by Dana Lyons
How much does he know? How does he know? What did he see?
“One problem at a time.” She walked the perimeter of her cell. Fairly large, she guessed the room to be half of a good-sized house.
“Underground. Maybe that’s why I can’t hear any of them,” she mused. Suddenly, she stumbled and realized she was drowsy. “Damn, drugged again.” She staggered to the bed and climbed in with her clothes on. She left the little light on, but when she closed her eyes, a darkness no light penetrated filled her mind.
The darkness of being alone.
* * *
Upstairs, Martin struggled through a quick dinner and fell into his bed. He’d been up most of the previous night, and had to go to work tomorrow. Along with his fatigue, he was utterly drained, yet unbelievably, when Dreya spoke, her words were better than anything he’d ever imagined.
For the first time in my life, I feel whole.
This confirmed that God had brought her to relieve his pain. He rolled over, hearing her voice in his mind, and knew he would never be the same again.
How long can I keep her?
* * *
The next morning, after flying all night, Rhys announced Coming in, and landed at the apartment door. It opened, and Simon stepped back, allowing him to hop through. He transitioned and took the robe Quinn offered, staggering to the couch. “Nothing. I flew all night long. Nothing.”
Their faces were strained, lips clamped, foreheads furrowed. “What would she tell us to do?” he asked as he sank back on the couch.
Silence stumbled through the room.
“Go over the evidence,” Simon and Quinn replied together.
“You two go look at everything we have—I’ve got to get some rest. I’ll be in the office this afternoon.”
After they left, he picked through leftovers in the refrigerator, replacing the massive number of calories he burned in a night of flying.
He held his head in his hands. He could replace calories, but he couldn’t replace her. The darkness in his thoughts ached with her loss, like phantom pain in his mind.
10
In her dream, Dreya was running … in place.
Can’t break free!
She moaned, and thrashed her head side to side.
Run harder, escape.
Can’t, she cried soundlessly. Trapped. She was trapped in darkness, alone.
All you have to do is give in.
Her eyes bolted open. Sweat soaked her armpits. Her legs shook, her heart quivered, and an acrid smell reeked in her nose. Goat piss, she thought, and realized what she dreamed. She licked her lips, and remembered the reality.
Four days in Fallujah, captured and held by the Taliban. Day one, they cut her French braid off at her neck. Based on the cheers she heard afterward, they displayed the blonde rope like a trophy. Day two, they beat her. Day three, they withheld water. During all this, from outside came the sound of bleating goats.
After they cut her hair, they put a black hood over her head. Every moment she thought she was going to die in a fashion she wouldn’t have chosen … after they gang raped her. She prayed, “Soon,” just wanting the torture over because once it was over, she could get on with surviving.
The emotional horror of those four days nearly broke her, but it was nothing compared to the loneliness surrounding her now. Her mind reached for Rhys, Quinn, and Simon, but nothing came back. She brought her hands to her face and sobbed.
Not even a black sack over my head felt this alone.
She gave the tears their time. Then, needing to blast the fear from her mind, she rolled over and screamed into the pillow over and over again until she was empty. Except for the will to survive.
The fear collapsed.
“I want out of here.” She got up and walked to the bathroom. A quick rinse of her face felt better, but she sniffed her armpit. “Ugh.” Off came her shirt and bra. She washed the sour sweat from her body, pulling from linens and fine soap stacked on a shelf. She sniffed. “Lavender. Huh. Beats goat piss.”
After rummaging in the drawer for clothes, she pulled out a sports bra and tee shirt. How he knew her well enough to provide fitting clothes was a thought she couldn’t explore at the moment.
The only light source in her confinement was a small battery powered lamp by the bed. She didn’t know what time it was, but she expected Martin to come down the stairs any minute, just as she expected to die any minute in Afghanistan. “Focus on the mission.”
Foot by foot she examined her perimeter again. She was housed in a basement, with no way out except the door at the top of the stairs. To her left was a massive bookcase set in the wall. She pointed the light at it, remembering a similar bookcase in Senator Stanton’s home.
“It’s too nice a bookcase to be in the basement.” She inspected it, willing her fingers to find a release. “Come on, let me out of here.” A small button perfectly set into the middle shelf flagged her fingers.
She paused, breath held, listening for footsteps upstairs. A creak of wood, a shuffle of shoe, the clink of china, the smell of coffee. Nothing came through.
“It can’t be this easy,” she mumbled in protest, and pressed the button. The bookcase soundlessly opened into a space behind it.
The temptation screamed for her to dart into the space, push the case back into place, and run for her life.
“Run where?” She remembered tunnels in Afghanistan that ended in booby traps.
She slowly advanced behind the wall. A fear of being entombed with no way to open the bookcase once she closed it brought a shiver down her back. Goosebumps flashed down both arms.
The space behind the bookcase opened into a tunnel. She paused on her tiptoes, eyes closed, her ears searching for any sound. All she perceived was the dark and dead of night.
Another step and her light revealed a corner in the tunnel.
Let it be. Let it be—
Using caution, she approached the corner while searching for trip wires and triggers at every step. Now that she hugged the corner, her back to the tunnel wall and the corner opening to her right, she spoke what she didn’t want to admit. “There’s no air flow, don’t get your hopes up.”
The boys were gone from her mind and she couldn’t think about that right now. She was on her own, and she’d been on her own before. She knew what to do.
Survive.
She peeked around the corner and her hope rushed out in an exhalation of despair. “All bricked up. I knew it was too good to be true.” She returned to the basement and pulled the bookcase back into place.
“Everything’s going to be okay.” She sat in the chair, not wanting to fall asleep again. Having roused the Fallujah dream, memories of the black sack waited for her.
The sound of a combination lock spinning jolted her awake. Next came the fog-piercing aroma of coffee as Martin came down the stairs with a tray. She smelled maple syrup and her mouth watered.
“I have to go to work,” he said. “I brought your favorite, waffles and syrup.” He pointed to a second plate on the tray. “A sandwich for lunch. And your favorite potato chips. And a cookie from that place on—”
While he talked, she read him. Her assessment yesterday that he was a little boy was accurate. The slight shift in his vocabulary was now placating, not demanding. From his stance, she knew he was conciliatory, but not collapsing. The game, she understood, must continue until he was ready for the end.
Or she could kill him in two moves.
Six months ago, that would have happened. She could walk out of here in sixty seconds, except for the combination lock at the top of the stairs. She didn’t relish the idea of being locked in here with a dead man. Aside from practicality, Nobility lurked in the corners of her mind, not nudging, but stepping out of the way. “What do you want, Martin?”
“You,” he said smiling.
Freaky eyes weren’t needed to see the joy in his face. She asked, “Are you happy, now?”
“I am.”
He said
the words as if they were a confession he waited his entire life to give. Sadness moved in and overcame the joy. She couldn’t take his sadness again. In a rush, she asked, “What will we do when you come home from work?”
“Can we play cards and be a family?”
She once professed wanting to put him down like a sick animal. But she didn’t want to hurt him. Not when he seemed to have found a moment of happiness in a life filled with so much pain. “Of course, if that would make you happy.”
His face opened like a flower, flooding her with reads. She choked back a cry for his abject loneliness, instead smiling. “I can’t wait.”
After he left and the bolt lock at the top of the stairs slapped into place, she paced. “What are Rhys and Quinn and Simon doing? Have they found a connection? Are they on the way?”
They would be going over the evidence, looking for what they missed. Rhys scowling, Quinn brooding, Simon pacing until they tripped over a missed lead. Something out there would bring them to her. SWAT would circle the house along with the FBI and her boys. Guns, everywhere. The risk of fatalities growing exponentially—
No one needs to die.
“Don’t come,” she whispered. “I got this.”
Damn Nobility for making this fucked up.
* * *
At the FBI building, Rhys walked off the elevator and Jarvis’ called him into his office.
“Sir?”
“What more can I do? What else do you need?”
“Thank you. If you’ll excuse me, I need to talk with my team.”
“Go, but keep me in the loop.”
In Dreya’s office, Quinn and Simon each worked from a stack of files. “What do we have?”
Simon pointed to the shorter stack. “I’m going over our victim autopsies, looking for some kind of marker.” He pointed to four tall stacks off to the side. “Then I’m combing through deaths, suspicious and otherwise, in our historical window for a match of any kind.”
“See if Andy can run any of the data for you once you find the marker.”
“Maybe,” Simon answered, grumbling. “I never met an algorithm I trusted.”
“Quinn, what do you have?”
“I’m going through van owners of all colors in the District and Virginia. Not sure yet, but if Simon finds something, we’ll cross reference it with my list. And yes, I’ll get help from Andy.”
* * *
“He wants to play cards and be a family,” Dreya said. What manner of abuse had he been exposed to as a child? More important, what did he expect to happen next?
Martin returned after his work with food from another restaurant, and they ate together in the basement, sitting across from each other at the small table.
“Work was boring,” he said. “I was in a hurry to come home all day.”
“Well, thank you for the meal. Another one of my favorites.”
He beamed, pride overriding the sadness for the moment. “I want you to be happy while you’re here.”
Silence swelled on the heels of ‘while you’re here’.
“Martin.”
“I know,” he blurted. He jumped up and took their trays over by the stairs. He came back with a deck of cards. “Please. I watched you play cards. Is that how a family is? Will you play cards with me?”
The plea was pitiful to her Noble ears. Denied a family life for whatever reason, his sanity craved this foreign interaction. She patted the table. “Come on. What do you want to play?”
They began with fish, went to 500 rummy, and progressed to poker. They tore pages from a magazine to use as money. When the hour was late, he raked in the final pile of magazine pages.
“Well done, Martin.”
Her words brought a raft of reads from his face, joy, happiness, pride, comfort. She wanted to give him what she could, for they both knew what was coming. “Can I come upstairs and take a shower?”
For a split second she thought he would refuse. Anger built, rising from him. But she smiled and reached out to touch his hand. “What comes next, Martin?” She took his fingers and squeezed. She wanted to save him, to end this without another death. “Can you tell me?”
He glanced down, suddenly contrite.
“Have you thought about it—what comes next?”
He nodded vigorously, spurring another wave of incredible sadness to pour off him. She braced herself and met it head on.
Without answering, he rose and dashed a hand across his eyes. “Come on up. You can use the shower.”
* * *
Rhys kept flying, hoping to hear one piercing thought from her. He circled the District and covered Arlington, returning back across the Potomac. Desperate for hope, he landed near the apartment in case she had come home, but there wasn’t a light on, nor a thought stirring inside.
Come to the office, Simon called. Got something.
Rhys entered the apartment and dressed, hope surging in his heart for a real clue. The internal darkness of her absence was glaring, the lack of her presence an irritation to his mind. He drove back to the District.
Simon paced in Dreya’s office. When Rhys walked in, he shut the door. “The marker, it was in the autopsies, but hiding in a notation.” He spread out the files and opened them, pulling pages. “Here--thoracic contusion, again, again, and again. He kicked them each in the ribs.”
Rhys rubbed his face. “How does that help us?”
“We’re looking for the same injury in victims from the March kill window,” Quinn said. “Problem is, there’s so much data, we had to go to Andy for an algorithm. The computer is crunching through thousands of deaths looking for this same injury.”
“How long?”
“As long as it takes. I’m not leaving.”
Shadows circled Simon’s eyes and frown lines ate into his forehead. Quinn looked haggard, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Alright. You two stay on this. I’ll go back up.”
He returned to the apartment, always with hope she was there. But the rooms were dark and silent, as dark and silent as his mind. Naked, he walked out and closed the door. Two seconds, and he was in the air.
Dreya, where are you?
* * *
As soon as Dreya stepped through the basement door at the top of the stairs, she sent out the message, Where are you? After the bleak darkness of the last 36 hours, anything would be a relief. When nothing came right away, she kept trying.
“The shower is here,” Martin said. “Clean towels are in the cabinet. There’s plenty of hot water, so take your time.”
A new sadness came from him, one of hopeless surrender. She cringed, knowing she would be a part of more pain for him. “You know they’re coming?”
“Yes. It’s okay.” He went to peer out the window. “Are they here already?”
“No,” she said. “But probably by morning. If you want to stay up and talk, we can.”
He rushed to say, “You were worth it. I’m sorry about the others, but I have no regrets.”
She showered under hot water, trying not to think about bathing in a serial killer’s bathroom. She used the shampoo and conditioner, oddly smelling like the toilet paper downstairs. She cocked her head. Considering his level of organization, she wanted to know, when did he give up?
When I didn’t kill him. When I stayed to give him all he ever wanted, words of love.
Her eyes burned in a rush of tears. To go an entire life without ever hearing words of love, how did he bear it? She placed her face in her hands and sobbed for him, for the women he killed, and for the woman who created this monster out of a little boy.
By the time she exited with her hair up in a towel, she was emotionally drained. She wanted to close the portal to her mind, but needed it open in case her men were looking for her. A new brush still in the package and a hair dryer on a stand next to the sink beckoned. She dried her hair with one thought.
Where are you? Can you hear me?
The awful sense of being alone evaporated when she ca
me above ground, but there was still no contact.
New clothes sat on top of the hamper; he must have opened the door and set them in. She dressed and looked at a small clock on the wall. 12:30 A.M.
Suddenly, she felt Rhys. Are you there?
Dreya! Where are you? Are you okay?
Hot tears flooded her eyes. Oh, Rhys, I’m so glad to hear you. I’ve been so alone without you and the boys.
Where are you?
I don’t know, but I’m not in any danger. We’re within driving distance of that French restaurant I like, and he says his name is Martin. But don’t come!
What do you mean don’t come?
I’m going to bring him in. He’s pitiful, Rhys.
He’s a killer.
Give me until sunrise, and we’ll come out. I don’t want him hurt any more than he already is.
Are you okay?
Her chin quivered. She just wanted this night over, so she would never be alone again. Give me till sunrise.
Find a piece of mail, figure out where you are. I’ll stay in the area. Simon and Quinn are going through data. Simon thinks he has a lead.
His near presence was an instant comfort; she wasn’t alone anymore. She had Rhys. And she had Martin.
Going to be a long night.
When she came out of the bathroom, he had two cups and a fresh pot of coffee ready. “I know you like the fancy stuff, but this came from your coffee shop.” He blushed. “I’m really sorry I dumped all the cold drinks on you.”
She took the cup. He motioned towards the table by a garden window. “We can watch the sunrise from here.”
They sipped their coffee. She wondered what they would talk about all night, and dreaded the possibilities.
“Tell me about them,” he said. “The men you live with?”
“What would you like to know?” She blew on the hot beverage.