Aurora felt the breeze rushing through her hair, flicking it around her shoulders as she walked away from her fifth Santa Barbara kill. Two more, and then she'd be out of there. Forever. Her head was pounding and her throat was dry. "I must be getting sick," she thought.
She crossed around behind the old hotel she was making her temporary home to go in through the back door, looking at the pale green paint on the walls. "Good thing they're modernizing this place," she thought as she pressed the elevator's call button, listening to the slow, rickety machine descending its shaft. "It's a bit too quaint."
Across the sprawling lobby behind her, the automatic front doors slid open. Aurora yawned, hearing the elevator stop on an upper floor. Hating the people who caused the delay, she tapped her foot on the floor and crossed her arms, twisting her head to look at the painting of a Canada goose on the wall behind her.
And froze.
Because walking through the lobby was someone who set her on fire. And look who he had with him: the psychic and the sidekick. Aurora struggled to retain control, chanting the Fourth Rule inside her head: "Don't panic. Don't panic. Don't panic."
Calmly, leisurely, she twisted her head back to look at the elevator, then stretched in a fluid motion, taking deep breaths. Her eyes narrowed as her focus zoomed in on the investigators.
"Head Detective Carlton Lassiter, SBPD," the detective said to the desk clerk. "I'm looking for a potential serial killer."
"Here? In this hotel?" the gray-haired and befuddled clerk asked. In her peripheral vision, Aurora could see him wiping his brow with a stained pink handkerchief before tucking it back into his gray suit pocket.
"Have you seen anyone carrying a Hello Kitty clock?" the psychic asked.
Aurora's insides turned cold. She abandoned the elevator and walked to a back staircase, trying not to vomit over its pastel blue railing. "This is the closest I've been since..." She pushed the trailing thought out of her mind and embraced the cold hard walls of her internal defenses. "Rule Eleven: Stay in control."
She walked up the stairs at a normal, moderate pace. When she got to her room, she packed her belongings (including the treasure she'd found) and stacked them by the door. She wiped down all traces of her existence in the hotel room and took the "Do Not Disturb" sign off the door. She relaxed. She would take her things to the rental car, and would not return to the hotel until check-out time the next morning, well after the police were gone. The maid would finish off any traces of Aurora that she hadn't already destroyed.
And if they found something, a bit of hair or a fiber from her clothes or something small and insignificant like that, so what? They had nothing to match it to. The killer was still playing by the rules.
She still had two more Santa Barbara kills to make before she could leave. And that kind of risk was something that the killer feared.
But also loved.
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