He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not

taped to the back. The note said the CD was playing in the motel room when the victim’s body was discovered. Alarm bells started going off in Logan’s head.
    Amanda had said the man who attacked her hummed a strange tune, something she’d never heard before or since but would recognize if she ever heard again.
    “Logan?”
    He jerked his head up at the sound of Amanda’s sweet voice, surprised to see her standing in the doorway, even more surprised to see Pierce standing next to her.
    He longed to go to her, to wrap his arms around her and ask her to give him those three precious words again, to tell him she loved him. But he didn’t. He couldn’t.
    Pierce strode to the desk. “Amanda let me in. I guess you didn’t hear the doorbell.”
    Logan pushed his chair back and stood with the CD in his hand. “Amanda, do you remember the case I told you about?” he rasped. He cleared his throat. “The case where I let the killer go?”
    She nodded and joined Pierce in front of the desk. “You didn’t know, Logan. You can’t possibly still blame yourself for that.”
    “She didn’t have long hair, but her eyes were blue. Her family called her Kate.”
    Amanda’s eyes widened. She glanced at Pierce then back at Logan. “That’s a fairly common name, isn’t it? Yes, I think it is.”
    He heard the doubt in her voice, that little note of uncertainty.
    “I was looking through the old file from that murder and I found a CD. The report says it was playing on the stereo when the police found Kate’s body.”
    He slowly walked across the room to the CD player built into the wall beneath the TV.
    “Logan, don’t. Please.” Her voice broke on the last word.
    His heart squeezed in his chest at the pleading note in her voice, but he had to know if his terrible suspicions were true. He took a ragged breath and pushed the CD into the slot.
    He slowly turned around, his eyes fastened on hers as he waited for his fate to be decided.
    “What’s going on?” Pierce glanced back and forth between Amanda and Logan.
    Logan ignored him, frozen in place like a man strapped into the electric chair, watching the second hand creep toward midnight, knowing the call that could save him wouldn’t come in time but desperately hoping it might.
    Deep, mournful tones erupted from the speakers. Amanda’s face turned white. A look of panic entered her eyes. “No.” Her voice was filled with anguish. “Logan, no.”
    She covered her ears and ran from the room, her sobs echoing back as she fled up the stairs.
    “I can’t believe you haven’t checked on her.” Pierce shook his head in disgust.
    Logan gripped the pen tighter and scrawled another line on the paper in front of him.
    “What’s wrong with you?” Pierce asked. “Why aren’t you upstairs with her right now? I thought you cared about Amanda.”
    Logan clamped his jaw tight and jerked open his bottom desk drawer. He grabbed the stack of photographs out, the ones he looked at every night, and dropped them on top of his desk. “What I want and who I care about doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t you see?” He fanned out the pictures, copies of the same pictures that were posted on the whiteboard in the conference room at work. “Everything I’ve feared for the past decade has come true.”
    “What are you talking about?” Pierce narrowed his eyes at him.
    “The only thing that got me through every day after I let that white van go was the hope that maybe, just maybe, the killer had never hurt anyone else after that day. I tried to fool myself into thinking no one else got hurt because of me.”
    He jabbed his finger at the photographs. “Now I know the truth. All of these women were brutally tortured, raped. . . .” His voice broke and he scrubbed a hand across his face. He dropped back down into his desk chair. “I have to stop him. I can’t let anyone else die, don’t you see?”
    “Not that I agree with anything you just said, but what does this have to do with Amanda? You should be upstairs, right now, helping her through—”
    Logan slammed his fist on his desk. “You saw the look on her face. She knows the truth now. She knows if it weren’t for me, she’d never have been attacked. Everything she’s suffered is because of me.” He tore the piece of paper off the yellow legal pad he’d been writing on earlier.
    Pierce shook his head. “For the record, I think you’re way off-base. You’re letting your own impressions cloud your