INTENSITY

Movement inside. A thump.

She tensed.

He didn’t appear.

Silence again.

The scent of blood was suddenly heavy out of the northwest, as though a slaughterhouse lay upwind of her. Then it passed, and she realized that she hadn’t actually smelled blood but had flashed back on the smell of the sodden sheets in the Templetons’ master suite.

The aluminum wall of the motor home was cold against her spine, and she shivered because it seemed that some of the coldness of the man inside was seeping through to her.

Waiting, she began to lose her nerve. Resurgent fear tempered her rage, shifting the balance from vengeance to survival. But she could still do it. She could do it. She struggled to hold on to her crazy-hot anger.

Then the killer came out of the motor home, but he didn’t use the exit beside her. He stepped from the open cab door at the front of the vehicle.

Chyna’s breath caught in her throat, and the chill wind from the oncoming storm seemed bitter with the scent of failure.

He was too far away. No longer distracted by the weight of Laura in his arms and the rattling of her shackles, he would hear Chyna coming. She no longer had the element of surprise to even the odds.

He stood just outside the cab door, thirty feet from her, stretching almost lazily. He rolled his big shoulders as if to shake weariness from them, and he massaged the back of his neck.

If he turned his head to the left, he would see her at once. If she didn’t remain absolutely still, he would surely spot her slightest movement even from the corner of his eye.

He was downwind of her, and she was half afraid that he would smell her fear. He seemed more animal than human, even in the fluid grace with which he moved, and she had no trouble believing that he was gifted with wild talents and preternatural senses.

Although he wasn’t holding the silencer-fitted gun with which he had killed Paul Templeton, it might be tucked under his belt. If she tried to flee, he could draw the weapon and shoot her dead before she got far.

But he wouldn’t shoot her dead. Nothing that easy. He’d pop her in the leg, bring her down, and take her captive. Load her into the motor home with Laura. He’d want to play with her later.

Finished stretching, he moved briskly toward the house. Up the walkway. Onto the porch. Inside.

He never looked back. Chyna’s pent-up breath stuttered from her in a tattoo of fear, and she inhaled with a shudder.

Before her courage faded further, she hurried forward to the cab door and climbed behind the steering wheel. Her best hope was to find keys in the ignition, in which case she would be able to start the engine and drive away with Laura, go into Napa to the police.

No keys.

She glanced at the house, wondering how long he would be gone. Maybe he was searching for valuables now that the killing was done. Or selecting souvenirs. That could take five minutes, ten minutes, even longer. Which might be enough time to get Laura out of the motor home and hide her somewhere. Somehow.

She still had the knife. And now that she was in the killer’s domain without his knowledge, she had regained the precious element of surprise.

Nevertheless, her heart raced, and her dry mouth was filled with the slightly metallic taste of feverish anxiety.

The seat swiveled, clearing the console. She was able to step from behind the steering wheel into the lounge area, which featured built-in sofas upholstered in a hunter-plaid fabric.

The steel floor was carpeted, of course, but after long years of hard travel, it creaked softly under her feet.

She had expected the place to smell like a Grand Guignol theater where the sadistic plays involved no make-believe, but instead the air was redolent of recently brewed coffee and cinnamon rolls. How odd—and somehow profoundly disturbing—that a man like this should find any satisfaction at all in innocent pleasures.

“Laura,” she whispered, as though the killer might hear her all the way from the house. Then more fiercely than ever, yet in a whisper: “Laura!”