Free Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate) by Deirdre Dore Page B

believed that the girls she’d kidnapped were her daughters, believed it and made the girls believe it, too, after being held in captivity for over a year. But once they’d been made to believe, Joy had started finding reasons why the girls should be punished—they hadn’t behaved a certain way or hadn’t defended her properly in front of others. She’d locked them in a closet and starved them to death when they’d pushed her to her breaking point.
    The thought of this unsub, with his insane talk of strings, had brought it back, the feeling that he was dealing with something so beyond the scope of reason that the killer would be impossible to predict, impossible to defend against. Kind of the way he felt about Ms. Pascal. One evening, and he couldn’t get her out of his head. She unnerved him with her constant motion, her gold eyes, her obsessiveness, her brazen disregard for rules, her lies. His ex had been a liar as well, just the more traditional kind—the kind that slept with other men. He didn’t want to be attracted to Ms. Pascal, but there was something about her. Something compelling.
    And he certainly didn’t want anything to happen to her, especially given her connection to the case. Putting a deputy outside her building just didn’t seem like enough to ensure her safety, not when the killer had shown himself adept at weaseling his way into peoples’ lives with technology.
    “I just don’t like this, leaving her without any kind of protection—or leaving her alone to cause trouble, for that matter.”
    “What kind of trouble do you think she can cause?”
    “A woman like that,” Ryan snorted, “a woman that makes a habit of spying on everyone she can, all the time, to find the missing. She seems like the type to take things personally. And someone taking what she created and using it to hurt people seems to have hit her pretty hard.”
    “Wouldn’t it bother you?”
    Ryan had never created anything that he could think of, other than helping his grandmother with her quilts now and then, which he’d never admitted to anyone, but what Ms. Pascal did wasn’t just creative, it was deceptive. She was helping people lie. He hated it, but he could see how the idea of the killer taking advantage of her skills would bother her. What she would do about it, though, that was the question.
    “I guess.”
    “You going to get any sleep tonight?”
    “Are you?”
    Midaugh shrugged his thick shoulders. “I’m sure the wife will appreciate it if I try.”
    “I’m sure she would,” Ryan agreed, not sure if he was glad or sad that no one was waiting at home for him. Usually he didn’t think about it either way. When he’d been engaged to Cara, every day was a battle over something: money, time, other women, even though she’d been the one cheating. He’d felt like home was a minefield that he had to navigate and work through; even hunting down violent criminals was a welcome distraction from the ever-intensifying drama.
    He hadn’t been lonely since she’d left; he’d missed her, but he hadn’t been lonely. He’d been suffering from relationship PTSD and the silence had been comforting, but suddenly the thought of coming home to someone sounded nice, even if she worried, even if she didn’t understand the stress and long hours.
    “I think I’ll go home and work out. Come in early, see what I can put together from the results of the subpoena we had on Ms. Pascal’s Internet records.”
    Midaugh nodded. “I’ll be in tomorrow morning. We have a meeting with the team at nine a.m.”
    “I’ll be there,” Ryan confirmed, already thinking about what needed to be done on the case. If he thought it would help, he’d head directly back to the office, but he knew better. Sometimes it helped to sleep, or work out, or just do something else for a while. It gave the brain a chance to relax and make connections, sort through problems. He had the feeling that Ms. Pascal had yet to learn that valuable