“Okay, did you tell anybody this at the hospital?”
She shook her head. “No, he dropped me off there and gave me a message.”
“A message? So what was in this message?”
The woman held up a piece of paper for her. “I don’t know what it means, but he told me to give it to you.”
Kate carefully took the paper from her hand and read the message out loud so Rodney heard. “Kate, see if Simon can do this.” She flipped the paper forward and backward and thenlooked over at the woman. “Does this message mean anything to you?”
The other woman shook her head, with tears in her eyes. “No, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who Simon is, and I don’t know what he’s supposed to do,” she murmured. “But I think it has to do with the game because he used to laugh all the time. He said something aboutSimon thinks he’s so fucking good, but I don’t think he’s got answers for this.”
“And do you know who this Simon guy is?” she asked, her heart sinking, as she shot a look at Rodney, who now sat beside her, studying the note in her hand.
“No, but he made it sound like it was an old friend. Yet I got the feeling that maybe it wasn’t so much of a friend as an old enemy.”
“An enemy might sound better,” Kate noted, “or at least a frenemy, a friend that became an enemy.”
“Maybe,” the young woman agreed, as she wrapped her arms around her chest.
Kate looked at her and frowned. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be in the hospital?”
“He didn’t hurt me,” she whispered. “At least not this time. He said, if I didn’t deliver the message, he’d show up, standing at the end of my bed, and I would know it’s time to start the game all over again.”
Kate winced. “Well, I sure as hell hope not. I think you’ve been through enough.”
She nodded. “He did say,” she added, then stopped for a moment and took a deep breath, which caught in her throat, before she exhaled noisily. “He did say that he likes to keep his pets.”
Kate stared at her in shock. “What pets?”
The young woman looked up and stared at her, tears in her eyes, then replied, “I think he meanthumanpets. You have to stop him. Before he comes after me, please, please stop him.”
Kate looked over at the young woman, now sobbing quietly, then got up, wrapped her arms around her, and whispered, “I will, sweetie. I will.” And she sure as hell hoped that she wasn’t lying.
I’ll need Simon on this one in a big way,she thought to herself. Unfortunately he didn’t yet know that he would play an integral part in this investigation because it could be all about his life. She knew that wasn’t something Simon would be okay with, but he had to be, this time, because lives were at stake.