Cold Death

by Mary Stone

  It took three tries with her shaky hands, but the lid finally popped off. She lifted the container to her lips. The reek hit an instant later.

  Bethany gagged, inhaling even more stink of rotting, moldy food. The sour scent filled the entire space, and Bethany imagined spoiled particles flying up her nose, in her mouth. Down her throat. The idea squished her stomach, and what little water she’d drunk from the faucet earlier burned on the way back up.

  By the time she finished hurling, her legs shook too much to stand. Bethany collapsed to the floor, which was wet with puke, but what difference did it make? There was nothing to clean up with, and she’d barfed on her shirt. The smell of vomit and rotten food made her tummy flip again, so she buried her head in her knees and closed her eyes.

  How long would he leave her in here? Days? Weeks? Would he let her die? What if her mama was the one who opened the door and found her dead body?

  With the little energy she had left, Bethany kicked at the door and pounded the wall with her uninjured hand. “Let me out! Let me out of here! I hate this place! I hate you! You’re going to be sorry!”

  She raged until her head spun again, until her lungs burned, and she gasped for air. Her body shook hard enough to rattle her teeth, like she was freezing, even though the air felt stuffy inside the box. She curled into a damp ball, wondering if she was going to die now.

  How long had she been trapped already? One hour? Two? Five?

  The door creaked open, and daylight rushed in, bringing air along with it. Bethany swallowed down long, deep breaths. Too deep, because she started coughing, hard enough to make her ribs ache.

  When she finished, the bad man was staring down at her. The scary blank mask was gone, and the tiny smile was back. “That was five minutes.”

  Bethany blinked at him in confusion, and the tiny smile grew.

  “Five minutes. That’s how long you were inside. I timed it. I carried a load of laundry to my bedroom and brushed the breakfast from my teeth, and then came back. Can you imagine what would happen if I walked away for ten minutes? Fifteen? An hour? What if I locked the door, picked up my keys, and went out for a little drive? To the grocery store, or the mall, or perhaps a hike? What if I stayed away overnight?”

  Huddled in a ball, shivering, Bethany stared up at him without speaking.

  “You must remember that your life is mine to give or take as I please.”

  She stayed very still, terrified that the wrong word or movement would lead him to shut the door again.

  After a moment, he nodded, then set a bucket on the floor in front of her. “Fill it with soap and hot water and use it to clean out the fridge. It’s disgusting in there.”

  Bethany crawled out and carried the bucket to the sink. When water from the faucet slapped the plastic bottom, she glanced down at her arms.

  Chunks of the rotten food and her stomach bile splattered her bare skin and sleeves and the front of her shirt. Sour and rotten, and green with mold.

  Her stomach somersaulted again, but Bethany swallowed hard and shoved her arms under the spray.

  Rotten, she decided as the chunks washed away.

  The bad man’s supervillain name was Doctor Rotten.

  9

  “I don’t know, Ellie. With that little girl missing now, I’m worried this case might be too much for you right this second. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Helen Kline’s doubt flowed from the Bluetooth speakers as Shane steered the Explorer into the precinct’s parking garage. Her bodyguard lifted an eyebrow at her, silently asking what she wanted him to do.

  She mimicked parking in a space before turning her attention back to her mother. “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “I’m sorry, but I find that hard to believe.”

  Ellie gritted her teeth. Why bother asking the question, then? But she held her tongue. Getting drawn into an argument with her mother was about the last thing she wanted to do.

  Shane guided the SUV past the disabled spots while Ellie waited for her mom to elaborate.

  A long sigh filled her ears first. “You just got back from burying someone you cared about. How can you possibly be fine?”

  The reference to Val’s death wrenched Ellie’s heart. She slammed her fist against the dashboard, startling Shane enough that he thrust his foot on the brake, causing the SUV’s tires to squeal.

  Easy. Totaling the Explorer won’t bring Val back.

  “What was that noise?”

  “Nothing, Mom.” Ellie examined her knuckles, glad the skin hadn’t broken. “Thought I saw a squirrel.”

  Crossing her fingers over her second white lie of the day, Ellie gave Shane a sorry smile and relaxed her muscles as the SUV edged on. None of this was her mother’s fault. Ellie had lied about being fine because her mom was an expert-level worrier, but maybe honesty was the better option.

  If the chief understood her reasons for not taking a break from work, her mom could too. “And you’re right. I’m not really okay. The truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again until we catch Kingsley and put him behind bars.”

  “Oh, honey.” A deep sigh. “I sometimes wonder…”

  Shane pulled into an empty space near Fortis’s black sedan and shifted the Explorer into park. Then he pointed, silently communicating that he was going to give her some privacy. She smiled her thanks. “Come on, Mom, spill. You’ve never been shy about sharing your thoughts before. Why start now?”

  Helen Kline holding back an opinion was such an anomaly that Ellie’s curiosity was piqued.

  “I suppose you have a point, Eleanor, dear. I was going to say, I sometimes wonder if jail is even the right place for a man like that. Like…Kingsley.” Her mom whispered the name like she was afraid that saying it out loud might summon the sociopath from thin air.

  Ellie frowned. “I’m not sure I’m following. If jail isn’t the right place for a man like Kingsley, then where is?”

  A hesitation. “That’s just it, Eleanor. I wonder if nowhere on this earth is the right place for a vicious monster like that.”

  This time the message registered. “Oh.”

  Leave it to her mom to find a delicate way to suggest that instead of law enforcement arresting Kingsley and bringing him to stand trial, society might benefit more from an extrajudicial kill. A murder.

  Not that the idea of putting a bullet in Kingsley’s brain hadn’t occurred to Ellie…it had. Multiple times. Especially on days when memories of her own kidnapping tormented her. Kingsley’s evil game would haunt Ellie forever. The worst emotional scars came from the role she’d been forced to play.

  They’d been tied up opposite each other, and the other woman’s face was permanently etched into Ellie’s memory, her image carved into Ellie’s subconscious through fear and blood and pain.

  Her battered face and the screams. The agonized noises ripped from the woman’s lungs were a soundtrack of terror. So traumatizing that even the thought of them now, over ten years later, fried Ellie’s nerves and made her desperate for escape.

  Kingsley’s mocking voice was always the encore, as he urged Ellie to make an impossible choice.

  If she said nothing, the woman’s torture and bloodcurdling screams would continue as Kingsley hacked away at her body, limb by limb.

  If she uttered the right words, the other victim’s suffering would end for good. No more shrieks. No more pain. Just bittersweet silence.

  Life or death, all on the basis of a single phrase. Die, bitch! Die.

  A devil’s bargain that no one, especially a fifteen-year-old, should ever have to make.

  At first, Ellie had refused, screaming that he couldn’t make her play. Kingsley had merely laughed and informed her that there was no escape because, “Not choosing is still a choice.” Hours and hours of witnessing the woman’s pain had worn Ellie down.

  In the end, Ellie had shouted the words.

  The screams stopped.

  She’d had to live with that choice ever since.

&n
bsp; For the decade following the kidnapping, Ellie had suffered from amnesia, and for once, the doctors all agreed. To protect itself from further trauma, her teenage brain had blocked those events out.

  After repeated encounters with one of Kingsley’s henchmen, who’d worked for a brief time as the department psychologist, the memories started flowing again.

  Some, at least. A few murky spots remained. Even now, a memory niggled at her brain, but the second she tried to tease the information out? Poof! Gone.

  Ellie bit back a curse. Each time she worked on detailing the hours spent in Kingsley’s warehouse, she failed. Those memories were trapped somewhere deep in her subconscious.

  So much time had passed now that Ellie doubted they’d ever be recovered.

  “Ellie? Are you still there?”

  Her mother’s voice pierced the dark storm of the past. “I’m here. And I understand where you’re coming from, but I’m a detective, not an executioner. My job is to gather evidence, make arrests, and trust our justice system to take care of the rest. If I kill someone just because I think they deserve it, then how am I any better than the criminals I hunt?”

  That exact question had stopped Ellie from descending too far into gruesome fantasies involving guns and scraping Kingsley’s brain matter off the wall.

  Helen Kline huffed into the speaker. “Don’t compare yourself to them. That’s absurd. Now, I’d like to see you soon and reassure myself that my only daughter isn’t on the verge of collapse. Can we please arrange a day?”

  Ellie stifled a groan. She loved her mother, but the last thing her frayed nerves needed was a head-to-toe, eagle-eyed inspection scrutinizing her for the tiniest hint of any cracks or fatigue.

  Her neck tensed just thinking about it. She rolled her head to the side to stretch, and her gaze landed on Fortis.

  She frowned. That was odd. Fortis hadn’t moved the entire time she’d been yacking away with her mom.

  “So, can you take a peek at your calendar and see which day—”

  Ellie knew the nagging would never stop. “How about lunch on Friday?”

  No sense dragging this out. Her mom would win in the end, plus Ellie wanted to check on her boss. Napping on the job wasn’t like him.

  Poor guy. He’d cautioned her about burning out over the Kingsley case, but maybe he needed to take his own advice.

  “Friday works, but it’ll have to be a late lunch. One or after? I have a meeting at eleven with a potential donor for the museum fund.”

  Fortis still didn’t move. Had he slept at all last night? “One is good, see you then.”

  When the call ended, Ellie grabbed her bag, and hopped out, leaving the engine running for Shane when he went back to babysitting duties. She spotted him at the stair entrance and knew he was scouring the place for people who were stupid enough to try to take down a cop in a police precinct’s parking garage.

  Ellie wasn’t worried.

  “Hey, boss. Looks like you’re the one who needs that vacation if you’re falling asleep behind the wheel. Want me to send you my travel agent’s number?”

  Once the joke quit echoing off the concrete walls, silence stretched out. Nothing from Fortis. He was out cold.

  Her frown returned. Hadn’t Fortis worn that same gray sport coat yesterday? She peered into the tinted window and the hairs on her forearms lifted. Her boss’s skin, usually a warm brown courtesy of his mother, appeared several shades paler today. Too pale, and his lips held a blueish tinge.

  Wrong, wrong, something is very wrong.

  Ellie whipped the gun from her holster and dropped into a shooter’s stance. “Fortis! Wake up! Fortis!”

  Barrel extended, she swept the garage and edged around the trunk, praying for a response. None came. Not even when she banged on the driver’s side window.

  The gun steady in her right hand, Ellie used the left to fumble with the door handle. After several attempts, her boneless fingers succeeded. She nudged the door open with her hip and tapped her boss on the shoulder.

  No. No. This isn’t happening. It can’t be.

  She jumped when Shane came around the car, gun up and ready. “What’s going on?” he demanded, his eyes scanning the vicinity.

  Ellie didn’t take her eyes off her boss as she shook him this time. “Come on, wake up.”

  Fortis’s head slumped forward, causing his sunglasses to slide off his face and into his lap. Up close, his skin was wrong. Waxy.

  Ellie waved her hand in front of him, but she already knew. Those sightless eyes would never see again.

  “No, please, no,” she moaned.

  Futile pleas her boss would never hear because Lead Detective Harold Fortis was dead.

  Ellie shuddered and pressed her fingers to his throat, checking for a pulse just to be sure.

  She waited…praying…putting all her senses into the two fingers pressed to his skin. Cold and silence was her only response.

  “Shit.” The curse came from Shane, who kept his gun up and ready while grasping his phone with his other hand. “I’ll call it in.”

  She pushed a fist to her mouth and started to turn away, but her anguished gaze snagged on a strip of white.

  There, in his jacket pocket. A paper of some kind.

  If she’d been thinking clearly, Ellie would have stepped back without touching anything else and waited for the crime scene techs to do their jobs, but her brain refused to function. Pure instinct drove her hand to pluck the note from her dead boss’s pocket.

  She read the message and went numb.

  Hate that I missed you,

  -K

  10

  Beyond the yellow crime scene tape that stretched across the parking garage, forensic technicians scoured the area surrounding Fortis’s car like busy little ants.

  Stranded on the wrong side of the tape, Ellie clenched her teeth in helpless frustration. She should be over there, helping the department search for clues. Instead, she was a hostage to Valdez’s endless interrogations. The detective asked the same six questions posed in slightly different ways.

  “When did you last see the victim alive?”

  Like that one. Ellie twined a loose curl tighter and tighter around her finger, tugging until her scalp stung from the pressure. “Yesterday afternoon, just before I left the precinct to go home. The same thing I told you the last three times you asked this question, and all the rest of them.”

  When did you become aware that something was wrong?

  Did you notice anyone suspicious?

  To the best of your knowledge, had the victim been acting strangely over the past few days?

  What did you touch?

  That one made Ellie grimace. Grabbing the note from Fortis’s jacket had been a rookie mistake.

  Do you know of anyone who’d want to hurt the victim?

  The last question was a complete joke. Fortis was a lead detective who’d put his fair share of criminals behind bars. Like most LEOs, there were plenty of bad guys out there who’d love to take revenge, given half a chance.

  But Ellie and Valdez both knew that Fortis’s murder wasn’t the work of some random criminal. Even before spotting the note, one killer in particular had risen to Ellie’s mind.

  Kingsley. This had his fingers all over it.

  Valdez rocked back on his heels. “Do you want to take a break and finish later?”

  Ellie released the curl and expelled a noisy breath. “No. I’m sorry. Here I am, complaining about the same questions witnesses are subjected to every day. I just hate this, all of…this.”

  She winced up at Valdez. The artificial lights washed some of the color from his brown skin, but the Latino man’s dark eyes were calm and steady as he regarded Ellie over the top of his notebook.

  “It’s okay. This has been quite a shock for all of us, but especially you.”

  She tried and failed to force her lips into a smile. “Thanks.” Until recently, Ellie and Valdez had been at each other’s throats, arguing about the multitud
e of Kingsley cases. For months following Valdez’s transfer to CPD, he’d made veiled accusations about Ellie being involved with Kingsley’s criminal enterprise, leaving her so furious on certain occasions, she’d come close to trading her job for the satisfaction of landing a punch.

  During a private conference, Valdez had eventually come clean, admitting he was an undercover FBI agent sent to investigate corruption within the Charleston precinct after the explosive discovery that a former detective was on the take. Ever since the truth aired, suspicions between the two of them had simmered down to a more bearable temperature.

  “Let’s prepare the area to move the victim.”

  The command drew Ellie’s attention to where the medical examiner and her assistants were arranging thin plastic sheeting on the ground.

  Victim.

  The word pinged through her head, like an old record that always skipped at the same spot. But no amount of repetition could inject reality into the word. How could her grumpy, tough boss be a victim? The man was a force of nature. Relentless and strong. There’d been times when her boss’s by-the-book methods drove Ellie bonkers, but no matter how much they’d clashed, she’d always admired him. Always.

  Harold Fortis had been a damned good cop and an even better man.

  Sorrow swelled in Ellie’s throat. Fortis hadn’t deserved to die like this. None of Kingsley’s victims had.

  She shied away from the scene, too heartsick to witness her boss being zipped into a body bag. “How did you get assigned this case if you’re still undercover?”

  Valdez shrugged while scribbling something in his notebook. “I’m done with that job, and I guess the powers-that-be figured my knowledge of the CPD made me the best choice to lead this particular murder case.”

  A small, injured noise escaped Ellie, and Valdez glanced up from his writing.

  His brown eyes softened when he studied her face. “Like I said before, I know this is difficult, especially for you, but I liked Fortis too. I admired the hell out of him, and I trusted him. Please, let me take care of the case. I give you my word that I will devote myself to bringing the bastard who did it to justice.”