The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller Read Online Free Page A

boxes from the van.
    I felt as if I were being dissolved. My case was dead. Obliterated. Leonard Amsel was simply new in town. He'd probably gotten the job before he had a home. Rented a trailer until he found the right house. If the boxes were full of scalpels and ropes and garbage bags, sure, it could still be him, but otherwise, there was no way the killer would bother moving into a new home less than 72 hours before he planned to leave this world.
    Two options. One, Amsel was the killer, but he wouldn't know it until Monday when he saw Stephen Jaso and the dark gears of his mind clicked into place; the crime wasn't premeditated, but one of opportunity.
    Or he wasn't my man.
    On his next trips to the van, he offloaded a brass table lamp, three boxes of books stacked on a handcart, a giant box overspilling with comforters, and a cat tree.
    I didn't have time for this. I headed straight to the motel and got out my laptop and stared at it in a daze. I had a little more than two days until the boy was taken and no leads as to who was about to cut him up. Kendra Wilkins? I had no proof she had attended a local high school. She could have told the old woman anything she wanted. Perhaps the fact she'd filled Irene Kleitz in on that detail betrayed a person eager to prove they had a past.
    I let that thought simmer while I combed through my files and photos. There was no order to my search. I was trolling for connections and patterns, letting the lines of my consciousness snag whatever they could. I hooked nothing.
    Wilkins, then. Her dusty sedan was parked right in front of her apartment building. I went to the diner across the street and got a seat by the window. I ordered coffee, took my time ordering a BLT. I hadn't had real bacon since one of my last visits, but my stomach was squeezing itself so hard I had a tough time keeping it down.
    By the middle of the afternoon, I was on my fifth cup of coffee and thinking hard about where to set up camp next. A Jeep rolled into the apartment lot and jarred to a halt. Three young women swung out their legs, hopped down, headed up the stairs, and knocked on Wilkins' door. I covered my face with my hands. Time-hopping pedophile predators don't go out for weekend drinks with their girlfriends.
    I'd seen a pet store just a couple shops down from the diner. I headed there, browsing among the bubbling aquariums, adrift in the musty warm smell of mammals. The employees left me alone. Around five o'clock, four young women left the apartment and piled into the Jeep. Numbly, I followed them down the highway and across another smaller river. They pulled into a bar and grill. I didn't bother to slow down.
    At the motel, I flopped on the bed and stared at the primer-white ceiling. No leads. No suspects. But a lot could come together in the last two days. That's when the snakes slip from their dens.
    I headed to the park. The Jasos weren't there. None of the faces rung any bells. I drove past their house. The car was still in the driveway. I parked at the corner and adjusted my rearview. The sun bloomed red and drained from the sky.
    There was nothing more to see. I returned to the motel and reread news and police reports that would emerge in the years after the killing. I woke facedown on the keys. The sun got up and so did I. There were no cars outside Amsel's trailer. At his new home, a couple of men wrestled a couch from the back of the van.
    My only real option would be to hang out around the school tomorrow and hope I'd be covering the right door when Stephen got abducted. Instead, I drove to one of the massive department stores across the boulevard from last night's bar and grill and bought the smallest pair of walkie talkies I could find. My hand shook as I handed over the cash.
    Quite possibly, it was already too late to do the very stupid thing I was about to do. The family car was parked in the Jasos' driveway. I parked on the opposite end of the block from where I'd spent most of my time