Guilt struck her in the heart. The faces of the women she’d buried for James and Zeke crowded her mind. After Kristie died, Chelsea had often sensed someone’s presence in the house. Not until she was alone, until both Zeke and James were dead, did the spirits push through the supernatural veil and appear to her. One at a time, stabbing her with their piercing accusations. She may not have directly ended their lives, but she had done nothing to keep them from dying.
Ethereal voices zoomed at her from every direction. She pressed her hands to her head to keep it from exploding.
He is here.
The words rang through her mind. Every night her subconscious had begged the spirits to tell her who was coming while her mouth remained mute. Many times after Sharona died, Kristie had muttered first in her sleep and then in her delirium, “He is coming.”
No longer was he coming. He was here.
Fear plucked with twitching fingers at every one of her pinging nerves. She knew the identity of the man who had been coming, who was finally here. She’d met him. Actually, she’d led him to Cooley’s work shed, knocked him out, and locked him in. Maybe she didn’t know his name, but she knew his face.
A new voice confronted her. You can’t hide from him.
Another voice taunted her. He will find you again.
A third voice shrieked in her ears. He knows who you are.
Terror finally rushed up from deep in her gut. She screamed bloody murder. The haze blinding her vision cleared, and the force holding her in the air released her. The pressure on her chest disappeared as if it had never squeezed the breath out of her. She hit the floor on her knees. Pain shot up her thighs, settling in her hips. With nothing holding her up, she face planted on the wood.
She scrambled to roll over and assumed a defensive position, but nothing threatened her. Peace had settled over the house. So quiet. Not a hint in the atmosphere of the recent supernatural activity. In fact, the room seemed so normal she could have believed what she had just experienced had all been a dream if not for the warm blood dripping from her battered nose.
It took all her strength, but she finally managed to get up from the floor and stumble into the nearest bathroom down the hall. The cool rag felt refreshing on her hot skin. She wiped the blood from her face and studied her reflection in the mirror. The tracks of her tears left little trails through the red stain. When had she begun crying?
She couldn’t stay in the house any longer. The ghosts were driving her crazy. Besides, any day the owner of the house would realize his renters weren’t going to pay the rent any longer and lease the place to someone else.
She felt utterly alone.
James was gone.
She had hated him, yet over the years she had developed a weirdly unexplainable loyalty to him. From the day James had dragged her through the back door of his mother’s house at Laurel Heights, he had treated her differently from the other women. Maybe because she was the first woman he had kidnapped for old man Cooley. In the last few years, James had often said he loved her, but she couldn’t understand why love had to hold another heart captive against its will.
Never had she been forced to work in one of Cooley’s meth labs as the others had. Chelsea’s job had been to help Zeke and James control their victims when they arrived and then to dispose of their remains when they left. James had shielded her from some of the harder circumstances the other women had endured. The others hated her because of him. Sometimes she wished he had treated her just the same, but then if he had, she’d probably be just as dead as they were. How many times had she forced one woman to dig the grave for another?
There had been three other women still living in the house. When she had told them that James was dead, and probably so were Cooley and Zeke, they had bolted and ran. She couldn’t blame them. In fact, she sincerely hoped somehow they found their way home. She could only hope. All of them were illegal immigrants, and all of them were in various stages of toxic decay. Inhaling the fumes from the meth cooking process would have eventually killed every one of them. Maybe those three could get some medical help before it consumed them.
Chelsea sighed and yanked the closet door open. Inside was her few pitiful possessions. Besides the clothes on her back and the sandals on her feet, she didn’t own much. A worn pair of sneakers, two stained t-shirts, and the shotgun she’d found at Cooley’s place when she’d gone there to look for James.
She sucked back a sob.
James was gone.
What was she going to do without him? It had been so long since she’d been free to go where she wanted that she didn’t know how she would survive making her own decisions. In a twisted sort of way, James had protected her from Zeke, but not because he cherished her. No, he thought of her as his personal property. Zeke used to love to push his limits by threatening to take her away from James. The thought almost made her throw up.
As much as she hated James, she hated Zeke even more. He pushed James around, manipulated him, withheld James’s cut of the drugs just for spite, laughed when James begged for a hit. As hard as James pretended to be, Zeke was harder. Pure evil. Zeke controlled James. Zeke owned him.
How many times had Chelsea daydreamed of James killing Zeke?
Zeke was gone.
She wanted to shout for joy, to be happy to be rid of him. But she had no strength for rejoicing. He’d robbed her of her adult life. James had taken her when she was a senior in high school, and Zeke had made sure he kept her a prisoner. She had no skills to exist in the adult world. She was free of both of them, but she didn’t know what to do without them telling her what to do.
Chelsea stuffed her things into a garbage sack and sniffed back another sob. Her first thought was to go home, but if she did, her brother Brett would make her go to the cops, and she couldn’t do that. Not yet. Some of the local cops were just as mixed up in Cooley’s mess as she was. Oh yeah, she’d heard many conversations that she wasn’t meant to overhear. No doubt, she was still in danger, but she had no idea where the danger came from. Beyond Cooley, she didn’t know what cold-blooded monsters existed further up the food chain.
The crash of the back door banging against the wall rattled the house. She froze and listened. Maybe she was about to get an answer to her question.
“Are you sure this is where Cooley kept his girls? There are three white houses on this street.”
A second man replied. “I’m pretty sure. This is the only one that doesn’t look like it’s been painted in ten years.”
A third voice. “You better be sure this is the right one or else we just broke into the wrong house.” The rebuke resonated with the authority of leadership. Jake Richards. Zeke’s cousin.
Someone sniffed, not a snot-filled sniff, but one full of disdain. “This place smells.”
Derisive laughter rang throughout the house.
The first man spoke again. “I don’t hear anything. Maybe they all scattered.”
The banging of doors added punctuation to the men’s conversation. Then tromping of heavy boots climbing the stairs. There was no way out of the room except through the door and into the hall. The windows were all nailed shut from the outside, a precaution against escape.
Her heart pounding to a jerky arrhythmic beat, Chelsea got on her knees and then slid underneath the antique iron bed. Inch by inch she ooched her way to the center. Through the open door, she caught just a glimpse of a man’s roughed up work boots out in the hallway.
The second man voiced his opinion. “There isn’t anyone here.”
Panic rattled the first man’s voice. “What are we gonna tell Haskins? He needs that product delivered and without anyone to cook it, he’s not gonna be able to fill the order. You know who he’s gonna blame. Us.”
Haskins. Everything made perfect sense. From the time she was a little girl, she knew who ran Hill County. Fred Haskins controlled most of the organized illegal activity in northwest Arkansas. Of course, he would control the drug traffic as well.
> So Cooley had worked for Haskins.
A sharp crack like one man had slapped the other man upside the head.
“Idiot. We’ll have to do it ourselves.”
“We’ll get ourselves killed.” Calm. Even. Unruffled. Jake Richards was obviously the leader of the trio.
First man laughed. “Walter White did it. We can just look it up on the internet.” This one sounded younger than the rest.
Chelsea felt a bit sorry for the guy. She was young when James had dragged her kicking and screaming to the dark side, a slice of society most people never saw, living right underneath their noses. Practically on top of them. In their neighborhoods. Next door to their grandmother.
Second man offered his observation with a heavy dose of sarcasm, probably with a sneer plastered on his face. “That’s just television, and he was a chemist. Don’t be stupid.”
It sounded to Chelsea like all of them were stupid.
Jake’s angry voice bellowed above the heat of the argument. “Those women couldn’t have gotten far without money or wheels. Let’s just go round them up and bring them back.”
“They’re long gone. We’ll never find them,” man number two stated as if he knew what he was talking about.
Jake answered with a sharp retort. “I saw one of them the other day at Cooley’s place. Thought she was there with Zeke until I found out… That’s got to be where they’re hiding.” He was obviously a man that didn’t like to be contradicted.
He meant Chelsea. It had taken all of her acting skills to fool him into thinking she was there with his cousin. She hadn’t told him that his cousin was already dead.
The only reason she knew where Cooley lived was because she’d heard Zeke tell James where to find the old man’s house once. But the other women? Jake was wrong. So wrong. Cooley kept his workers away from his house. They wouldn’t even know where to find his place.
It didn’t matter if Jake found them there or not. He would hunt them down until he had them back in his control. Chelsea pressed her fist into her mouth to keep from cursing them. She had so hoped the other women would get away and start over.
Guilt ripped through her conscience once again. Just like Kristie had said years ago, before she died… Chelsea could have done more to save their lives.
She was allowed more freedom than they were. How many times did she have the opportunity to run away, but she hadn’t taken the chance? Glued to James’s side as if he were some sort of savior for her. All he’d done was taken sex from her and kept her away from Zeke. But what kind of life had she lived? Was she just as guilty of letting those women die as if she’d forced them into servitude just like Zeke and James had?
As long as they were alive, she’d been too scared of them to run, knowing they would hunt her down and kill her for daring to defy them. Even now, she was sure if this new group of men caught up with her, they’d think she was one of the others and put her to work killing herself cooking meth.
She held her breath until the boots moved out of the doorway. Minutes passed before she heard the back door slam. She waited hours before she dared slide from underneath the bed. By then, afternoon had turned into evening and the sun had begun to set over north Arkansas. The front door was still padlocked. She’d have to slip out the back and hope to God no one saw her.
Where could she go? She was out of options…except for one.
He is here. Had the ghost meant her message as a warning or a promise? What if she’d always misinterpreted the message? She had feared him, dreaded his arrival, but what if the guy had actually come to help her? The man who had been coming had finally arrived. She’d already met him. Conked him on the head. Locked him in a shed.
Trouble was the man was a cop. But looking into his eyes she knew she could trust him. Or at least, trust him more than anyone else. Every instinct screamed that looks could be deceiving, but this guy…this guy was different. Too bad the ghost hadn’t told her in plain language why the man was searching for her.
She had a plan. Chelsea could go look for him, the one who had come to find her. She’d last seen him at Cooley’s house, but she’d first found him at Laurel Heights.
****
The meeting that Shaw had arranged at his abandoned catfish restaurant was laced with tension, about the topic of discussion and between the participants. Jordan Clark needed an organization chart to map out all the relationships around the table. Who loved whom? Who distrusted whom? Who had quit speaking to whom years ago? Who had decided to become friends again? The group was coming together and uniting whether they wanted to or not, and all because of the threat emanating from one man. The goal of their unsanctioned task force was to bring down the local crime boss, Fred Haskins.
Jordan was beginning to hate Haskins, and he’d never met the man.
The ringmaster of this circus was his senior partner with the Arkansas State Police, Shaw Bennett. Before the meeting started, Shaw had handed some documents over to Hill County Crime Scene Specialist, Josh McCord, and McCord had begun studying them with an intense absorption from the moment Bennett had placed the papers in his hands.
Jordan was only halfway listening to the debate going on around him. He took another sip of soda even though he was no longer thirsty. His eyes darted toward the documents in front of McCord, trying to read them without being obvious. How McCord could concentrate on the discussion and study the notes at the same time was a mystery to Jordan. McCord must have been a good multi-tasker. Jordan was a one-thing-at-a-time sort of guy.
Bennett had just dropped the bomb on them that Fred Haskins had been going to a cancer treatment center. Mitchell Grayson, the Hill County Sheriff’s Department lieutenant, who had recently been placed on leave of absence, snorted his contempt for Fred Haskins, cancer patient or not. “That old man invented mean. No sympathy here.”
Grayson’s girlfriend, Hill County Crime Scene Specialist Tori Downing, sputtered her opinion of his opinion. “Really, Gray? How can you be so—”
“So what, Tori? Cold?”
She leaned away from him and crossed her arms over her chest. A vein pulsed in her neck, a sure sign she was pissed off. “You’ve let your hatred for him change you.”
“No, I have not.”
Jordan tuned them out, not really interested in their interpersonal squabble. Lovers were strange creatures.
Then he saw the name Kristie. Right there on a list in front of Josh. The name James Standridge had been penciled at the top of the page. Standridge had been involved in the northwest Arkansas meth distribution network, but Standridge was dead, murdered by his partners in crime. The list comprised the names of women along with several dates noted by each name. The first date next to Kristie’s name was two days after Jordan’s sister had disappeared.
Jordan eased back in his chair, trying hard to keep his surging emotions in check. If he had to describe what he was feeling, he probably couldn’t have. Anger. Fear. Hope. Mixed in with a good amount of anxiety. His pulse surged with anticipation, that feeling he got when he knew he had figured out something important to breaking a case.
This time it was his sister’s missing person case.
What he had just seen changed everything. He had first come to Arkansas to find Kristie and ended up staying. In Josh McCord’s hands was the first lead he’d gotten on her whereabouts in years. He’d almost given up finding her. His heart raced at the thought of restarting the investigation into her disappearance. Could the Kristie on the list be his sister? Gut instinct told him that it was a strong possibility.
Kristie had last been spotted on the parking lot of a truck stop near Lafayette, Louisiana. A witness had seen two men force her into her car at gunpoint. The car was long gone before police arrived. After an intense search, the burned out shell of her dark gray Honda Civic was located months later at the end of a dirt track in a remote spot in north Arkansas. That’s when Jordan had moved to Little Rock and pursued a career in law enforcement.
Jordan’s thr
oat clogged with emotion. He rose from his chair, struggling to breath. He needed air. He needed to get away from other people and settle down. Control his emotions. Not let the others see his pain. He wasn’t yet ready to discuss Kristie or her disappearance, or to bring up the possibility that he knew one of the women on a list that had been in a murder victim’s possession.
He slipped out the side door, hoping Shaw Bennett wouldn’t comment on his departure.
****
Chelsea cranked the engine on Zeke’s beat up bright red Crown Vic. She wondered why the cops hadn’t taken his car yet. Maybe they didn’t know where to look for it. She’d last seen him get into a truck with Omar Cooley, so his car was still parked behind the house on Chelsea Lane. Like the dumbass he was, he’d left his keys in the ignition. He always thought no one would mess with someone as bad as he was. But he was dead, so someone had certainly messed with him.
She smiled, a grim little expression of intense pleasure at the thought of Zeke Richards suffering before he died a painful death. She didn’t know that he had. He could have died instantly, but she’d rather believe he struggled for his last breath.
She shoved the gear into reverse and backed out of the detached garage. When James hadn’t come home for a couple of days, she’d risked Zeke’s wrath and borrowed the car to drive out to Cooley’s house to look for James. It was a massive car and had the potential to draw attention. Something she didn’t want, but she didn’t have any other way to get out to Laurel Heights. She couldn’t hitch a ride. So this time she risked being pulled over for driving a dead man’s car.
When she’d last been at Laurel Heights, she’d heard the cops talking when they were doing their crime scene stuff after the lab exploded. Cooley had hidden one of his labs in a cave behind the house and something had made it go boom. The cops kept arguing about whether Zeke and Cooley were really dead. The tall cop wanted to get an earthmover and dig them out. The skinny cop said it was a waste of time and money.
Chelsea Lane (Haunted Hearts Series Book 5) Page 2