by Ruth Parker
It took every ounce of Fletcher’s self-control and will-power to finish backing out of Johnnie Mullins’s driveway. Laurel was in there. In that rundown, dingy clapboard house. That slimy, creepy weirdo—that killer—had Laurel. Had the twins. He was fifty yards away.
But he had to go back onto the road, drive away, then circle back. Mullins was surely watching from behind those grimy curtains, making sure that Fletcher left. Probably chuckling to himself at how clever he’d been to fool the police. It made Fletcher’s blood boil. He was clenching his teeth, clenching his fists around the steering wheel, clenching his stomach. But he had to leave. For Laurel’s sake.
Detective Bowen had assured them that they were ten minutes out, fifteen tops. Fletcher was supposed to wait for them.
Laurel didn’t have fifteen minutes.
He pulled onto the main road, taking the turn way too fast. A fishtail of gravel and sand flew up in his wake and the centrifugal force of the turn made his already-clenched stomach tighten even more. He drove down the road, the speedometer needle hovering at the eighty mile-per-hour mark. If anyone pulled out onto the main road from any of the numerous little private driveways, he’d plow into them; there simply wouldn’t be any time to stop.
He saw the sign ahead for Old School River Road. He forced his foot off the gas and eased on the brake as he approached. He’d have to make a hairpin turn to go back south, back towards the killer’s house. At the intersection, as he was slowing for the turn, another car came from the other direction. He slammed on the brakes as he had to yield for them. The other car honked and gave an indignant what-the-hell gesture shoulder shrug. The car was a sensible four-wheel drive station wagon, the sort that had as much horsepower as a sewing machine. They were obeying the speed limit, a mind-numbing twenty-five miles per hour. It seemed like the entire fucking state had a speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour.
Fletcher didn’t have flashers on his rental car and he had an idea that the station wagon was driving slow on purpose, punishment for his reckless driving at the intersection. The road was narrow, the sort where if a car was coming from the other way, one car would have to almost pull over to the side while the other passed. He rolled down his window and stuck his arm and head through, honking the horn repeatedly. “Police,” he yelled. “Police emergency! Please pull over. Police emergency!”
The other driver’s window rolled down. Just when he thought that they’d heard him and understood the reason for his erratic driving, he saw the driver’s arm slide out of the window and flip him the bird.
“Police emergency!” he shouted again, hoping that they would hear him now with their window open. The only response he got from the driver was a fervent pumping of the finger. “Fuck it,” he said. He pulled his car to the right, the right two wheels dipping into the shoulder. The car jerked and bounced as he sped on the uneven ground. It would be a miracle if he didn’t get a flat tire, but even riding on the rim would be faster than getting stuck behind this station wagon. The station wagon driver—while edgy enough to flip the bird to a madman on an isolated country road—did not want to play chicken. The station wagon steered way left and put on their brakes, happy to let Fletcher pass.
Finally, Fletcher thought. While the entire incident had only lasted two minutes, it felt like it had cost him an hour. Everything was happening so slowly.
Those two minutes just might cost Laurel her life.
Twenty-Six
He carried the cup and saucer to the basement door. He would go downstairs and see how Laurel was doing. He’d sit on the couch with her and the girls. Laurel would drink her tea and relax. When she was nice and calm, he would take her upstairs. He would apologize and she would forgive him. He could tell her about Samantha and Susie. Laurel would take him into her arms. She would love him.
He held the saucer carefully as he put the key into the lock. His hands shook with excitement. He would have one day of happiness. He deserved it more than anyone.
He unlocked the padlock and opened the latch. He switched keys and unlocked the deadbolt. He turned the doorknob. There was a weird thud. What the hell was that? He tried to push the door open, but it stopped. It was stuck or something; the hinges felt like they’d gotten stuck.
“Are you okay down there?” he called. Something was wrong. Were the girls okay? Was Laurel okay? He gave the door a hard push, and it gave with a snapping sound. The door detached from the wall and dangled at an odd angle in the doorway. He fell off balance on the small stair landing. In his shock, he dropped the teacup. It tumbled and clanked down the stairs, but did not break. He tried to regain his balance, but something caught his feet. He grabbed at the railing, but he fell down the stairs, following after the teacup.
He heard a scream from down in the basement. He couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a whoop of triumph. Just then, he felt the hard crack of something smash across the back of his neck. What the hell was going on? His vision darkened, like he was looking through some dark and fuzzy lace. Laurel was holding something, raising it over her head as if to strike. Why was she trying to hurt him?
He rolled out of the way and her bludgeon came crashing down on the stairs. He saw it was shiny brass; it must have been the lamp. She was trying to hit him. Trying to escape. She’d escaped him when she was twelve, had sneaked out the window. But that was when she was a girl, impulsive and rash. Now she should know better.
He snaked his leg out and hooked her leg, pulling it quickly towards him. She stumbled, dropped the lamp, and landed prostrate on the stairs, screaming out in pain as one of the stairs dug into her back. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but she gave him no choice.
Their bodies were close. On the narrow stairway, their legs were intertwined; he could feel her heat, hear her jagged gasps for breath. This was the closest he’d ever been to a woman. It was exciting.
He forgave her transgression.
She was grabbing at the railing, trying to pull herself up. He reached up, wrapped his arm around her chest, and pulled her back down. Her back rested against his chest. She struggled and fought, but he held her tight. Her hair spread over his face. He could smell her and she smelled good, like soap and skin and sweat and honesty. His beard stubble grazed her face, sending a shiver through his stomach.
“Give this up,” he said, his voice a low growl in her ear. She tensed her limbs, going still in response to his command.
This was very exciting.
“I just want to talk to you,” he whispered in her ear. “Explain a few things. Let me explain about what happened to your sister. Let me explain what happened to Leigh.”
She collapsed against his chest, sobbing. The two girls were sitting on the couch, holding each other, waiting to see what would happen next. “Don’t try anything and I’ll think about letting the girls go,” he said, loud enough for the girls to hear. That was a lie, he was sorry to admit. He didn’t want to start their new relationship off with such a blatant falsehood, but sometimes women needed to hear the right thing.
“Okay,” she said at once, eager to help the girls. Such a difference from the younger version he’d known, the Laurel who was so eager to help no one but herself.
They walked up the stairs carefully, together. When they got to the top, he told her to sit at the kitchen table. She moved with a ghostly obedience, sitting in the wooden chair, looking at him for her next command. He lifted the door back into place. They had taken the bottom hinge off of the door somehow. The top one was dangling by a thread, but still held. He opened up his kitchen drawer and found two brackets and a handful of nails. He fastened the door in place. It wouldn’t hold very long, but it wouldn’t need to.
“Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s talk.” She stood up complacently, all the fight having gone out of her.
He led her to his bedroom. It was clean; there were new sheets on his bed, the floor was free of dust, and the windows were free of smudges and fingerprints. He had prepared for this moment. She sat down
on the edge of the bed.
He sat down next to her, their legs touching, their knees touching, their shoulders touching. Her warmth gave him strength. His life had been full of nothing but misery and misfortune—but this one moment made everything worth it.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. He couldn’t help it. He reached his hand up and touched a dark strand of her hair with the tips of his fingers.
“Tell me what happened to Leigh,” she said. Fair enough. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate until he told her.
“Okay,” he said. He grabbed her hand for support. This was a hard story for him to tell. He needed her strength. Her hand was limp in his, but it didn’t matter. The soft lines of her palm grazed against his, helping him find the nerve. “After I realized that you’d gone out the bathroom window, I panicked.”
Once he started, it got easier. He told her everything. And when he was done, they were both crying.
Fletcher parked his car a quarter mile down the road from Mullins’s house. He got it onto the shoulder as far as possible, but it was a narrow road, and his car was still blocking the way. He put on his emergency flashers and got out. Protocol was for him to wait here for the other units to arrive. Detective Bowen reminded him that he was not a sworn law enforcement officer under the state’s penal code and was not authorized to do searches, seizures, or arrests. If he went into the suspect’s house alone, it could jeopardize the entire case. “Any lawyer with a mail-order law degree could get the case thrown out,” she’d said. “And a good lawyer will get the asshole a huge cash settlement for wrongful this and excessive that.”
Fletcher knew that. He knew that he couldn’t go inside that house.
But there was no way in hell he was going to sit on the side of the road for fifteen more minutes, knowing that Laurel was inside with that creep. It wasn’t physically possible.
Fletcher got his extra magazine from the glove box and put it into his coat pocket. He racked the slide on his Glock and got a round chambered and ready to go. Glocks didn’t have safety switches, so that was one less thing to do. He kept the gun in his hand, wishing that its cold weight brought him comfort. It didn’t. The only comfort would come from Laurel being in his arms and feeling her heart beat against his chest.
He jogged along the shoulder of the road, trying to tread lightly, trying to keep his feet from thudding against the hard dirt. But it was hard to do anything light or easy or slow or delicate. He would need finesse to sneak into the ramshackle house and get Laurel and the twins, but he was so angry (scared—he was scared under it all, scared of losing her) that he didn’t know what else he could do except kick the door down and throw the asshole to the ground.
Fletcher didn’t have a plan. He had a gun.
The house came into his view, nestled between the trees, in the middle of nowhere—a house where no one could hear you scream.
He forced his feet to slow, but was unable to slow his heart. His chest heaved, his heart hammering so hard against his chest it caused a sick, painful ache. He strained his ears, trying to hear anything. His mind reeled with the possibilities: screams, cries, shots, power saws. He couldn’t hear anything except his own ragged breath and heart humming in his ears.
On the doorstep, he put his ear against the door. He couldn’t hear anything. The door had a standard doorknob lock and a deadbolt, the sort of residential lock duo that most every house had. The best way inside this house was through the window.
Unbidden, memories of his final day as an active FBI agent came to the surface, despite years of trying to push them away. He’d been tracking a child molester—although, that was putting it lightly. The sick things that guy had done to his victims gave child molesters a bad name. One of the boys he’d abducted had to have emergency surgery and would need a colostomy bag the rest of his life. They hadn’t been able to get much from the victims—boys ranging in age from eight to thirteen—but one thing that all the boys had remembered was stairs. Knocked out and dazed, they remembered being carried up a seemingly endless flight of stairs.
A call came in from a neighbor; she’d said that there was a weird guy who lived in her building and she’d seen him carry a large bundle over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. They weren’t much for calling the cops in that neighborhood, but she swore that she saw white shoelaces dangling down her neighbors back, poking out of his bundle. She was afraid that it might have something to do with all those boys who’d gotten kidnapped and abused.
Fletcher’s team had assembled, ready to pounce on the guy. It was the best lead they’d had—hell, it had been their only lead. The guy lived on the fourth floor of a scummy building in Baltimore, and they’d taken the steps two at a time, in full riot gear, carbines and handguns ready. They’d gotten a warrant and took the battering ram to the door without knocking.
Everything happened very fast after that. There was screaming. There was blood.
One of the guys on the team had gotten the suspect, wearing nothing but a sagging pair of jockey shorts, onto his stomach on the floor. He was keeping a boot on the back of the guy’s spine for good measure. As Fletcher cleared the rest of the rooms, he saw it.
There was a boy, dead, his arms tied to the headboard, his neck cut, bleeding out onto a stained mattress.
They’d gotten there just one minute too late. They’d done everything right. They’d followed the rules, done everything by-the-book. But it hadn’t been enough. He went back out into the living room, pushing the other agent away, and shot the child murdering asshole in the back of the head.
There had been fall out, sure, but not that much controversy in the media. Even in a day and age where the media loved to make law enforcement out to be violent, jackbooted thugs, there was no way a child molester would get any sympathy from the public.
And here he was, about to charge into a suspect’s house. Not sworn into duty, no warrant. Fuck playing by the rules. Fuck doing things by-the-book.
He crept around to the window on the farthest left-hand side of the house. He shucked off his jacket and wrapped it tightly around his gun-hand. He punched his hand into the window glass as hard as he could. The house was old and the glass wasn’t tempered, and it cracked like an eggshell. The sound was deafening to his ears; outside in the silent woods, the high, clear crunching of the glass was like the tinkling of a xylophone at the hands of an unskilled musician. He used his covered arm to clear away the jagged pieces that stood out in the window frame. Once the frame was clear, he tossed his jacket on the ground and hoisted himself inside.
That was when he heard the screams.
“We have to go,” Madison said. She pulled on her sister’s arm, trying to get her off the couch. Madison wished that she had another one of those pills to give her sister. Melissa was groggy, scared, and coming down from the blessed apathy that the pills inspired.
“You heard him,” Melissa said. “He told the lady that if she went upstairs with him, then he’d let us go.” Madison too had felt a joyous ray of hope inside her chest when he’d said that. She had forced herself to ignore it.
“We can’t believe anything he says. We have to get out while we still can. While he’s distracted with her, we can sneak away.”
“No,” Melissa said. She yanked her arm away from Madison’s pleading grasp. “If he sees that we’re trying to escape, he’ll get angry. He won’t let us go. But if we’re good, then we can promise never to tell the police about him and he’ll trust us. Then he’ll let us go.”
Madison ignored her sister’s protests. Nothing she could say would convince Melissa to take the risk of leaving the basement. Her sister couldn’t accept the fact that they were going to be killed. Madison went back up the stairs and looked at the door. The bottom hinge was still broken, the gap between the door and the frame at least two inches. She’d heard him hammering into the door as he left, and that was good. Nails would slip out of the crumbly, old drywall. That was something else she’d learned from her father. Don’t put
nails into drywall, because they wiggle right out. If the man had used screws for his haphazard repair… but she didn’t even want to think about that.
Madison grabbed the edge of the door and pulled in as hard as she could. Once the nails got free, then she could wiggle the top hinges out of the frame and they could go. She pulled and pulled, but the door didn’t give an inch. She needed Melissa to help her. The two of them could get out, but they had to do it together. She went down the stairs to her sister. Melissa was still on the couch, clutching her knees, staring off into space. Madison sat down next to Melissa, put a protective arm around her shoulder.
“If you help me right now,” she said softly. She tried her hardest to be calm, like Laurel had been. She sure didn’t feel calm. It wasn’t fair. She’d love to be the one to curl up on the couch when things got too scary, let someone else take care of the hard stuff. The part of her that had turned into an adult over the last few days, however, knew that none of that mattered. It was her job to get the both of them out of there, even if all she wanted to do was get underneath the blankets and hope that the end would not be painful. “Then when we do get out, I’ll tell mom and dad that entering the modeling contest was all my idea. I’ll tell them that you wanted to ask their permission but I wouldn’t let you. That way, I’m the one who’ll get in trouble.” She had a vague hope that this would appeal to Melissa—appeal to her optimism that they’d get out and her newly-regressed emotional state that was concerned only with following orders and not getting in trouble.
“They’re going to be mad, aren’t they?” Melissa asked.
“Not at first,” Madison said. “At first they’ll just be happy to see us. But they’ll never trust us again. When we’re in high school, they’ll be too afraid to let us go out with friends, go out on dates, get our driver’s licenses…” Madison trailed off. Going out with friends was very, very important to Melissa. “They’ll probably take away our phones and laptops too.” The only thing more important to Melissa than hanging out with her friends was her phone.