The Ghost

He could hear her coming toward him, just a short distance away. The ragged sound of her breathing, her sneakers thudding on the trail created a beautiful symphony to him. His pulse started to quicken as it always did in these circumstances.
He peered through the early morning mist that was clinging to trees. She always took the same trail at the same time each morning. It was a mile long. It started on the residential side of town close to her home, wound through the forest and ended abruptly in a park-and-ride lot in the middle of the business district. Not that it could really be called a district. A few office buildings, a pharmacy and a movie theatre were really all it was, but the pretensions of a small town kept its residents calling it that.
Suddenly the mist broke and she appeared. His breathe caught in his throat for that first instant. She was a fluid beautiful goddess in the shadows. The predawn light not yet destroying the illusion of who she was, and yet could never be. She pulled up short when she saw him. Lifting her hand in a short wave, she ran to his side.
“What are you doing here?” she questioned.
As he fed her the story he had prepared his mind kept slipping to the real reason he was here and a grin almost escaped his lips.
“Of course she would help,” he laughed silently. “They always do.”
He had urgently needed to pick up a prescription and the taxi that had driven him to town was gone when he had gotten out of the pharmacy. Oh he could always call another taxi from the payphone, but he had dropped his prescription bottle and it had rolled under that van in the corner of the parking lot. How could she refuse? He was elderly, in a wheelchair, and most of all he was a friend.
They made their way across the parking lot, her sneakers beating a soft cadence into the blacktop while the wheels of his chair moved silently, he liked to think stealthily, and he watched the way her body moved. Even beneath the shapeless form of her sweats, it was a beautiful thing and the sight of it sent distant memories rushing to the surface with the pangs of familiarity.
Of course it was not her body he was remembering, but Cathryn’s. The similarity between hers and the one in his mind were enough that it had been the reason he had chosen her. The girl walking before him moved with the same ease and grace.
As they reached the corner of the parking lot where he had claimed to have dropped his prescription bottle, he felt his usual rush of anticipation. How he loved this part. She would never expect what was coming next, he thought. As he reached beneath the afghan he had spread across his lap, feeling the smooth barrel of the syringe, he did the most unexpected thing of all. He stood.
Grabbing her tightly he used his body to press her into the side of the van that he himself had parked there. Her face registered confusion and than shock, and lastly, as he slid the needle into her flesh injecting her with the sedative; fear.
They always made it so easy. Because they believed who he pretended to be, because they thought they knew him to be harmless, they let their defenses down. They hardly ever fought him at this stage.
As she slumped against him, the drug quickly taking effect, he pulled the van open and lay her body on the floor. Pulling the roll of duct tape from beneath the seat he bound her tightly. Placing the final strip over her mouth, he could see her eyes still struggling to stay
open; to remember her surroundings and the face of her captor.
“Smart girl,” he thought savagely.
“I’ll enjoy this next part. If she wants to see the face of her killer, he thought to himself, why not indulge her?”
He had never revealed himself this early before but then, she was not like his other victims. He knew before he even took her that she would end up dead. That was because he knew that she wasn’t Cathryn.
“Oh well,” he thought focusing on the task at hand, she would still serve his purpose. His fingers deftly found the edges of his jaw and keeping eye contact with her the whole time, he peeled the latex from his face and brushed the wig off his head, letting it fall to the ground. He could tell by her eyes, as they practically bulged from her head, that she had not been expecting that. There was that instant of pure hysterical panic before they rolled back into her head succumbing to the effects of the drug.
Chuckling to himself, he quickly folded up his wheelchair, picked the wig up off the ground and slid into the drivers seat of the van. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he thought of the girl in the back of the van. If you stood this girl and Cathryn side to side, they would seem very different. The girl behind him was raven haired and olive skinned, a real Italian beauty. Cathryn was fair and light. Both pleasing, both beautiful, yet very different. He would never have made the connection. Until he saw her move, that is. Then her resemblance to Cathryn was undeniable. It was seeing her lithe body glide with such confidence that he realized she was to be the one to help him get to Cathryn.
“Oh Cathryn,” he thought to himself. “I have found you at last. It will only be a matter of time before we are together again. Once we are together, nothing will keep us apart, not even the FBI.”
He let a smile escape his lips as he thought of the FBI. They struggled so hard to catch him, for five years they had been tracking him. Five years of his wonderful game, and they were still no closer to seeing the pattern, seeing the reason behind the choices. If they only knew how easy it was to stay one step ahead of them. As he steered his van along the curving roads, climbing higher and higher into the mountains a smile played across his lips. He was going home.