by Alison James
‘I can’t, not now. It’s too late for that.’
Harland refilled the water bowl with a plastic jug, then disappeared again. When she returned, she had her laptop with her.
‘It’s finished now – see?’ She held up the screen against the bars of the crate, but Rachel’s eyes were so sore and so unaccustomed to the light that all she could see was a blur of dancing colour.
‘All I have to do is press this button and Your Health Angel goes live.’
She waited, but Rachel was no longer listening. She was sweating, and her body felt first icy cold, then hot and damp with sweat.
‘One… Two… Three…’ Harland clicked a button on screen. ‘Go! I’m live. Let’s see how long it is before I get my first client.’
‘Harland, I’m ill. I need medical attention.’
‘Drink some water, and get some rest.’
‘I. Can’t. Rest. I’m in a fucking cage.’
Harland ignored this. ‘Maybe I’ll bring you some Tylenol later.’
The door of the unit slid shut and Rachel was enveloped in darkness again.
* * *
Rachel must have slept, fitfully and feverishly, but woke feeling exhausted. Was it still the same day, she wondered? If it was Tuesday, then she had now been missing for three days. She forced her brain to use logic, when all she wanted to do was howl with misery and self-pity.
Someone must surely be looking for her, right now. Apart from anything else, she had failed to attend her promotion board. Patten would know she’d never do that willingly. So someone would eventually start searching for her. All she had to do was hang on somehow until help arrived. She had to keep going. She drank the rest of the water and managed to roll over, awkwardly, so that she was lying on her other side. She recited the colours of the rainbow, the words of the police phonetic alphabet – Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot – and her times tables. Anything to keep herself focused. Anything to stop herself from screaming.
She needed Harland to return, because the alternative was being abandoned without food or water. And yet she dreaded her return too, unsure what form of torment she would dream up next.
‘I have good news,’ Harland announced triumphantly when she eventually pulled back the metal door. She had shed the fat suit and was dressed in wig, full make-up and a size-6 Harland outfit of tight white jeans and fitted striped T-shirt. In one hand she held a small blue plastic box, which she placed on the floor next to the cage.
Rachel’s heart leapt. Harland was clearly heading out into the world, so had probably decided it was time to release her prisoner. She was tired of tormenting Rachel like this, wanted to move on to a new victim.
‘I’ve got my first client. Already! Isn’t that amazing?’
Rachel stared at her with blank eyes.
‘She’s very anxious for me to begin coaching her on her wellness journey. That’s what she told me. So I’m heading up there to meet with her at her house. She says she can’t wait to have her first session.’ She laughed happily.
‘What about me?’ croaked Rachel.
‘Well now, that’s the thing.’ She checked that the padlock on the cage was secure. Rachel saw that she was also wearing latex gloves. Her heart started hammering.
‘I can’t just go off on a trip out of state and leave you here. I could be gone days. Weeks maybe, if things go well. So I’m afraid it’s time for you and I to part ways, Detective.’
‘You’re letting me go?’ Rachel knew as she said this that it made no sense. Why would she be released now, just as Harland embarked on a new spree?
‘I guess, in a way, I am.’
She opened the blue plastic case and took out a syringe, a glass vial and a needle sealed in a clear plastic wrapper. With deft movements she attached the needle to the syringe and inserted it into the vial, pulling up a measured dose and holding it towards the light to check it.
‘Jesus Christ! What’s that?’ Rachel was trembling so fiercely she could barely speak. Her tongue felt huge and thick in her mouth.
‘Potassium Chloride. It’s what they use in voluntary euthanasia. Also execution by lethal injection. After administering anaesthesia first, of course. They keep it in a locked box in the labs, but as a senior tech I can access the key, no problem.’
Rachel had never heard three sentences that were more measured, or more reasonable. Or more terrifying.
‘Harland, you don’t have to do this. Please. Don’t do this. Just talk to me, please.’ Rachel edged back against the back wall of the crate but it made no difference where she positioned her body: she could not get away this time.
‘It’s me that gets to make the decisions,’ Harland said in a low voice. ‘Me. It’s not me that’s at the mercy of others any more, it’s the other way around. I get to decide things.’
There was a bang and a scuffling noise. Someone else was in the basement. Harland darted round the side of the cage, thrust the needle through the wire and held it up ready to plunge it into the back of Rachel’s exposed upper arm.
‘Joe,’ whimpered Rachel, her only thought now for her son. ‘Joe!’
As Harland brought the tip of the needle to her skin, the door of the unit slammed open. From where she huddled, Rachel could see an oddly familiar pair of shoes. Their owner lunged at Harland, grappled with her and dragged her backwards, away from the bars of the cage.
‘Christ, Prince, look at the fucking state of you.’
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Brickall dropped to his knees beside the dog crate. He pulled frantically, ineffectually, at its padlocked door with one hand, groping through his pockets with the other to find something to open it with.
‘Fuck!’ he yelled. ‘Fuck, what’s she done to you?’
It took Harland no time at all to capitalise on Brickall’s concern for Rachel. She clambered over him, bolted for the door of the unit and sprinted away.
‘Go!’ Rachel urged through cracked lips. ‘I’m okay. Go after her!’
But Brickall ignored her and picked up the syringe. ‘What is this? Do you know?’
‘Potassium chloride.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ! Did any of it get into you?’ He held up the syringe to check the level of the fluid inside.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Thank fuck for that. Help’s on the way, we’ll have you out of here in a second.’
‘Mark –’ it would have been wrong to call him anything else, but still it sounded strange – ‘you need to go after Rowe. You’ve got to stop her. Seriously, leave me and go.’
‘I’m not leaving you, Prince. Tough.’ He squatted beside the cage.
A few seconds later they heard the faint drone of a siren and two burly Baltimore County police officers appeared, weapons drawn.
‘Suspect’s gone,’ Brickall told them. ‘Few seconds ago, so she can’t have got far.’
One of the policemen disappeared again, while his partner radioed for an ambulance and fetched a bolt cutter from his squad car.
‘Go after her!’ Rachel urged Brickall again as she was loaded onto a stretcher with a saline drip attached to her arm. ‘Go up and check her apartment, at least. 714.’
Brickall hesitated, his face still taut with shock.
‘Go on, Detective Sergeant, that’s an order! I can’t exactly go, so you need to do it for me.’
He reluctantly handed the syringe to one of the paramedics and followed them out of the basement, leaving the second policeman to wait for crime scene officers. ‘All right, if it will shut you up.’
He hovered, watchful, as a grey-faced and sweaty Rachel was loaded into the back of the ambulance, then turned and headed back into the apartment building.
* * *
Several hours later, Rachel lay admiring a sunset streaked with rose and amber from the window of her room in the University of Maryland Medical Center. The sky had never in her life looked more beautiful. It probably never would.
Brickall appeared in th
e doorway and stood watching her silently for a few seconds. She was wearing a hospital gown and attached to two drips: one giving fluid and the second an antibiotic. There were dressings on the pressure sores on her wrists. Her hair was still lank and greasy, her lips blistered and her skin waxy, but she had never felt more alive.
‘I’ve got a bladder infection,’ she told him, when he pointed to the second drip.
‘You really know how to turn a guy on, Prince.’
Rachel patted the edge of the bed, but he pretended not to see this and lowered himself into the blue vinyl visitor’s chair at the side of the bed, wary, as though he might catch something from her.
‘I’m not great with ill people,’ he said unnecessarily.
‘And you didn’t bring any bloody grapes. You’re as much use as an outside toilet in a submarine, Brickall.’
He reached in his pocket and slapped a half-eaten chocolate bar on the bed. ‘There, you ungrateful cow.’
She reached for his hand, but after the briefest touch he pulled it away.
‘I am grateful. You will never know how grateful. Really.’ There were tears in her eyes. She made no effort to wipe them away.
‘Pack it in, Prince.’
‘So do they know where Rowe is?’
Brickall shook his head. ‘Not a scooby. She wasn’t in the apartment, or anywhere in the vicinity of the building. But half the FBI are out there looking. They’ll nab her eventually.’
‘And how on earth did you find me? Who told you to come?’
‘You did.’
Rachel gave him a shrug of incomprehension, rattling the drip stands that connected to the tubes in her forearms.
‘You called me from your phone. At about 3 p.m. on Friday, UK time. You didn’t really speak, just made horrible noises like you were being strangled. Then it sounded like you’d dropped the phone, and after that the line went dead.’
Rachel thought back. That was mid-morning, east-coast time. She had just drunk the poisoned coffee, after Harland came back to the apartment and caught her snooping.
‘But…’ She thought she had phoned Rob, but didn’t want to say so out loud, with all the implied slight that would carry. She must have hit Brickall’s number instead. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’
‘There was clearly something going on, and I tried to call you back about a hundred times, but your phone rang out every time, and then eventually started going straight to voicemail.’
She nodded. ‘Rowe broke it.’
‘So then I got hold of details for your hunky Interpol contact in Washington. Old Jason Bourne.’
‘Rob.’
‘That’s the one. He said he’d had an emergency message from you, but soon afterwards another one saying you were fine. So he’d left it.’
Rachel looked down at her blackened fingernails. So much for being there at the end of the phone. Nice one, Agent McConnell.
‘Sunday evening I still couldn’t get hold of you. Then Monday morning you didn’t show up at back at HQ. Patten said he’d heard nothing from you, so did Joe when I texted him. I phoned your mum—’
Rachel groaned and stared at the ceiling. ‘Oh God. Poor Mum!’
‘It’s okay, I phoned her a few minutes ago and said you’re fine, without going into detail. And I phoned Joe. But you can break the news about the bladder infection yourself.’ He grinned. ‘Patten reckoned you’d probably just missed your flight and got a later one, and were planning to go straight to your interview. But by first thing this morning when there was still no reply to my texts and calls – this morning UK time, which I suppose was Monday night for you – I went to Heathrow and flashed the badge to get a look at incoming flight manifests. You hadn’t checked in, but you hadn’t changed or cancelled the original flight either. They said you were a no-show.’
Rachel grimaced. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘So then I knew for sure that something had happened. Meanwhile, your mate Rob had at least been able to supply Harland Rowe’s address, so I sweet-talked a check-in girl into finding me a seat on the next flight out to Baltimore. Got here lunchtime, went straight to the address. You weren’t at the apartment. She opened the door, Rowe, let me look around. Nothing.’
Rachel grimaced. ‘I was locked in the storage unit by then.’
‘There was something about her, something in her manner that didn’t sit right. Call it my gut, if you like. I pretended to go away satisfied, but really I just hung around until she came out of the apartment and headed down to the basement.’
Rachel shuddered visibly. ‘So it might have been because you came looking for me that she decided to give me the lethal injection? Or maybe she’d already planned on it before you arrived.’ She broke off a piece of chocolate and popped it in her mouth. ‘Maybe we’ll never know.’
‘We won’t know anything unless we catch her.’ Brickall helped himself to the chocolate. ‘And if they don’t grab her before she has the chance to go out of state, I’m guessing things are going to get a fuck of a lot more complicated.’
‘Wait,’ Rachel sat upright in the bed. ‘I bet I know where she’s headed. She told me she’d lined up a fresh victim. Someone who contacted her via her new website.’
‘She didn’t say where?’
‘No, but if we can get into the website we’ll be able to get their details. ‘It’s www.yourhealthangel – all one word – dot org: I told myself I’d memorise that web address if it was the last thing I ever did. When I was locked in the crate.’
‘So all we need is someone who can hack into the site.’
Rachel smiled. ‘And I know just the person.’
* * *
Mike Perez’s delight at receiving a Skype call from Rachel had been matched by his dismay at seeing her in a hospital bed, wired up to drips.
‘Prince-ess! What the hell happened to you?’
‘Long story. Listen Mike, I need a really big favour, and I need it in a hurry.’
He sighed. ‘Same old, same old. What is this, like, favour number six?’
She summarised the events of the past few days as efficiently as she could.
‘Wow!’ Perez rubbed his stubbled jaw. ‘You sure you’re okay? Sounds like we nearly lost you.’
‘I’m fine,’ Rachel assured him. ‘But I’ll be even better if you can get into Rowe’s website and go through messages. Sent and received. Identify the person who’s set up a meet with her.’
‘He seems like a good bloke.’ Brickall observed as Rachel ended the call.
‘He’s the best. Would never have cracked the case without him.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘And yet you decided to fall for the other one. Always the bad boys, Prince.’
Rachel flushed slightly, but did not rise to the bait. ‘Go and find me nurse or a doctor who can get these tubes out. I want to get out of here.’
* * *
Rachel was insistent on discharging herself, against medical advice. Once she and Brickall had checked into the first budget hotel they could find, she was equally insistent that they share one room.
‘Don’t be stupid; I’m not doing that. That would just be fucking weird,’ Brickall protested.
‘I honestly don’t think I could lie there alone in the dark. Not after being locked up in that crate.’
‘Should have stayed in the hospital then. Lights would have stayed on all night long. Plus loads of machines making nice bleeping noises. Lots of lovely nurses coming and checking your vitals.’
In the end they compromised on two adjoining rooms with an interconnecting door, which Brickall agreed to leave ajar. ‘And don’t you be creeping in for a sneaky fumble!’ he shouted through the door after they had checked in.
Rachel shampooed her filthy hair under a scalding shower, which felt blissful. She put on a hotel bathrobe, threw her stinking clothes into a plastic laundry bag and lay spreadeagled on the clean sheets. This also felt blissful. All her limbs were free. She could move them into any positi
on she liked, light as a feather.
Crippling exhaustion swamped her as soon as this novelty had worn off. She switched out her light and fell asleep curled up on top of the covers.
* * *
Three hours later, waking to darkness and an unfamiliar room, she experienced what she guessed was a panic attack. Her brain jolted her back to the cramped, humiliating space of the dog crate. She heard Harland’s voice, felt the raging thirst and cramping muscles. Felt the tip of the hypodermic needle sting as it probed her skin.
Heart hammering, lungs clamouring for air, she sat up and screamed, louder than she had ever screamed in her life.
‘Christ on a bike, Prince!’
The interconnecting door was flung wide open, letting in light from the other room, along with the comforting low murmur of a TV. ‘People will think we’re having sex. Only even at my best I don’t think I’ve ever made anyone scream like that.’
He pushed her across from the centre of the bed to make room. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas,’ he said, as he lay down next to her. ‘And don’t think I’m staying, either.’
* * *
But when Rachel woke after six hours of the deepest sleep of her life, Brickall was still lying beside her. The phone on the bedside table was ringing.
‘You stayed.’
‘Answer the bloody phone, Prince,’ muttered Brickall. ‘Jesus.’
It was the front desk, saying that a Baltimore City Police officer had just dropped off her suitcase, found in the rear of the Mazda. Her bag, found in Harland’s apartment, would be kept as evidence, but they had agreed to return her passport. A grumbling Brickall went downstairs to reception to fetch them.
‘At least you’ll be able to put some clean clothes on,’ he told her, as he handed over the suitcase ten minutes later. ‘You smelt pretty rank yesterday.’
‘Sod off, Brickall.’
Rachel flicked him on the back of the legs with a towel, using as much strength as her still-aching arms could muster, then went in the bathroom and put on clean underwear, jeans and a white T-shirt. Then she followed Brickall down to the restaurant, where they devoured bacon and eggs, a huge stack of pancakes dripping with maple syrup and several mugs of coffee. Brickall glanced up from his, nodding in the direction of the doorway, where two strapping men in blue nylon FBI coach jackets hovered awkwardly.