by Anne Frasier
His breathless reply was equally unromantic, his forehead resting against hers. “I know.” Spoken as if to reassure her, to let her know it was okay that she didn’t. That maybe his love was enough for both of them.
They dozed a little, and talked a little, and made love again. Two hours after arriving at the house, they dressed in silence.
She didn’t try to hide her scarred body. Let him see it now in these last hours. But she kept her head down, not wanting to witness his revulsion. She was brave, but not that brave.
Once they were dressed, she forced herself to look up and saw longing and confusion in his eyes. He wasn’t repulsed. That’s how much he loved her. He swallowed, broke eye contact.
She trusted him. He was strong enough. He would hold it together for as long as he needed. Save the child. He would save the child. Because Sweet was right. Funny that Sweet had called him out about putting a child before her when her father had admitted to framing Remy for the very same reason. To save children.
They gathered their things. Avery called to let them know the team was setting up along River Street.
She disconnected.
David was watching her with an intensity she’d never seen in him before. And he looked like hell, or at least as much like hell as David Gould could look. His hair was wild and over his forehead, his shirt buttoned incorrectly. She reached for him, began to redo the buttons. “It might be okay. Everything might be okay.”
He put his hands over hers. “This was good-bye. I know good-bye when I see it.”
She finished with the last button and repeated herself. “It might be okay.”
“There’s something you aren’t telling me. What aren’t you telling me?”
“You know everything I know.” She watched his face, could see the exact moment he believed her lie.
He spun away, his back to her, hands at his waist. She watched his shoulders rise and fall as he looked down at the floor and pulled himself together. He slipped his Smith & Wesson from his belt and checked the magazine. “Don’t do anything stupid just because you couldn’t possibly deal with the awkwardness of seeing me every day after this.”
She almost laughed. He knew her so well.
He looked over his shoulder. “If you want me to forget about it, I can do it. I’m good at forgetting.” He slid his gun back in the holster. “If everything goes the way it should—and it will—I’ll pretend sex between us never happened.”
She had bigger concerns right now. And he was talking as if she’d return, as if there would be a tomorrow. She wasn’t sure if she’d come back from this. Physically or mentally. She didn’t tell David that.
She felt a stab of terror, then thought about the envelope from LaRue, and a calm came over her. The things that had made the psychologist cry? Nobody would ever do those things to her again. She would be in control of her own life. In control of her own death.
CHAPTER 46
The towering brick and stone warehouses of Savannah’s River Street had been built on a bluff, with the lower floors opening to wharves for the loading of cotton and rice onto cargo ships docked in the port. What remained of those days were dark and narrow passageways and tunnels—places where the roots of the city, good and bad, could still be felt.
Today it was a place where history and tourism collided, and the riverfront, with its eateries, hotels, and bars, smelled like taffy and fried food, cigarettes, cigars, and beer. Now, near midnight and just minutes from the time the exchange was to take place, boats were anchored in the Savannah River waiting for the fireworks to begin, and the street was crammed with thousands of people, most of them drunk. Girls in short dresses stumbled along the trolley tracks, snagging their heels in the deep spaces between the cobblestones as they screamed with laughter.
River Street was for tourists, not locals.
“Don’t do anything heroic,” David had told Elise thirty minutes earlier as he’d tightened the Velcro of her bulletproof vest. “When you’re close to the boy, grab him, duck, and run. We’ll do the rest.” A simple plan.
David, Sweet, and Avery, along with strategically positioned sharpshooters, were on roofs. At street level, plainclothes cops were in the crowd, keeping an eye out while Elise stood in an alley, her back to a wall, waiting for her cue.
David’s voice came through her earpiece. “Nod if you can hear me.” She nodded, knowing he was watching her through binoculars.
“Okay, say something.”
She spoke into her chest. “A woman just pulled down her pants in front of God and everyone and is peeing in the street.”
He laughed.
The sound relaxed her, but only for a moment. A loud report echoed off the warehouses and bluff to roll across the sky, announcing the start of the fireworks and the signal to begin her walk.
“Be careful,” David said. “If it comes down to the kid or you, choose yourself. I mean it, Elise.”
The undulating crowd on River Street was like a current she just had to move with. People were shoulder to shoulder, and occasionally she felt a hand grope her ass. She didn’t react. She wouldn’t allow anything to distract her.
As she walked, David spoke in her ear. “Anything?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll keep moving west.”
It seemed impossible, but the crowd thickened. It was like a rock concert, people shoulder to shoulder, nowhere to move. With a discreet gesture meant to look like the stroking of her hair, Elise ducked her head and removed the earpiece to let it fall to the ground, where it was immediately trampled. Under cover of the crowd, she unclipped the mic from her shirt and dropped it too, completing the process by untaping and ditching the tracking device. It would take a while for David to notice. Hopefully she’d be long gone by then.
The crowd surged forward. She spotted an opening, cut through, and ducked into a bar. Inside, she worked quickly, stripping off her dark shirt, pulling a black cap from her vest, slapping it on her head. That was followed by aviator glasses. She peeled back the Velcro and removed the vest, uncovering a baby-blue top. All so her own men wouldn’t spot her when she emerged on the other side of the building.
Like many riverfront businesses, the bar had a back entrance. She walked through the establishment, climbed three flights of stairs, and exited high on Factor’s Walk, where it was relatively quiet compared to the crush of the lower street.
Head down, she moved quickly along the sidewalk, crossing a parklike area as she put distance between herself and the river. Behind her the sky exploded and people cheered. On Bay Street, just as she’d been told, a black van waited. When she was even with it, the side door slid open, the interior dark and foreboding.
She stopped. “The boy.”
In a move that took her by surprise, a child was shoved out the open door. He fell to the ground like a broken doll, silent and still. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
“Leave him,” came a voice from the darkness. “I have a gun on his head, and I’ll shoot if you don’t get in the van.”
She got in the van.
While the team fanned out to search for Elise, David scrambled down the fire escape, dropping several feet to the street below. He ran, shoving his way through the crowd, taking the path she’d been on before communication had failed. He ducked inside the bar where he’d lost visual, and immediately spotted a black shirt and Elise’s bulletproof vest on the floor in the corner.
Not equipment failure. She or someone else had removed it. He suspected Elise herself and now understood her uncharacteristic behavior earlier and why her actions and her demeanor had been one of acceptance of defeat. She’d been preparing for this. While they’d been making plans, Elise had been following her own script. Or rather a script likely provided by Remy.
He shouldered his way through the bar and took three flights of stairs to the main street, ducking out the door. He ran down the sidewalk, his eyes searching for anything out of the ordinary. He stopped a couple, asked if they’d seen a
woman. “About five foot seven, dark hair?” He spotted a group of people looking at something on the ground. He ran for them, shouting Elise’s name. When he got close, he saw that the shape was too small for Elise.
A child.
Approaching, he pulled out his phone, called 911, and gave them the location. Then he broke through the onlookers to crouch next to the boy. In the light of the fireworks exploding overhead, David recognized Taylor Millett, his eyes red and filled with tears, his mouth covered with silver duct tape. Bruised arms were secured behind his back.
“I’m a cop,” David said softly. “I’m here to help you.” Carefully, knowing it would hurt, he removed the tape from the boy’s face. Taylor didn’t react—probably in shock.
“Anybody have a knife?” David asked.
A guy stepped forward and handed him a pocketknife, blade open. David cut the tape from the child’s wrists. Without taking his eyes from the boy, he passed the knife back.
Taylor’s mouth opened wide, and sobs erupted.
“You’re okay.” David pulled him into his arms and hugged him to his chest, burying his face against the boy’s sweet and sour hair, remembering the scent of his own child. “You’re okay now.”
The boy clung to him, small hands gripping David’s shirt, clinging to his tie. It shouldn’t have gone down this way, but the child was safe. And David knew this had been Elise’s plan.
Sirens wailed, and an ambulance pulled to a stop on Bay Street. Doors flew open, and flashlight beams cut erratically through the narrow strip of park.
The boy didn’t want to let go, and the young female medic had to pry him away. “You’ll be okay,” David said. “You get to ride in an ambulance. And you’ll see your mother very soon.”
Once the child was gone, David could still feel the imprint of his body like an echo of David’s old life. Ambulance and siren fading into the distance, David called Taylor’s mother and told her they’d found him.
“Is he hurt?” Panic in her voice.
He answered the question she couldn’t bring herself to ask. “He’s alive.” Taylor had lived through something horrendous, something that could have had a much worse outcome. But thanks to Elise, he was free and would be home soon. “Medics are taking him to Candler,” David said. “You can see him there, in the ER.”
“Thank you.”
David disconnected and looked up at a sky still bright with fireworks, thinking about the price Elise had paid and the eerily prophetic words he’d spoken to her just hours ago. I know good-bye when I see it.
CHAPTER 47
Getting into the van on Bay Street, Elise had been hit with a Taser, bound, and gagged, the battery removed from her phone and the device smashed for extra measure.
Two men. Probably the same men who’d shot up the cemetery and attacked her in the parking garage. Black ski masks, one driving, one who’d pressed his knee to her spine to further immobilize her.
She’d tried to keep track of the route—the passing of minutes, the turns—but whenever she grew too still or too alert, the man with the knee on her spine Tasered her again.
And now here they were. She was tied to a chair, hands behind her back, ankles secured to the chair legs, mouth covered with duct tape.
One of the masked men positioned himself in front of her, arms crossed, legs spread wide. He might have been Remy, might have been the man on the phone. She got the idea he was the leader of the pair, and the other person, no longer in the room, was his henchman, his follower.
“I have somebody I want you to meet,” the man said.
They were in a warehouse. Where, she wasn’t sure. Brick walls, wooden floors, a building that was vast and cavernous, that echoed when the man walked and talked. Few windows, and well over a hundred degrees inside. Her shirt was soaked with sweat, and Remy, if it was Remy, was sweating profusely too. If she could have spoken, she would have advised him to remove the mask before he suffered heat stroke.
“I met a friend of yours some time back,” he said conversationally. “Wait here while I get him. I wanted to surprise you both.”
She’d made a lot of enemies in her career. What cop hadn’t? He could be talking about anybody. So why was her heart pounding faster, and why was she sweating more?
The man walked down the center of the vast, open warehouse to disappear around a corner. She heard his footsteps fade, followed by the distant sound of awkwardly shuffling feet, then his return. More than one person this time. Moving slower this time.
Three men appeared in the distant gloom, the room so vast she watched them approach for what seemed minutes as they grew from something small enough to crush with her fingers to full-size men. As they drew closer, she understood the cumbersome sound of their steps. One of them was attached to a long pole, the kind used to control vicious dogs, or mental patients years ago. The third man, the man she figured for the henchman, followed along behind, a video camera in his hand. His mask was gone, but he was no one she recognized. White, thirties, dirty and skinny, with meth sores on his face. She kinda wished he’d put the mask back on. Maybe not a Remy convert after all. Just a junkie working for his next fix. As he walked, he kept an eye on the flip-up camera screen in his hand.
“He’s normally pretty easygoing and does what I tell him to,” the masked man said about his charge. “But I thought I’d take extra precaution, because I wasn’t sure how he’d react to seeing you in person.”
The man attached to the pole appeared docile—until he was close enough to get a good look at Elise. Then all hell broke loose. He lunged and roared, and the masked man had trouble keeping him under control, fighting like someone bringing in a sailfish.
Her “present,” her surprise, didn’t look human. A large part of his face was just gone. He had a raw crater in the center where a nose should be. But the eyes . . . She recognized those eyes.
Atticus Tremain.
Now she understood what John had been trying to tell them the first time he woke up. Tremain was alive—or whatever this existence could be called, because it couldn’t be living. She’d been willing to sacrifice herself, but not like this. In her darkest nightmares she could never have dreamed up anything like this.
He lunged again, his hands raised like claws, his mouth agape, jagged and broken teeth bared.
Behind the tape, Elise screamed, and the man holding the pole laughed while the meth head got it all on camera, the documentation of her fresh torture at the hands of Atticus Tremain another gift of Remy’s, this one no doubt for Jackson Sweet.
CHAPTER 48
We need to get an ID on the body that was left in Remy’s grave,” David said, addressing the other men in his office. “That’s an important lead and could be the break we’re looking for.” It was early morning, and Elise had been gone six hours. As usual, they were enlisting the public’s help, hoping for a vehicle spotting, but so far nobody seemed to have seen anything. They’d probably had their eyes on the fireworks. “I’m convinced the switch took place in the funeral home.”
“The search for the identity of the body in the casket proved a dead end,” Avery reminded him.
“Maybe we didn’t go wide enough.” David had been up all night, and his skin felt too tight for his body, but he was focused. “We were looking in Chatham County, but the body might not have come from here.”
John Casper surprised him by offering to help. “I’ll check out the library microfilm.” He’d arrived not long ago, looking weak and trembly and unfit to be out of bed, let alone involved in a murder-and-kidnapping investigation. “I’ll concentrate on missing persons around the date of the burial,” he said, his voice not much above a whisper. “And I’ll go broad.”
David didn’t have the heart to tell him to go home instead. But then again, the kind of research he was talking about wouldn’t be physically taxing. It might even be good for him to feel he was doing something to catch the man who’d killed his wife.
“Okay,” David said.
�
�It’s your fault.” The accusation came from Sweet, who stood with his arms crossed, staring a hole through David. He’d entered the room with that expression, and it hadn’t changed in the hour he’d been there, silently listening to their brainstorming while adding nothing.
“If you don’t have anything to contribute, leave,” David said.
“You could have stopped her.”
“Nobody can stop Elise.”
“She would have listened to you.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You don’t know what you’ve done.”
“We saved a child. Your daughter saved a child’s life. Try to appreciate that for a moment.”
“I’d appreciate it a lot more if she was safe.”
“She will be soon,” Avery said.
“You’re delusional.” Sweet finally broke eye contact with David. “You’re all delusional. The best we can hope is that he kills her fast. But that’s not going to happen. A mercy kill isn’t what this is about. Her death will be slow, and it will be painful. And if by some chance she does survive, she’ll never be the same.”
“So you’re giving up?” David knew his question would light a fire under Sweet, and he also knew Sweet would never give up. He’d just dropped in to lecture them on their stupidity.
“I’m hitting the streets to see if I hear anything,” Sweet told him. “Let me know as soon as you have any new information, and I’ll do the same.” He left.
David took off a few minutes later, heading to the hospital in hopes of questioning Taylor Millett. He was relieved to find the boy looking healthy, all things considered. David sat down on the edge of the bed and pointed to a box of crayons. “Mind if I do a little coloring?”
The boy pushed the box at him without a word. David tore a page from a blank tablet, pulled out his badge. While the boy watched, David chose a bright-blue crayon, placed the paper on top of the badge, and ran the crayon over the rough surface, making a copy. It was something his son used to do.