Page 67 of The Rut in the Road

I nodded. I supposed it would be that, or it would make us hate each other. I supposed we would find out.

The bell on the front door chimed, and I nodded to Mason before turning and heading out to the lobby to see who it was.

I frowned downat the table, not particularly pleased to be standing in the basement of the FBI with the collected evidence from all three hit-and-run cases—not just the fragments from the vehicles, but pieces of bloody clothing, shoes, battered wallets, and so on.

Raj was standing beside me, his body tight and tense. He and Hart had come to Beyond the Veil looking for me—they needed me to read the case evidence, to look for anything relevant that might have been missed or that couldn’t have been determined by ordinary crime scene technicians. I might have already read the pieces from the vehicles, but now they wanted me to touch literally everything else.

Just in case.

What that really meant, according to Hart, was that they had nothing else to go on except what I’d given them, and that apparently wasn’t enough for them to do anything. He’d said that with a good deal more swearing and a bitter glance over at Raj, whose tight jaw and pressed-together lips told me he wasn’t happy about any of it—the lack of leads or the fact that I was getting dragged even deeper into the case.

I turned to him. “What do you want me to start with?” I asked.

He sighed, his expression unhappy. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

“Hey, Rayn,” came a friendly female voice from behind me.

“Hi, Cass,” I greeted the red-haired agent.

She offered me a quick smile. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said, and I recognized that the phrase was meant to be a joke. I didn’t actually understand the joke, but I smiled back at her anyway, because that’s what I was supposed to do.

“Let’s get this fucking over with,” Hart grumbled. “If you’re good, kid?”

I nodded, then stepped up to the table. On the far side was the cigarette butt from the first hit-and-run. “Do you want me to read it again?” I asked. I didn’t want to, but I also didn’t want to read any of this stuff, so it didn’t much matter if I did the butt again or not.

“Nah,” Hart replied. “We’ve got the full transcript from it already.”

I swallowed, hard, staring down at the bloody pair of jean shorts the victim had been wearing. I didn’t want to hear the man’s dying thoughts. But I was absolutely going to.

“Rayn—” Raj cut himself off, but I could hear the stress—the worry—in his voice. He wasn’t happy about this, and I wondered whether or not he was secretly hoping I would refuse. But people were dying. Three, so far. And nothing I’d read from the three killers suggested that they were going to stop.

I supposed it was possible that there were three drivers because both of the first two had been wracked by guilt and weren’t going to commit any additional murders.

Having been in the heads of the first two killers, however, I very much doubted it.

“Ready, kid?” Hart asked, standing beside the table, a pair of blue nitrile gloves on his long-fingered hands.

I nodded once, lying to both him and myself.

Hart picked up a watch, the band scuffed, the face cracked. His pale purple eyes studied me intently, and then he put the watch in my open palm.

I stared at it for a moment, wishing I didn’t recognize that the stiffness of the fabric band was likely caused by dried blood that was now touching my skin. And then I let myself go in.

What the fuckhad he done to piss this asshole off? He’d been followed by cops before, but not like this. Not with the swerving and riding the curb in places where there weren’t lights or bushes or trash cans.

He wished the buildings weren’t so damn close to the road.

Wished there were other people out here so that he could at least try to disappear into a crowd, although that was a lot harder with horns and hooves than it used to be.

Wished there were one of those damn alleys coming up that were all over the city.

He saw the break between the buildings, felt a surge of gratitude, and sped up.

The engine behind him revved.

His stomach dropped when he realized the alley was more than wide enough to accommodate a car or truck.

He prayed it wouldn’t make the turn.