The Stranger You Know by Andrea Kane Page A

choked away her life. He ground her into the concrete floor as the last spasm surged through him. He was triumphant. She was violated and dead. It was a power like no other. And the best was yet to be.
    In the meantime, he needed release, and he needed it now.
    Dropping down on his cot, he threw a blanket over himself and reached for his drawing tablet.
    One hand went to his crotch. The other grabbed the red crayon. He began to draw furiously.
    Each slash of crimson corresponded to a pulsing surge of his climax as it shuddered through him.
    * * *
     
    The next two days were long and tedious as the FI team worked with the police and on their own to identify the sick bastard who’d killed Kendra Mallery and was now threatening to extend his killing spree to Casey.
    Having done her part—compiling the two lists Marc had asked for—Casey was going crazy. She’d watched the video of the campus vigil three times, and other than feeling sick to her stomach, she’d seen nothing incriminating. All that it had succeeded in doing was to bring back a flood of painful memories from the past as she relived the vigil she’d attended for Holly. Different victims. Same nightmare. Same sense of helpless frustration.
    Casey’s existence was like being under house arrest. She was practically imprisoned in the brownstone, and when she went out, either Patrick or one of his hired bodyguards was glued to her side.
    Her confinement only served to intensify the sense of responsibility she felt to solve the Jan Olson case. Jan’s father had called each day, several times a day, to see if there was any news, even a tiny lead, to tell them where his daughter or her body could be found.
    Casey couldn’t ignore that. She’d made a commitment to this poor dying man. She intended to fulfill it.
    She couldn’t just rely on Claire’s vision of seeing Jan racing terrified through a park, glancing fearfully over her shoulder. That was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There were countless parks in New York City, and that was assuming the attack had taken place here.
    Holed up in one of the smaller conference rooms, Casey went through everything they had. She followed up on Brenda’s list, contacting as many people who’d known Jan as possible, particularly her boyfriend, Chris Towers, who now lived in Colorado with his wife and two kids. He was completely taken aback by the subject of Casey’s phone call, but he answered every one of her questions, and his take on Jan was similar to Brenda’s, only from a boyfriend’s point of view. He confirmed that he and Jan were pretty much inseparable, but not sexually active, so pregnancy was out. And he agreed with Brenda that, in the week leading up to her disappearance, Jan had been acting unusually jumpy and nervous. She’d assured him it was just academic stress. But when she’d vanished without a trace, he couldn’t help believing the two were related. He and Brenda had contacted the police, but no sign of Jan materialized. Eventually, they were forced to accept the fact that she’d taken off on her own. Any other theory was too horrific to live with.
    “When was the last time you remember seeing Jan alive?” Casey concluded, asking it as a routine question. Frankly, she didn’t count on his answer to shed any light on things. If he and Jan were as inseparable as it seemed, he’d doubtless seen her on the day she’d vanished.
    Sure enough, Chris replied, “The afternoon she disappeared. I walked her to work. We made plans to meet up in her dorm room around eleven o’clock that night. She never came back.”
    Work.
    Abruptly, something clicked in Casey’s mind. Jan had been a waitress at the Lakeside Restaurant at the Boathouse in Central Park. If you coupled that with Claire’s vision—a park with a backdrop of water—you got a strong potential scenario for the scene of the crime.
    That was solid enough to act on.
    Casey walked through the brownstone and found Claire in the main