If Lola had a problem trying to seduce men when she needed help, then he had a problem of trying to seduce women when they needed help.
And, well, that didn’t sound like a situation that was going to work out very well between the two of them, did it?
Shit.
Well, he wouldn’t see her. He’d stay away from her.
He could do that.
He really could.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tanya Laird propped open the door so that she could hear if the music kicked off. She was always afraid that would happen, that there would be dead air. Then the station manager would hear and call her and demand to know what was going on.
Tanya had three shows per week on the campus radio station, and this was the third. She was a communications major, and she desperately wanted to be a radio DJ, so she’d taken every open slot that no one else wanted. Two of her spots were at normal times, one in the afternoon on Sundays and one around seven on Tuesdays. But she had two late night shifts as well. She was working one of them now. It was Thursday, and she did the last live show, from one in the morning until two. After two o’clock, the radio clicked over to automated programming until around ten the next day. So, she was the last person at the radio station on Thursday nights. And she was the only person in the building.
She propped the door open for two reasons, actually. One was because she needed to hear the music. If the song went off before she’d finished her cigarette, she’d have to rush back in and press play on the next piece of music. The other reason was that the door would lock if she closed it, and she’d never be able to get back in.
Security came around and locked up the building around nine. The radio station was housed in the bottom of the English building, and there were no more classes after that time of night. The station manager and a few other students with paid positions had keys, but they didn’t give them to all of the DJs. So that meant that the last DJ let the next DJ in, and so on. When Tanya left later on, she’d close the door after herself, and everything would be locked up tight until the next morning.
She found that she actually liked doing the late night radio shows. There was something about being all alone in the building that was very relaxing. She could speak into the microphone, and it felt as though she was talking to herself. But her voice was being transmitted over the airwaves, and perfect strangers could hear her. There was something very cool about that.
And there was something very cool about getting to learn by doing. Instead of sitting in some stuffy classroom, listening to someone lecture on and on about how to run a radio station, she actually got to do it. She got to be part of the operation of a real, working radio station. And she loved it.
She was pretty sure she could be happy doing this for the rest of her life.
Tanya peered up at the night sky. It was a clear, cold night. The stars shone brightly, even through the street lamps on campus. She watched as the smoke from her cigarette climbed lazily into the darkness.
When she got back in, she was going to play another song, and then she’d do a backsell, explaining which songs she’d had on before. She wanted to say something witty and interesting when she did it, but she couldn’t think of anything.
She smoked, considering the names of the bands she’d been playing. Could she make a little joke about any of them? Were there any puns or double entendres to pull out?
Someone was walking up the sidewalk.
Tanya ignored him. There weren’t lots of students wandering around at this time of night, but there were always a few. To most college students, one-thirty in the morning was equivalent to eight in the evening for normal people.
The person stopped. “Excuse me.”
Tanya turned to look at him. He was really tall, with huge shoulders. He had short-cropped hair. And she was pretty sure he was too old to be a typical college student. “Um, hi.”
“You alone?” he said.
What kind of question was that? Tanya felt fear splinter through her, a hot spike up her spine. She stepped backwards, moving the prop out of the door. She didn’t care if she was being rude to this guy. She had a feeling that she needed to get away from him. Now.
The guy moved forward. He was baring his teeth in something like a grin. “You are, aren’t you?”
The door was stuck. Tanya struggled with it.
The man closed the distance between them. “I’m Nick. What’s your name?”
Tanya swallowed. “Why don’t you just back off, okay?” Her voice quivered.
Nick grabbed her by the arm.
“Let go of me,” said Tanya. “I’ll scream.”
Nick tugged her against his body. He slapped a hand over her mouth.
Tanya tried to scream anyway, but her cry was muffled against his fingers.
And now his other hand was at her neck, pushing in all the wrong places.
Everything was starting to get hazy for Tanya. In the distance, she could hear that the song she’d played was ending. Dead air was hissing through the speakers.
And then everything faded out.
*
Tanya woke up in the backseat of a moving car. She sat straight up. She could see the back of Nick’s head. And now she thought she remembered something. She didn’t spend a lot of time paying attention to the news. She had too much going on with classes and the radio station and her social life. But she thought she’d seen something about a guy who’d escaped from jail. And he’d already killed another girl that went to the college.
But he’d taken her from someplace else, someplace near her apartment, where she’d been running. Not from campus.
“You awake?” said Nick. “You were out for longer than I thought you’d be. Maybe I pushed too hard.”
“Let me go,” she said. “Let me go. I won’t say anything about this to anyone, I swear. I’ll just go home. You can just stop the car and let me out.”
He was going to kill her. She just knew it.
Actually, screw it. What was she thinking? She’d open one of the doors and hurl herself out—
It was a two-door. The only doors were in the front. She was trapped back here.
Her breath started to come faster and faster. What was she going to do?
“Can’t let you go,” said Nick.
She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t find any tears. “Please. Please, I won’t tell anyone. I promise. I won’t.”
“Are you going to keep talking like that, because if you are, I’m going to have to pull over and shove something in your mouth.”
She pressed her lips together. Okay, she’d be quiet.
Or should she do what he said? If he didn’t want her to talk, was that because it made it hard for him to want to hurt her? She’d seen Silence of the Lambs. Killers didn’t like it when you told them about your life, right? They needed to see you as an object, not a person.
Of course, it hadn’t really worked in Silence of the Lambs, had it? No, it wasn’t like Buffalo Bill had come out and said, “Sure, senator, I realize the error of my ways. I’ll let your daughter go.”
She stared out the window, trying to figure out where she was. They were on a back road, maybe somewhere down by the river. It was dark outside, so it was tough to tell.
Anyway, someone would figure out she was gone, because there was no music on the radio. The station manager…
But maybe not either. The station manager didn’t listen to the radio all the time. Sometimes he had to sleep. Of course, maybe he was listening. And if he was, the first thing he’d do would be to call her—
Her phone!
Was back in the radio station. She’d left everything inside. She hadn’t taken it out with her to smoke.
Shit.
So, he’d call her, and then get no answer, and he’d… What? Would he call the police?
No, he probably wouldn’t. He’d call someone else, or else he’d go down to the station himself to turn on the automated system. And then maybe he’d find
her stuff, and then maybe he’d realize that something was wrong and call the police.
God, she could be dead by then.
Again, she wanted to cry but couldn’t.
She put the heels of her hands to her eyes and pushed. Think, think, think. You have to get away from him.
But the car was stopping now, pulling over into a field.
Nick turned around in the front seat. He was smiling. “Well, here we are.”
She shook her head. “No. No, don’t. Please don’t.”
Nick pulled a phone out of his pocket. He dialed some numbers and put it on speaker phone.
Tanya could hear it ring. “Who are you calling?” she asked in a tiny voice.
“Oh, just the asshole that stole my girlfriend,” said Nick.
Someone picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Hello, Sam,” said Nick.
“Shit,” said Sam.
“I’ve got someone else to introduce you to. Say hello.” Nick nodded at her.
She choked.
“Well, go on,” said Nick. “How else is he supposed to know that anyone’s here with me?”
“Help me,” she rasped. And now, suddenly, she could cry. Fat tears started rolling down her cheeks.
“I want to talk, Sam,” said Nick.
“I’m calling the police,” said Sam. He hung up.
Nick glared at the phone. “What? He can’t do that.” He turned to Tanya. “That fucker cannot do that.” Nick dialed again on the phone.
The call went directly to voicemail.
Nick’s nostrils flared. “Well, if that’s the way he wants to play it.” He yanked a gun out and pointed it at Tanya.
Tanya shook her head, tears flowing faster. “No. No, please.” She could see into the barrel of the gun, and inside, there was only darkness. “You can’t. Please, I’m not…” She wasn’t ready to die. There were too many things she hadn’t done. Hell, she was still technically a virgin, since she didn’t think it counted if you and a guy both had your underwear on, even if he sort of went inside her anyway. “Please don’t.”
But Nick pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sam was pacing. “I shouldn’t have hung up. Maybe if I hadn’t hung up, I could have stopped him somehow. I could have talked to him. I could have saved that girl.”
“You did the right thing,” said Cross, who was leaning against the wall in the police station. “You did what I told you to do. I told you to call as soon as he called you again. He’d already shown us that he had no respect for human life, and that he was prepared to kill no matter what. Talking to him on the phone only gives him more of what he wants.”
“But that girl…”
“We had no idea where he was. There was no way we could have found him in time.”
“Even though her body was in a place nearby the other one?”
“Well, we had no way of knowing that. And it wasn’t all that similar. They were probably seven miles apart,” said Cross. “We wouldn’t have known to look there if someone hadn’t heard a shot down by the river and been paranoid enough to call it in. Generally, that wouldn’t happen. Lot of hunting goes on out there.”
“But he’s staying in the same place, though. That’s something.”
“It is,” said Cross. “We’ve got people all over the area. If he’s out there, we’re going to find him. He’s being pretty sloppy. It’s amazing we haven’t caught him thus far. Look, I want to ask you something.”
Sam stopped pacing. “I told you everything I know. Hell, I barely even talked to him.”
“No, this is a more general sort of question. You’ve done some research into Todd’s life, right?”
“A little bit.”
“Well, does he have any ties to this area? I know that the murders took place further away, down the panhandle.”
“Yeah, Keyser’s a good two hours from Shepherdstown,” said Sam.
“Well, have any of his friends relocated to the Shepherdstown area?”
“No. The ones I talked to still lived in Keyser. I certainly don’t know of anyone living around here.” Sam rubbed his forehead. “But this is where they came, he and Lola. They took Route 50 down to Winchester. That’s where he killed the hitchhikers. Then they went up I-81. The woman who worked at the gas station was right outside of Martinsburg. Maybe he has fond memories of killing people around here.”
“But nobody around here that would be sympathetic to him.”
Sam shook his head. “Not that I know of. Why?”
“It’s only that I’m beginning to suspect he’s got someone helping him. Possibly someone who caused the car crash that allowed him to get away from the police officers and possibly someone who’s helping him now. Hiding him. Feeding him. It doesn’t seem like he should be able to be this brazen and evade capture on his own.”
“I really wouldn’t have any idea. I’m sorry I can’t help.”
“Well, if you think of anyone, you let me know.”
“Of course.”
*
Rachel Fletcher didn’t like it when it got too cold in her apartment. It reminded her too much of all the times that she’d been too cold in the basement when she’d been kidnapped. She liked to keep the temperature at a balmy seventy-five degrees, no matter how cold it was outside. This wouldn’t have been a problem normally, except that she didn’t have a thermostat in her own apartment that she could control. The whole building was kept at the same temperature through a master set of controls. And the temperature that they kept it at was always too cold.
So, Rachel had bought herself space heaters. She had one in every single room, and when she was planning to go from one room to another, she would pop into the room, turn on the space heater, and then wait until it warmed up to go spend time in the room.
But that morning, the space heater in the living room had broken.
Now she could make do by dragging the space heater from the bedroom into the living room, but that was cumbersome and annoying. What she wanted was another space heater.
She could order one online, and it would be delivered to her house within three to five business days.
That didn’t help now.
If it had been a few years ago, she could have simply called her father, and he would have had a new space heater brought right over to her.
But last year, her father had died.
Rachel hadn’t even managed to make it to the funeral. She got terrified every time that she left the house, and so she never did. Nearly everything she needed could be ordered online. She did have to walk into the hallway to dump her trash down the hallway chute, but other than that, she didn’t have to leave at all.
She missed her father.
She had a younger brother who managed the family estate and made sure that she got money every month. But he was less than charitable about her little quirks. She could just imagine what would happen if she called Griffith now and asked if he could get someone to bring over a space heater.
Griffith would tell her to go on her own. Or he’d tell her that her apartment was perfectly warm on its own. She didn’t need a space heater. Maybe he’d tell her both. Maybe he’d lecture her about her electric bill.
So, she didn’t call Griffith.
But she began to feel more and more perturbed.
She didn’t like dragging the space heater around, and she was beginning to feel as if she couldn’t even spend time in her own living room.
Rachel hated that.
So, she perched on her bed in her bedroom, thinking about how problematic it was.
See, she wanted to go into the living room. But if she took the space heater out of the bedroom, it would get cold in here. If she went into the living room after she plugged the space heater in, it would be cold out there.
In the interim periods of time when the space heater was being moved, the entire house was too cold.
She wrapped her arms around herself, and even to her own mind, she
thought she was far too thin.
She needed to eat more.
But she really couldn’t stand eating.
She lay back on the bed and cursed the kidnappers who had ruined everything for her. If they hadn’t screwed with her head so badly, maybe she wouldn’t be such a freak. Maybe she’d be able to have a normal life like other people. She could leave her house and not worry about the cold and eat more.
It was all their fault.
They’d done this to her.
All for money.
Once Rachel had gone to a therapist who’d told her that she could reclaim her life by facing her fear.
But Rachel didn’t think she could handle doing that. She couldn’t face things like cold, or eating, or leaving the apartment. She was fairly sure she would fall apart, that she would completely lose her mind.
Rachel had stopped going to that therapist and had switched to going to someone else who simply gave her medicine and listened to her talk while making sympathetic noises.
And, of course, when she said “gone to” a therapist, what she really meant was that the therapist had come to visit her. Because Rachel didn’t leave her apartment.
Sometimes she would look out her window, down the three stories to the sidewalk beneath her. She’d see people walking around. Those people weren’t afraid. Rachel envied them and despised them.
And in some ways, she despised herself. She wanted to have the courage to face the badness, to go through her worst fears and come out on the other side, safe and sound.
But she didn’t.
She couldn’t.
She really didn’t think she could anyway.
But maybe…
Rachel took a deep breath. She got off the bed and took determined strides into the living room.
There was no space heater out here, and it was cooler than the rest of the house. She wasn’t sure how cool, of course, but she knew it wasn’t as warm as it had been in her bedroom.
Her heart began to beat quickly. She began to think about being stuck down in that cold, dank basement, terrified that the men above her were going to swoop down at any second and kill her. Terrified that they’d do it before she got thin enough to fit through that window. Her breath quickened.
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