by Kaylea Cross
For one, Jack had given her a way out: cooperate with the police and be taken into protective custody. But she hadn’t given up anything. Two, he didn’t want to think of her as a possible victim. He needed an enemy he could reach to fight, and right now Ashley Price was the only one within reach. He was going to bring Blackwell down through her.
He’d rattled her before, had taken her paintings. She’d come close to breaking. He would push her as hard and as far as he needed to, to finish the job.
His phone rang. Always hoping for a lead, he took the call. Then wished that he hadn’t.
“Hi, this is Dr. Beacon,” the shrink Bing had sicced on him at the hospital said on the other end.
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“We need to make an appointment.”
“How about I call you back?”
“That’s what you said the last time.”
“I really don’t have any problems.”
“That’d be a miracle, after what you’ve been through. Denial is normal. What do you know about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?”
“I don’t have time to have PTSD.”
“Insomnia, trouble breathing, anxiety, hallucinations, paranoia… It’s a long list, Detective. Why not let me help before things get really bad?”
“How about this? I’ll call you at the first sign of trouble.” He hung up on the man as Joe, one of two rookies, pushed through the door and dropped his gym bag on the floor, heading straight for the treadmill with a grin. “Fallen and you can’t get it up?”
He’d been the town football hero back in his high school days, had gone to college on a sports scholarship. Never managed to turn pro, although he’d spent time with a couple of the East Coast teams before coming home and settling back into his small-town-hero life.
“Odd that should be on your mind at your age.” Jack rolled to his feet. “Trouble in that department? You’ll get better with experience. Try not to worry.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, old man. Hot stud is my middle name.” The twenty-something flashed another cocky grin as he began running.
He was so full of hot air it was a wonder he didn’t float to the ceiling. But he was well-meaning, and he would watch a man’s back if needed, so pretty much everybody liked him around the station and overlooked his strutting peacock tendencies.
“What are you working now?”
Joe picked up speed on the treadmill. “The burglaries.”
“Still?” There’d been a rash of burglaries in town over the last few months, a pushed-in back door here and there, small items taken, things that could be quickly sold online. Property crime like that usually picked up as the economy dipped.
Joe shrugged. “They stop for a week, then start again. I’ll get the sucker.”
Jack nodded as he passed by the treadmill, ready to hit the shower. “Bing in yet?”
“Came in, went out. Someone reported some hunting-camp bunker thing out by Spring Road. Filled to the rafters with guns and knives and axes and some weird shit. Chase went to pick up a flasher. Harper is at a tractor-trailer accident. I’m not sure where Mike is. Nobody’s in.”
Jack picked up speed, the parting jab he’d meant to throw at Joe forgotten. He rushed through his shower, and stopped by the front desk on his way out of the station. “You got that number I asked for earlier?”
“You bet.” Leila slipped a piece of paper across the counter.
She was the sole admin support, a widow in her late forties with three boys to raise. She was competent and tough, wouldn’t take flak from anyone. She had short hair that hadn’t dared to gray yet, and the voice and demeanor of an admiral. Although the six men who made up the Broslin police often ribbed each other, nobody was fool enough to go up against her.
He glanced at the empty conference room. Looked like the FBI was out. He wished he knew what they were doing.
He pocketed the sticky note. “Thanks. You’re the best.”
She gave a bark of a laugh. “Stop kissing up, Sullivan. Christmas is over. I’m not bringing in any more cookies.”
He put on his best crestfallen expression. “The thought of those cookies brought me back from death, you know that?”
“Your stubbornness brought you back. The same thing that’s keeping you from being home and recovering like you should be. You need to take better care of yourself, Jack. Gain some weight back.”
“That’s exactly where the cookies come in,” he said, straight-faced.
She was laughing as he walked out the door.
In less than half an hour, he was in the woods off Spring Road, walking up to Bing.
The captain’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”
“Was driving by, saw the commotion.”
“And I’m a woodland fairy. You know what sick leave means? You stay home and heal.”
“You sound like Leila. So what do we have?”
“A hiker called the place in.” Bing shrugged, then called out, “Anything back there, Mike?”
“Locked up tight.” Mike, the other rookie who’d joined the team the previous year with Joe, came around the cabin, a round Irish kid, red hair sticking up all over, eyes green as shamrocks, and a grin that betrayed he hadn’t spent too much time on the force yet. He’d barely seen anything.
“Who owns the place?” Jack asked. “You called it in?”
Bing nodded. “It’s been for sale for a couple of years. Sold recently, but the new deed hasn’t been put into the system yet. When we’re done here, Mike will go to the county clerk’s office to look through the paper files.”
“You think it’s connected to Brady Blackwell?” Mike asked Jack with a little too much enthusiasm.
“Jack is not investigating Blackwell.” Bing stepped in and effectively ended that topic.
Mike’s enthusiasm didn’t dim any. “Are we going in?”
“What do you think?”
The rookie’s shoulders slumped after a second of thinking. “No probable cause, no search warrant. We have to walk away.”
“Heard that, Jack?” Bing turned to him.
Jack strode up to one of the front windows, cupped his hands around his eyes, and looked in. A row of gun cabinets stood against the back wall, all filled. In the corner, a stack of metal boxes nearly reached the ceiling, probably ammunition and who knew what else. Instruments of torture, possibly. His muscles tightened.
He glanced back at the captain. “Kids are out in these woods all the time. Some testosterone-flooded teenage boy gets his hands on this stuff…”
“Until they do, there’s nothing we can do about it.” Bing swore under his breath.
“And if it’s really connected to Blackwell?” Mike wanted to know.
Bing glared at him. “Get a fingerprint kit from the car. Let’s see if you can lift anything off the door. If you get something, we can run it against the database.”
They walked out to the road together. Bing drove away, heading back to the office. Mike popped the trunk of his cruiser. Among all the other emergency response supplies, a standard-issue army shovel caught Jack’s eye, brand-new, still in the wrapper.
“Where you get that from?”
“Sunday flea market, the old Polish guy in the back row. He’s gotten some army surplus in.” Mike caught on the next second. “Already checked him. He sold two dozen in the last month, but he keeps no record of his customers. No credit card record either. Place like that, most people pay cash.”
Jack filed the information away. He’d go check out the flea market on Sunday. But that was two days away, and he had things to do in the meanwhile. He strode back to his car and got in but didn’t put the key in the ignition just yet. He pulled out his phone instead, then the piece of paper Leila had given him, with the phone number he’d asked her to track down.
He needed ammunition to break Ashley, and he had a feeling her father, William Price, would have it. If he was raising Ashley’s daughter, it could m
ean only one thing: he didn’t trust Ashley with the kid. Why?
He dialed the number, lining up his questions, hoping that this lead at last would take him somewhere, give him some answers. He let the phone ring a dozen times before he gave up and tossed it onto the passenger seat.
He pulled a different piece of paper from his other pocket, this one well used and wrinkled, a list of buildings in town that had a somewhat isolated location. One could possibly be the site of Blackwell’s “workshop” where the bastard had tortured him.
The farmhouse where he’d been trapped, tased by a rigged-up mechanism as soon as he’d opened the door, had already been inspected several times over but was spotlessly clean, not a speck of dust in the place, let alone a fingerprint. He needed to find the torture chamber Blackwell had taken him to from there.
He’d been going through his list of possibilities one by one, whenever he had time for a drive. He’d already checked a dozen homes repossessed by various banks and sitting empty, closed-down businesses in town, and an old, crumbling silo that had nearly collapsed on top of him.
If he found a place, he might find a clue that could lead him straight to Blackwell. The “workshop” was somewhere in or near town. He’d been conscious—if tied and blindfolded—for the trip from the torture chamber to the grave. While the ride, with all that pain riddling his body, had seemed to last an eternity, he didn’t think it took more than twenty to thirty minutes.
He unfolded the list and looked at the next item that hasn’t been crossed off yet, the old firehouse, abandoned when the new state-of-the-art facility had been built, just before the recession had hit.
He drove over frozen roads, traffic sparse, then sparser yet as he reached the back roads again. The old firehouse had been built on the edge of town, back when they used the creek to fill the trucks with water. The new bigger one sat in the middle of the city, within easier reach.
The township still owned the building that now housed road-maintenance equipment. The building stood deserted and locked up for the moment. Jack pulled up to the front and eyed the big padlock on the door of the single bay.
Eddie Gannon had access to the place. Eddie was friendly with Ashley. Eddie was about the same build and age as Blackwell. Yet the voice was off, Jack thought. But could he trust his full-of-holes memory?
He got out of his car and walked around, looking in windows. He saw no suspicious activity, and, more importantly, no door that could have led to a basement. The two inside doors were open, one to a bathroom, the other to the kitchen.
And he’d definitely been held in some sort of a basement, the only thing he was sure of. The place had smelled like a basement. He could see a small strip under the blindfold, saw the stained cement floor. The light had been on 24/7. So he was looking for a basement without windows, most likely, but not necessarily. Could be Blackwell kept the windows boarded.
He was looking for a place away from other buildings, in an area that was deserted. Nobody had heard his screams.
For a few seconds, he stared at the big snowplow that took up most of the place, its cheery yellow color mocking him. Then he went back to his car with a disappointed grunt and crossed the firehouse off his list.
Only two more places to go. Another abandoned farm and the old train station. He was almost sure the old train station didn’t have a basement either, the place little more than a shack. He checked it anyway. But neither the train station nor the farm panned out.
He called William Price again. And when the man, once again, ignored his call, Jack decided to swing into Philly. He didn’t feel like going back to his lonely rental. The sticky note Leila handed him with the phone number also contained an address, in the posh Art Museum district.
He had some time to think on the way. He went down the list of things he knew about Blackwell for sure, as he did several times a day.
Name: unknown. Blackwell was a name he’d used early on at a motel where he’d stayed. He would have used a number of aliases, Jack expected.
Age: midthirties to midsixties.
Body type: medium, fit. He’d been strong enough to drag Jack into his car after he’d tased him.
Occupation: possibly something that required travel.
Smart. He’d outsmarted everyone for a long time now, taking victims when he pleased, as he pleased.
Strong possibility for sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies.
A collector. That would make sense, since he kept parts of his victims.
No accent of any kind.
Jack turned all that information over in his head, plus the timeline, the victims, every single clue strong or weak that he’d collected over the years. He was close, so close he could taste it. But he wasn’t seeing the big picture yet, no matter from what angle he looked.
That left him pretty frustrated by the time he reached William Price’s penthouse apartment. The doorman let him up when he identified himself as a police detective. But the housekeeper, a middle-aged woman named Bertha with ridiculously curly gray hair and a goofy mess of elbow macaroni necklaces, tried to make him wait outside the door upstairs. He simply pushed his way in.
Then all his bluster leaked away when he saw a little girl, a small replica of Ashley Price, watching him from the lavishly furnished living room with anxious eyes. All right, he was a hard-assed bastard but not at the point yet where he would have enjoyed scaring small children.
“Hi, Maddie.” He did his best to soften his face. “I’m Jack. I’m a friend of your mom.” He stretched the truth there, more than a little.
The kid’s face lit up with a smile. “Is my mom here?”
“No. I came to talk to your grandfather.”
The man in question appeared through a doorway, holding a phone and tapping his earpiece, probably muting it. He cut an impressive figure, clean-cut in a conservative suit, with a faint air of superiority. He could have passed for a politician. “What is the meaning of this?”
“He says he’s from the police,” Bertha rushed to say.
“Detective Sullivan. Broslin PD. Not an emergency. Nothing bad. But I need to talk to you in private.” He looked toward the little girl, who was hanging on their every word.
The man nodded. “I’m in the middle of an important meeting. Let me wrap up. Give me two minutes.” Then he turned and tapped his earpiece again, walking away, probably back to his home office.
“I’m playing princess,” Maddie said.
Definitely. The million-dollar Persian rug in the middle of the elaborately furnished living room was smothered with dolls and horses and castles. Some small toy stores had a lesser inventory, he was sure.
“The drawbridge is stuck,” Maddie prattled on.” If Prince William can’t get to Princess Lillian, they can’t fall in love.”
A tragedy.
“Bertha can’t fix it.” The little girl looked at him expectantly.
Kids were trouble. He wasn’t good at relating to kids. But it was clear that this one expected something from him.
He cleared his throat. “I could look at it.”
The smile that lit up her face was nothing short of angelic. She had eyes the exact shade of green as Ashley’s, and hair the same color too, except with some waves to it.
He strode over and went down to one knee, and wiggled the drawbridge that had gone off track. He pulled out his pocket knife and popped the piece of brown plastic back in, sliding it up and down a couple of times while Maddie clapped her hands and made happy kid noises.
He stood as Prince William rode his white horse into the castle, slid from the saddle, then stumbled his way up to the tower room to have tea. Poor bastard.
“Did you see my mom today?” Maddie asked while the prince and the princess gazed blankly at each other over a pink plastic miniature table. They didn’t look like they were having the time of their lives, frankly.
“Not today.”
She jumped up, scrambled over to the marble coffee table, and grabbed a sheet of paper
from the pile. “I drew her a picture. It’s me and Bertha making cookies. Can you take it to her?”
Someone out there might have been able to say no to that face, but he sure couldn’t. He took the picture, two stick figures playing with something that looked like dog doo-doo. Didn’t look like the kid had inherited her mother’s art genes.
She kept looking at him expectantly.
A few seconds passed before he figured out what she wanted. “Very, um, pretty.”
Her smile widened another inch. Her tiny teeth were going to fall out if she didn’t watch it. He’d never seen anyone that happy.
In stark contrast to her mother, who had shadows all around her.
“Can you take her some cookies too?”
In for a penny, in for a pound. “Sure.”
Whatever her grandfather’s reservations were, the kid clearly loved Ashley. The thought that he was here to dig up enough dirt on her to put her behind bars left Jack slightly uneasy. Which was plain stupid, so he shook off the feeling.
He stepped back, but if he’d been hoping for some distance from the kid, he wasn’t about to get it.
Maddie grabbed his coat sleeve and dragged him through a door into the kind of fancy kitchen he’d only seen on cooking shows when he couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night and clicked through the channels. Gleaming hardwood and granite stretched everywhere, punctuated by stainless-steel appliances that were at the high end of high end.
Bertha followed them with a pinched look on her face, but she did help with obtaining a plastic container from the fancy cabinetry.
“Would you like a cookie?” Maddie offered him a lopsided plop of brown something.
On second thought, her drawing wasn’t too off the mark.
“No, thanks.”
The smile began sliding off her face. “I made it.”
He took the darn thing and bit in. The perfect sweetness spread on his tongue. Whatever the cookie looked like, Bertha had clearly made sure all the right ingredients had gone into it. “I like it.”
She beamed at him.