by Sasha Winter
This thought caused her to consider that the sounds at the kitchen door had gone quiet, and it occurred to her that the murderous bastard was moving round to the back of the building and what felt like a much less secure proximity. The back door might have been locked, but having just the one pane of wood between her and this psycho was not a comforting feeling. What if he had a gun? The lock could be overcome with a simple pull of the trigger. She had no choice but to place hope in the fact that the killer had previously relied on the power of his bear form to murder—except in the case of poor Jones.
Taking a large kitchen knife in hand, though hoping that a scenario in which she had to fight blade to blade (or blade to paw) did not materialize, Erin approached the back door tentatively, hoping not to hear a gunshot. If he got through, she would have to move the refrigerator again and, even if quick enough to escape the back room, what then? A chase on foot down the highway?
Her barricading really did need to buy her some time, or else she was done for.
Braced for some attempt at battering the door down, Erin didn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed when what came instead was the killer’s voice.
“I know you’re in there, little Erin,” came the introduction, surprisingly well-spoken and, though she was struggling to think, Erin realized that she knew that voice.
“Trust me, you don’t want to see me in my bear form. Why don’t you open up and try to convince me to calm down; it’s your boyfriend I want to upset, really, and there are different ways of achieving that.”
Her boyfriend was on his way and it suddenly occurred to her that keeping him talking was the way to go, but she couldn’t get anything out until she placed that voice.
Then the recollection came.
The eccentric man who had made a speech to her customers about the merits of treating oneself to lemon meringue pie. It was him! The revelation was a slap in the face, causing her to acknowledge that she hadn’t paid proper attention to the description she knew the police had since Nana was attacked. The blond hair might have been a dead giveaway, especially as—she also remembered—Nana had been at the bakery that day too. Of course, he had probably followed her from there, leaving his dessert unfinished in order to do so.
Why the hell had she been so stupidly insistent on judging the case as having nothing to do with her? That was a link, or even a speculation, she might have previously made and perhaps given the cops a name to hunt down.
“Mr. Neiman…it’s you?” she called out, hoping he wasn’t already shifting to a form that could not respond.
“Ah, so you recall our meeting. I must say I was slightly peeved to learn of your lack of credentials.”
“My lack of credentials? What do you mean?”
“Yes, when I was here last I noticed you do not have any formal baking qualifications. Some of the simple folk round here might not be smart enough to realize that but, for a learned man…well, I feel a bit defrauded.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Erin snapped. This man was truly bat-shit insane, but she needed to keep him talking. “Everyone loved the pie. Why do you need a formal qualification?”
“Indeed, the taste was good,” Neiman responded, “but an unsophisticated approach always leads to short cuts, which was what caused me to wonder what rogue ingredients you were using?”
“You bastard,” Erin shouted back, furious at the suggestion and forgetting her danger with the reputation of her bakery at stake. “I don’t use rogue ingredients. I have natural talent, and I’ve damn well poured my heart and soul into this place.”
“Ah, but skill beats talent every time,” Neiman went on, not changing his tone to compete with her raised voice. “Which you would know had you taken a nobler route. Same with everyone around here—your boyfriend, for example. Looks the part of a cop, has natural talent perhaps, but what skill has he developed? None sharp enough to track me down. And that fraud of a boss; Jake McClintock. Does he think it makes him a good sheriff because he’s popular and everyone knows him? He’s usurped a fine public service for its status that’s all; he can’t solve a crime any more than you can compete with the food they serve in proper restaurants. You know, the ones where they’ve earned their stripes.”
“That’s horse shit.”
“You think anyone would pull up for your shitty little dishes in New York? Or Chicago? Dream on, my little Montana munchkin. Your bakery wouldn’t last a day where people know to do things with proper panache.”
“What would you know about it? Nothing!” Erin yelled, through gritted teeth.
“Oh, but I know lots of things, little Erin,” he replied. “As you’re about to find out.”
Neiman clearly loved the sound of his own voice, but this only served to make the silence that followed more ominous…even more so when Erin called out to converse with him again and there was no response.
Maybe his threat referred to something he had planned for her boyfriend and he was tormenting her that way. As he had said, Tom was the one he really wanted to upset.
Daring to hope that he had left, Erin knew that she wouldn’t come out until she heard a friendly voice, and then the first thing she did hear was a familiar humming sound. A car, she realized—either Neiman speeding off or Tom coming to her aid. But the sound was unusually close and, almost too late, Erin clued in that it was coming right for her.
Then the back door—and half the wall along with it—caved right in.
16
Hook, line and sinker, Tom had fallen for it. There was no other way of judging what had occurred. The vigilance he had challenged himself to keep at all times as far as Erin’s wellbeing was concerned had proven tame.
Having been at the bakery when the news came, he should have considered the likelihood that the murder was a distraction to draw him—and the majority of the police forces—away from a more desired target. Instead, his wits had transgressed right back to the first murders, before he had even met Erin, when all they had on their hands appeared to be a random and indiscriminate madman. Tom should’ve made more room for doubt and not gone rushing off, knowing as he did that the nature of their investigation had evolved considerably since then. He had been the one to first suggest they were dealing with an intelligent individual, and so the oversight was unforgivable. Rather than keeping Erin by his side he had left her isolated, safeguarded by an officer he knew to be just chalking up a few hours by then.
By the time the call came, Tom had just arrived at the murder scene, only to answer the phone before he had even seen the body or spoken to anyone, and learned straightaway that he should have been all the way back where he had come from. There was not enough time to explain anything—not with Erin’s life at stake—and so he had sped off, sirens blazing, deciding he would make a radio call on the way for backup.
Unlike some cops, Tom wasn’t particularly fussed about the ability to drive fast, though he was certainly making up for that with the speed he was racing at back to the bakery. The journey from there had taken him twenty minutes, which he hoped to halve in getting back, but it was during his attempt to get a message passed on to Jake that his flirting with being a racer was cut abruptly short. There had been a warning when the speedometer had flashed to zero a couple of times; Tom had more on his mind than worrying about a faulty speedometer, but suddenly everything went dead and he knew then without further investigation that this had alluded to another problem entirely. His car battery was flat; an absurd thing to happen to a regularly serviced motor, and he knew that it had been sabotaged. Easily done by cutting the fan belt, allowing the remaining battery power to run out as the unsuspecting driver went off on his route.
The killer had been at the bakery all along. Maybe he had even called in the dead body himself on knowing he had got to Tom’s car and that, once disappearing down the road, he would not be back to rescue his girl in a hurry.
In other circumstances, Tom might have had a few words to say about the Einstein who inve
nted steering locks, which meant that his attempts to direct the vehicle safety to the side of the road were futile, allowing him to make the right-hand swerve so as to leave the driving lane but then preventing him from straightening. His car ploughed into woodland at high speed, and he was only saved from serious injury in that it was fern and bush, rather than immovable tree trunk, that he hit head on before finally coming to a stop. There was a lot more to worry about, of course. His radio was out and he had no way of knowing whether anything more than a garbled message would get to Jake—or whether their operations would be quick enough to help Erin anyway.
He pictured her shut in the bakery, desperately trying to keep death from the door, and he feared what despair he would encounter if he arrived too late. If he found that his love had become just another one of those bodies torn apart, left for coroners to swim around in as if their life had become nothing more than a puzzle for someone divorced from suffering, he thought his mind would break.
How could a man who had failed his love so utterly ever make a claim to be sane again?
And would he ever want to be?
But Tom wasn’t about to give in yet. He was a bear shifter too, and it was time to look beyond typical police resources to sort this one out. His initial intentions, on climbing out of his car and through the brambles, had been to rush back to the road, point his gun at some passing motorist and commandeer a car to make the rest of the journey. There was no sign of activity back on the highway however, so knowing this to provide a speedy resolution was impossible—plus, there might be a better way altogether.
The forest was not at its thickest at the point Tom had left the road and, from his position, he could easily make out where the trees broke and the land began to rise, beyond the verge of which was Cold Lake. Erin’s bakery was the first building he would come to in that direction. For a human’s limbs, the ground was too uneven to make at a full speed, and even at a fair pace it would have taken twenty minutes to overcome. But for a bear’s limbs, running at speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour, that distance wasn’t so great.
I’m coming, Erin.
***
There was no sign of movement at the bakery by the time Tom’s aching limbs brought him there. Just an eerie silence, though one that threatened to say a lot of things—that somewhere inside was his love, only no longer breathing and taken from him.
As a bear, Tom may have been able to easily outpace a man, but most predator’s speeds are designed for short distances. Tom was not a werewolf, and so his lungs yearned for air and his veins burned with acid. It was a condition he was better suffering in human form and so, as he came within close proximity of Jones’ car and the first dead body on the scene, he shifted back into human form, though not before his attempts to make a sensual assessment of the scene obtained some strange results. As he had feared, he smelled blood—among many other strange odors—but it was not Erin’s blood. That he couldn’t smell, but what he could smell belonged to the killer, a factor his previous visits to crime scenes confirmed.
There had been a twist of some kind, but what did it mean?
And where on earth was Erin?
17
Disrespecting the reputation of her bakery and her cooking skills had been a step too far for Erin. A lack of qualifications had always loomed over her efforts to make a success out of her own business, and its robustness depended solely on happy customers, not from whatever certificate she would have also had if her upbringing had given her both the time and money to secure it. Her bakery was a success in spite of the world and its silly ways of making everyone’s efforts feel inferior.
Temper flaring in spite of her fear, Erin’s mind flashed back to being written off by the so-called friends who had belittled her efforts as a pipedream, and the banking clerk who had dismissed her request for a loan without even looking her in the eye. She had turned her ideas into reality against all the odds, and so she was not about to take lectures from any shapeshifting psychopath that fancied himself an expert just because he was articulate.
Smarmy blond bastard!
Army generals have known for centuries that being under siege inevitably means having to make the most of one’s own resources. Erin was in that situation now, and kitchens were versatile entities. They could be enemies if the wrong appliance had been left on, or too much oil and fat was left to linger next to heat. Hers had been an ally in pursuing a successful business, but now she was in a position of needing it as an ally in fighting off murderous intent, and so all those dangers she had to manage—chemicals, knives and heat—might now be brought to her aid if effective in creating chaos rather than order.
When the car’s impact had smashed the back door open, Erin’s perturbed state became amplified by the damage Neiman was causing. Her precious miniature empire was at stake as well as herself, and she immediately sprang into a form of action she hoped he wouldn’t expect.
First up was the lights.
Erin supposed that bears had better eyesight than humans—though she was unsure whether this also applied to shifters when in their human form—but, either way, she knew her way around her own kitchen with her eyes closed.
Neiman did not.
Neither did he know what was stored inside, and what could be used against him, and so the lights were switched off.
The scenario Neiman had conjured was clearly to his liking, because he didn’t rush into the backroom as soon as her defenses were down. Erin hid behind the second of her two lines of storage, keeping the doorframe in view but deciding not to try running or screaming as she imagined he expected. Instead, he probably took her for a frightened guinea pig, remaining motionless in the hope that the predator failed to spot her. Soon the outside view was obscured by a human figure, which she saw as a positive, having no desire to be within close proximity with a full-sized bear. It might have been that Neiman thought the interior too small to shift into his more destructive form. If so, that was another positive for staying there and not trying to run to the nearest Cold Lake house around five hundred yards away.
“I know you’re in here, little Erin,” came the implied threat, but she was done talking.
Instead she stood deadly still, keeping an eye on his position by peering over the tops of the bags of flour that lined the middle shelf. Neiman was arrogant, choosing not to rush in and push all the supplies to the floor to either squash or flush her out. Erin took this as a good sign if Tom was indeed on his way. Everything was down to a question of how long this game of cat and mouse could be drawn out.
Slowly the murderer made his way inside, taking short steps that showed no urgency to get to the purpose of their intrusion. Neiman was taking delight in the tease, relishing the close proximity to his next crime and clearly content with the interior as the place it should be carried out. Erin thought he was moving in such a way to prevent any darting attempt at escape, being just as happy to commit murder indoors and in human form as under the moonlight.
There were three allies which Erin was looking to call upon, and if she was quiet enough to lie in wait until the perfect moment, and then precise enough in application when that moment arrived, then Andrew Neiman, sick murderer and food critic, would be having a very bad day.
No sounds of rescue could be heard from outside, which could be bad for her, but also bad for Neiman too.
Oven-cleaning liquids ranked among the kitchen products to be most wary of, having to be powerful enough to sort out stains created at such high temperatures. Erin always wore rubber gloves whenever she was on her knees and tackling the most imposing appliance whenever it needed a clean. It might have been the most annoying task to fulfil in order to maintain the quality of her kitchen, but she had been disciplined enough to keep all of her equipment in good condition, and so the chemical symbols that indicated the product’s high corrosive potential was scorched into her memory banks. She didn’t know what ‘caustic’ meant in exact scientific terms, but she was familiar enough with the
word to know that getting caustic chemicals in the eye was not a good idea.
Of all the allies to bring to her side, this was surely the first one to apply. What better way to make up for her inferior strength and agility by taking out Neiman’s vision?
The bottle top was open, the contents in her hands. It took both of them to hold the contents upright, but if her aim was sound, then what she had planned next might be achieved all the more effectively. She just needed the discipline to wait…just a little longer…a few inches more…
Then strike.
And she did. Although she caught an elbow to the face as Neiman jerked and sought to guard his face from the chemical, he was unprepared for sweet little Erin to have such fire in her belly, and so became the first of the two of them to scream like a little girl.
Caustic chemicals burn instantly on contact with a bodily orifice. As a clever man, Neiman no doubt knew that, but knowing something didn’t stop it hurting or give him any advantage as he desperately rubbed his eyes to quench the excruciating sensation.
That was one of three punishments that Erin had in mind. The second was more obvious, not demanding much from the imagination to conjure, but she doubted her ability to inflict a significant wound without first being able to disorientate Neiman. Now that this was achieved, she ran immediately over to the kitchen sink and drew out the largest kitchen knife of her collection. It was the kind that was used for chopping meat, and Erin saw no reason to change its use in this instant.
Neiman was thrashing and unpredictable, clearly imagining he was having to fight off a foe that wasn’t there at the same time as looking to regain enough of his vision. Erin had closed in, but didn’t rush with the knife so long as he was moving. She was crouched, half-sheltering behind the empty crates of vegetables that, all going well, she would be able to offload in the morning. Panic had robbed Neiman of some of his wit, because he was swinging his arms about as if facing a foe of equal stature.