by Jane Blythe
“I mean, she said nothing,” Rose repeated. “When I told her, she just freaked out and ran from the room. She refused to talk to me. Locked herself in the bathroom. Elias was working a night shift tonight, and I didn’t want to leave her alone, so I called Ryan and asked him to go and stay with her. Jack, I don’t know what I'm going to do about her.”
“Hopefully coming back to work will help her to get back to her old self,” Jack consoled.
“I hope so,” she murmured, completely unconvinced. Dealing with Paige made her feel completely helpless. She wanted desperately to help her friend, but she just didn’t know how.
Before Jack could respond, her phone began to ring. She dug it out of her purse pressed answer. “Hello. Detective Lace speaking.”
“Detective, this is Connor Newman, one of the doormen.”
“What can we do for you, Mr. Newman?” She remembered meeting him the first day they’d come to the apartment building. He was an older gentleman, in his late sixties, with thinning, grey hair and warm, brown eyes.
“You said to call you if anything unusual happened,” he replied.
Excitement sparked inside her and she threw a quick smile at Jack. “What happened, Mr. Newman?”
“Well, one of the residents just came in and he said he saw someone hanging around outside. He said the person left a letter of some sort,” Connor explained.
“We’ll be right down, Mr. Newman.” She was already heading for the door, gesturing at Jack to follow. “Keep the man who found the letter with you; we’re going to want to talk to him,” she ordered. “We’ll be right there.”
“What letter?” Jack asked the second she hung up.
“One of the doormen, Connor Newman, said one of the residents just came to him and said he saw someone outside leaving a letter of some sort,” Rose informed him as they took the stairs down to the ground floor.
“Did anyone catch the guy who left the letter?” Jack asked. They still had officers both inside and outside the building.
“I don’t think so, but I didn’t get a chance to ask, I just wanted to get down there,” she replied as they pushed through the stairwell door and jogged to the front desk where Connor Newman and another man were waiting for them.
“Detective Lace, Detective Xander, this is Mr. Christenson.” Connor made the introductions as soon as they reached him.
“Axel Christenson,” the man added.
“Mr. Christenson, do you know if any officers went to look for the man you saw?” Jack immediately inquired.
“As soon as Mr. Christenson told me what he’d seen, I reported it to the officer in the lobby and he went to see if the man was still out there, then I called you.” Connor answered before Axel could.
“All right, I’ll go see if they found anything.” Jack glanced at her and she nodded her assent.
“Okay, Mr. Christenson, can you tell me exactly what you saw?” Rose asked once Jack had headed outside.
“I was coming home from work; my car is in the shop, so a co-worker dropped me off just down the street a little way. I was walking toward the front door and I saw someone—I think it was a man—who was dressed all in black. He was right by the front, near the sidewalk, and it looked like he was putting something in the bushes out there. Normally, I wouldn’t have even looked twice, but given what’s been going on here, I walked toward him. When he saw me, he ran off. I started to chase him, then thought maybe that wasn't the best idea. So, I stopped, found the letter, and came straight in here and told Connor,” Axel summarized.
“Did you get a good look at the guy?” She hoped Axel Christenson could corroborate the description of the guy they’d gotten from Jessica Elgar.
“Not really,” Axel replied apologetically. “It was dark and I didn’t get that close. Maybe kind of my height, with darkish hair, I think. Sorry, that’s the best I can do.”
“That’s fine, Mr. Christenson,” she assured him. As soon as they were done here, she’d call Stephanie and get the letter tested for prints—that should confirm whether or not this was from their guy. “Did you touch the letter?”
“No, I left it where it was; I didn’t want to mess up your forensics,” he replied, a little smugly.
“All right, thanks, we’ll call you if we need to know anything else,” she informed him.
“I can go now?” Axel confirmed.
“Yes, thanks.”
“You’ve got officers still here, right?” he queried.
“Right,” Rose assured Axel Christenson.
“And you're making progress in finding this guy who’s terrorizing our homes?” The look Axel gave her was stern.
“We’re working this case as hard as we can,” she promised.
Axel’s face changed from stern to skeptical, but he nodded once and then strode off toward the lifts. Connor Newman was off to the side talking with another resident, so Rose headed straight for the front door. She spotted Jack down by the bushes at the sidewalk.
“Jack,” she called.
He looked up and waved her over. “I was just about to open the letter,” he told her once she reached him.
“Did you find the man Axel Christenson saw?” she asked.
“Nope, he was long gone. Probably in a car and off down the street before Axel even made it inside,” he answered.
With gloves on, Jack carefully used a small knife to make a slit along the top of the envelope. Then he slid out a piece of paper, holding it out so they both could read it at the same time.
Greetings Detectives,
Congratulations! Finally, you caught on. Apartment 1J, apartment 2J, apartment 3J, apartment 4J–they were all just steps on my way to my goal.
For her sake, you better find her before I get my hands on her. But you won't. You’ll never find her and you’ll never find me.
Enjoy your evening.
P.S. Don’t bother keeping the Zeke family out all night; I'm not interested in them!
“Well, he’s certainly pretty cocky,” Rose mused wryly.
“He’s pretty confident we aren’t going to find him, or her,” Jack agreed.
“He was watching us again,” she noted. “He knew the Zeke family wasn’t in apartment 5J tonight.”
“We have to find her, Rose,” Jack said desperately. “When he gets his hands on her, he’s going to torture and rape her until he gets bored and then he’s going to kill her. We have to find her.”
And if they didn’t, then her partner was going to blame himself. Although on this one, Rose would probably find herself joining Jack in being swamped with guilt. This guy kept circling around them, darting in and out of this building despite their presence. He was like a ghost. And if they didn’t get to this woman first, she was going to wind up a ghost, too. Literally.
JULY 23rd
7:56 A.M.
“All righty,” Belinda announced, “let’s get through this meeting quickly so we can get moving with our interviews.”
Jack was tired. He hadn’t gotten much sleep the last few nights. Last night, it had been close to two before he’d finally fallen into bed before rising at seven to grab a quick shower and come back to work. They had a lot to get through today.
At least it had been a quiet night.
Their killer seemed content with the fact that he had gotten his message across. He hadn’t felt the need to go after anyone else—either another random casualty or his intended victim. But that wouldn’t last.
This guy was having fun, but he was only just getting warmed up.
They had to find the woman.
There was simply no other option.
If they didn’t find her, not only would she be killed, but she’d be horribly tortured first.
The knowledge left him with an unpleasant tightening in his chest that he was afraid would never go away if they didn’t get to this woman first. He couldn’t live with any more deaths on his conscience. And this one would weigh heavily.
They were close.
The letter confirmed it.
That woman was in the building.
They just had to find her.
What was really worrying Jack was that this woman might not even know that she was the target. They were working the theory that she was either a previous victim of this man or else a previous lover. But that didn’t mean that she had realized these crimes were related to her. And if that were the case, if this woman didn’t know that this was all about her, then they could interview her, discount her, and move on.
“The prints from the motel once again match our samples from the other scenes,” Stephanie was saying.
“So, it was definitely him. He has her.” Jack felt his heart drop. They’d known this, but having it confirmed made it seem more real.
“Looks like it,” Stephanie agreed dejectedly.
“We’ll find Audrey, Jack. We’ll find this mystery woman, too.” Rose reached over and patted his hand sympathetically.
His partner seemed to sense his disproportionate guilt. In fact, she apparently knew a lot more about what went on inside his head than he’d ever realized. Perhaps he’d been naïve to think that no one would notice the change in his behavior after that nightmare of a vacation three years ago.
“Yeah,” he agreed morosely. “But will we find either of them alive? Audrey could already be dead. He doesn’t really need her. She was just a pawn.”
“No, I think Audrey is still alive,” Rose disagreed. “I think he’ll keep her alive until he gets this woman he’s really after. I think he’ll want her to see him kill Audrey. Make sure she knows that Audrey is only dying because of her. He wanted this woman to suffer. What better way than making her watch him kill someone he took just to send her a message?”
“That’s makes sense,” Jack begrudgingly acknowledged. The idea that Audrey was still alive and they still had time to find her before he killed her should have made him feel better, but it didn’t. Because they all knew that this poor woman would be subjected to horrible suffering. If the killer didn’t plan on attacking anyone else from the apartment building until he made his play for the woman he was after, then Audrey Nichols was going to be his only source for fun until he claimed his real prize. That did not spell good news for Audrey.
“Did anyone report seeing anything at the motel the night Audrey was taken?” Rose asked.
“Not so far,” Belinda replied.
“He probably went in early, while it was still dark and no one would be out and about,” Rose commented.
“He would have made sure he looked like he fitted in,” Jack added. “In case anyone spotted him, he would have looked like just another tourist staying at the motel.”
“He has a real knack for blending in,” Rose agreed. “We still don’t know how he’s getting in and out of that building or whether he’s a resident there. Any way we can get a warrant to print everyone in the building?”
Belinda shook her head. “Not unless you get something to narrow it down or something that directly points to a particular resident. But so far, we don’t have anything to prove he lives there so no judge is going to okay printing the entire building.”
“What about the sketch of the guy Jessica Elgar described as her attacker?” Rose persisted. “Can't we at least print anyone who matches the description?”
“You’ve seen the picture, it’s pretty vague,” Belinda reminded her. “It could match nearly any man, I don’t think it’s enough to let us do the prints. Basically, we’d still be printing every male who lived in the building.”
“We can ask them to volunteer their fingerprints and DNA, though,” Jack suggested. “As we interview each apartment, we can ask the residents if they’d be willing to voluntarily offer up the samples so we can discount them. If they're innocent and have nothing to hide, they should offer them without complaint. Especially since they're all desperate to find this guy and end this so they and their families are safe. And anyone who refuses can go on our list as a suspect. It’ll at least help us narrow things down.”
Belinda nodded her consent. “We’ll also go back over the apartments where the residents have already been interviewed and ask them to volunteer their samples.”
“If we can locate this woman and get her out of the building, it’ll mess up his plans.” Jack paused thoughtfully. “Like it did with Audrey.”
“It didn’t seem to mess him up,” Rose countered. “He simply followed her to the motel and grabbed her there.”
“Yeah, but he had to use Audrey’s suitcase,” Jack pointed out. “He didn’t have anything with him that was suitable to get her out of the building and to his car. If he did, he wouldn’t have had to dump her clothes on the floor and stuff her inside her suitcase to get her out.”
“That’s true, he wasn't ready for that,” Rose agreed. “He obviously had something different in mind if she’d been in her apartment, but, since she wasn't, he had to improvise.”
“So, he’s organized, and he can adapt, but then he has to improvise. If we can mess things up by removing this woman from where he thinks she’s going to be, it would definitely give us the advantage.”
“That only works if we can find her, though,” Belinda said. “We’re looking into Audrey’s background, speaking with her family and friends, to see if she might have been the intended target. It seems feasible since he went to so much effort to get her.”
“But we can't be sure that Audrey was the target, especially since the letter seems to imply otherwise,” Jack reminded him.
“I don’t see why he’d bother to come back to the building just to leave us a taunting note if he already had who he really wanted,” Rose mused.
“It would be too risky,” Jack agreed, “to come back there when he knows how many cops are going to be there, just to goad us. If it was Audrey he wanted, then he already had her. It would be stupid to come back. He would have just taken her and disappeared.”
“That doesn’t discount her as the intended victim, though,” Belinda countered.
“But the letter does imply she wasn't. He congratulates us for realizing that his previous victims were just pawns in his game. And he includes Audrey in that. Then he also tells us that he doesn’t care about the Zeke family. And then he tells us that for ‘her’ sake, we better get to her first, but he knows we won't find her or him. It wasn't Audrey he was after, the real woman is still out there somewhere,” Jack summarized.
“Are we sure the letter is really from our killer and not just some nut after attention?” Belinda queried.
“Prints match, Steph?” Jack asked the crime scene tech.
“Yep, same as the prints from apartments 1J, 2J, 3J, and the motel,” Stephanie confirmed.
“Okay,” Belinda conceded. “We’ll assume Audrey isn’t the intended target, but I’ll keep people looking into her past, just to be safe. You two,” Belinda directed to Jack and Rose, “keep working through the ‘J’ apartments. That seems to be where we’ll be most likely to find this woman.”
“We know it isn’t anyone in apartments 1J through 5J, and yesterday Rose and I did apartments 6J and 7J, so today we’ll start with apartment 8J and keep working our way up until we either get through them or we find something viable.” Jack was really hoping and praying that today would be the day they would finally make some definitive progress on this case.
“Okay, sounds like a plan.” Belinda stood to dismiss them all. “Let’s go find this guy.”
* * * * *
9:33 A.M.
Ever so slowly, Audrey Nichols began the slow climb back to consciousness.
At first, she wasn't sure where she was.
All she knew was that she was lying on a bed in kind of a hazy, surreal slumber.
Audrey tried to open her eyes, but they felt heavy.
Why did her eyes feel heavy?
She tried to move her limbs instead, but they too felt as though they’d been weighed down with lead.
She could twitch her fingers, though. And beneath them,
she felt the soft, satiny feel of sheets. She was definitely lying on something soft and comfortable. And it felt like there was a pillow beneath her head. She was definitely in a bed.
So, the next question was, where was the bed?
It didn’t feel like her own bed. The mattress was too soft. Audrey had a bad back, an old injury from her days as an equestrian rider. So, she slept with a firm mattress. Something as soft as what she was currently lying on wouldn’t offer enough support.
That confirmed it, then. She was definitely not in her own bed.
Since she felt heavy and disoriented, maybe she was in the hospital. She could have been in some sort of accident. The way she felt now was similar to how she’d felt awakening in the hospital after her fall off the horse. She’d fallen plenty of times before. But that one had been different. That one had left her with a badly broken arm, swelling in her spine, and serious head injuries. It had also ended her career.
She had been in a coma for six long days. Well, long days for her family; she had known nothing of what was going on. When she’d finally awakened, she had been in the hospital. She’d felt sore and groggy and focusing on where she was and what had happened to her had been near impossible.
Maybe that was why she felt odd now. She was in the hospital again. She no longer rode, but maybe she’d been in a car accident.
But something was niggling at her.
Something that told her wherever she was right now and whatever had happened to land her here had nothing to do with a car accident. Nor did it have anything to do with any sort of accident.
She forced her sluggish mind to focus.
Audrey went with facts.
What was the last thing she remembered before waking up feeling like this?
The last few days, there had been a spate of violent crimes at her apartment building. A man had been murdered. Then a young woman had been raped. Then there had been a violent assault on the woman who lived in the apartment directly below hers.
The police had come to her, worried that she might be the next victim. They had wanted to have a police officer stay in her apartment as a decoy, so they could try and catch this assailant. Audrey had readily agreed to the plan. She had no wish to end up like her neighbors. So, she had gone to a motel for the night.