Last to Die

worker.
    “You’re right, Teddy,” she admitted. “I’m not really a friend. I’m a detective. But I do want to help you.”
    “No one can help me.”
    “I can. I will.”
    “Then you’ll die, too.”
    That statement, said so flatly, sent a cold whisper up Jane’s back.
You’ll die, too
. She turned to stare at the boy. He wasn’t looking at her, just stared bleakly ahead as if seeing a hopeless future. His eyes were such a pale blue, they seemed unearthly. His light brown hair looked as wispy as corn silk, one drooping forelock curled over a pale, prominent forehead. His feet were bare, and as he rocked back and forth she glimpsed smudges of dried blood under his right toes; she remembered the footprints leading away from the landing, leading away from eight-year-old Kimmie’s body. Teddy had been forced to step in her blood to flee the house.
    “Will you really help me?” he said.
    “Yes. I promise.”
    “I can’t see anything. I lost them, and now I’m afraid to go back and find them.”
    “Find what, Teddy?”
    “My glasses. I think they’re in my room. I must have left them in my room, but I can’t remember …”
    “I’ll find them for you.”
    “That’s why I can’t tell you what he looked like. Because I couldn’t see him.”
    Jane went still, afraid to interrupt him. Afraid that anything she said, any move she made, would make him pull back into his shell. She waited, but heard only the sound of the splattering water in the fountain.
    “Who are you talking about?” she finally asked.
    He looked at her, and his eyes seemed lit like blue fire from within. “The man who killed them.” His voice broke, his throat choking down the words to a high keen. “I wish I could help you, but I can’t. I can’t, I can’t …”
    It was a mother’s instinct that made her suddenly open her arms, and he tumbled against her, face pressed to her shoulder. She held him as he quaked with shudders so powerful she felt his body might shatter apart, that she was the only force holding together this shaking basket of bones. He might not be her child but at that moment, as he clung to her, his tears soaking into her blouse, she felt every bit his mother, ready to defend him against all the world’s monsters.
    “He never stops.” The boy’s words were so muffled against her blouse that she almost missed them. “Next time, he’ll find me.”
    “No, he won’t.” She grasped him by the shoulders and gently pushed him away so she could look at his face. Long lashes cast shadows on his powder-white cheeks. “He won’t find you.”
    “He’ll come back.” Teddy hugged himself, turning inward to some distant, safe place where no one could reach him. “He always does.”
    “Teddy, the only way we can catch him, stop him, is if you help us. If you tell me what happened last night.”
    She saw his thin chest expand, and the sigh that followed sounded far too weary and defeated for someone so young. “I was in my room,” he whispered. “I was reading one of Bernard’s books.”
    “And then what happened?” Jane prompted.
    Teddy focused his haunted eyes on her. “And then it started.”
    By the time Jane returned to the Ackerman residence, the last of the bodies was being wheeled out—one of the children. Jane paused in the foyer as the stretcher rolled past her, wheels squeaking across the gleaming parquet floor, and she could not block out the sudden image of her own daughter, Regina, lying beneath the shroud. With a shudder she turned, and saw Moore coming down the stairs.
    “Did the boy talk to you?”
    “Enough to tell me he didn’t see anything that will help us.”
    “Then you got a lot farther with him than I did. I had a feeling you’d be able to reach him.”
    “It’s not as if I’m all that warm and fuzzy.”
    “But he did talk to you. Crowe wants you to be the boy’s primary contact.”
    “I’m now the official kid wrangler?”
    He gave an apologetic shrug. “Crowe’s the lead.”
    She looked up the stairs toward the upper floors, which now seemed strangely quiet. “What’s going on here? Where is everyone?”
    “They’re following up on a tip about the housekeeper, Maria Salazar. She has the keys and the password to the security system.”
    “You’d expect a housekeeper to have those.”
    “It turns out she also has a boyfriend with a few issues.”
    “Who is he?”
    “Undocumented alien named Andres Zapata. He has a rap sheet in Colombia. Burglary.