Page 3 of Waysider
But the eyes were the same, Cass thought as they landed on her. An icy breath exhaled down her spine.
No matter how much time passed, from the school portrait Patrick had taken when he was nine, to the newspaper clippings covering his murder trial at twenty-six years old, one thing about Patrick Doyle remained the same—his eyes. They were so blue and so completely, chillingly empty.
The eyes of a killer.
His guileless smile disguised it, most of the time. It was how Patrick had hidden in plain sight for so many years. He was the boy next door. He grew up in Minnesota, the papers said over and over again. Then, after a brief stint in California, where he married his college sweetheart, he went to Oregon and bought a house in the woods. He and his wife had one son together.
A wife who divorced him shortly after his conviction.
He’d never seen his kid again, either.
Patrick stood up from the desk and walked over to the wall, flashing that infamous smile. Dimples appeared, in spite of his gaunt cheeks, and Cass felt like she’d seen a ghost of the charming man he’d once been. The man who had managed to coax so many young female hitchhikers on Highway 20 into his car, even when their instincts might have whispered that something wasn’t quite right.
According to the many, many articles written about Patrick, that charm melted away within minutes once he had them. As soon as the women were unconscious, he drove back to his house, opened the storm doors, and threw them into the cellar. Where his family wouldn’t hear any of the muffled sounds. Where he could do his dark, gruesome work without being disturbed.
You’re safe, Cass told herself desperately. Still needing reassurance, she glanced down quickly, hoping the man in that cell wouldn’t notice. The holes along the bottom of the barrier were too small for him to reach through. The frame between each sheet of glass looked like iron.
But if that was true, why did she want to bolt so badly?
“Miss Ryan,” Patrick said, his warm voice penetrating the icy haze around Cass. She blinked and refocused. “You came. I’m glad, I was hoping we’d get to meet.”
Rage and terror gripped Cass’s heart, both urges pulling at her. Rage won. She went up to the wall—she heard Cal swear behind her—and smacked a piece of paper against it. The abrupt gesture visibly startled Patrick, and he blinked.
“Ricky Ramirez. That’s the only reason I’m here. What the fuck do you know?” Cass snarled.
Patrick paused. He studied the paper for a moment. Cass had scribbled Ricky’s name on it during the call with Dr. Phillips. After another moment, Patrick walked back over to the desk, where he grasped hold of the chair he’d been sitting in. The legs scraped against the floor as he dragged it across his cell. Then he sank onto the chair and gave Cass an appraising look.
“Tell you what. I’ll answer your questions if you answer some of mine. That seems fair, right?” he said pleasantly.
Cass’s first instinct was to tell him fuck you and walk away. But she’d gotten on a plane to get here. She wasn’t going to blow this chance to learn the truth, no matter how much she wanted to tell this psychopath where he could shove his games.
A voice echoed from her past, bringing a memory along on its coattails. I’m so sorry. Eyes darkened with guilt. Screaming. Darkness.
“Fine,” Cass said through her teeth. She’d play along. For now.
Still refusing to look at Cal—she had his grim expression committed to memory, anyway—Cass sat down, too. She raised her head to face the killer across from her.
As she met Patrick’s gaze, the corner of his mouth quirked. It was there and gone in an instant, so faint and fleeting that Cass wondered if she’d imagined it. But then she looked into his cold eyes, and she remembered what he was. She knew she hadn’t imagined anything.
Cass’s mouth flattened into a hard, thin line. She didn’t look away.
Patrick caved first. He leaned back in his seat, resting his elbow on the back of his chair. Gotcha, Cass thought viciously. But he spoke with his usual ease as he asked, “What have you learned about me, Miss Ryan?”
Her voice was flat. “The newspapers call you The Taxidermist.”
“Do you know why?”
“Because you tried to preserve the bodies of your victims.”
“I did preserve them. I didn’t just try.” Patrick leaned forward and tapped the wall between them with the tip of his middle finger. Cal tensed. But the man behind the barrier wasn’t making a threat; his expression was wistful. Distant. His voice dropped to a murmur as he said, “Glass eyes. That’s what I used.”
Cass’s skin crawled. Unbidden, she thought of the pictures again, and there was one in particular that she wished she could forget—the one that had been in all the papers.
They’d found his collection in the woods. The victims Patrick had preserved. He couldn’t exactly keep them in the house, so the killer had arranged his gruesome creations in the trees, far away from any houses or roads.
It had only been found by sheer dumb luck. Well, if anyone could call that luck, randomly stumbling upon a horror scene while you were supposed to be on a fun camping trip. The campers called the police, who set a trap for Patrick. That was how he’d finally been caught.
There was no documentation of what those campers had discovered, save for one image. Before he’d gotten hauled away for crossing the crime scene tape, a reporter had managed to take a single, eerie photo with his camera.
