Page 20 of He Sees You

Cain

The amateur thinks height makes him safe.

I watch from my position forty yards west as he shifts in the abandoned hunting blind, twenty feet up in a massive white pine.

He's been there for three hours now, camera lens trained on Celeste's bedroom window like a dog waiting for scraps.

Roy’s technique is sloppy—too much movement, cigarette smoke that carries on the wind, the occasional flash of light off his lens that anyone with training would spot immediately.

But Celeste isn't trained.

She's a writer, a dreamer, someone who looks at darkness through the filter of fiction.

She has no idea that while she types at her desk, creating monsters from imagination, a real one sits in a tree, photographing her every movement.

How do I know his name? Idiot dropped his ID in the woods.

He adjusts his position again, the platform creaking under his weight.

The blind's been abandoned for at least five years—I remember when Mitchell built it, before his wife made him give up hunting.

Now it's become a nest for something far worse than any hunter.

Through my binoculars, I can see his profile.

Weathered face, prison pallor still clinging despite six weeks of freedom, teeth stained yellow from institutional coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes.

He's forty-three, according to the research I did after first spotting him four days ago.

Eight years in Fishkill for aggravated sexual assault.

The girl was seventeen, but looked younger.

Roy likes them young, vulnerable, isolated.

Like the sheriff's daughter who’s come home to write.

He found her books in the prison library—I discovered that yesterday when I followed him to the town library and watched him check the computer history he'd forgotten to clear.

Searching for "Celeste Sterling address," "Celeste Sterling photos," "Celeste Sterling boyfriend."

The last search made me grip my knife so hard my knuckles went white.

As if this piece of garbage could ever deserve to breathe the same air as her, let alone more.

Roy lifts his camera again.

The shutter clicks in rapid succession, the sound carrying in the mountain silence.

He's taking pictures of her shadow moving behind the curtains now that darkness has fallen.

Later, in whatever hole he crawls into, he'll develop these.

Add them to his collection.

Touch himself while looking at her silhouette and imagining what he'd do if he could get past her father's protection.

He'll never get the chance.