by Lisa Gardner
He had never been so happy to see an emergency vehicle in his life. Grateful to the point of humbleness. Desperate to the point of tears leaking from the corners of his eyes as he tried to report what happened, what Kimberly needed, what Shelly needed, until the EMTs simply shouldered him and Mitchell aside and went to work with ten times the competence and ten times the gear, and Mac and Mitchell stood there, dazed and confused, as they tried to tell each other it would be all right.
Kimberly disappeared into the ambulance just as the chopper arrived for Shelly. Mac and Mitchell helped load the sheriff into the chopper. Then it was gone and Kimberly was gone and they were both reporting in the best they could.
All in all, it probably took twenty minutes. The longest twenty minutes of Mac’s life. And he didn’t even get to go with Kimberly. He wasn’t family. Just the man who loved her.
Which left him standing outside the battered surveillance vehicle, thinking of the ring. He wished she was wearing it now, maybe on a chain around her neck. If not for her, then for him, so he could see it, and know that she had said yes and told him that she loved him. That they had been happy, right before this.
He finally climbed into the van. Mitchell got in behind him. With nothing left to do, Mac crawled into the driver’s seat, started putting the vehicle into gear.
And Mitchell said, “Holy shit! Look at this!”
45
Wednesday, 1:22 p.m. PST
Rainie dialed Quincy’s cell phone. She clutched the receiver against her cheek. She held her breath when she heard his phone ring, a strange fluttering in her stomach, like a schoolgirl calling for a date. Wondering if he would answer. Wondering what she would say.
“Quincy,” he said, and for a moment, she was so overwhelmed, she couldn’t speak.
“Who is this?” he asked sharply.
Rainie started to cry.
“Rainie? Oh my God, Rainie!” There was the sound of squealing. Then cursing. She had caught him driving. Now he was obviously wrestling his car to the side of the road.
“Don’t hang up,” he was yelling. “Don’t hang up, just tell me where you are. I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming,” and in his voice, she heard all the desperation she’d felt for the past few days.
She cried harder, huge, hoarse sobs that pounded against her ribs and exacerbated the pain in her head. The emotion felt as if it would tear her body apart, become the final blow to her battered frame. But she couldn’t stop sobbing. She rocked back and forth, clutching the phone against her mouth and frantically gasping out the only words that mattered: “I … love … you.”
“I love you, too. And I’m sorry, Rainie. I’m sorry for … everything.” And then, even more urgently, “Rainie, where are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Rainie …”
“I don’t know! It’s a house. With a basement. And it’s flooded and we’re cold and Dougie’s not doing so well and I’m not doing so well. I need my medication. My head hurts so bad and I know I should’ve told you—”
“The Paxil. We found out. We’ll bring it. Help me, Rainie. Help me find you.”
“It’s dark,” she whispered. “So dark. The windows, the walls. I think he painted everything black.”
“How long did it take you to get there? Do you remember the drive?”
“I don’t know. I think he drugged me. A dirt road, I would guess. But I smelled the ocean. Maybe someplace near the water?”
“Do you know who took you, Rainie?”
“White light.”
“He blinded you?”
“Yes. And now we live in the dark.”
“Do you know where the man is right now?” Quincy asked crisply.
“I have no idea.”
“All right. Stay on the line, Rainie. Don’t you dare hang up. I’m going to find a way to trace this call.”
But just then Rainie did hear a noise. The scrape of a key in a lock. Then the sound of a front door crashing open.
“Honey,” the man called out cheerfully. “I’m home! And boy, did I bring home the bacon today!”
“Uh-oh,” Rainie whispered.
And Quincy said, “Danicic?”
Wednesday, 1:25 p.m. PST
“I gotta go,” Rainie whispered to Quincy, and without waiting for a reply, tucked the phone under the bed, receiver lying next to it. She would have to trust Quincy to trace the call. She would have to trust herself to keep her and Dougie alive until he got there.
She heard sloshing, wet footsteps as the kidnapper splashed through the family room, headed for the kitchen. He was still whistling tunelessly, oblivious to their escape.
In the good-news department, Rainie had a knife and the element of surprise. In the bad-news department, he had a Taser and was much more physically fit. She had taken him on twice now and lost. Given her deteriorated condition, she saw no reason to expect that equation to change.
It would be a matter of wits then, not brute strength.
She crossed to Dougie, moving as quietly as she could. The boy remained unconscious but was no longer shivering so hard. She didn’t know if that was a good sign or bad.
She got an awkward grip on his cocooned body. Staggered over to the closet. Deposited him inside.
Just in time to hear a cry of rage from the laundry room.
Not much time left.
Rainie closed the closet door and crossed immediately to the window. Please let her be lucky. Please, just this once, let God give her a break.
She found the old metal latch. She flipped it open. She grabbed the top of the wooden-framed window, and with all her might, she pushed up.
Nothing.
She tried again.
More splashing. Furious footsteps running through the kitchen.
“Come on,” she begged in the darkened room. “Come on!”
But the old window wouldn’t budge. After all these years, it was either swollen or painted shut.
Footsteps in the hall.
Rainie ducked behind the door. Got a grip on the knife.
Time was up.
Wednesday, 1:27 p.m. PST
Mac threw the van into gear and they went charging down the access road before either of them had their seat belts on. Mitchell had the radio and was furiously trying to raise Kincaid.
“We got a location. GPS has stabilized on a single set of coordinates. We’re running them through the program now and should have an address in a matter of minutes.”
Kincaid squawked on the other end in delight and surprise. He wanted the address the moment they got it. He was calling for SWAT, he was calling for backup, by God …
Then there was a short interruption as he took a call from his cell phone. Quincy. He had Rainie on the line. She was trapped in a house and the kidnapper had just returned home. Quincy would swear to God the man’s voice had sounded just like Danicic’s.
“We got an address,” Mitchell yelled.
“Danicic’s house?” Kincaid pressed.
No, it was Stanley’s fishing cabin in Garibaldi.
“We’re ten minutes away,” Mac reported, and hit the gas.
“I’m already there,” Quincy said as he went tearing back onto the dirt road and Candi grabbed the dash.
Wednesday, 1:29 p.m. PST
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the man called softly down the hall. “Whoo-hooo. Come on, Dougie. Say hi to your old friend.”
Rainie held her breath, remaining in position with her back pressed against the wall. She could see a small sliver of hallway through the crack in the spine of the door. A foot came into view.
“I know you’re still in here. The doors are locked from the outside, the windows screwed shut. It pays to be prepared when kidnapping a law enforcement officer and her little felonious friend.”
Another step. She had a view of black jogging pants, now splotched with water.
“You’re not getting out of this house, Rainie. Dougie and I have a deal. If you escape,
I will have no choice but to fulfill my end of the bargain and burn Peggy Ann alive. You don’t want Peggy Ann to suffer, do you, Dougie? You wouldn’t want to kill her the way you killed your own mom?”
The man’s whole profile appeared. Rainie inched back, feeling his eyes go to the gap between the back of the door and the wall.
“Come on, Dougie,” he said impatiently. “Enough of this foolishness. Step forward, confess what you’ve done, and I’ll forgive you. It’s Rainie who’s hurt you, remember? She lied to you. Pretended to be your friend.” And then, as a new thought struck him, “Hey, Rainie, let’s make this real simple: You come forward, and I’ll pour you a drink.”
The man stepped into the doorway, and Rainie slammed the door on his face. She heard a crack, followed by a sharp cry. “My nose, my nose, my nose! You bitch, you broke my nose! Do you know how that’ll look on TV?”
Rainie fumbled with the knob, tried to find some sort of lock. Nothing. She dug her heels in, pressing her weight against the door as her eyes searched the room. She needed a chair to jam beneath the knob. Or a heavy piece of equipment.
She spied the bureau, but it was too cumbersome and distant. Then her whole body thudded as the man threw himself against the door, howling in outrage.
“You are not getting out of this house. Do you hear me? You are dead.”
He slammed against the door a second time, and Rainie rocked back on her heels. She got her weight forward just in time for the third blow. Then, slowly but surely, he went to work, twisting the slippery knob beneath her hand.
She tried to get a better grip. Fumbled with the knife so that she could use two hands.
He was too strong. He’d eaten and slept and not spent two days trapped down in a frigid basement. He had more muscle. Less fatigue. He was going to win.
She started the countdown in her mind. When she got to ten, she sprang away from the door.
The man burst in, stumbling forward and promptly falling onto the bed.
And Rainie bolted out the door.
She was aware of many things at once. The weight of water, now nearly at her ankles, as she splashed down the hall. The sight of the front door, looming nearly fifty feet away as she struggled through the kitchen, into the living room, reaching, reaching, reaching.
The sound, maybe in her mind, of car doors slamming shut. The voice, maybe in her head, of Quincy saying I love you.
Then the louder, closer scream of outrage as the man came barreling after her.
She turned at the last minute. She saw a large black figure bearing down on her. Lucas Bensen appearing on the deck when she was only sixteen. Richard Mann waiting for her with a shotgun a decade after that. All the nightmares she had ever had, careening down the hall, racing toward her.
Rainie planted her feet. She brought up her knife. She prepared for her last stand.
The front door burst open. “Stop, police! Put down your weapon.”
Rainie dropped to the floor.
Danicic lunged forward.
Quincy and Candi Rodriguez opened fire.
46
Aftermath
In the hours that followed, things moved slower, evened out, tried to make sense.
Medics arrived. Pronounced Danicic dead. Found Dougie still alive, slowly warming back to consciousness within his cotton cocoon. They took the boy to the hospital. Tried to take Rainie, too. She refused to go. Just sat in the back of Quincy’s car. She had his coat around her shoulders, four blankets on her lap, and a steaming cup of coffee in her hands.
She wanted to feel the warmth seeping back into her bones. She wanted to inhale the scent of Quincy’s cologne in the collar of his coat. She wanted to realize herself, inch by inch, as she ventured back to the land of the living.
Quincy sat in the car with her as more investigators arrived and started to work the scene. The house, Rainie learned, belonged to Stanley Carpenter, his grandfather’s old home that he kept for periodic rental income. He had been pleasantly surprised to receive an inquiry in August to rent the property for the entire winter. The renter claimed to be a writer from out of town, looking for someplace quiet to work on his next novel. Stanley had received a cashier’s check for the entire winter’s rent up front and hadn’t thought about the house much since.
The house sat on a heavily wooded property, just a mile from the ocean. The nearest neighbor was five miles away to the west. Rainie and Dougie could’ve run all night and still never found a single person to help them.
A Sergeant Detective Kincaid appeared. He stared at Rainie so hard and so somberly, Rainie didn’t know what to say. Then he nodded once to Quincy and walked away.
Next came a gorgeous Hispanic officer named Candi. She had been one of the first officers at the scene, arriving with Quincy. Now she took a seat on the gravel drive beside the open door on Rainie’s side of the car and, with a surprising gentleness, drew out Rainie’s account of the past few days. How Rainie had pulled her car over in the middle of the night. Been surprised by a blinding white light. Woken later to discover herself drugged and bound in the back of a vehicle. She’d done the best she could, working hard to protect herself and Dougie.
She had no idea who had taken her. When Candi used the name Danicic, Rainie was genuinely startled. “Isn’t he a reporter for the Sun?”
No one had that answer for her. Candi disappeared and Lieutenant Mosley took her place. He wanted to personally make sure she was okay. Then he was off to make a statement to the press.
“It’s about time we had some good news today,” the officer said, which left Rainie, in the back of the car, staring at Quincy.
Alone at last, he started to speak. He told her of the ransom notes, of the task force team. He told her of Mac and Kimberly flying immediately from Atlanta to help.
And he told her, expressionlessly, for that was the tone he used for things that mattered most, how a detective, Alane Grove, had been murdered while working the case. Best they could tell, a local had spotted her with the ransom money and, unable to resist the temptation, had snatched her into the back of his truck and strangled her for the cash.
Then had come the disastrous ransom drop. Danicic had rigged the scene with explosives, resulting in serious injuries to the Bakersville sheriff, Shelly Atkins, as well as to Kimberly. Kimberly was now listed in stable condition, but would probably be in the hospital for days while they monitored her lungs and treated her burns. For Sheriff Atkins, the prognosis did not look so good.
“We should go to the hospital,” Rainie said immediately.
“No.”
Rainie frowned at him. “But Kimberly …”
“Is finally getting to see her fiancé. If we interrupt them now, they both will kill us.”
“They’re engaged?”
“That’s what I’m told.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the beginning? Men!”
Quincy took her hand. “Yes, men. We like time alone with our women. Mac has his. Now I have mine. And you’re not going anywhere.”
Which made her both smile and cry, but also proved not to be entirely true. She went to get out of the car, passed out cold, and Quincy got to yell once more for the paramedics.
She woke up hours later, screaming hoarsely in the dark. The room was pitch black, the water closing over her head. She banged her hand against the metal bars of the hospital bed, searching desperately for leverage. Monitors screamed. The IV wires became tangled. Then Quincy was there, grabbing her hand, telling her she would be all right.
She drifted back off, only to wake up screaming once again.
“I don’t think I’m quite sane,” she told him.
“None of us are,” he said, and climbed into the bed beside her.
In the morning, Rainie was discharged with orders to rest, eat, and drink. Her cracked ribs were tightly wrapped. Her left knee, with a torn ACL, was secured in a metal brace. She would need surgery to repair the injury, but not until she got her strength back. With Quincy by h
er side, she limped gamely to Kimberly’s room.
The young agent had been moved from the intensive care unit to the general-population ward. She was on oxygen, fluids, and antibiotics to protect her damaged throat from infection; the doctors did not expect to release her for many more days.
But she seemed in good spirits, giving Rainie a fierce hug, flashing her engagement ring. She couldn’t speak a word, and Mac was already saying that he preferred her this way.
He speculated out loud about a huge, four-hundred-person wedding, held out at his parents’ orchard. They’d roast a pig, hire a country-western band, have a hoedown. Kimberly mimed strangling him with her bare hands. He expanded his vision to include a barefoot bride wearing petticoats and carrying a bouquet of peach blossoms.
Kimberly stopped trying to kill him and started nodding instead. That scared him back into silence, and Quincy and Rainie left the two lovebirds holding hands.
Dougie’s room next. The boy was still asleep, Stanley and Laura Carpenter standing next to his bed. Stanley looked terrible, as if he hadn’t slept in a month. Laura Carpenter looked just like Rainie remembered—as if she’d been trampled on all her life and didn’t expect things to get any better soon.
“He’s going to be okay,” Stanley said hoarsely the minute Rainie walked into the room. “Doctors say he’s in surprisingly good shape. Just needs to rest.”
“Has he woken up?”
“A few times. He asked for you. We told him you were doing all right; he could see you soon. I mean, that is, if you don’t mind. I would understand …”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“A policewoman came,” Laura volunteered. “That Rodriguez woman. Asked Dougie a few questions. He did okay. Didn’t get too upset.”
“He knew Danicic, didn’t he?” Quincy asked gently. “He thought the man was his friend.”
“Our fault,” Stanley said immediately. “He approached us soon after we became foster parents for Dougie. Said he was doing an article on kids in the system. Wanted to profile Dougie as a happily-ever-after piece. You know, the kid who’s been around but finally has a good home. He stopped by regularly for a bit. We didn’t think much of it. We never saw the story appear, of course, but every time we asked, Mr. Danicic said his editor had held it back—it wasn’t timely, just a general-interest piece, that kind of thing. He used to be a foster kid, too, you know.”