Lynch then worked his way up to New Jersey, seeming to kill at random. After the neighbor and his ex and her husband, the victims had been total strangers. There had been a man at a rest stop in DC, beheaded and with a collapsed chest cavity courtesy of a brick. Then came the fifth victim, where Lynch had left the prints behinda model living in Baltimore, twenty-two years old and newly engaged. There had been no sexual assault, no interest in her looks at all, apparently. Hed butchered her, cutting her open from neck to navel as if he had taken a sudden interest in surgery. The sixth victim had been a trucker, sleeping at a 24/7 truck stop; hed been stabbed twenty times and Rachel and other agents had spent several days trying to figure out if Lynch had bene trying to spell something in the mans torso.

Then there was the seventh victim, an elderly gentleman that Rachel later found she had been just ten minutes away from saving. Theyd been able to track Lynch based on security camera footage from the truck stop and thats how Special Agent Rachel Gift had ended up staring Alex Lynch down from across the bed of a recently murdered old man, starting into those eyes pierced with darkness.

And now here she was, revisiting that moment, watching the old mans blood splatter off of Lynchs hands as he applauded her for capturing him.

Nothing good is going to come of this, she told herself as she drove south. Maybe you truly are losing your mind. Maybe this tumor is messing with your ability to reason.

For all she knew, maybe it was. But as the interstate unrolled before her, she just dared to hope there were answers to be found. And though the idea of peering past the glasses that covered Alex Lynchs face chilled her, she could not deny that there had been times since his arrest that she wondered if there might indeed be some answers waiting there in that darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The maximum security wing of Arlington County Jail was located on the eleventh floor. Rachel had been inside roughly a dozen prisons for the occasional tasks related to cases, but the one in Arlington was one of the quieter ones shed ever encountered. The eleventh floor, in particular, was eerily silent; it housed only fourteen men, with the capacity to hold only twenty-six at any given time.

A single guard led Rachel down the eleventh-floor corridor. Unlike the basic cells scattered throughout the ten floors below them, these cells were closed off by solid doors with little slots in them to deliver food, mail, and other necessities. They passed by one door that was opened, revealing a small but tidy interior. Rachel assumed it was the residence of the man she had come to seea man that was currently waiting for her in the small visiting room at the end of the hallway.