Deathtoll (Broslin Creek Book 8)

by Dana Marton

  “No problem.”

  Bing shot Murph a hard look as if he thought the response was too quick to be trusted. “I know how you feel about Kate. I know Emma is like family to you. But you’re here strictly on my forbearance.”

  “I know. Thank you, Captain.”

  “Don’t make me regret this.”

  “I won’t.”

  “We’ll see.” Bing looked at Gabi, then Mike. “Off we go. I expect everyone to check in from each location you inspect.”

  They nodded, then ran for their cruisers.

  Murph slid behind the wheel of his pickup and slapped the map on the dashboard with one hand, turning the key in the ignition with the other. He waited as, ahead of him, Gabi, Mike, and the captain turned right at the intersection. He turned left. He already had his first target fixed in his mind—the ramshackle old firehouse by Broslin Creek. The new firehouse was in the middle of town, a state-of-the-art facility. The township used the old one to park the snowplows.

  His phone rang in his pocket.

  “Anything?” Kate asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “You’ll call me if—” Her voice broke.

  “I will. I’m not going to stop looking until we have Emma back. I’m going to find her. I promise. All right?”

  The sniff on the other end broke his damn heart. She never cried. She was one of the toughest people he’d ever met.

  The closer Murph got to his destination, the more he convinced himself he was on the right track. Broslin hadn’t seen snow since the previous winter. None of the plow operators had been called up yet. The place would be empty. Out there, nothing too close by, isolated. The location had been chosen over a century before, because the fire wagon tanks could be filled up from the creek.

  Murph brought up the old building and its surroundings in his mind. Creek on one side, woods in the back. He was going to stay away from the long driveway. He wasn’t going to play this like a cop. He was going to play it like a soldier.

  Bing was a fine captain, but he’d spent his career chasing small-town criminals. Asael was ten levels above all of them, in a category of his own. The combined forces of the FBI and Interpol hadn’t been able to catch the assassin yet.

  Murph would. He’d promised Kate, and that was that.

  He slowed as he drove by the turnoff, fumbling with his phone in case anyone was watching. But as he pretended to read a text, he stole a look down the driveway. The parking lot up front stood deserted.

  He kept on driving, over the little wooden bridge that spanned the water, and took the next crossroad, a bumpy gravel path that led to a rarely used fishing spot on the other side of the creek. He and his brother, Doug, had fished there a million times when they were kids.

  Murph didn’t stop until he was behind tree cover, where nobody from the old firehouse could see him. The disadvantage was, he couldn’t see the firehouse either. Not even when he slid out of his pickup with his gun in hand.

  He maintained a firm grip on his weapon. If Asael was in the building, this was where it would end. There would be no call to the captain.

  There it was. The truth. Whatever that said about Murph.

  Asael had Emma. Asael was a threat to Kate. Asael needed to die.

  No police custody, no hearings, no prison, no hundreds of ways to escape and come back again.

  Somebody needed to take care of the Asael problem permanently. And Murph was going to be that man. If he ended up spending the rest of his life in prison for it, as long as Kate was safe, he could live with that bargain.

  * * *

  Asael

  “Like I said, I prefer you alive, but I can work with dead,” Asael told Emma Bridges, who was turning out to be a pain.

  Whoever had invented the kickass-heroine genre should be shot in the head. Those books and movies gave women too many ideas these days.

  “Fuck you,” she spat at him.

  He’d removed the duct tape because he didn’t want her to suffocate. She’d cried a little when he’d dragged her from the delivery van, down the stairs, into the basement. Her nose had gotten plugged up, her face turning blue from lack of air.

  He lifted a piece of paper towel to her nose. “Blow.”

  She tried to bite him. Clearly, she had recovered.

  “I’m going to tape your mouth shut again in a minute. If you can’t breathe through your nose…” He smiled.

  She got it. Blew. Then blew again.

  Damned disgusting. He tossed the wadded-up paper towel aside. Then he grabbed the roll of duct tape from the floor.

  “Don’t!” She turned her head.

  He slapped her. Just enough so she knew he meant it. He might yet have to rough her up later. He would enjoy that, but he didn’t want to start too early. Didn’t want to chance that he might get carried away. It’d happened in the past.

  When she stilled, he taped her mouth shut again.

  “No crying,” he told her as he stood and walked away.

  “Mfmmd.”

  Was she trying to swear?

  He looked back at her over his shoulder. “No worries. I’ll be coming back. But right now…” He smiled at her. “Time to pay a visit to your sister.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Murph

  Murph jumped from rock to rock as he crossed Broslin Creek, careful not to drop his gun. The town hadn’t seen any rain in the past couple of days, so the water ran low. And since the creek wasn’t shaded on both sides—woods to the east, but fields to the west—enough sun reached the protruding stones so they weren’t covered in moss and weren’t slippery. A nice piece of luck. The last thing Murph wanted was to face-plant in the water.

  He climbed up the crumbling bank on the other side, then kept in the cover of scattered bushes as he approached the building. Ed Gannon had parked the broken old plow out there. It probably didn’t fit inside anymore with the big new plow and the salter.

  Murph ducked as he dashed behind the salt storage shed. Adrenaline sharpened his focus and his senses. His main target, the old firehouse, stood thirty feet ahead.

  He ran forward silently, in a straight line, over to the firehouse’s nearest dirty window. Then he flattened himself against the wall, waiting for any sound that might indicate that he’d been spotted.

  No sound came from the inside.

  He inched up and looked through the glass.

  No movement either. The interior appeared just as deserted as the outside, nothing but snow-management equipment.

  Murph waited and watched for another minute. Then he was on the move again, carefully rounding the building.

  A fine dusting of dirt covered the driveway, along with a drift of dead leaves. No tire marks. The front door was padlocked from the outside. Not a single window open anywhere. None broken either. Each time he came to another pane of glass, he looked inside, going around in a complete circle.

  No sign of life. No sign of recent occupation. Nothing remotely suspicious.

  He rolled his shoulders to release some of the pent-up tension in his muscles. Dammit. It would have been too easy.

  He called the captain on his way back to the creek. “Old firehouse all clear. Doesn’t look like anyone’s been out here in weeks.”

  “Nobody’s had any luck so far,” the captain told him.

  Murph hated the thought that Emma might not be in Broslin. Their best chance for recovery was there. Outside of Broslin…he didn’t even have a guess.

  When he didn’t say anything, the captain added, “She might not have been taken. She could be just mad as hell, focusing on her road trip, and making a point with her silence.”

  “Maybe for an hour or two. But not this long. Emma wouldn’t do that to Kate, and definitely not to their mother and father. She’s in trouble.”

  “Then we’re going to find her.”

  After they hung up, Murph made his way across the babbling water, then drove to the next possible location on his list, then the next, then the next. No si
gn of Asael or Emma anywhere.

  Then only one address remained, an out-of-business printshop. They used to print the two local papers there, but one of the papers had folded, and the other one had gone to a bigger printer for a better price in West Chester. Murph wouldn’t have been surprised if the Broslin Chronicle folded too and soon, or went completely online. People read the news on their phones these days.

  The printshop was next to a razed strip mall right on the edge of town. Murph found a broken window and climbed in, searched every inch of the building, but found nothing.

  He was walking to his truck, his mood as dark as the cracked blacktop under his feet, when he happened to glance up at the water tower across the road, and it jiggled something loose in his brain. He knew another place connected to Asael, didn’t he? Connected, like the apartment, through Mordocai aka Fred Kazincky.

  Years ago, when Mordocai had kidnapped Kate, Murph had caught up with them an hour north of Broslin, on the edge of another small town, in the woods. Mordocai had tied Kate out as bait, then climbed a tree to hide behind the leaves and have high-ground advantage over Murph.

  It hadn’t worked.

  There’d been an old water tower behind the guy, which Murph had used to line up his shot.

  Who the hell knew why Asael wanted Emma, what his twisted mind was thinking? Maybe the assassin meant to sacrifice her on the spot where his lover had died, to honor Mordocai’s memory.

  Murph slammed on the gas, flying down the road as fast in the approaching twilight as his rattling pickup could take it.

  He had no doubt that Asael’s end game was Kate. But killing her didn’t seem to be enough for the bastard. He wanted to punish her first, for having escaped him for so long, and for being the cause of Mordocai’s death.

  What better place to spill Emma’s blood than the very spot Mordocai’s blood had been spilled? Poetic justice.

  Murph picked up his phone to call the captain with his latest theory.

  He hesitated.

  He’d been a soldier. He’d been trained in E&E, escape and evasion. He’d been trained how to sneak through the woods unseen. He drove a beat-up pickup, not something that would be immediately suspicious if seen. But if he drove up to Asael’s hiding place with the captain and a couple of police cruisers in tow…

  Instead of Bing, he dialed Kate.

  “Did you find her?” she asked as soon as she picked up.

  “Not yet.”

  He could hear her gulp of disappointment before she said, “I called her again. This time, it went straight to voicemail.”

  “Her battery is probably dead. What’s going on at your place?”

  “Joe just checked all the doors and windows again. House is locked up tight. Hunter had to leave, but Mike came to spell him. He’s outside, in the front. Chase is in the back. Are you still looking for Emma?”

  “Going down my list of possible hiding places.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If I finish my list and don’t find her… I thought I’d spend the night at your place too. I could take the living room couch.”

  “I already promised it to Joe.”

  And there Murph was, suddenly jealous of Joe, which was stupid because Joe was head over heels in love with his wife, Wendy.

  “Kate…”

  “Thank you for looking for Emma.”

  We need to talk he wanted to say. But now was not the time. It never was the time lately.

  Thank God frustration didn’t have calories. He would have been the Goodyear Blimp by this point.

  * * *

  Asael

  Asael drove by Kate’s house. One stupid cop up front, one inside. Pitiful.

  He drove to the corner, turned right, then right again onto the street that ran parallel to Kate’s. He pulled over between two houses so if the inhabitants of either one looked out, they’d assume he was visiting the neighbor. Forty yards in front of him, in line of sight with the back of her house, another cruiser sat by the curb.

  Asael turned off the dome light, then slipped out of his car. He used various landscaping features as cover until he was in Betty’s backyard.

  He let himself in. Because his stomach growled as he walked through the dark, half-empty house, he headed straight to the kitchen. Enough moonlight filtered in to make out that the muffins he’d seen on the counter the last time were gone. He opened a cabinet. Empty. He didn’t want to open the refrigerator. He could have unplugged it; that would have taken care of the fridge light, but dragging it away from the wall far enough so he could reach in there wasn’t worth the bother. Kate Bridges had probably cleaned that out too, just like she’d cleaned out the cabinets.

  He strode back to the laundry room and stood to the side of the window, watched as the light came on in Kate’s bedroom next door.

  “Optimistic,” he said, “to think you’re going to sleep tonight.”

  When she stepped into her bathroom, he scowled. The bathroom window was up high. He couldn’t see in there. But he didn’t have to wait long for her return.

  She was back in five minutes, wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt instead of a nightgown. Maybe because she had that cop in her house. Or maybe because she expected a call at any second that her sister had been found, anticipated having to jump into her car to rush to Emma’s side.

  There was that optimism again. She thought she was going to get her sister back. Asael laughed under his breath.

  Emma.

  Had a mouth on her, that one. Pretty. Too bad it wouldn’t last. He was in a mood. The town brought out the worst in him, or the best…depending how one looked at it.

  He’d found the perfect lair, one nobody would suspect, and it came with a built-in torture chamber. Did he believe in fate? He believed in himself, his brain, and his skills. Although, just this once, he felt as if maybe the universe was giving him a gift.

  On the other side of the gap between the houses, Kate stepped up to her window and looked out, as if looking right at him.

  Asael savored the tingles that spread over his skin.

  She couldn’t see him. She wasn’t even really looking. She stared into nothing.

  She was slim, strong, with lovely breasts, he noticed as she turned. A pretty pair of sisters.

  He was going to enjoy them. He could do whatever he wanted. No specific instructions from a client.

  This wasn’t a job.

  This was a treat.

  * * *

  Murph

  Murph drove east on the Turnpike, tearing himself apart over whether he was doing the right thing. Driving away from Kate went against all his instincts. But Emma was in mortal danger. And he couldn’t ignore that either.

  Took him an hour to reach the right pull-off from the highway, a strip of bare dirt curled around a stand of bushes. He could see tire tracks, fairly crisp. Could have been from earlier that day, or from a day or two ago. They didn’t mean much. It was the kind of spot cops used for cover to catch speeders.

  Murph jumped from his pickup and headed across the field to the stand of woods ahead, to the spot where he’d killed Mordocai and saved Kate. He swore as he went, hating to think about that day. He’d never meant to come back.

  The twilight was giving way to dark. He picked up speed. He needed to be able to see.

  The cursed water tower waited a few hundred feet into the woods. Higher ground. If Asael was up there, like Mordocai had been, if he had a better gun than his lover had at the time, say, a rifle with a scope, he could pick Murph off from a distance. Especially since half the leaves were off the branches.

  Murph kept as many trees between himself and the tower as possible, looking for footprints on any bare spot of dirt.

  He stopped behind the last line of bushes, the last line of cover. The tree Kate had been tied to stood straight ahead, twenty or so feet away. The memory made him want to shoot Mordocai all over again.

  He waited and listened.

  No sound. No movement.

  H
e kept in cover and circled the tower at a distance.

  Nobody up there.

  By the time he approached the base, there was precious little visibility left.

  Enough, however, to see the broken spiderwebs.

  Somebody had been up there recently.

  Asael.

  Who else would come out to the middle of nowhere to climb a rusty tower? Murph had come for a reason. Whoever had come before him would have come for a reason as well.

  To pay his respects to a fallen lover.

  Murph circled the base again, this time looking down, using his phone as a flashlight. Stopped when he found a partial footprint. Not his. Deep. It had to have been left when the ground had been wet.

  When had it rained last?

  Saturday.

  He’d helped Kate clean out Betty’s house that day.

  A ten-second memory snapped into sharp focus, as clearly as if he were back in Betty’s kitchen. Emma’s smiling face as she asked, Did Kate tell you I saw a ghost?

  “Asael.” Murph spat the name as if speaking a curse.

  Asael had been in Betty’s house. Within arm’s reach of Kate. He could be in there right now.

  Murph took off for his pickup, calling Joe as he ran.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Murph

  When Murph’s phone rang with a call from Bing, he was just flying past the town-limit sign, finally back in Broslin.

  “Anything?” the captain asked. “Where are you?”

  “Coming back from the water tower where Mordocai died. I had a hunch.”

  “And?”

  “A single footprint.”

  “More than we got.”

  “The print was left in mud.”

  “Saturday,” the captain said immediately. “Okay. Say Asael was here that early… What was he doing between then and taking Emma?”