Waking Lazarus by T. L. Hines

had put this right up front. If it bleeds, it leads .
    Odum knew James well. One of those people who preferred the proper ‘‘James’’ to the more informal ‘‘Jim,’’ a bit of pretense that usually bothered him. But he could cut the man some slack. James had actually been the first person to welcome Odum to Red Lodge the previous year. The town had interviewed several candidates for the Chief of Police position. For most folks in town, a local boy already in the department was the sentimental favorite, but Odum managed to get the position. James Flynn had been unabashedly in the local boy’s corner, although that didn’t stop him from showing up at the office the first day with a nice bottle of Scotch. James even did a flattering interview for that week’s edition, a fine piece asking folks to welcome the new Chief of Police.
    Red Lodge was a good move for Odum. He had needed to get out of North Carolina. It wasn’t that he disliked North Carolina— quite liked it, in fact, with its lush green undergrowth and the mountains— but Mike Odum was a travelin’ man. He didn’t stay in any one place and cool his heels for long. That made a police officer soft, mushy. Pretty soon you started worrying about yourself, and it was all over then. He didn’t plan on worrying about himself for a good long time yet.
    Odum picked up his coffee cup, read the lead-in paragraph for the story again. Man alive. James would have everyone in town panicky, convinced their children could be snatched at any moment. Of course, in this day and age, that was certainly a possibility. But people didn’t need to be reminded of it all the same. Especially people in his town. Maybe he’d have to call James and chew him out a bit. Couldn’t hurt.
    Still, it wasn’t really James bothering him. Odum was misplacing his anger by directing it at James, an easy and convenient target. Odum had been thinking about the child disappearances quite a bit himself. He knew the pattern of the disappearances, the towns, the dates. All of it was committed to memory. Once he heard or saw something, he never forgot it. Never.
    Odum put down the paper after reading the story for the fifth time, then grabbed the coffee. He had, of course, already memorized all of the text, filing it away in his head. But something compelled him to keep rereading. He put down his coffee, brought his hands to his face, and rubbed his eyes. Not even ten o’clock in the morning, and he already felt tired.
    Odum had been tracing the kidnapping patterns for several weeks now. Again and again he pulled the names and faces of victims into the foreground of his mind, examining them from every angle. He didn’t share any of his work with the Feds out of the Billings office, who of course were working the case because of multiple disappearances. The Feds hadn’t bugged him yet, because no children had disappeared in his town.
    But they would, he was quite sure of that. He was in the mind of the killer. None of the bodies had been found, so no one had really named the perp a killer. But Odum knew. He knew .
    It was terrifying, in some ways, knowing how the killer thought. But at the same time it was crucial and energizing. So Odum embraced it—had to embrace it, knowing that doing so would keep him on the edge and ready.
    Right where he wanted to be.

8
    THINKING
    Jude mopped the floors of the school in the morning, playing thoughts of Kristina over and over in his mind. Normally Jude didn’t mop during the school day, but today he wanted to be near other people. Be near the students. So he mopped the hallway while students sat in classes no more than twenty feet away.
    He flipped his mop out of the bucket, ran it back and forth across the white and green linoleum. He tried to make himself think of other things, anything.
    Keep it secret, keep it safe .
    He called an image of his son to mind, reminded himself of dinner at Rachel’s after work. But after a few minutes, the image of