deliberate turn. The confirmation check. The marker. Even now. Even with a Taser and a prepared approach and eleven years of methodology behind him, he was checking the marker.
Marcus hit him at full speed.
They went into the tree line hard. Marcus had his hands on Adrian's jacket. Adrian was faster than he looked and adjusted quickly. Faster than Marcus had calculated. Adrian got his elbow back and connected with Marcus's jaw. The world sparked briefly, but Marcus had taken harder hits.
He didn't stop moving.
He got his hands on Adrian's collar and drove him into the ground face-first. Adrian twisted with the efficiency of someone who’d thought about this scenario and prepared for it. He got his knee under himself. Got his hand free. Reached for something in his jacket.
Marcus grabbed the wrist before the hand finished moving.
He torqued it back at an angle that forced his elbow to dislocate.
Adrian made a sound, a surprised scream.
It was the first sound Marcus had heard from him, and it was also the last because Marcus had his full weight on him now and the arm with the dislocated elbow locked behind him.
He pushed Adrian’s face into the gravel, hard.
It was over. He spoke into the wire he was wearing.
“Suspect secured. Roll medical stat.” He glanced over at Haven.
It wasn’t over in Marcus's heart.
He was breathing hard. His jaw was going to be bruised tomorrow. His hands on Adrian Hale's wrists were shaking with something that was not exertion.
Haven was on the ground fifteen feet away. She was moving, he saw with relief. Pushing herself up.
She got her hands under herself. Got her knee down. Her head came up, and her eyes found him. She was pale, and her jaw was set. She was still shaking from the hit, and she was getting up.
Something broke open in his chest.
He smashed and ground Adrian Hale's face into the gravel when he felt the man move. He looked at Haven getting up off the ground and felt his heart break open completely.
“I've got him,” he said. His voice came out rough. “I've got him. Don't get up too fast.”
“I'm fine,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “The fucker tased me.”
He heard the tactical team coming through the tree line. Heard Reyes calling his name. Heard the organized noise of people arriving to take over the thing he'd been holding.
He didn't let go of Adrian Hale until Reyes's hands were on the bastard.
Then he stood up.
Adrian was on his knees with his hands behind his back, and Reyes's people on either side of him.
His face was bleeding where it had met the gravel.
His expression was the flat clinical register that Marcus had read about in Wheeler's profile. It was the same as he’d seen in the photograph and was seeing now in person for the first time.
No rage. No fear. No performance.
Just a man making mental notes.
Marcus looked at him for a long moment.
Adrian looked back.
“Adrian Hale,” Marcus said. “You're under arrest. Reyes, read this piece of shit his rights.”
Marcus turned away from him and walked to Haven.
She was standing on her own. Shaking but standing. The Taser had done what Tasers did, and if he remembered his training, her legs wouldn’t be entirely reliable yet. But she was holding it together through the force of will that she brought to everything.
He put his hands on her face.
She put her hands over his.
“Are you all right?”
“I am now,” she said. Her voice was still shaking. “I am now.”
He pulled her in and held her, and she let him. Haven didn’t let people near her unless she'd decided to let you into her private world. Carver walked up to them. Marcus didn’t release Haven.
“Haven, you’ll need to be checked out by medical. You hit your head again.”
“Not my head. My face.” Haven’s voice was buried under his black sweater somewhere.
“Your face is attached to your head,” Carver countered. “Protocol. Marcus, you get her there and back to the squad room. We’ll get this one booked, and I’ll call a press conference.” Carver put a hand on his arm. “Damn good work.”
He acknowledged Carver’s comment and continued to hold Haven. Until she was ready to move, he’d stand here with her in his arms.
Behind him, he heard Reyes managing the scene. Heard the tactical team and someone calling for the medical team. He listened to the organized chaos of an arrest in progress.
He heard one more thing.
“A notebook,” Webb said, walking down the path. He lifted the book in a gloved hand. “He kept the nails as trophies.”
Marcus pulled back and looked down at her. She nodded. “I’m okay. Just shaky.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of gloves and slipped them on.
Marcus took the book from Webb. “We found it in his truck.
The sniper from the tactical team watched him leave his truck this morning.
As soon as you had him, the forensic team was in there.
This is logged and photographed already.
Chain of custody is intact. He handed Marcus a pen.
Marcus noted the time and date and signed the back of the tag. It was now his evidence to safeguard.
He opened the book.
The pages were dense with notations. Dates. Locations. Behavioral observations. One nail glued to the top of each page. He turned through them with careful hands. Subject One. Subject Two. Three. Four. The corridor in miniature. Eleven years of careful documentation.
He found the last complete entry.
The St. Louis woman's page.
He turned to the next page.
Subject Fourteen.
The page had a date at the top. An address. A location notation. Resting site selected. Confirmed adequate.
She was alive.
She had to be alive. The page wasn't complete. There was no notation of her responses to his killing her. There was no nail.
He wondered if the mystery woman knew how close she’d come to death. He hoped she didn’t. He hoped she was living her best life, oblivious to any of Hale’s observations.
Marcus closed the notebook.
He looked at Adrian Hale on his knees in the gravel with his hands cuffed in front of him due to the dislocated elbow.
Then he looked at Haven.
She was looking at Adrian Hale, too, with the look of a woman who’d waited too long for this moment.
She watched him for a long time.
Adrian stared back at her with no expression.
“Subject Nine,” she said quietly. “Incomplete. Forever.”
Adrian said nothing.
Haven looked at him for one more second.
Then she turned away.
She was done with him.
Marcus fell into step beside her as she walked back toward the trail. Her legs were steadier now. The shaking had mostly stopped. The morning light was coming through the tree canopy.
“He identified another one,” she said.
“He didn’t kill her,” Marcus said. “She's alive. There’s no nail. He hasn’t taken her yet. She was his next victim.”
Haven looked at the trail ahead of them. “We got him.”