Frantically, she rang the door bell again and again. No response. When the dog emerged from this driveway, the man would know her whereabouts. Maybe he knew this house was unoccupied. With the dog back under his spell, the man would command it to find her.
Fumbling in the dark, Jennifer picked up a small concrete flower pot from the front porch and pounded it against the etched oval of glass on the front door. The sound of shattering glass rent the still night, but after the tinkling shards cascaded onto the floor, an encompassing silence returned. Bashing out the remaining jagged shards for a safer entry, she jumped through the resulting hole in the door and ran inside the dark house, desperate to find a phone. Afraid to turn on lights to show the man coming up the driveway exactly where to find her, she stumbled into the kitchen where a tiny night light provided weak illumination.
Seeing a wall-mounted phone, she picked it up and with shaking hands dialed 9-1-1, lifted the receiver to her ear and waited impatiently. No sound! Clicking the hang-up bar, she listened again. No dial tone. Disconnected!
The wealthy owners must be on a long vacation.
The man and dog would reach the house any minute, where they’d barrel non-stop through the hole she bashed in the front door. She dropped the receiver, wondering where to hide. Desperate, she opened the kitchen door, hoping for some solution in the back yard, but the impenetrable darkness revealed no quick safe place and no lights visible through the trees from other houses where she might run to safety.
Where to hide? Under no circumstances the basement. She’d had enough underground horror for a lifetime.
Running back toward the entry, she tore up the wide, graceful staircase to the second floor, ran down the hall, jerked open a door at random, dashed inside and locked the door behind her. Only her jerky breathing sounded in the dark room. She looked around. Curtains drawn, the room very dark. In the gloom, she barely made out a bed and dresser.
Looking for a weapon, almost anything, she grabbed a lamp, jerked the cord out from the wall, ripped off the shade and held it upside down like a club. She flattened herself against the wall so he wouldn’t see her until the door swung wide and when he entered the room she would smash the lamp against his head again and again.
Listening for sound in the hall, she waited as endless, silent minutes passed. Her shoulders ached, her head throbbed, her back hurt, her energy drained. She couldn’t take much more. When would it end?
Worse, how would it end?
Then a sound: the whine of a dog. He’d led the man straight to her door! When that door opened, she’d have not only the man to fear but the dog, which appeared to relapse to its original training. Silence. The dog whined again. She watched the doorknob turn slowly, stopping when the man discovered it was locked. With trembling hands she lifted the lamp above her head. Dreading what she knew came next, her heart pounded so loudly she feared he could hear it.
With a deafening smash, the door crashed open, slamming against the wall where she would have been crushed if standing directly behind it. As he burst into the room, she realized to her horror that she’d dangerously miscalculated. He was so tall and she so short that the lamp only smashed ineffectively against his broad shoulder. Halted more by surprise than injury, he turned in a menacing rage to grab her.
Still holding the lamp in her right hand, she pulled the screwdriver out of her belt with her left hand and stabbed all four inches to the hilt into his lower torso. She twisted it left and right before letting go of the imbedded handle and ducked aside as his earlier momentum lurched him against the wall where she’d just stood. Startled, he staggered, clutching his stomach, and bent over, grunting. With a moan he stumbled to the floor.
The dog rushed into the room, sniffing at the slumped, moaning man before looking squarely at her. With the man no longer a threat to the dog, would its loyalty to him also end? In that poignant moment, the animal’s allegiance could shift either way—the man’s cruel beatings and starvation or her food and kindness?
She stared pleadingly into the animal’s eyes, fixed upon her. “You don’t have to be his dog. Be my dog! Please, please be my dog!” she begged.
As if reading her mind, the animal made its answering decision. Snarling ferociously, he leaped toward her, fangs bared.
The screwdriver gone, she lifted the broken lamp, forcing the twisted harp and bulb deep into the animal’s open jaws. The dog fell back in surprise, shaking out the obstruction jammed in his throat, while she dashed from the room. She saw the man rise onto one knee as she slammed the door behind her and ran for her life.
The dog couldn’t open the door, but the man could. If only he were too injured to do so!
Rushing headlong down the staircase toward the front door, she leaped across the shattered glass slivers strewn across the entryway floor, through the door’s yawning oval hole and into the dark night.
CHAPTER 51
Legs pumping, Jennifer reeled off the porch, down the tiers of stone steps to the sidewalk, and rushed across the top of the driveway toward the man’s parked truck. She prayed his keys were inside as she jerked the door open and blinked at the pickup’s automatic ceiling light that illuminated her in the otherwise black night. Her fingers brushed an empty ignition.
Leaving the door ajar, she hopped into the driver’s seat. No keys on the seat, under the floor mats or behind the visors. If she stayed here, locked the doors and leaned on the horn, would someone nearby hear the noise and call police or investigate themselves? Not likely, with houses spread sparsely across these multi-acre lots. And honking the horn would tell him exactly where she was, to open the truck door with his own keys, grab her and...
If only she could disable the truck, but with no handy tool and none visible in the car she couldn’t slash his tires. Nor dared she take precious time to unscrew their valves to let out air. Sliding out, she closed the pickup’s door, spun away from the truck and ran as fast as she could into the darkness down the long, twisting driveway toward the street.
She couldn’t see well and hoped to avoid the fallen log she knew lay somewhere ahead. Nor dared she slow down to choose her way more carefully. Had her screwdriver jab crippled the man or only further enraged him? His size and strength boded granite resilience, making her too-short screwdriver wound likely superficial. If he could drag himself far enough to open the bedroom door, he’d release the dog. She knew she couldn’t risk pausing to grab a stick or find a rock, and with no weapon to fight off the dog, running became her only option.
***
“Aw,geez,” Jake growled, hearing the computer aided dispatch report “a residential silent burglar alarm at 3509 Winding Trail Drive.”
Adam grumbled his own annoyance. Focused exclusively on the 3508 address identified by Jeremy Whitehead and verified by the dispatcher, Adam hated getting this close to the possible rescue of his quarry and instead being diverted to cover this alarm. The new address might halt a crime in progress, but at the other address he might save someone he knew. Grudgingly, he admitted the residential alarm identified a known incident while the other was still only a hunch. And the call’s address was very close. They had no choice.
“Just tell me where to turn,” Adam said with resignation to Jake, who searched for house numbers on mail boxes and brick columns along the dark street.
“3503, 3505 we’re getting close,” Jake chronicled the advancing street numbers. “Here’s 3507, must be the next left.”
***
Dashing down the driveway, Jennifer heard the dog’s faint bark back near the mansion. Then his tags jingling metallically, that sound growing closer. Simultaneously, Wrestler’s pick-up truck engine roared to life and its headlights flashed on. Swiftly circling the area in front of the garage to angle downhill, its lights would spotlight her in seconds.
Her lungs ready to explode, she glimpsed the main road another fifty feet ahead, though reaching it hardly meant safety. Directly behind her, she heard the dog’s heavy panting, his tags jangling l
oudly now. The animal was closing in, her gruesome nightmare hideously real this time! She couldn’t go on, couldn’t breathe or make her exhausted legs speed forward any longer. Suddenly she felt sharp pain as the dog’s teeth grabbed her arm. At the same moment, her foot caught on something in the darkness. The downed branch. She tripped and as the fall pitched her forward, it jerked her arm from the dog’s jaws. She plunged headlong and skidded forward, scraping her hands, arms and face on the driveway’s unforgiving asphalt surface and twisting her ankle. Triumphantly, the dog leaped for the kill.
In a sudden surrounding bath of ultra-bright illumination, she shuddered at the vivid view of the dog’s huge jaws, red mouth and gleaming teeth opening directly over her face, the last horrible sight she would ever see.
And then a firecracker! She lay on her back in the driveway, elbows and knees flailing in futile life-and-death desperation to fend away the mauling dog. But after fevered jerking without the searing pain of his fangs sinking into her flesh, she realized the dog was no longer there. Still terrified, she struggled to sit up, blinking into powerful lights blinding her from two directions: the man’s truck at the top of the driveway and more lights at the mouth of the driveway.
Immobile, open mouthed and uncomprehending, she saw two forms emerge from the lower set of lights. Her captor’s cronies? Would three men subdue and torture her now instead of one? She cringed, unable to see them until they were only a few feet from her. She tried desperately to scramble away from this new danger, but her spent body wouldn’t respond. A uniformed policeman and another man, both with guns drawn, hurried up the driveway in her direction. As comprehension took hold at the sight of police, so did mingled waves of relief and exhaustion. Before they spoke she cried out, “Help me, please! He’s trying to kill me! That man in the truck up there, he... ” Surprised at how loud her voice had sounded despite how weak she felt, she cradled her head in her hands and began to sob.
The man not in uniform pounded on up the driveway toward the man’s pickup truck while the uniformed cop called for backup.
Aware that a dark shape lay on the ground beside her in a widening pool of blood, she jerked back from the dog’s motionless body. The sound hadn’t been a firecracker at all, but a gunshot.
“Did you…? Is he...?”
“Dead, yeah,” Jake confirmed. The first man out of the police car, he witnessed the dog’s attack and fired immediately. “Hated to do it but he was going in for the kill, Ma’am. You or him; couldn’t be both. Even if you are a suspect, we need you in one piece,” he added, referring to the silent residential alarm and identifying this scruffy female derelict as the probable person-of-interest.
“A suspect, but...?”
As he checked out the pickup, Adam shouted from too far up the driveway for her to recognize his voice. “Nobody here… but blood on the seat. I’m turning off the truck’s headlights to cut the glare,” he added, using a Kleenex to preserve existing fingerprints.
“I called for backup,” Jake shouted back. Turning his full attention to Jennifer, he said, “Now tell me… who are you and what’s going on here?” Confused and dismayed to be labeled a suspect after what she’d been through, she tried quieting her sobs to answer the uniform’s questions when Adam’s face appeared inches from hers.
“Oh, my god, it’s Mrs. Shannon. Quick, get her into the cruiser. Here, Ma’am, let me help you. Are you okay?” he asked in an anxious voice.
“Yes. Except for this ankle… but mostly just… just tired and scared.” Supported by his arm, she limped on her tender ankle to the police vehicle and crawled gratefully into the protective walls of the cruiser’s back seat. The policemen got into the front seat, locked the car’s doors for protection and both turned to Jennifer.
“Can you tell us what happened?” Adam asked.
Calmed by the secure surroundings, she did. When she finished, a side of Adam she barely recognized transformed him from the pleasantly charming young man who dated Hannah into a trained police professional. All business, he spoke into his cell phone, “Located missing female, Jennifer Shannon, while responding to residential silent alarm at 3509 Winding Trail Road. She is alive with apparent minor injuries. Besides backup already requested, we need Rescue to stabilize her. We need K-9 assist ASAP for suspected abductor still in vicinity. We need a cruiser to secure the broken front door at this location. Copy?” He waited for the acknowledgement before continuing.
“Suspected abductor’s domicile is across the street at 3508 Winding Trail Road. That is a crime scene. We need cruisers to apprehend the suspect if there. No sight or sound. If not there, he can’t be far, so let’s flush this guy out tonight. We also need an Animal Warden to remove a dog we shot and a rabies screening, since he bit the victim.” He then described the essence of the crime information Jennifer gave him.
While he finished his transmission, Jennifer dried her tears on a tissue the uniformed cop handed her. “Thank you a billion times for finding me. But... but how did you know where to look?”
Jake explained the silent residential burglar alarm. “Broken windows and opened doors set off the signal. We always investigate, especially in these neighborhoods with the big houses. Turned out, we were almost on top of this driveway when the call came in. When we saw the dog mid-attack, we had to cap him. As I said up there, burglar or not, we wanted you alive. We’ve had several recent incidents of dogs running loose in this area. I covered an attack on a young girl two days ago, less than a mile down the road. She was hurt pretty bad. Some of these mutts are worth a bundle and their owners scream if we harm them, although they admit their animals sometimes get loose and roam out of control. For us, protecting human life always comes first.”
She nodded numbly. “What does that mean, ‘no sight or sound’?”
“No blinking cruiser lights or sirens,” Adam explained.
Safe at last and unaware how mentally overwhelmed and physically taxed her ordeal had left her, she relaxed into a fear-free stupor for the first time in nearly two days. Leaning her head back, she closed her eyes.
CHAPTER 52
Adam backed out of the driveway and repositioned the cruiser by the unoccupied mansion’s mailbox in a cleared area intended for the postman’s access. As they waited for the summoned assistance, Adam asked his partner, “Do you think we ought to call for a chopper?”
“I like the idea. Fairfax One’s million candle-power searchlight and heat-seeking infrared would cover a lot of ground fast, especially in woods like these.”
“True, but it’s a judgment call,” Adam said. “If we nab him right across the street, we don’t need to waste that manpower and fuel. Still, this is a high-profile case. There’ll be hell to pay if we lose him. Let’s do it. We don’t want any mistakes so let’s also get a quick search warrant. We want a good look around once we’re in the guy’s house. Who knows what the hell we might find there. Get on the phone fast and order ‘em both!”
As Jake did, a rumble of traffic swelled along this little-traveled road as a string of police vehicles moved up Winding Trail Drive. When numerous cruisers pulled to the top of the farm house driveway at 3508, their headlights blended with the farm’s automatic motion lights to illuminate the graveled back yard, making the weathered barn and old sheds appear gray and ghost-like in the background shadows. This glow, though faint at a distance, shone through the woods from the mailbox area across the road at 3509, where Adam’s cruiser waited.
Rescue and K-9 pulled into the 3509 driveway, followed by uniforms assigned to secure the mansion. The medical techs took Jennifer in hand while Adam and Jake gave K-9 an overview, beginning with the suspect’s truck where the handler’s dog got a good whiff of the suspect’s scent. Jennifer watched from the ambulance while the Animal Warden placed the remains of her captor’s dog in a canine body bag and removed it from the scene.
“You treat your charges kindly.” Jennifer managed a smile for the medical techs.
“Ma’am, we know that be
sides physical injuries, crime victims are usually pretty upset about what’s happened to them. So we take that emotional stress into account and just treat you the way we’d want someone to help us if we were in your spot.”
“So, what’s the verdict?” Jennifer asked the head tech when they finished their examination.
“Luckily, the dog bite is superficial, but teeth pierced your skin in several places so we cleaned it out and bandaged it, the same as your deeper scratches. You twisted, maybe sprained, your ankle. It doesn’t look broken, but better see your doctor tomorrow for X-rays. We’ve taped it to keep swelling down and make walking easier. We also cleaned up the bump on the back of your head and again, your doctor may want a head X-ray. Those bruises on your back just take time to heal. We disinfected the scrapes you got in your tumble on the asphalt. All in all, you’re looking pretty good and in a couple of weeks you ought to be perfect again!”
The other tech added, “Sometimes folks who go through situations like this benefit from post-trauma counseling. Your doctor may have some ideas about that and we also have information at the station if you decide to look into it. Take care and we hope you’re 100% again very soon.”
Jennifer thanked both techs for their gentle care, and they returned to their parked vehicle.
Adam spoke with Rescue briefly before returning to the cruiser where Jennifer waited. “How are you doing?”
“Surprisingly well, considering…”
“Now that the techs are finished, we can take you right home. The worst of your ordeal is over!”
Blinking to clear her eyes and her mind, she stared out the cruiser window. He didn’t understand. Her ordeal wouldn’t end while that man who possessed all her identification remained at large. She and her family were at terrible risk. This dangerous maniac must be captured. He could be getting away this very minute. Fear lined her scratched, weary face, followed shortly by resolve.
Garage Sale Stalker (Garage Sale Mysteries) Page 23