Twenty Years Later: Friday, October 21

The bogeyman — Isla

Monsters rarely look the way you expect. Isla watched Heath McGowan through the window. He lay prostrate, his head held in place with a cylindrical cage. He should have looked like the devil. And yet there he lay, all five feet nine inches of him, a thick frame supporting a square head, hair cut bluntly short, somehow smaller now than the last time she saw him. An ordinary man, a small pot of a belly beginning to form, nails bitten down to the quick. And yet it would be no lie to say that she had thought of him every night for twenty years, that every night, as her hand grazed the lamp switch, she had paused to drink in the last of the light and had thought of the killer on the wall. She was a thirty-five-year-old woman, and she was afraid of the dark. Heath McGowan was the reason.

"You okay in there, Heath?" She leaned closer to the microphone, depressing the speaker button, keeping her voice light, friendly even. "We're going to get started in just a minute."

She watched him on the monitor, his eyes darting upward as they dissected her words. What was he looking for in there?

But Isla had done this kind of thing many times before, and she knew full well what Heath McGowan was hoping to find in her.

Weakness.

"You take your time, Professor." His voice was calm, almost relaxed, as if somehow he had made the coffin of the MRI scanner, the guards, and the shackles that waited for him disappear, and he was lying on a beach.

Isla released the button and glanced across at the prison guard. Steve? Stan? Attractive in an overmuscled way, he stood flush with the window that separated the control room from the scanner — separated him from his prisoner — his gaze locked on the machine and what could be seen of Heath McGowan's body. It was a strange sensation. To know that the room had been swept, that anything that could, even in the wildest of imaginings, be transformed into a weapon had been removed, that there was a guard here, one outside the door, another outside the door beyond that, and yet still to feel that your safety relied on the good grace of a monster.

"There's coffee there." Isla waved to the table beside her. "And cake. You should make yourself at home. This will take a while."

The guard nodded, risking the briefest of glances in her direction. "I'm good. Thanks."

"MRI is ready." The radiographer was a small woman, neat and gray, unimpressed with the caliber of the patient. She drummed her fingernails on the desktop.

Isla depressed the button. "Okay, Heath. We're starting the structural scan now. This will take a few minutes."

"Yup."

It was a special kind of madness this, lunacy in the pursuit of science. To remove a man convicted of two or three or four or more murders from his prison cell, to place him into a transport, with guards who look at you like you have lost your mind. To bring him to a hospital, take him into a room in which you will have to remove his handcuffs, encourage him to lie down on a sliding table and be slotted into the clanging wildness of an MRI. All the while hoping against hope that whatever evil put him in prison can remain boxed away, at least for this little while.

And yet here they were.

"Lucky number thirteen." Connor leaned against the back wall, cradling a chipped mug.

"Lucky number thirteen," Isla agreed.

Thirteen serial killers. Thirteen times they had removed monsters from their cages, had peered into their brains, had felt their hot breath, their ice- cold smiles, and thirteen times, Isla had known that her survival depended on the good grace of the devil.

Isla watched Heath's feet, white sneakers slack against the table, and wondered what he was thinking. Of course, the real question was: Did any of the previous twelve count? Really, if she was being honest with herself, hadn't it always been about this moment and this man?

She had run across the moor on that July day twenty years ago, her heart beating hard, unsure whether she was running from or running to. Had flung herself through the back gate, past the goldfish pond, screaming for her father like she was the one being murdered. She didn't know how she had made him understand, how she had put into words that which seemed so far beyond them, and yet somehow she had, and then she was running again, this time her father alongside her, pulling ahead of her, seeming to lead instead of follow. She had thought that Ramsey would be dead, that he couldn't possibly have survived the hours, years that it had taken her to call for help. And yet, miraculously, he was not, remained clinging to life, still facedown in the sodden grass. She had thrown herself down beside him, had clung to his hands, muttering comfort that she did not believe, while her father had stood and stared at the dead. Then a drowning cascade of sound, wailing sirens, blue lights thrown up against the stone walls of the nearby cottages, and people, everywhere, it had seemed.

More childhoods than hers had ended that day. Because it seemed now that all of Briganton had been experiencing a prolonged infancy, that it had been cradled by Hadrian's Wall and the Cheviots and the ocean of moorland, that the world had been kept at bay for longer than should have been possible. And then, on that July day, all that had been...