by Kay Hooper
“Wait a minute,” Jonah said slowly. Then, almost immediately, “No, it couldn’t be that.”
“Couldn’t be what?” Luke asked politely.
Jonah ran the fingers of both hands through his hair, then rested his elbows on the conference table and stared straight again, frowning. “We’ve been looking for commonalities. One thing all six of these people have in common.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Have you thought of one?”
Jonah’s frowning gaze turned to the evidence boards. “But it’s ordinary. I mean, part of my job.”
“Want to clue us in?” Lucas asked.
Clearly reluctant, Jonah said, “I . . . saved them. Every person on that board is alive today because of me.”
—
NESSA HAD NEVER been so terrified in her life, and it was getting more and more difficult to keep that terror underneath the placid surface of her mind. One outstretched hand had already touched one person, whose clammy skin had made her stumble backward.
But the breathing, soft and even, remained the same.
All Nessa wanted to do was find a wall. It was weird but an exterminator had come to their house a few weeks back, just to spray for the summer bugs that would be coming. Nessa, ever curious, had asked him how he could be sure he sprayed his bug-off along every baseboard of the entire house.
“I just start following a wall,” he’d answered cheerfully. “Start in one direction and keep following a wall. And you end up back where you started.”
Nessa didn’t want to end up back where she started, but she knew if she could find a wall, then surely it would lead her, sooner or later, to a door.
So that was what she was doing. Hands outstretched, moving slowly, so slowly, so if she touched something or . . . someone . . . she’d be less likely to jerk away and maybe turn over something noisy.
At one point, she reached a section of wood, about up to her waist, and then she felt something that was familiar, but not. It took her several long seconds to realize that it was the lid of a toilet, fashioned from rough wood.
And once she acknowledged that to herself, she could smell the odors rising from a pit far below. This had to be where he dumped the pots or bowls or whatever he kept beneath his prisoners.
Nessa recoiled, only just stopping herself before she could collide with one of the silent, breathing prisoners around her.
She spared a moment to concentrate fiercely, to make the placid surface of her mind even calmer, undisturbed. But it was hard, and getting harder. There was a cry of terror swirling around beneath that placid surface, a scream she kept locked behind gritted teeth.
She had to get out of here. She had to.
No matter what their captor planned for them, he had already hurt them in ways Nessa could barely comprehend, ways she couldn’t even form words to describe, and she wanted out, wanted them all out, into the normal world again and safe from him.
So she stepped closer to the wooden box with its toilet lid, and reached carefully past it. Wall. It felt like dirt, but Nessa didn’t care, she kept one hand on the wall, just her fingertips trailing it, and the other out in front of her in case there were obstacles she still couldn’t see in the dark, dark place.
She walked slowly and carefully, vaguely aware that her bare feet were cold, but uncaring. Just keep walking, just one foot in front of the other, and don’t let go of the wall, never let go of the wall . . .
—
“IT’S MY JOB,” Jonah repeated. “I never thought anything about it before.”
“You literally saved these people from death?” Sam asked, her gaze intense. “Never mind modesty, we need the truth. Did you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
“And you remember them all?” Luke asked.
“I don’t think you ever forget saving someone’s life,” Jonah retorted.
Sam got up and went over to the evidence board. She picked up a marker, and pointed. “Okay. Simon Church. How did you save his life?”
“Before the Jeep, he had a smaller car, a beater, pretty much. I was out patrolling one rainy night when he went past me like a bat out of hell. I called it in, then hit my lights and sirens and took off after him. I didn’t know the brakes had failed and he was trying desperately to stop the car. Just outside the town limits, there’s a mean curve with a solid drop. Straight down about four hundred feet and into an old granite quarry. There was no guardrail at the time.”
“He went over?” Luke asked, intent.
“Yeah. He’d managed to fishtail the car two or three times before he hit the edge, so it both slowed the car and sent him down at a slight angle. I got to the edge to see that part of a dead tree and part of a crumbling ledge were the only things holding that car in place, about thirty feet down. I yelled at him not to move, then went back to my Jeep and got the hook from my winch. I had to move carefully, because it was still raining and I could feel the mud moving underneath every step I took.”
He drew a breath. “There was no way in hell to stop that car from falling except for a minute or two. Not long enough to try to attach the hook to the car, to anything solid. So I hooked it around me, and when I got to the car, which thankfully had stopped with the driver’s side facing up, I was able to ease the door open.
“Simon hadn’t lost his head even though he looked terrified. He’d already unhooked his seat belt. I grabbed his wrist and held on as hard as he did. He started to slide out of the car—and that’s when the slope let go. We were both sitting on our asses in the mud, watching that car tumbling all the way to the floor of the quarry. There was barely enough left to put in a wheelbarrow.”
“Wow,” Sam said.
“It was close,” Jonah admitted. “I was just wondering if we were going to try to climb back up holding on to that slippery cable when Sarah got there. We held on, and she operated the winch to pull us slowly back to the top.” Jonah shook his head. “No question he’d be dead if I hadn’t been able to get down to him.”
Sam made a quick note under Simon Church’s name, simply SAVED FROM CAR CRASH.
“Okay,” she said. “Amy Grimes. What happened?”
Jonah shook his head. “One of those unthinking teenage things. It was about a year ago. Amy had a different boyfriend then, and they decided to have a nice, romantic little picnic. In a pasture. Normally, that time of the year, that pasture is empty because the farmer is about to cut hay.
“On that day, however, I got a frantic call from the farmer, whose place I had left as part of a regular, routine patrol no more than five minutes before. His meanest bull, one that would as soon trample you to death as look at you, had kicked its way out of the stable it was in and had taken off through the pasture. He was just going to let the animal run, burn off his temper, but he caught a glimpse of color at the far end of the pasture and realized somebody was inside the fence. He was too far away to do anything, but he knew I’d been headed in that direction, so he called me.”
Jonah paused. “Just as I got there, the boyfriend was bailing out over the fence. Amy was frozen, absolutely couldn’t move. And that bull was headed right for her. The farmer had told me to shoot him if I had to. I had to.”
“One shot put him down?” Lucas asked matter-of-factly.
“Two. Two quick rounds, which, luckily, I knew where to aim. He was moving so fast that he was dead in midgallop. Flipped over forward. One hoof grazed Amy’s arm. That’s how close it had been.”
Sam let out a low whistle, but all she wrote under Amy’s name was BULL ATTACK.
“Keep going,” Lucas said. “Judge Carson?”
“Few years back, when I was first appointed, we had something of a meth problem in the area, and that was a problem we definitely didn’t need. I didn’t want it to take hold, and that meant we had to stop it. My department was aggressive, and I called in outside help, experienced
drug enforcement officers to work with my people in locating and taking out the labs. One meth lab blew up before we could get there, killing the three inside. But we were able to capture the lieutenant of the wannabe drug kingpin of the area.”
“And he was willing to talk,” Sam guessed.
“That was the plan. We kept him in protective custody right in the courthouse until Judge Carson could charge him and—Serenity being a small town with not much on the docket—hear his testimony at the same time. Judge was fine with it, lawyers were fine with it, even the dealer was fine with it.
“His boss, however, wasn’t. He must have gotten in through one of the windows, because he didn’t go through security downstairs. Had a silenced automatic and shot two of my officers outside the courtroom doors. Didn’t kill them, luckily. His lieutenant wasn’t so lucky. The first shot was to the head, second to the heart. He was rumored to be a crack shot. The rumors hadn’t lied. His next shot would have been the judge.”
“So you stopped him,” Lucas said.
Jonah nodded. “It took three shots to bring him down, and he still managed to wound the judge in the arm. But he didn’t kill him.”
Silent now, Samantha wrote underneath Judge Carson’s name ARMED DRUG DEALER.
“Next,” Lucas said. “Luna Lang.”
“She used to own a little cottage, couple of years before she met Dave. Hired a contractor for some electrical repairs. I honestly don’t know if he screwed it up or it was just an old house and something sparked the wrong way. I heard the town fire alarm go off, got the radio call, and I was closer than either the fire trucks or EMS. When I got there that night, the place was already an inferno. I could hear the fire engines, but I knew they wouldn’t get there in time. I went in. Luna had managed to make it as far as the downstairs hallway, so I didn’t have to go far. But just as I carried her out, the whole roof caved in. The house was a total loss.”
Sam stared at him. “I bet it’s hell for you to get life insurance.”
He managed a faint smile. “Luckily I have no dependents, and my pension would take care of cremation and any bills left.”
Sam looked as if she wanted to ask more questions but in the end just shook her head, wrote HOUSE FIRE under Luna’s name, and went on. “Sean Messina?”
“He was hiking up in the woods not too far from here. Hunting season, so he had his gun and his dog. Never actually figured out how it happened, but somehow he managed to shoot himself. I was also in the woods, about a quarter mile away, but I was looking for some illegal traps the hunting fairies set each season.”
Sam blinked, then smiled. “Ah. You’re not sure who’s doing it.”
“Oh, I’m sure. I just can’t catch the bastard. Anyway, I was hunting for traps, and springing and collecting those I found when I heard the shot. Sean’s dog deserves some of the credit; he came bursting out of the brush near me barking his head off. Led me back to Sean, who was bleeding like a stuck pig.”
“So you saved him,” Lucas said.
“Well, I was barely in range to use my radio and have them send our EMS unit. Until they came, I used basic first aid.” Jonah shrugged. “They said he would have bled to death if I hadn’t known what I was doing.”
Silently, Sam wrote HUNTING ACCIDENT under Sean Messina’s name.
“Okay,” Lucas said. “How did you save Nessa Tyler’s life?”
FIFTEEN
Nessa was beginning to think the dirt wall she followed was never going to end. When she paused to rest, which seemed often to her, she could no longer hear the breathing of the other people. She’d thought that was scary enough, but the absence of it, the sheer aloneness she felt in that damp, so-dark place, was more terrifying than anything she’d ever known before.
She felt like she’d walked miles. Her feet had gone so cold they were numb, but she had a pretty good idea how scratched up they must be by now, even as careful as she’d been.
But then Nessa realized that the wall she’d been following had been straight for a long time, much longer than any room would need. For the first time, she had a sense of something above her head, as if she could reach up and touch more dirt if only she were a few inches taller. A few more yards, and she could have sworn she could make out a faint light ahead. Very faint, not like daylight exactly—more like dusk.
The final few yards were a climb, or felt like it, though she didn’t realize until she at last reached the mouth of the shaft that she had climbed from God only knew how deeply underground.
She stood there, and for a moment closed her eyes to make sure the surface of her mind was still calm and without ripples. Remarkably, it was. She opened her eyes then, looked around to get her bearings—and wanted to burst into tears.
Nothing looked familiar. Absolutely nothing. There was no sign of a cabin, much less a house. No sign of a shed. Trails crisscrossed through the woods all around her, but she couldn’t see anything wide enough to show that a car had passed this way, or a horse, or a bike.
Even worse, there were evergreen trees all around, filling in for the hardwood trees only now beginning to green out, and because of them, Nessa could only catch glimpses of the sky. The darkening sky.
And, faintly, she could hear thunder rumble.
Damn. She didn’t dare say it out loud, and not only because that black snake of a him was still back there, and maybe by now knew she was gone.
There was a lot of forest around Serenity. Back when she’d really liked to ride her pony, her father had taken her along a lot of the old trails that wound all through the forest, and Chief Riggs had made sure they were clearly marked, especially for Sunday riders.
But she hadn’t ridden in a long time, and nothing she was looking at looked familiar.
Worse, it was getting darker. And if it stormed . . . even if she found some kind of shelter, what if he came after her? What if he found her?
With a choked-back sob, Nessa picked a direction and struck out, trying to listen in case he was behind her, scanning in front of her to see where she was going as long as she could see. And wishing she could just stand and scream and scream and scream until somebody heard her and came to save her.
SIXTEEN
“Well?” Sam asked.
“It was nothing heroic,” he told them. “Nessa used to ride all the time, first ponies and then the bigger horse her dad, Matt, got for her. She was a really good rider, so more than ready for a well-trained horse. That one was. They don’t have pasture, so he boarded the horse at one of the outlying farms. She wasn’t allowed to ride alone, none of the kids were, but they’d form groups just about every Sunday and ride most of the day exploring the trails through the woods.
“I got the ranger service out here to clearly mark the trails that were suitable for riding, made sure every rider had a map and a compass in their saddlebags, and put the fear of God into them about not leaving the marked trails. The forest can get dense as hell, and we’ve lost hikers in years past. I wasn’t about to lose any of those kids in those woods.”
Sam said, “What happened?”
“The kind of freak thing that can happen whenever you’re riding a horse in the woods. They weren’t going faster than a trot; that’s what the kids swore, and I believed them. Nessa’s horse somehow got his hoof wedged in under one of those big roots and fell. Maybe if Nessa had been older or more experienced, she would have had the quick reactions to push herself clear of the horse. But she didn’t. And when he fell, he came down on top of her.”
“Jesus,” Sam muttered.
“Yeah. I counted it lucky she was riding with an English saddle that day and not Western like the others; the saddle horn probably would have killed her. As it was, she had a broken arm and a couple of broken ribs. Worse, she also had internal injuries.
“The oldest boy knew enough first aid that he was able to splint the broken arm, and two of the others s
et off for town to get help.” Jonah shook his head. “She was out cold, and he had sense enough to know both that she shouldn’t be jostled and that he needed to at least start heading back for town. So he and one of the other boys fashioned a litter they could carry on foot between them, holding her as level as possible.”
“Smart kid.”
“The real hero.” Jonah smiled. “He’s in college now. Pre-med.”
Lucas smiled, but his eyes were still intent. “What happened?”
“They managed to get her nearly to the road, where the EMS unit met them. The unit got her to the hospital.”
“And?” Luke prompted.
Jonah sighed. “Most people think they know what the rarest blood types are, but scientists are discovering new variations all the time. The rarest blood type, one most people have never heard of, is Rh-null. A patient with that blood type can give to some other Rh patients, but if you’ve got it, that’s what you have to get if you need a transfusion. Nessa has Rh-null blood.”
“And so do you,” Sam said.
Jonah nodded. “There was none in the clinic’s blood bank, and even with a chopper it’d be a good two hours or more getting some here. Doc knew I had it, so he called me. And I came.”
After a moment, Jonah said, “I give blood at the clinic as often as Doc will let me. Nessa gives about once a year. With a little luck, we’ve got enough stockpiled for both of us in case of any future need. Now.”
Sam looked at the evidence board, and then under Nessa’s name slowly wrote: BLOOD TRANSFUSION.
“Nothing heroic,” Jonah repeated. “I happened to have the right blood and I was here. So Nessa survived.”
“She would have died without your blood,” Luke said, and it wasn’t a question.
Jonah half shrugged. “Doc said so later. I asked him to downplay what the risk had been to Nessa, but her dad, Matt, can be a persistent bastard, and he found out. Honestly, I think that’s one of the reasons he isn’t totally batshit crazy about Nessa missing. He’s convinced I can find her and bring her home. Thinks of me as her guardian angel.”