Revenge is Sweet (A Samantha Church Mystery, Book 2)

by Betta Ferrendelli

  “I’ve never paid attention to any of this stuff before,” Sam said, her head down as she walked back to the desk. “I always thought everything else printed on the page was such a waste of good paper.”

  David looked in her direction. “That waste of good paper is going to tell us everything we need to know.”

  Sam reached her desk and turned the document in David’s direction so he could have a better look. “Is that the IP number right there?” Sam pointed to a set of numbers located about a quarter way down the page. David followed her finger.

  “Yep, that’d be it,” he said and pulled the document from her hand. “Let’s see who this puppy belongs to.”

  Sam stood next to David as he studied the e-mail more intently.

  “Looks like the kidnapper’s e-mail went through two other paths to get your address,” he said.

  The e-mail from Wilson’s kidnappers showed that the MSMail Priority was marked: Urgent. The X-Mailer was Microsoft Outlook Express, 6.0. The ‘To’ was Sam’s e-mail address and the Subject Line contained a single word: Revenge.

  Finally, David found what he was looking for. “Here’s the return path,” he said and tapped the piece of paper with his index finger.

  Sam leaned in closer. They both saw the contents:

  Return-Path:

  And that it was received from:

  “Who’s jgarcia?” David asked.

  Sam straightened and brought a hand to her lips and tapped several times, deep in thought. “jgarcia?” She repeated the name, her eyes watching the second hand speed around the clock. Can’t let time get away from me.

  Sam snapped her fingers when the thought came to her. “He’s the one who headed up the smuggling operation here,” Sam said, her voice excited and animated. “I’m sure of it. I think his first name is Juan. I remember some of the detectives working on the case saying that he had masterminded everything, but that bastard had managed to elude police capture after the article came out.”

  “Obviously,” David said.

  They both stared at the e-mail a moment in silence. David shook his head and tossed the document over Sam’s keyboard. He folded his hands over the top of his baseball cap. “I don’t know, Sam, the more I think about it, it more it seems like the guy, this Juan Garcia guy or whoever it is that’s behind this wanted you to see his name.” David shook his head in disbelief. “Personally, I think it’s just a trap to get you back.”

  Sam gave him a skeptical look. “David, if they wanted me back, they would’ve never let me go in the first place. In fact, I’m surprised I’m still alive. I don’t think that this Juan realized that we could track his name. Maybe he thought he was being anonymous sending that e-mail. Maybe he is as stupid as I am when it comes to computers and this e-mail thing. He’s a dirty, filthy drug dealer for Christ’s sake, not an IT professional.”

  David didn’t seem convinced. “For all we know that’s not even the guy’s real name … do you know how many Juan Garcia’s there are in this world? I think we should call the police.”

  Sam shook her head. “No, David, we can’t. I want to call them just as much as you do, but I told you we can’t do that now. You read the e-mail.”

  David was not convinced. “Sam, we can do this very quietly, not everyone at the Grandview PD has to know. There’s got to someone there you can still trust.”

  Sam shook her head. “Maybe there is, but I just can’t take that chance right now.”

  “We should at least try, Sam,” he countered. “If you think they’re going kill him anyway and this is all just for revenge then we may as well go all out. What do we have to lose?”

  They studied each other intently in silence, before Sam shook her head again. “David, please, let’s just keep this between us a little while longer.”

  Sam closed her eyes. When she opened them David was staring at her intently, his brown eyes a shade darker, his hands still firmly clasped over his head. Waiting for her next move.

  “I remember the detectives taking me by a house that the drug dealers had been using to manufacture methamphetamines,” Sam said, her voice a mixture of frustration, irritation and weariness. “It looked like just like a normal house on a normal residential street, but built beneath it, David, was a room probably no more than eight feet by twelve or something small like that. It contained everything you could imagine to make meth, from battery acid to aspirins.”

  “I remember you telling me about the smell,” David said and nodded.

  The look on Sam’s face soured as if the scent had returned. “It smelled absolutely awful. Like cat urine. I remember Wilson saying something to me about the smell after we were kidnapped and still being held together.” Sam had a burst of energy and hope that made her want to jump out of her skin. “That’s where Wilson is I’m sure of it. David we’ve got to find him.”

  He put a hand over her wrist. “This isn’t something we’re just going to go ahead and do on our own, Sam. Doing something foolish will get everyone killed. We’ve been patient this long, like you said, so we need to be a little while longer.” David glanced up to the white-faced clock on the wall. “It’s nearly one o’clock. Can we be levelheaded on this, Sam? We lose it now and something could happen to Wilson. You’ve got to be exhausted from your trip and everything that’s happened. Let’s get some sleep and we’ll talk to Nick first thing in the morning.”

  Sam shrunk back from David’s touch. She sat down in her chair, resting her hand on top of her desk to steady herself. She didn’t want to admit it, but David was right. He folded the paper with the kidnapper’s e-mail in half and handed it to Sam. She took it and opened her middle drawer to place it inside. When she did, she let out a shriek and pushed her chair away from the desk so hard that she crashed into David’s chair.

  “Sam! What!” he said.

  “They … they’ve been in my desk drawer, too! Get it the hell out of there,” Sam said in a halting voice.

  David rose hesitantly from his chair and looked cautiously inside Sam’s middle desk drawer. “My God,” he said.

  “David, no, I don’t want to look at it,” Sam said and she turned her head away from the desk. She held her breath and didn’t watch as David went to reach inside her desk drawer. He pulled out a Barbie doll made to look like Sam. The doll’s hair was colored the same light ash blonde as Sam’s and shaped in her style. The doll stood erect with only its right arm slightly raised upward. In the neck was a razor blade, blood oozing down the doll’s neck and covering the top she wore. David looked again in the desk for a note that might have accompanied the doll. He found one. Holding the look-alike Barbie in his left hand, he opened the letter folded in half and in half again. The text was written in simple block letters without punctuation:

  it will be your turn soon

  “Get that thing away from me, David,” Sam said. “I don’t want to ever see it again.”

  “No, Sam, we can’t do that. We need to keep it as evidence.” David lowered his hand to hide the doll partially behind his left leg. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Sam rose from her chair and reached for her jacket. The blood in her veins turned to ice as a chill flooded through her. She shivered involuntarily. When Sam lifted her jacket off the desk, the box wrapped in the brown paper stared back at both of them.

  Sam and David eyed each other, sharing the same sickening thought. Sam felt like her knees were about to buckle. She grabbed onto the back of her chair for support. David squinted. Neither moved.

  “It’s from them,” he said and swallowed hard. “It has to be.”

  Sam nodded, keeping her eyes fixed on the box. Anne’s yellow sticky note, placed in the center of the package stood out, taunting them. The room was so quiet that they could hear the sound of the second hand sweeping around the white-faced clock.

  “Do you want me to open it?” David asked, looking at Sam.

  Sam drew a deep b
reath and thought for a long moment, wondering as fear churned in her stomach, what could be worse than seeing a Barbie doll in your likeness whose throat had been slit with a razor blade? “Go ahead,” she muttered.

  David took the box in his hand and began to unwrap it nervously. He worked slowly, pulling away one piece of tape at a time until finally the white box was exposed. He placed the wrappings on the desk.

  He adjusted his ball cap firmly on his head, the bill covering his eyes. He opened the box, setting the lid over the brown crumpled paper. The contents were folded in white tissue, as if the package had been wrapped in a department store. He looked up and saw that Sam had her attention fixed on him, not the package. As he started to move the tissue, he noticed his hands were shaking. He bit his bottom lip, his gaze adverted slightly as he exposed the contents of the box.

  “What is it, David?” Sam asked, a fear welling so great in her she could hardly breathe.

  It was a pair of mannequin hands. A left and a right. Each stopped at the wrist.

  “Pull it out, David,” Sam said. “I want to see what kind of assholes we’re dealing with.”

  David shook his head, feeling slightly nauseous. “You don’t want to know.”

  At Sam’s insistence, David reached in the box and pulled out the hands. He raised them to eye level and stared at Sam.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  “This is what we’re dealing with, Sam,” he said.

  Sam squeezed her forehead hard between her fingers. She kept her attention fixed on David, standing on the other side of her desk. The second hand on the white-faced clock made another full sweep. “Is there a note?” she asked finally.

  David set the hands on the chair and moved the tissue around in the box. He found an index card. The words had been written as simply as the message that came with the Barbie doll.

  What would you do, Samantha Christine, without the use of your hands? This is what happens to bad people when they write stories on their computer that they shouldn’t … it is only a matter of time … soon you will know what it is like to be ‘cut off’ from your livelihood …

  “Is Christine your middle name?” David asked after reading the message out loud.

  Sam nodded wordlessly and eased herself into the chair he had pushed to her desk. She took a deep breath to calm herself. “Let’s get out of here,” she said finally.

  “Do you want me to follow you home?” David asked and he was almost whispering.

  Sam shook her head and mumbled something he could not understand. “What’s that?” he asked.

  She shook her head again and waved him off as if to say never mind. Instead she said, “I want to find Wilson and put these bastards in prison where they can rot the rest of their miserable lives away.”

  David felt the Barbie doll and gripped it hard and he tried to avoid looking at the mannequin hands. He felt sick to his stomach. “We need to do something with this stuff,” he said. “The police will want to see what we have here. We probably should’ve kept our hands off everything.”

  Sam snorted. “Oh, I’m sure they thought to use Latex gloves. Or maybe not. Maybe they don’t give a shit if the police know who they are. Once they do away with Wilson and me, they’ll disappear without a trace anyway, go off to a fancy yacht somewhere to enjoy their millions. It’s how those kinds of people operate anyway. They’ll slit your throat without batting an eye and laugh while they’re doing it.”

  “Right,” David said and put the doll in the box with the mannequin hands and headed toward his desk. “I am going to keep these in my bottom drawer.”

  He put the contents in his desk and headed for the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Sam asked.

  “To your car,” David called over his shoulder. “We’ll want to play the tape for Nick in the morning.”

  He returned to Sam’s desk minutes later. She sat lifeless, staring straight ahead lost in thought on what their next move should be, her hand resting lightly on the jacket over her lap. He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Want me to drive you home?”

  “No, David, I’m fine. This really pisses me off.”

  Sam stood and pushed her shoulders square. “They’re not going to defeat me.” She put her jacket on. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll tell Nick everything in the morning and then somehow come up some kind of a game plan.”

  Sam followed David up stairs and waited while he reprogrammed the alarm. They walked to their cars, letting a mixture of rain and snow collect on their clothes.

  Twenty-one

  Wilson could not get comfortable. He felt it had been days since he had slept and guessed it was probably due to a combination of hunger, the dull ache in his left shoulder blade and the pain from his broken nose. The thin mattress on the cold floor didn’t help. Every bone and muscle in his body felt like it was full of arthritis.

  He had to go to the bathroom. Trying to sleep anymore was useless. He groaned heavily as he managed to lift himself to a sitting position. He looked at his wrist again and wondered which of his kidnappers had taken his watch, an Omega, one he’d had for years. He tapped his wrist several times wishing his watch were there. He broke the deep, slumbering silence surrounding him with a booming laugh. He found it ironic that whenever he went on vacation he made it a point to put his watch in the suitcase and turn the clock in his hotel room toward the wall. He had no desire to know the time of day when he was on vacation. He had lived his professional life working against the clock on deadline after deadline. When he had a chance not to have to live by the clock, he simply made it a point not to.

  Since he had been abducted, he had lost count of the times he had glanced toward his wrist wondering what hour of the day or night it was. He had no way of keeping track of time; no way of knowing how many hours had passed since he woke and Sam was gone. He looked toward the crack in the wall. Nothing. He felt his wrist where his watch should be and guessed it was dark outside, probably two or three in the morning.

  It would be a few hours before Fuzz Face or the twins would come with food and to take him to the bathroom. Both would be welcomed. The wait would be an eternity. But Wilson would not focus on that. Instead he was going to continue planning his escape.

  The last several times his captors had come with food or to take him to the bathroom, it had only been one of them—but not Fuzz Face or the twins. A new person Wilson had never seen before. A shrimpy little guy that Wilson towered over. He was Latino like the twins, but had the whitest hair that Wilson had ever seen. It was so white that it made the little man’s skin seem almost black.

  To Wilson’s surprise, the white-haired man was more careless than Fuzz Face or the twins when they came into the room. Wilson was so much taller that he had to stay seated so the little man could put the hood over his head. Then Wilson had made it a point to rise quickly after the hood was on, forcing the little man to scramble and only loosely tie the hood. Wilson could keep his head down when he walked to see the floor.

  He had counted the paces toward the bathroom. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Just like that. Just that easy. He knew from turning his head slightly that to the left of the bathroom there was another door. He didn’t know if it led to the outside and freedom, but his captors had to enter from somewhere. Wilson was willing to take that chance.

  He had to get to Samantha before Juan did. He knew by now that she must have received the tape, the Barbie Doll and the mannequin hands. Juan had brought them to the small room and showed Wilson. He could see him turning the Barbie doll around with his pencil fingers, laughing when he looked at Wilson with his dead dark eyes and told him what he had planned to do.

  It had been the only time that Wilson lost his composure. He lunged at Juan, almost reaching him before he was whacked hard in the shoulder by the butt of one of the twin’s gun. The blow stunned him and he collapsed to the ground, falling heavily on his knees.

  The next day
when the kidnappers entered the room, they came equipped to make the tape. Another painful experience for Wilson. When Wilson refused to talk into the microphone, Fuzz Face slapped him hard across the face. Wilson couldn’t help himself and cried out in pain. His nose immediately started to bleed. Large drops of blood ran down his lips and fell on his shirt. He raised his hands, which were handcuffed, and wiped the blood away from his mouth, staring intently at Fuzz Face.

  “Are you ready to talk now?” one of the twins asked.

  When Wilson refused again, the twins jerked him up from the chair he was sitting in and Fuzz Face kneed him directly in the groin. Wilson grunted in pain and dropped hard to the floor. He grimaced, holding himself.

  Juan had been standing at the door, watching. He came into the room. He looked down at Wilson on the floor curled inward. Juan placed his boot against his shoulder and pushed him over. Wilson landed on his back, his breathing labored. “We can keep this up all day and come back tomorrow and the day after and the day after, Mr. Cole,” Juan said and fished his cigarettes from an inside pocket. “Or we can get this over with right now.” Wilson was in no condition to put up more of a fight. He did as he was instructed.

  In the dark, with nothing but the sound of his own breathing to keep him company, he regretted giving in to make the tape and lunging at Juan when he saw the Barbie doll. He did not want them to see his weaknesses. But when it came to Sam, he knew he would do whatever it took to defend and protect her. The thought made him laugh; a hollow, tinny sound that carried in the darkness. He was hardly in any shape to protect a kitten much less the life of a woman for whom, as much as he wanted to deny it, he had deep feelings for, deeper than Sam would ever know.

  Wilson could not underestimate the white-haired man, however. Size is no true indication of strength, and he knew that. Though he was in no real condition to put up much of a fight, he was banking on one thing: The element of taking his diminutive captor by surprise. One good swift kick in the balls is all it’s gonna take.