The Dark Need Read Online Free Page A

out.”
    “You did,” she said.
    He shook his head. “Just a guess.”
    They were both silent for a minute. Matt pulled at the oars. Tilted his head back and saw a sky so full of stars it almost hurt the eyes to look at them. All that beauty burning in the empty dark. He suddenly felt small. His life, hers, the lives of those his quarry had killed, this boat on a lake that didn’t even have a name on his map: beneath those billions of stars, everything he knew was small. But that didn’t mean those things didn’t matter.

5
    “You haven’t said why you are out here.”
    “It’s what I do,” Matt said.
    “That’s not an answer.” The eyes she turned on him were the same blue as water when it is violently cold. “You’re following him, like I am. That’s clear. You even have a plan, Samaritan?”
    “Not yet. But it will probably take another fifteen minutes to get over this water. That gives me fifteen minutes to plan.” He glanced at that dark, forested bank. Despite his words, he was worried. If the killer was out here, how was he to locate him? He couldn’t just start knocking on doors. Out here, he’d probably be answered with a shotgun.
    “You’re something, aren’t you?” She shook her head. “All right, you asked me what I know. His name is Richard Oslo, and he’s killed nineteen people.” A quiver in her voice.
    Oslo. Like Norway. Matt filed the name away. Something in him burned at the thought of nineteen lives snuffed out.
    He’d only known about fourteen of them.
    “So what else do you know?”
    She hesitated.
    “Help me,” Matt said. “Whoever you are. Before any more innocent people die.”
    She shook her head.
    “What?” he asked.
    “He doesn’t kill innocents.”
    He leaned on the oar a moment, looked at her. “What do you mean?”
    She looked out over the water for a moment. The fog of her breath. “They all have a secret,” she said. “Something dark inside them.”
    “Dark.” His face went grim at the word.
    “Something they’ve lived with all their lives. Something they’ve hidden. A regret, a crime. The first one he killed was a pedophile.”
    “How do you know this?”
    “I know him.”
    “Why’d you mistake me for him, then?”
    She didn’t answer. She kept staring at the water, water cold and darker than the heart.
    Matt resumed his rowing, felt the strain of it in his arms, a good strain—the feeling of being alive. He was thinking hard. He didn’t know this woman or whether he could trust her. Richard didn’t seem like the type of killer to hunt with colleagues or accomplices, but Crucifix Girl seemed to know a lot about him. Or said she did. He glanced at the shore ahead. Nothing to be seen there but dark cedars and a few dark houses. Many of them had no lights in the windows. For some reason that unnerved him. He couldn’t have said why, and he knew it was irrational. It was the middle of the night; who kept their lights on all night? This wasn’t the city. Yet the dark silence of that shore ate at his insides. He swallowed back the unease. He couldn’t afford to be afraid of the dark.
    Crucifix Girl sat with her legs drawn up before her on the bench, her arms hugging her knees. She seemed suddenly vulnerable. Maybe she felt some of that unease, too. Or maybe it was only that he hadn’t dropped the oars and attacked her, and she was feeling a bit absurd for her fears.
    “Thanks,” she said.
    Matt grunted.
    “For helping me. I was looking for a boat, too. So I wouldn’t have to walk. And the dock, it just…” She shivered.
    “It’s all right.”
    “I would have died.”
    He rowed for a moment in silence.
    “I’m sorry I cut you.” Her voice was small.
    Matt rested the left oar across his knee. Lifted his fingers to his throat. He’d forgotten that. The sting returned when he touched the skin. Brought his hand before his eyes, and in the reflected starlight he could see a little blood on his fingers.
    “You should bandage