Level Five

by Carla Cassidy

  “If they were all taken by the same person, then that person had to have seen them someplace.”

  “In Maggie Black’s case, since she was taken from the McDonalds parking lot where she works, we went over hours of surveillance video, but in the week before her disappearance she waited on hundreds of people. It was impossible for us to chase them down unless they used a credit card to pay for their order.”

  “What about the other woman, Kelly Paulson. I understand she was taken in the parking lot of the dental office where she worked. Is that anywhere near the McDonald’s? Could he have maybe seen them on his way home from work or live near either of them?”

  Jake shook his head. “They were taken from opposite ends of town.”

  “So, where did Edie go that this perp might have seen her?” Frank asked.

  Jake frowned thoughtfully. “She didn’t go many places, at least that’s what I thought. We know now she occasionally went to the Skylark Motel. She hated to grocery shop and went only when absolutely necessary. She didn’t get her fingernails or hair done. In the last couple of weeks before her disappearance the only place she went regularly was your house to talk to Colette. As far as I know, Edie is a pretty private person.” He hated the fact that he now felt as if he had to qualify what he knew about the woman he loved.

  “What about the book signing?” Frank asked.

  Jake stared at him wordlessly. Why hadn’t anyone thought about the signing, a perfect place for any average Joe to walk off the street and see her…meet her and develop some kind of sick obsession about her.

  “We need to get out of here,” Jake said with an urgency he hadn’t felt since the first couple of days Edie had been gone. “I’ve got to talk to Teddy. We need to see if the bookstore has any video from the day of the signing.”

  For the first time in two days Jake felt alive again, filled with the hope that had been absent for the past couple of days, the hope that somehow a miracle could still occur.

  Chapter 27

  It was growing more and more difficult for Edie to hang onto any hope. She’d lost track of the days, but knew it was well over a week that she’d been missing.

  She and Anthony had been working on his book for four nights and last night had been the first time since they’d started on the project that he’d once again lost control.

  He’d been telling her that when he was twelve their bathroom stool had stopped working. Because of the conditions in the house, calling a repairman was out of the question.

  “We lived next door to a gas station, so my mother didn’t see this as a big problem. She was friendly with the manager there and knew he’d let us use the restroom whenever we needed,” Anthony had said. “But the gas station closed at ten each night and sometimes I had to pee after that.”

  He’d broken eye contact with Edie and instead had stared at some point over her head. Edie knew he was lost in memories. Those memories had the capacity to hurt her.

  “Pickle jars,” he said suddenly, his gaze shooting back to focus on her. “You made me piss in empty pickle jars.”

  Edie didn’t remember anything after that, except a vague surprise when she’d finally regained consciousness. She’d rolled over on her side and fought the need to vomit from the pain that racked her body.

  Dried blood crusted her lips and under her nose. She suspected she had a concussion. It was at that moment she realized the odds were that she’d never finish Anthony’s story. She’d be dead long before the book was finished.

  Even if she finished his story, she knew her ultimate fate was death. But she’d hoped to buy herself time so that somebody could find her, so that Jake might rescue her.

  Would he even want to rescue her? Oh God, she’d been such a fool where he was concerned. Now she’d never have the opportunity to tell him that he’d owned her body and soul. She’d never have a chance to tell him that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.

  Deep in her heart she knew that was never meant to happen. Fate had placed her in Anthony’s hands. She knew she would die in this room filled with paper and bugs.

  It was nothing less than she deserved. Over and over again she’d played and replayed in her mind that day so long ago when she’d walked home alone, when she’d left Francine vulnerable to a killer.

  That’s why her mother had left, because she couldn’t stand to look at Edie. And that’s why her father was a broken-down drunk. They both had known that Edie was as responsible for Francine’s death as Greg Bernard had been.

  It had been a strict rule that the two sisters always walk home from school together. Edie had broken that rule and caused her sister’s death. Now karma had arrived in the form of Anthony.

  As she lay on the floor with her eyes closed to halt some of the dizziness, she wondered if it was possible to beat karma.

  A wing of anger took flight in her heart. Was she really supposed to be punished for a mistake she’d made when she was ten-years-old?

  Dammit, hadn’t she been punished enough?

  Her mother had abandoned her and her father had manipulated her with crushing guilt. She’d denied herself the happiness of reaching out for all that Jake had offered because deep down inside she hadn’t thought she deserved it.

  She roused herself to a sitting position and eyed the computer nearby. Didn’t she deserve to be happy? Francine’s death wasn’t her fault. Greg Bernard had killed Francine. If he hadn’t done it that day he would have figured out a way to get Francine another time. He’d had pictures of Francine everywhere in his house when the police had arrested him, indicating that she was his obsession.

  It hadn’t been Edie’s fault. She refused to die in this place at the hands of a man who might have been a victim as a child. He wasn’t a child anymore and had made the choice to be a predator.

  And Edie had made the choice to be a victim as well. She’d taken on the guilt and used it as a barrier to keep people at bay. Colette had been wrong. Edie had never been a true survivor, she’d always allowed herself to be a victim. Worst of all, she’d made Jake a victim as well.

  She jumped as she heard the faint ding of the microwave. So soon? She must have been unconscious for much of the day. Once again she looked at the computer. “My name is Edie Carpenter and I love autumn.” As always, the affirmation gave her a bit of strength.

  Anthony might beat her to death, but he’d be beating Edie Carpenter, not his mother, Lila. And no matter how hard he tried to make her the mother who had ignored him, the woman who hadn’t loved him as he’d needed, Edie wasn’t that woman, would never be that woman.

  That’s why he’d beaten her so badly the night before. As he’d hit her, she’d kept screaming that she wasn’t his mother. She’d done nothing to him and she refused to be his stand-in monster.

  Like Colette, this was how she held onto her dignity, the one thing he couldn’t make her do or say even if he beat her to death. She would not pretend to be his mother. She curled back up on the floor and was still in that position when he walked in.

  “You almost killed me last night,” she said, not moving from her place on the floor. “If you do that, then your story will never get told.” Her words sounded faint and slightly slurred.

  “I can’t help it. Remembering everything makes me so angry.” He sat in his chair and tossed her a pre-packaged sandwich.

  She made no move to grab it. In fact, she didn’t move at all. He frowned. “Go on, eat. We need to get more work done. Things are moving too slowly. You’ve only managed to get five pages done so far.”

  Edie knew what she was about to do was dangerous, that she might stir his ire to the point that when he left the room she’d be dead. But somehow, someway she had to gain some sort of upper hand. She needed to see if she could shift the power at all in her favor. And the only way she might do that was through his desire for everyone to know his tragic story.

  “I can’t work like this. It’s obvious you can’t control your rage and the way we’ve be
en doing this isn’t working. If you want me to write faster, then we need to do things differently from now on.”

  His green eyes narrowed slightly. “What are you talking about?”

  With effort she pulled herself to a sitting position and fought off another wave of nausea. “Maybe you should write down your memories during the day and then give them to me each evening. I’ll incorporate them into the book. I also need this chain taken off my ankle. It prevents me from finding a comfortable position to work and the pain keeps me from thinking clearly.”

  His frown deepened and Edie painfully held her breath. “I don’t know about taking off the chain,” he said.

  “Anthony, I’m in a room you keep locked. I can’t get to any of the windows. There is no way for me to escape a windowless locked room. I want to write your story, but the chain is a bothersome distraction.”

  He hesitated, his gaze sweeping around the room as if assessing it for weak points. Edie already knew there were none. The towers of paper were three and four deep, rising from the floor almost to touch the ceiling in places.

  It would take her days to attempt to move enough of them to find a window. An impossible task. And in any case it was far too possible that if she tried to move the papers there would be an avalanche that would crush her to death.

  He appeared to come to the same conclusion as he finally stood and pulled a key ring from his pocket. Warily he approached her ankle and bent down. He unlocked the ring that held the chain.

  He immediately backed up and remained standing. “I’ll think about the note thing.” Without another word he turned and left the room.

  As Edie heard the lock turn in the door, she released a shuddery sigh. It was a victory. A small victory, but a victory never-the-less. She pulled the sandwich toward her chest, but she wasn’t ready to eat it yet. She was filled with a fragile hope that somehow, someway, she might still manage to survive.

  She was losing him. The weekend had come and gone with no phone call from him. During the last week he’d seemed distant, distracted. He hadn’t even joined them on Wednesday to go to McDonalds for lunch.

  Susan was losing him and she was frantic. She stared down the lane toward his house, her heart aching with a need she’d never felt before. Another weekend was here and still he hadn’t asked her out or called her.

  Everything had seemed to be going so well between them. What had she done wrong? How had she screwed things up? She’d gone over and over every minute they’d spent together in an effort to pinpoint what had gone wrong. She’d come up without any answers.

  She had half a mind to march herself right up to his front door and demand an answer. After everything they’d shared surely she deserved at least that.

  She knew he was home. His car was in the driveway. Was there somebody else inside with him? Had he just been stringing her along for some crazy reason?

  She gripped the steering wheel tightly as tears blurred her vision. She’d believed he was her prince and in fairy tales the prince never left the princess.

  She drew a tremulous sigh. Tomorrow was Friday. Maybe he’d ask her out then. Her friends had always told her that her expectations of dating and men were skewed, that she expected too much too quickly.

  Glancing down at her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel, she noticed that her mauve nail polish was chipped. She couldn’t confront him now. She couldn’t go up to his door less than perfect.

  She pulled away, knowing the truth was that she was a coward. She was almost afraid to confront him about his distance from her, afraid that he might confirm what she feared…that she wasn’t in the process of losing him but rather had already lost him.

  It had taken them nearly a week to cut through all the red tape to receive the videotape from the book store. They had been concerned about the privacy of their customers.

  For the first time since Edie disappeared seventeen days before, Jake was back in the police station, this time as a civilian to view the video.

  It seemed like years ago that Frank had pulled him from his bed and forced him to deal with Edie’s absence, although it had just been a week.

  In that week Jake had retrieved a happy Rufus from the vet’s office and moved more things into Edie’s place. When she came home he could always move back out but the only place he felt he belonged right now was in her house.

  Each night he slept in Edie’s bed along with Rufus, who brought with him one of Edie’s fuzzy slippers to use as his pillow. Jake didn’t have the heart to reprimand the dog about the slipper and he had a feeling Edie would forgive Rufus for slobbering on it.

  He hoped every day for a ransom call, but if this had been about money they would have received a call long ago. Frank and Colette stopped by each evening, as if knowing the time between dinner and sunset were the most difficult hours of the day.

  As he waited for the tech to get the video ready, he and Teddy small-talked with Art Conrad and Larry Kincaid. They talked about sports and their kids and everything under the sun…except the reason they were all together.

  Jake knew the case had gone cold. It would soon be a month. Time would continue to be measured in painful heartbeats and unanswered questions.

  “We’re lucky the book store tapes these events,” Teddy said as the tech indicated he was ready. “I guess they sometimes use clips for publicity reasons. Roll it.”

  Jake steeled himself for the images to come. And there she was, as beautiful on film as she was in person. Stabbing pain rolled through him as he watched her laughing with the manager, settling into her chair at the table they’d provided and pulling her special book signing pen from her purse.

  It was like seeing the ghost of somebody beloved who had been lost and now appeared in a dream, bringing with it all the sense of loss, the hollow ache of despair.

  Teddy stood up just behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder to offer support, but the pain that screamed inside Jake couldn’t be staunched by a friend’s hand on his shoulder.

  Still, he shoved past the pain to concentrate not on Edie, but on the other people in the film, one of whom might know something about Edie’s disappearance.

  “You just let us know if anyone appears out of line or if maybe you’ve seen somebody since the signing,” Teddy said.

  Jake nodded. He knew the drill. He knew exactly what to look for and he was desperate to find it…find him, the man who had stolen Edie away.

  “You know, we’re all assuming this is a male perp, but we can’t rule out that it might be a female,” Art said as they all focused on the running tape.

  There was no audio and for the next hour there was little conversation in the room. All of them concentrated on the signing and the people who approached Edie as she sat smiling behind the table.

  The angle of the camera was directly on Edie and the table, making it difficult to see the people who approached her until they turned away to leave.

  Larry Kincaid was making notes on each person who visited with Edie. Older woman, a young man, an elderly couple…nameless faces. None of them looked threatening at all. Jake watched himself give Edie a cup of coffee, her favorite white mocha and then he disappeared off screen.

  After that a woman with two kids was at her table, followed by a man. As the man turned and his face was visible to the camera, Jake frowned thoughtfully. “Freeze that frame,” he exclaimed. The video froze on the man’s face.

  “You know him?” Teddy’s deep voice filled with a new urgency.

  “I…no, but I’ve seen him before.” Jake stared at the man. Tall and pleasant-looking, the man held Edie’s book against his chest. His green eyes were bright with a shine of intelligence. His mouth was curved into a smile.

  “You saw him that day, at the book signing,” Art said.

  Jake shook his head. “Yeah, I know that, but I’ve seen him someplace else, in another setting.” The harder he concentrated, the more fleeting the answer became.

  “Where, Jake? Where else could yo
u have seen him?”

  Jake sighed helplessly. “I can’t think of it right now.”

  As they watched the rest of the video he continued to try to place the man in another setting. He felt certain he’d seen the man before…at some point either just before or after the signing.

  They watched it until the end when Frank and Colette had arrived. Then the video ended abruptly. “Play it again,” Jake said. A frantic desperation ripped and clawed inside him. It was vital that he remember. Dammit, it was vital!

  They watched the video again and froze once again on the picture of the man. Alarm bells rang in Jake’s head, an irregular clang that mirrored the rhythm of his heart.

  It was like having the name of a song on the tip of your tongue, like a word that perfectly described what you wanted but couldn’t be accessed to be spoken.

  By the time Jake and the others had watched the video for a third time, he felt like screaming with frustration. Had he seen the man before or was he so desperate he was grasping at straws?

  “The tape from McDonalds,” he said suddenly. “I want to see it again.”

  Somebody groaned. He didn’t know if it was Art or Larry. “We’ve got three days worth of security tape from the Maggie Black case,” Art said.

  “And you and I have already gone over it,” Teddy said gently. “Twice.”

  “Then I want to see it a third time,” Jake replied. “I’ve got nothing but time on my hands and I have a gut feeling about this.”

  Teddy nodded for the tech to load the file while both Larry and Art stood. “While you two watch the tape, we’re going to check in on some of the other cases we’re working.” Art gave Jake a sympathetic gaze. “Sorry, Jake. But life goes on. We’ve got other cases to work.”

  Jake nodded, a bad taste rising in the back of his throat. Of course they had other cases to work, cases that were hot and urgent, not like the case of a woman who’d been missing seventeen days.

  “You should go home,” he said to Teddy. “It’s Saturday. You should be with Lisa and your girls. This is going to take hours. I can do it by myself.”