by Martha James
“Haven't you been listening to a damn word I've said?” he hissed. “I did have to, because of you! And, guess what, do you want to know a secret? I kind of enjoyed myself... Yeah! I did! It turns out, when your whole fucking life has been taken away from you, it feels kind of good to take away someone's life in return! I might have actually acquired a bit of a taste for it, after that first time proved to be so rewarding...”
Her eyes widened with fear, and he savored her expression for a long time before continuing.
“Oh... Don't worry... I don't think I'll have to kill you unless you force me to. But, I was thinking there might be some other fun things we could enjoy together. Like, I could release you once I have the ransom money, but could keep a few of your fingers with me as keepsakes. Or, I don't know... Maybe I could add some lines to that pretty little face of yours, give it some character. You know, give you a taste of how the real world is for all of us who aren't lucky enough to be one of the beautiful people...”
She tried to swallow, but found that her throat was completely dry.
“No... No...” she rasped, when suddenly he brought a hand through the air toward her. She thought he might be about to hit her, but instead he placed his fingers gently against her cheek. It made her skin prickle, and she thought that it was almost worse than a slap would have been.
“Or, I don't know... Maybe we could do something a little bit more tender... Something a little bit more... I don't know...”
His fingers swept up and down several times, making his intentions crystal clear, and she felt like she might have been on the verge of losing her lunch at any moment.
At last, though, he drew away from her, his dark eyes still beaming at her once his hand was absent from her face.
“We'll just have to see...” he said, summing up the thought. “It depends more than anything on just how well you behave... And whether I decide the money I can get out of you is enough for all the trouble you've caused me...”
She wanted more than anything in that moment to spit in his face, or kick him in the nuts, but knew that doing either would only provoke him toward carrying out any number of his horrid threats to her person.
“But anyway,” he said, “let's cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, I've got myself a ransom letter to mail out-” he waved a yellow envelope in front of her. “Now that I know that you've survived, and that they'll still be willing to pay to have you back. You sit tight here, and I'll head to the kitchen and fix us a pizza to share when I get back. Okay?”
She didn't say anything, but gave him a look that clearly indicated that she thought he was deranged.
“Are you going to be a good girl while I'm gone?” he pressed.
Her eyes twinkled, and she nodded her head almost imperceptibly.
“Oh, come on now... I told you, you're going to have to speak up. I'm a little bit hard of hearing. I said-” he pulled out his knife, the same one he'd used to kill Shade, “are you going to be a good girl while I'm gone?”
The steel blade glinted in her eyes, and as soon as she got past the fact of her jaw locking up, she nodded her head slowly, and said in a terrified voice, “Y-y-y-es, s-s-sir...”
His lips twisted into a demented smile, and he slid the knife back into his pocket.
“Good... Good...”
And that was all.
He turned without paying her another look, and made his way up the stairs from wherever this hellish prison of hers was located. She stared after him until he was out of sight, then broke down in tears, burying her face in her one free hand.
She didn't think the words existed to describe the depths of her despair...
_____
Julian spent hours talking to the police- hours, he thought, during which progress might have been made in attempting to save Desiree, although he knew in reality that as much was being done as possible to accomplish just that.
They told him what little they knew about the situation. In spite of the kidnapper's efforts to snatch Desiree up unseen, he had indeed been spotted by a single witness. An incapacitated older woman who'd seen someone pulled into a car off the streets, minutes after she'd been approached by two young girls and seemed to sign a pair of autographs for them. This detail had been crucial in the deduction that it had been Desiree that was kidnapped- given the proximity of the incident to her manager's building, and the possible threat on her life little more than a month ago, it didn't take long for the police to start piecing things together.
They told Julian they hadn't yet found anything concrete by which they might deduce the identity of the attacker. Once the incident was reported they'd managed to track down some street cam footage of the attack, as well as the vehicle fleeing the scene. However, the vehicle in question had been reported stolen earlier that day, and hadn't belonged to the perpetrator at all- they'd eventually found it abandoned in a parking garage, with no indication as to who'd left it there. They were in the process of checking for any potential DNA traces, but again the suspect had been remarkably careful not to leave any traces of himself behind.
Julian, shaking by the time they'd finished recounting all of this, told them everything he could think of in return. How he'd been looking after Desiree in the evenings as her private security, and how- this part he said with some hesitation, clearly thinking it would make him seem suspicious to the interviewers- he'd ended up going to bed with her the previous evening. He said he supposed that made him her boyfriend now, and admitted that it was him who'd told her to take the meeting that morning, in spite of her protestations.
They'd given him a brief look, as though wondering whether there could be something there- that somehow he might be involved with the crime- but in the end they seemed to dismiss this notion, and didn't take him in for further questioning.
He begged them to do whatever they could to find her, and to let him know if they thought of anything at all he could do to be of assistance.
After another hour or two, the entire police team dispersed, given that there was no real crime to be investigated at the mansion itself. Julian was a little bit surprised to be left so suddenly in this way, lingering behind in the total emptiness of the house after it had been crawling with investigators and interviewees for so very long.
There was no real reason for him to be here, he knew... There was no one for him to look after, no purpose in torturing himself any more than he already was.
But returning to his own apartment seemed like far too nauseating a prospect for him to even consider in his state of grief of panic, and so he found himself pacing anxiously about the empty house, trying to think, hating himself for the sense of helplessness he now felt.
God only knew what was being done to poor Desiree right now...
Beautiful, sweet, innocent, Desiree...
Possibly the love of his life.
Possibly not even alive at this point...
He choked back a sob at this, and took a deep breath.
He couldn't allow himself to think like this. He couldn't surrender to hopelessness, or tell himself that it was all a lost cause.
He had to do something... Anything!
He began to think, trying to set aside his emotions for the time being.
He did his best to recall everything that the police had told him about the ongoing case of Desiree's disappearance, as well as those of Shade's murder.
He tried to think of what they had in common, what stood out about them in his mind.
He thought about the theories the police had offered- first, the idea that the killer had been after Shade, for some reason related with his supposed drug addiction. This seemed like nonsense of course, now that Desiree had been kidnapped- obviously, the son of a bitch had her in his sights, and Shade had simply been an incidental casualty of his pursuit of his real target.
Then there was the notion of a rabid fan...
Not out of the question, but again, it didn't really seem to click for him.
Desiree's fan base consisted mostly of kids in their teens and early twenties... Julian was certain that the man he'd seen had been in at least his forties, probably quite a bit older than that. Maybe his fifties or even his early sixties.
There was the disgruntled, middle-age pervert theory, of course, but...
Then a thought occurred to him.
What if the police had been handling this case from the wrong angle the entire time.
What if, in fact, the killer had been after Desiree, but not for the reasons they suspected.
Maybe he wasn't some parasite who'd set his sights on her following her astronomical rise to stardom.
Maybe this was someone Desiree had known somehow before she was famous, who'd been planning this, or something like it, for years...
This seemed to click in Julian's mind, and his eyes widened.
He rushed into Desiree's room, eager to look for clues that might support this theory.
Tearing through her closets and dressers, he teemed through old journals from her teenage years, looking for any signs of older male harassers or mentions of any family friends, both to no avail. He dug out her high school yearbooks, pouring over the faculty sections of each one, trying to find any teachers or school staff who resembled the man he'd chased frantically down the streets of New York. It was true, he hadn't really gotten a clear look of the man's face, but he nevertheless felt certain he'd recognize the bastard if he saw him again, from any angle.
Still nothing...
He thought, then ran to get online, remembering Desiree's account of her former manager before Geri, a male, who'd been accused of sexually harassing one of his other female clients. He'd never touched Desiree back then, but it wasn't unthinkable that he might have ended up snapping and taking his sexual frustrations out on the world in a far more direct fashion.
But nope...
Turned out he was in prison on charges of sexual assault, and couldn't possibly have committed either the murder or the kidnapping.
“Damn it!” he cursed him, almost wishing it had been him so that at least he'd had some direction by which to continue his seemingly aimless search.
He went on to search Desiree's bedroom, as well as the rest of the house, for the next hour and a half, combing through every scrap of paper he could find in hopes of any sign, any clue whatsoever as to the identity of a suspect or his potential motives.
He began to think he might be going a little bit crazy, and wondered whether he was making this all a bit more complicated than it actually was. Grief could do odd things to one's mind, and though he generally considered himself to be a rational person, it occurred to him that the “random psycho” theory might be just as plausible, or perhaps more so, than the notion that some mysterious figure from Desiree's past had suddenly materialized out of nowhere.
But then, just as he was about to give up hope, he opened the door to the study of Desiree's father.
He flipped on the light, not expecting to find a damn thing, only to have his eyes dart immediately to a photograph across the room.
His legs nearly buckled out from under him...
Even at a distance he knew it was the man. The man he'd seen running off backstage, whom he'd chased down the busy evening streets, all the way down onto the subway platform.
There was absolutely no doubt in his mind...
He strode across the room, hands shaking, and pulled down the photograph from the wall.
It was a framed newspaper clipping, featuring a much younger version of the man he'd seen, but unmistakably the man himself. “Jeffery McCullouch,” the caption said, standing on the right of two other people at what appeared to be a groundbreaking ceremony. Desiree's father had made his fortune as a real estate developer, Julian recalled, and sure enough his younger counterpart was captioned under the photograph as “Johnathan Starr.” In between the two of them was a figure that confused Julian for a moment- a woman, who looked strikingly similar to Desiree herself. Her mother, he surmised, and Johnathan's now ex-wife. “Christine Saunders,” the caption said, and he vaguely remembered hearing from somewhere that Desiree's mother's name was Christine.
The weird thing was, though, that in the photo, Christine wasn't holding the hand of Desiree's father- but of the man on her opposite side, Jeffery, whom Julian now felt certain to be the killer.
He rushed over to the computer with the clipping in hand, hurriedly hopped onto the internet, and quickly typed in “Jeffery McCullouch,” along with “Johnathan Starr” for good measure.
It didn't take long at all to discover a motive for Jeffery's actions.
His mind was racing far too fast for Julian to make total sense of the exact details, but it was abundantly clear that, at some point in the early nineties, the two men had been partners, only for Johnathan to have screwed Jeffery over big time in a widely reported business deal, in essence taking over his share of their development firm.
That obviously wasn't the only thing he'd taken over, either, given that Jeffery's then girlfriend had soon after become the mother of the traitor's daughter.
And then the traitors' daughter had gone on to become an internationally renowned pop star...
The jealous machinations of Jeffery's mind suddenly became as plain to see as the nose on one's face- hell, Julian might actually have felt sorry for him had it not been for the psychopathic behavior he'd carried out so many years down the road, his twisted idea of getting revenge.
The only real question now was what exactly he planned to do with Desiree now that she was in his grasp... There was the possibility of demanding a ransom for her safe return, which seemed like the best possible scenario in Julian's mind. But then again, he had proven quite capable of taking a life before, and that was the life of a man he'd presumably never met before. This, aside from being a woman, was the child of the man by whom he'd been cuckolded and humiliated, worth millions of dollars. God only knew what he would consider appropriate retribution for the wrongs done against him, but Julian wasn't about to sit around for another minute to find out.
The thought of calling the police never even crossed his mind- between the urgency of the situation and his own desire for retribution against the son of a bitch, he wasn't about to let any third party stand between himself and the safety of the woman he loved.
He hurriedly searched online and managed to track down Jeffery's address, scrawling it down on a sheet of paper and leaving the room without bothering to turn out the desk lamp.
He stormed out of the house, checking his gun as he went, his heart thudding wildly out of control.
No man alive got away with doing what he'd done... Either to Shade, or to Desiree.
Not while Julian was around and had anything to say about it....
7
He pulled up outside the address he'd found online- a squalid little dump of a place, which made sense considering the kind of luck Jeffery seemed to have in his life. Julian waited a moment before getting out. He wasn't afraid, but he was cautious, and well aware of what was potentially at stake. He was bound and determined to get Desiree out of danger, safe and alive, and winding up in the same situation as her would do little in the way of helping him to achieve that goal.
There were no lights on inside as far as he could see, and presently no vehicles parked in front of the house.
He didn't know whether that was a good thing or not, but he tried to convince himself that it was...
He stepped out of his car, and the cold night air immediately began to sting against his flesh.
He shivered slightly, but proceeded across the street, looking around for any signs of movement- either Jeffery’s or that of a neighbor. The only thing he saw was a black cat ducking through the shadows, however. The whole neighborhood seemed as abandoned as this particular house, with the home on its right foreclosed upon and abandoned, and the one on the left otherwise unlighted, by all appearances vacant.
He stopped at the house's landing, gripping the butt of his
pistol as he considered what to do next.
He almost took a step up and went in, but then had a change of heart.
Cautiously, he decided instead to circle around to the other side of the house, and was rewarded for his care by the appearance of a back door.
This felt like a safer bet, and he made his way swiftly forward.
A motion light flashed on as his hand met the handle of the door, and he immediately whipped out his gun, ready to fire it if need be.
There didn't seem to be anyone around, however, and upon pressing an ear to the door he couldn't pick up a single sound.
He stepped back, and breathed a sigh of relief.
He then began to pull on the handle of the door, finding that it was predictably locked. He looked around for anything a spare key might be hidden in and, not really feeling in the mood to waste time, he smashed the butt of the gun into the glass plane of the door.