The Dark Need by Stant Litore Page B

vigorously to divorce him after his arrest on charges of molesting children. The pastor had been out on bail for a week when a neighbor reported the pastor’s front door swinging open and shut in the wind. The cops found him in his bed, a puncture wound in his throat, his lips white and bloodless.
    Matt spent an afternoon at Arlington’s public library Googling for any clue that might help him anticipate and track this killer. He’d nearly been ready to give up when he stumbled on a news story of a similar killing six months earlier, two hours’ drive south in King County.A little more hoofwork, and he found three more killings from that same month, all of them in King County. The police had never caught the killer; he’d cleaned up too well after the kill, left the crime scene too pristine. And stopped after several victims.
    On impulse, Matt looked up a map of the county. He noticed something immediately.
    The towns the killer visited made a straight line, from coast to mountains, like an arrow aimed at the pass. The killer hadn’t crossed over. He just murdered his way right up to the mountains, until he reached some place quiet and without people. Then stopped.
    Matt stared at the computer a few moments. All around him the hushed murmurings of patrons in a small-town library. Then his fingers clattered over the keyboard.
    Six months ago, King County. Two months before that, a string of towns in the grain fields near Chehalis. Again, an arrow aimed at the Cascades. That time, there had been eight murders. The killer’d had a longer way to travel before he reached the silence of those high peaks.
    Matt leaned back, fighting the onset of a headache. Thinking.
    He pulled up a map of Snohomish County, a topographical map overlaid with roads and towns, and printed it. Got a pencil from a librarian who peered at him over her glasses with a “You’re not from here” look, then went to sit against one of the low glass windows near the children’s books. A mother sat with her back against the stacks, a small girl in her lap, reading to her. Two boys flipped pages in an illustrated guide to dinosaurs. Another girl with two pigtails ran back and forth, back and forth, across the carpet, from one end of the children’s stacks to the other, her arms spread, making muted airplane noises. A young woman, blonde, probably in her early twenties, stood at the windows looking out, a frown written deep into her face. Her features were vaguely familiar, but Matt couldn’t put a name to her. After a momenthe ignored her, and the children, and peered at his map. He penciled in
X
s over the towns that had been hit in the past few days. Then drew a line through them.
    Almost a straight line.
    An arrow pointing east.
    With gathering excitement, Matt followed the old county road with his finger, noting towns: Oso, Trafton, Darrington. Elevations appeared near them in tiny print, telling the story of a narrowing road climbing steep foothills.
    Matt folded up his printed map, stuffed it in his jeans pocket. Slipped out the back door.

    Matt hitched a ride up to Darrington on a logging truck, listening to the driver grouch about the state of the lumber industry, old complaints that he knew quite well. He gazed out at the thickness of cedars to either side, marveling at the riot of ferns and underbrush crowding the road’s narrow shoulders. Years spent harvesting timber, yet he hadn’t thought there were this many miles of old-growth forest left anywhere in America.
    Matt arrived less than an hour after the local police found the body. He didn’t risk getting close enough to look, but from the astounded faces of the cops at the door of that house, he was sure it was the same as the others: a tiny puncture wound in the throat, the victim bled dry. No sign of breaking and entering.
    Matt watched the police put up crime tape from the window of a ma-and-pa coffee shop a couple of blocks down the street. He’d hidden his ax behind a rusted