Page 35 of The Trap by Catherine
There’s two crucial... let’s call themsafety zones.
The first is just before it happens. All there is then is a woman, walking by herself down a road. All is well. All is normal. I’m just a man driving a car that’s presumably about to pass her. Nothing to see here.
The second is the first moment after I take her when everything isbackto looking that way. When it’s just me again, driving my car down a road. So long as I’m not speeding or driving erratically, and my face doesn’t have any injuries another motorist might see if they pulled up alongside me at a traffic light, and there’s nothing odd about the exterior of my vehicle—no bloody streak on the side, no woman pounding on the window in the back, no thumping noise from inside the boot—then I’m OK. I’m safe again.
The key to all this, then, I knew, would be to let as little time lapse between those two points as possible.
Which meant I had to get her into my car as quickly as I could. And locked in there, secure.
But before that, I had to get rid of her phone.
How is he choosing them?That’s another needless mystery that no one can figure out. I really hope there’s some poor guy buried in the bowels of Garda HQ who’s been staring at a corkboard of paper scraps and maps and string for months on end, trying to figure out what links my victims.Is it something physical, like how they wear their hair? Or is it something hidden in the patterns of their lives, like how they frequent the same coffee shop or bank branch or gym? Or are they getting so desperate that they’re trying to match things up with pagan festivals, or the phases of the moon, or Catholic feast days? Or—God, I’d love this—have they already resorted to bringing in a white witch or a psychic? But it’s so simple, actually.
Are you ready for it?
All the women I took were womenwhose phones I could see.
That’s it.
That’s the connection.
I was out, driving around rural or relatively rural roads, in my dumb car and with no phone, not planning to do anything, not committed to it, but prepared to take advantage if an opportunity presented itself, and then it did. I saw a woman walking close to the road, alone, on a quiet stretch of it, with very little, if any, passing traffic, away from houses and intersections and other people.
And she was holding her phone.
Looking down at it, ideally. Distracted by it.
She has to be shorter than me and skinny, not because I care about how she looks or I have a type or whatever, but so that I can be confident I can physically overpower her and, later on, carry her a distance.
Although...
Well, I suppose Idohave a type, because I like them to be around my own age or a little younger. Not a lot younger, and certainly not young. This isn’tthat, OK? I’m not one of those sickos. One of them was much younger than I thought, actually. Too...
She was too young, to be honest with you. When I read her age, later, in the papers, I felt a little...
I don’t know.
Not great. But I didn’t know how old—young—she was. She didn’t seem like she was only seventeen, like she’d only just turned that.
If I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken her. I swear.
And I didn’t know about her dog either.Thatwas a bloody surprise. When I first saw her, he was under a hedge, probably taking a shit, and I suppose the lead was hidden on her other side or something.
But it could’ve been worse. At least he was a small, docile little thing who didn’t react at all to his human getting into a strange car and driving away, leaving him behind. He didn’t even chase after us, from what I remember.
So, yeah. I have to be able to see her phone, to know where it isbeforeI stop. There’s going to be no time to dig through her bag or her pockets looking for it, and of course she’ll tell me she doesn’t have one if I ask, thinking there’ll be an opportunity to use it later, or at least to track her location after the fact.
What happens then?
You know, in a weird way, I’m kind of excited to tell you. I’ve never told anyone this. And with you, of course, things were different, so...
Right. So. Here goes.
INTRUSION
When she got home, Lucy stood at the kitchen counter and poured herself a cold glass of white wine. She drank half of it immediately, imagining that she could feel its effects instantaneously, that as it slipped down her throat it was already working to blur the sharp edges of this awful, awful day.
Then she refilled her glass almost to the brim, and carried it into the living room.
