by Cynthia Eden
At the station, he’d seen a grainy photo of Lynch, courtesy of the DMV. DMV. He’d scanned the photo and also learned that…shit, the guy was registered to drive a ’92 Oldsmobile sedan.
Anthony shoved his way through the last of the bushes and was back at Lynch’s house. One cop was bent near the fallen officer as another shoved Lynch into the patrol car. Anthony locked his gaze on Lynch. The guy was sobbing. He’d give Lynch something to sob about.
Anthony yanked the cop out of his way. In the distance, he heard the shriek of a siren. Still faint and too far away, but coming.
He grabbed Lynch. His hands fisted in the material of Lynch’s shirt. “You gave the bastard your car.”
Lynch nodded miserably. His gaze was on the ground.
“You lured us into that house so he could get her.” He wanted to rip the guy apart. Lynch had been screaming, yelling so loudly. Had Lauren been outside, crying for help then? And they hadn’t heard her over Lynch’s screams? “Why?”
Paul moved behind Anthony then. Anthony heard the detective speaking into his phone and ordering an APB on Lynch’s car.
“He has Helen!” Lynch whispered as his gaze lifted. “You have to understand. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Helen’s his ex-wife,” Paul muttered as he stalked closer. Then his voice rose as he snapped into his phone, “Yes, dammit, a ninety-two sedan! Stop the car and approach it with extreme caution because we think the DA is his prisoner.”
“I still love her,” Lynch said, swallowing thickly. “I couldn’t let Helen die.”
The wounded cop on the ground was gasping for air. Anthony hauled Lynch toward him. “But you could let that guy die?”
The uniform next to the fallen man looked up, the pain clear on his face in the weak moonlight. “McHenry’s got a wife, a baby on the way…”
“I’m sorry!” Lynch cried. “So sorry!”
“Fuck sorry,” Anthony said. Sorry wouldn’t change anything. He was trying not to picture Lauren at that moment. Trying so hard not to imagine her fear, but—
A killer had taken him as a hostage once, too. Anthony had been tied up and left to die. He’d been so sure death would come for him. Hope had bled away, moment by moment.
He didn’t want Lauren to feel the same way he had.
But while the Valentine Killer had toyed with him, the guy hadn’t tortured Anthony with his knife.
The Bayou Butcher was all about torture.
“Tell us every damn thing you know about Walker,” he snarled as the rage threatened to burst free. “Where the hell is he going?”
“I don’t know anything!”
Anthony’s back teeth ground together. “He told you that if you pulled us in, you’d get your wife back.”
A miserable nod. The shrieks from the ambulance were closer now. “I’m sorry about the cop. I didn’t think…”
No, he fucking hadn’t. If he had, he would have gone to the authorities for help and they could have sprung a trap on Walker.
“How were you getting Helen back? Where were you supposed to go?”
Lynch’s tongue swiped over his lips. “The old fishing pier on Rattlesnake Bayou. He said to go there at dawn.”
The ambulance was pulling onto the road. The flashing lights lit up the scene. Anthony shoved Lynch away. “Take him to the station,” he ordered to the other cop. “Stay with him. Don’t let the bastard out of your sight!”
“I’m sorry!” Lynch cried out. “I didn’t have a choice!”
Same damn song. The guy didn’t even know what sorry was, not yet. If Anthony didn’t get Lauren back, he’d make sure the guy knew.
He jumped into his SUV. Revved the engine.
Paul yanked open the passenger side door. “You aren’t going without me!”
Anthony wasn’t wasting time arguing. He wheeled the vehicle to the left and headed as fast as he could for the old highway.
Her head hurt like a bitch. Something wet and sticky was in her left eye. She reached up her hand—blood. Her blood.
Darkness surrounded her. The kind of thick, total darkness that made her think of tombs and death.
The Bayou Butcher has me.
A scream built in her throat and burst from her, but the scream didn’t do any good. She could tell that the car was moving. There was a grinding sound, like wheels, and she was bumping every few moments.
Lauren lifted her hands and her fingers pressed into a hard surface, one just inches from her face. The trunk. He put me in a trunk.
He’d put her in the trunk, and now he was trying to take her someplace. He hadn’t killed her at the scene, the way he’d done to poor Officer McHenry. Walker had taken her.
So he could play with her.
She wasn’t in the mood to be his plaything.
Lauren twisted her body, shaking and maneuvering so that she could try to search the area for some kind of tool. Her fingers fumbled in the dark. At least he hadn’t tied her hands—that would make it easier for her to escape or to fight back. Her nails shoved into the trunk’s walls, but she kept searching. The drumming of her heartbeat filled her ears. She was so afraid that, at any moment, the vehicle would stop and Walker would come for her.
Then I’ll be dead.
Her fingers swiped over something sharp. She stopped, breath heaving, and her fingers slid over the object. She could tell by its shape that she’d found a screwdriver.
Thank you, God.
Her right hand held it tight, while her left started to run along the trunk’s wall. She had to locate the rear of the car, had to find the spot where the trunk locked. Once she found the actual lock, she could try to use the screwdriver to pry it open. If the trunk had a separate release latch, she could try to find that. She would find something.
Because she would get out of there. Lauren wasn’t going to give up. No matter what.
She had a tool now, one that she could use to escape. If Walker came for her before she got her freedom, she’d damn well use the screwdriver as a weapon.
The car bounced, hit a deep hard hole, then jerked forward.
Lauren tensed. It didn’t feel like they were on a road anymore. No, the vehicle had turned, and Walker was taking her away from civilization. That was the way he worked, right? Take the prey into the swamp to torture for hours.
They were on a bumpy road. A dirt road?
Her fingers were sweating around the screwdriver as she frantically went to work.
There was a roadblock up ahead. Anthony saw the flashing lights of two patrol cars at the end of Lincoln Road before the road branched and led back to the city.
He slammed on the brakes and jumped from the vehicle. He’d just gone all the way down the road, and hadn’t seen a sign of the sedan. “Where the hell is he?” Anthony demanded.
Matt rushed toward him. “No one’s come this way. We were on scene as fast as we could be, but no one’s passed our way.”
No. No fucking way.
“He got out before you were here,” Paul said as he climbed from the car. His voice was flat. “The bastard took her out before the roadblock could be set up.”
The road was old, and from what Anthony had learned on his one-hundred-mile-an-hour drive there, not well traveled at all. “He likes the swamp.” There was plenty of swamp around. They’d flown by the twisting cypress trees, and he’d seen the black edge of the bayou water gleaming in the moonlight.
Matt took a few more steps toward them. “He could have driven through before we got here. We hauled ass, man, but it still took us twenty minutes to get here. The cop”—he pointed behind him to one of the patrol cars—“beat me by a bit, but not much.”
It had taken Anthony ten minutes to get there from Steve’s house, going hell fast. Matt and Paul were right—Walker could have gotten away and gone back to town.
But that just wasn’t the way he liked to play.
He’s changed the rules. The guy had busted out of prison like some kind of alpha dog, and instead of hiding in the shadows like h
e’d done in the past, had attacked Karen right away with a brutal in-your-face kill directed to hurt Lauren. The guy thinks he is in charge, so he’s trying to make us dance to his damn tune. Anthony looked at the dark mass of swamp and woods. “Get Wesley Hawthorne out here.” If they had to search the woods, he wanted the tracker.
“Walker keeps his prey out there, he plays with them…he is in the area.” He just had to find out where. His eyes narrowed as he glanced back at Paul. “We passed a little road, didn’t we? A dirt road…” It had been but a blur at the time, but now…
Walker could have taken her down that little road. He never would have made it to the roadblock then.
Paul shook his head. “If we focus our efforts on searching the swamp, and she’s not there”—Paul sighed, his face grim—“we could be fucking killing her.”
Anthony’s back teeth were about to grind to dust. “Then let’s divide our efforts. You go to town.” He pointed to the darkness behind him. “And I’ll search here for her.” His gaze flew to Matt. “Get the tracker, and tell him I need him with me, now.”
Every minute that passed would bring Lauren closer to death.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The killer had abducted the DA.
It was a move that FBI profiler Cadence Hollow had feared, ever since she’d heard about the photo Walker kept in his prison cell.
Walker had fixated on Lauren Chandler. He’d killed a woman in her house. Cadence had no doubt the man had gone into Lauren’s house intending to kill the DA, but when Lauren hadn’t been home, he’d found Karen instead…you thought you’d make her suffer by killing her friend.
Every move he’d made had been targeted around the DA, and as soon as he’d seen an opening, as soon as he’d lured Lauren to him, he’d attacked.
Cadence stood at the roadblock, watching the swirl of lights illuminate the scene. One of the marshals, Matt Meadows, was a few feet away, carefully screening a car that was passing. On Detective Voyt’s orders, they were checking every car that came their way, in case Walker had switched rides.
So far, they weren’t having any luck.
Meadows glanced up at her and slowly crossed to her side. “Not him.”
No, she hadn’t expected it to be. Her gaze drifted to the woods—she knew the woods stretched for a few miles, then gave way to the swamp. “Ross went in there?”
“Yeah, the Fish and Wildlife guy, Hawthorne, just went after him. Hawthorne said there are a few cabins back that way that Walker might be planning to use.”
“He likes to take his victims away from civilization.”
Meadows tilted his head as he studied her. “You think Ross is right? You think the Butcher took Lauren back into the swamp?”
“He wasn’t planning to kill her quickly.”
Meadows stared back at her. She’d never met this marshal before the Walker case, and she was discovering he could be tough and tenacious.
“If he had been planning to kill her right away,” she continued, “Ross would have found her body dumped next to the cop’s.” The cop had been lucky. Very lucky from the sound of things. McHenry was in ICU, but the doctors thought he would pull through. Walker hadn’t been interested in killing him; instead, it seemed as if he’d just wanted the cop out of his way.
Walker would have driven a knife into the back of anyone who stood between him and his target.
“He thinks she made him suffer,” Cadence said, “so now it’s her turn.” For the DA’s sake, Cadence hoped Ross found her before Walker started to play. Because once he started…
Cadence exhaled slowly. “You said there was a dirt road a few miles away? One that cut right away from Lincoln?”
He gave a nod.
More cops were pulling in behind the roadblock. Backup that she didn’t think was necessary, not there anyway.
“Marshal, we need to get out to that dirt road.”
That was a whole lot of land out there, and once Walker started cutting on Lauren, he wouldn’t stop.
Not even when she begged him to. Especially then.
The latch snicked.
It snicked. Finally. The screwdriver had slipped in her hand dozens of times, cutting her again and again, but Lauren hadn’t given up. When she heard that snick, she couldn’t remember a more beautiful sound. She shoved against the hood and the trunk popped open. The car was still moving, but Lauren didn’t care. She’d take whatever scrapes came her way if it meant freedom. She jerked upright in the trunk. The car jostled, going too fast, bumping along the rough terrain. Do it. Lauren swallowed back her fear, then leaped.
Her palms hit the ground first, then her knees, her shoulders, her head. The impact stunned her for a moment, but the sudden screech of brakes got her moving again.
Walker must have seen the trunk fly up, or maybe he’d seen her swan dive. Either way, she wasn’t sticking around. She grabbed for her screwdriver a few feet away and surged back to her feet. Then she was running. Running as hard as she could away from the car. Footsteps thundered behind her.
She opened her mouth and screamed, “Help me!”
His footsteps thundered faster. Much faster than her own. The bastard must have spent time doing cardio in prison. He’d come out even stronger than he’d gone in.
She risked a fast glance over her shoulder, and saw Walker closing in. He was a big, hulking shadow in the night. One lunge, and he’d have her.
One lunge…
She twisted her body to face him as he came at her.
He lunged, all right, and when he did, she shoved her screwdriver into his side.
He was the one to cry out then. A bellow of fury and pain.
Yes, bastard, that’s what pain feels like. He’d made sure his victims hurt over the years. Now it was his turn to feel pain.
She left that screwdriver shoved deep in his side. Then she spun and ran as fast as her legs would carry her.
But soon there were footsteps racing behind her.
He should have been down. The attack should have bought her some time.
A hand grabbed her shoulder. He yanked her back. Caged her between him and the heavy trunk of a tree.
“Your aim is shit, DA,” Walker snarled at her as his body shoved against hers. “Fucking shit.”
She tried to yank away from him, tried to kick, but he blocked her attacks.
He laughed.
“You’re not getting away from me.”
His breath was hot as it blew over her face.
“I’ve planned for this moment, dreamed of it, for too long.”
Terror was closing her throat. Choking her. She couldn’t get away from him. His grip was about to shatter her wrists. Anthony wasn’t there, Paul wasn’t there, no one was coming to save her.
I have to save myself. Have to get away.
Have to live.
Was that what his other victims had thought, too? When Walker had them under his knife, had they been desperate to live just a little bit longer?
“You stole my life,” he whispered as his mouth came close to her ear. “Now I’m going to steal yours.”
It was so damn dark that they could hardly see any tracks along the dirt road. It sure didn’t help that the road had split into three sections as it snaked into the woods and headed for the swamp.
Three sections—three ways for Walker to have vanished.
But Walker had been there. Anthony had met up with Wesley Hawthorne, and they’d gotten their lights out and scanned in the darkness. They’d found signs of a vehicle headed this way, a vehicle that had left tire tracks that were consistent with a midsize sedan.
Walker hadn’t returned to the city. He’d taken Lauren and headed for the swamp, the way he seemed to so enjoy when he killed.
Don’t kill her.
“There’s a cabin about two miles up ahead,” Wesley said. The guy wasn’t talking much, and that was a good thing. It was all Anthony could do to control the rage and fear twisting through him.
He’d told Lau
ren he would keep her safe. Instead, he’d just delivered her to Walker. Fucking delivered her.
“There’s water behind the cabin. The bayou snakes and twists all the way back here.”
Anthony’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. “If our guy has a boat, then that’s how he was able to get from that damn cabin to here.”
He pushed the accelerator down even more. He swung the vehicle around some trees, then slammed on the brakes.
The sedan was abandoned, its trunk up, not ten feet away.
Anthony jumped from his SUV. His vehicle’s headlights lit up the scene as he advanced toward the Oldsmobile. His gun was gripped tightly in his right hand.
If he’d seen Walker right then, Anthony thought he might have shot the bastard on sight.
But Walker wasn’t there. Neither was Lauren.
The car was empty so that meant Walker had left on foot—with Lauren. Both Wesley and Anthony began to search the ground with their flashlights. The dark made it harder to notice any telltale tracks on the ground. Anthony yanked out his phone, calling Matt and ordering that the K-9 unit be brought into the area. They needed the tracking dogs.
To rush off on foot, Walker had to be close.
“Blood!” Wesley called out.
Anthony’s body tensed. His flashlight lit on the same spot Wesley had found. Sure enough, he saw the spray of red in the illumination from his light.
Lauren was hurt.
“The blood goes to the left.” Wesley was already following the faint trail. He had his gun gripped in his left hand. “The cabin is back that way.”
“Then let’s get the hell there, now.” He couldn’t stand the thought of her suffering. I’m coming, baby. I’m coming.
Their feet thudded over the earth as they followed the blood trail toward the cabin.
She’s alive. She’s alive. The words played through Anthony’s head again and again. Lauren had to be alive. For him, there wasn’t any alternative. Because if he burst through that cabin door and she was dead—
He didn’t know what he would do.
She’s alive. She has to be alive…