Fireproof

each other, his smile wiped that doubt away.
    “So Agent O’Dell, perhaps you can tell us what’s going on? Are there any fatalities? We’ve been waiting for some word to let our viewers know if everyone in that basement is okay.”
    “I have no idea.” And she started to turn to follow Patrick.
    “Maybe you’d like to comment on the profile piece we aired about you last night.”
    Sam could see the agent’s shoulders push back, but she continued to leave. Sam hoped O’Dell wouldn’t unleash her anger. Sam would never be able to compensate for not getting it on film. Jeffery would certainly fire her.
    And now Jeffery, ever the performer, turned so the camera captured a better angle of him before he delivered his blow. “Perhaps you’ll offer some comment after the interview tonight with your mother.”
    O’Dell stopped this time. “Excuse me?”

CHAPTER 47

    The last time Maggie sat in Dr. James Kernan’s office she had been even more on edge. Her world had been turned upside down by a serial killer named Albert Stucky. Several years before, he’d gotten away, leaving her cut and bleeding in a Miami warehouse, but only after making her watch while he gutted two women.
    Albert Stucky ended up in prison, but during a transport he managed to escape, killing his two security guards. For his second rampage he decided to kill women who had the misfortune of simply coming into contact with Maggie: the pizza delivery girl, Maggie’s neighbor, a waitress.
    It had been his sick game of cat and mouse, seeing to it that she received or found pieces of the women—a spleen in a cardboard pizza box, a kidney on a hotel room service tray. How could anyone blame her for being on edge? For feeling the need to be on alert 24/7, constantly looking over her shoulder?
    Her old boss and mentor, Kyle Cunningham, had pulled her from the field, his idea of protecting her, not punishing her. Though at the time it certainly felt like punishment, working the teaching circuit. Talking about killers instead of tracking them, instead of hunting down Albert Stucky.
    Jeffery Cole’s profile included some of the very things she had worked so hard to compartmentalize. But the exposé wasn’t the only thing conjuring up old memories and fears. If Ramirez had seen a man behind Maggie’s house last night, who was he? And why was he there in the middle of the night, in the middle of an ice storm? Was it the same man in the tunnel? She had no evidence, nothing to support her suspicions except a gut instinct.
    It would sound ridiculous if it hadn’t, in fact, happened in the past. All of her memories of the Stucky murders came back to Maggie as she sat in her old professor’s office, waiting for him. In some ways it seemed like a lifetime ago. Right now it felt like yesterday, listening for the shuffle of his footsteps as she breathed in the remnants of cigar smoke, Bengay, and old leather.
    She had been in a much more fragile place in her life back then. She and Greg had just separated. She had bought the house in Newburgh Heights and had just moved in. It hadn’t even been a week when Stucky took her new neighbor. Days later he took her real estate agent. The only good to come out of the ordeal was Harvey. While Maggie hadn’t been able to rescue her neighbor, Harvey’s master, she had rescued him.
    Yes, she had been in a much different place then, her frame of mind much more volatile than ever before. And sitting in Kernan’s office brought it all back. It didn’t help that the constant ache in her head had made her feel as vulnerable about her body as Stucky had made her feel vulnerable about her mental state. Without warning, the ache could turn into a dull throb, sometimes escalating to a jackhammer drill against her temple. The throb had come and gone throughout the afternoon, and it was back now.
    How could she keep Kernan from seeing it?
    Even with his thick Coke-bottle glasses he’d spot a wince or atwitch. The man definitely had the power to see things no one else noticed. Perhaps that explained his office decor.
    She looked around the small space at his strange collection of paraphernalia. A Mason jar with the frontal lobe of a human brain acted as a bookend. It held up leather-bound volumes of what Maggie knew were rare first editions that included Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams next to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . The latter appropriate because Maggie could easily envision Kernan as