The eggs were burned and lacy around the edges with sunshine-soft yolks that made Marlene half-nauseous. He moved the gun off the table and shoved it into the front of his pants.
“Don’t get any funny ideas,” he said as he moved behind her and untied her right hand. She nearly sobbed with relief as she moved her hand to the top of the table, easing the ache of her shoulder.
He resumed his chair opposite hers and shook his head as he gazed at her swollen, rubbed-raw wrist. “You might as well not fight the ropes. I tie a mean knot. Now eat.” It was definitely more of an order than a request.
Marlene picked up the fork and cut into the egg, the yolk running the way she knew her blood would when he decided it was time for her to die. Why? Why was this happening? Why was she in this nightmare?
“Now we can talk,” he said as he tore off a piece of his toast and dipped it into his yolk. “A little conversation over a meal is nice.”
“Why am I here? Why do you want to kill me?” She set her fork back down.
“Not exactly pleasant conversation,” he said chidingly. “You’re not as smart as I thought you’d be. I thought you’d have it all figured out by now.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really confused,” she replied.
“You haven’t really done anything to me, but you’re an important piece of my revenge.” He tore off another piece of his toast.
“Revenge? For what?”
His pale blue eyes seemed to light with a fire from within. “For her. For Stacy.”
Stacy? What on earth did Steve’s ex-girlfriend have to do with any of this? Stacy had tried to kill Roxy in some obsessed notion that she and Steve could be together again.
“I’m sorry. I still don’t understand,” she said.
“She was mine,” Chopper replied. “I loved her, and once she finished up her business with her ex she and I were going to be happy together. We were going to be a real family, her and me and her kid.”
“But she tried to kill my sister. She wanted to be back with Steve,” Marlene replied.
Chopper slammed his fist down on the table and Marlene squealed at the unexpected force of his action. “Lies. All lies. I suppose that’s what the cops told you, but she just wanted to talk to Steve, give him a chance to pay up some child support and see his kid. She was mine and he killed her and now he has to pay.”
Marlene stared at him in horror as she realized that the “he” Chopper spoke of was Frank. It had been Frank who had killed Stacy. He’d been forced to shoot her an instant before she plunged a knife into Roxy’s chest.
“But what does all of this have to do with me?” she finally managed to ask. “I didn’t kill Stacy. I wasn’t even there when she was shot.”
“He loves you. He loves you just like I loved Stacy. He took Stacy away from me and now I’ve taken you away from him.”
Marlene stared at him and fought against the bubble of hysterical laughter that threatened to spill from her lips. “He doesn’t love me,” she protested.
Chopper narrowed his eyes. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He loves you all right, and he’s the reason you have to die. It took me four days before I found out what happened to Stacy. She left here to have a talk with her ex and I waited for her to come back for four days. Now Detective Delaney is going to wonder and worry about what happened to you for the next four days.”
“And after that?” Her heart beat painfully as the taste of terror coated the back of her throat.
“And then I’m going to kill you and leave your body someplace where he can find you. Now, eat up. I don’t like cooking for somebody who doesn’t appreciate my efforts.”
She grabbed a piece of toast, her mind trying to process everything she had learned. It was so ironic that this was all happening to her because Chopper believed Frank was in love with her.
The toast tasted like cardboard but she chewed and swallowed and washed down each bite with a drink of bitter coffee. Four days. She had four days to stay with the man who was going to kill her.
She tried to tell herself that at least that gave Frank and his team four days to find her, but there was little relief in this thought.
They’d all believed that it was about her. They’d investigated her life, her acquaintances, any issues she might have had with other people in town, and they’d come up with nothing. Because it had never been about her. It had always been about Frank.
And without knowing that, Frank and his team would be spinning their wheels, and the next time anyone would see her again, she’d be dead.
Four days they’d been given in hopes of saving Marlene’s life, and the first twenty-four hours passed in a flurry of activity that led nowhere.
It was seven the following morning after Marlene’s disappearance that Frank stumbled into his silent home and fell to the sofa in utter despair. She’d been gone for twenty-six or twenty-seven hours. The only hope he maintained at all was the mention of the four days in the note that had been left with her phone.
The phone had been checked out thoroughly. No fingerprints had been found and the last call that had been made had been to Frank.
Roxy and Sheri had rallied half the community to search for their sister, their eyes hollow and filled with the same kind of fear Frank knew radiated from his own.
He buried his head in his hands. He’d been sent home by Jimmy and Steve to get a couple hours of sleep, but sleep was the last thing on his mind. How could he rest when he knew she was out there somewhere? How could he sleep when he knew that she was in danger, that each tick of the clock brought her closer to death? If she wasn’t already dead.
He shook his head to dispel that horrible thought. She had to still be alive. The Avenging Angel had essentially given them, given her, four days before she’d die.
He closed his eyes and envisioned her wrapped in a pink bedspread. He wished there was some way he could send her the mental image, which he knew would bring her some form of comfort.
If she was still alive, did she know the countdown to her death had begun?
How frightened she must be. He couldn’t imagine the terror that had to be coursing through her body with each minute that ticked by.
Frank knew the taste of sorrow and the emptiness of loss, but not even his devastating experience with Grace had prepared him for the intensity of his emotions now.
Despite his intentions he must have fallen asleep, for when he opened his eyes again he was stretched out on the sofa and the afternoon light slivered in through a crack in the living-room curtains.
He jerked up, appalled that he’d been able to sleep while Marlene was still missing and in the hands of a killer. It took him only minutes to shower, change clothes and then head back to the station.
The minute he walked into the patrol room he knew that nothing had changed except Steve had nodded off at his desk and Jimmy wore his weariness on his features and in the slump of his shoulders. Everyone in the room appeared to be in a holding pattern, wearied and in recharge mode before beginning the search for answers once again.
As Frank sank down at his desk, Jimmy brought him a cup of coffee and a doughnut. “You weren’t down long,” he said as he sat in the chair in front of Frank’s desk.
Frank raked a hand through his hair and leaned back in his chair. “I can’t believe I went down at all. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but I did. I’m assuming there’s nothing new.”
Jimmy shook his head. “We’ve got boots on the ground searching every single building here in town. Joe and his team left for the mountain search hours ago and Jed called to see if we wanted to try his dogs from the place where we found the phone.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that ultimately it was your call, but my gut feeling is that Marlene was never in that house, and I think the dogs w
ouldn’t be able to find a scent to follow.”
Frank nodded, agreeing with Jimmy’s assessment. Dogs were good if they had a trail, but so far they had no idea where the perp might have taken Marlene. She could be in a mountain cabin or right here in town in somebody’s basement.
He believed the only way to find her was to figure out the motive. “There’s no question that whoever has taken her believes he’s been wronged in some way,” Frank said thoughtfully.
“Avenging Angel definitely implies whoever it is, is looking for some sort of retaliation or payback for something,” Jimmy agreed. “But we’ve been unable to find anyone who fits that criterion.”
“I know, but I think the key to this is figuring out the motive.” Frank took a bite of the doughnut, which tasted like sweet dust in his mouth. He ate it only because he knew he needed the sugar rush to stay on his feet, to keep him thinking clearly.
What he didn’t want to think about was what Marlene might be enduring at the hands of her captor. He couldn’t allow his brain to go there without delving into madness.
Once again Frank had the feeling that they were missing something, something important to the case, a piece of the puzzle that was staring them right in the face yet they couldn’t see it.
“I can’t shake the idea that we’re overlooking something important,” he said.
“If we are, I can’t imagine what it would be,” Steve said as he pulled up a chair to join them. “We’ve picked through Marlene’s life with a fine-tooth comb trying to figure out who might want to hurt her, and we’ve come up with nothing to go on.”
“Well, we’re not going to find her sitting around in here,” Frank said. He started to rise from his chair but Steve motioned him back down.
“We have teams out everywhere doing the legwork that’s necessary. If you really feel like we’ve missed something, then we need to go back to the beginning and figure out what it is,” Steve said. “Everything that can be done is being done to find her. The most important thing we can do now is put our heads together and figure out what we might have missed.”
Frank settled back in his chair, knowing that Steve was right. Crimes were often solved by brainstorming and speculation, and at this point he felt as though that was all they had left.
“Let’s start at the very beginning. The first thing that happened to screw up Marlene’s world was the break-in and trashing at her place,” Jimmy said.
“Which we know was done by Michael Arello,” Steve replied. “So no mystery there.”
Frank nodded thoughtfully and tried to ignore the burn of fear that lit his gut with an unrelenting intensity. “Then she got the first note.”
“‘Vengeance is mine,’” Jimmy said. “So we know at that point in time she’d apparently done something to somebody to tick him off enough for him to take action.”
Frank remembered the night she’d called him about the note. It had been the night after he’d decided to ask her out, to see if the feelings she evoked in him might be reciprocated. She’d shot him down on the dating thing...but so much had changed between them since that time.
“And then came the shooting at the store,” Steve said.
“And that’s bothered me since it happened.” Jimmy leaned back in his chair as Frank leaned forward. “I mean, of all the nights to attack Marlene, why would the perp pick that particular night when she had an armed detective at her side? Why not another night when she went out to her car alone and would be completely defenseless?”
Maybe that was what had been bothering Frank. The question was definitely a valid one. Why would the Avenging Angel attack Marlene when he was right by her side with a gun of his own? “I don’t know—maybe he couldn’t wait any longer to try to kill her. Maybe he figured with the cover of trees and the darkness of the night, my presence wouldn’t stop him from achieving his goal.”
“Or maybe those bullets weren’t necessarily meant for Marlene,” Steve said. He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just a thought.”
Frank considered Steve’s words. “But I didn’t get that first note. I’m not the one who is missing now.”
“I know there’s been something personal going on between you and Marlene,” Jimmy said. “It’s fairly obvious to anyone when the two of you are in the same room. Is it possible somebody else knows about your relationship with her and is going through Marlene to hurt you?”
Frank stared at Jimmy, trying to make sense of the idea that he might be the target in this whole mess. Was Marlene somehow just a tool to use to hurt him?
“Who would be so evil?” he asked softly. It was a rhetorical question, for he knew that none of them had the answer.
“I could be way off base here,” Jimmy said. “But maybe it’s a scenario we need to kick around.”
“Why would somebody want to hurt me? I haven’t had any problems with anyone except Michael Arello, and we’ve solved that issue.” Frank’s head spun with confusion.
Had they approached all of this from the wrong angle from the very beginning? Had the note delivered to Marlene actually been a message for him? Who was it? Who hated him so much that he would kill a woman whom Frank cared about?
He stared down at a copy of the latest note that they’d found with Marlene’s phone in the abandoned-cabin closet. Four days of hell and then I’ll return her back to you...dead.
He looked back up at his partners. “Four days. Why not two? Why not five? What’s the significance of four days? For that matter, if he wants to hurt me, why not just kill Marlene at Travis’s and have me find her dead there?”
Jimmy’s frown deepened. “You’re right. We have to assume that the four days is somehow important to him.”
Frank racked his brain, trying to think of why that particular number of days would have any importance to anyone.
Were they wasting time in even thinking that the true target might be him rather than Marlene?
“Four days,” Steve said. “That’s how long it was between the time that Stacy was killed and Tommy was brought to the station to me.”
Frank stared at him. “Are you sure?”
“Trust me, I’m positive. I lived those four days in agony, not knowing where Tommy was, afraid that Stacy had him so well hidden I’d never find him again. Then she was dead and couldn’t tell me where he was. I know it was four days before that guy brought him into the office and said Stacy and Tommy had been hanging out at his cabin.”
“I killed Stacy.” The words rang hollow as Frank remembered the torturous moment that he had to make a split-second decision to shoot Steve’s ex-girlfriend in order to save Roxy’s life. “I’m the one who shot her. ‘Vengeance is mine.’ ‘An eye for an eye.’ ‘Four days of hell...’” Frank’s voice trailed off as his head spun dizzily.
It suddenly all made a crazy kind of sense, and adrenaline sizzled through his veins as he stared at Steve. “The guy who brought Tommy in—what was his name?”
Steve frowned in concentration. “Chopper. He said his friends called him Chopper, but his real name is Chad something.”
“Pope. Chad Pope.” The name exploded into Frank’s head. “We need to find his place. He’d said Stacy and Tommy had been staying with him at his cabin. He’s the Avenging Angel. Apparently he cared for Stacy and he knows Marlene is important to me. He will kill her unless we find her.”
“I’ll find that cabin,” Jimmy said as he jumped out of the chair and hurried to his own desk. It took him only minutes to look up from his computer screen. “825 Beaver Creek Road. It’s about an hour from here.”
Together Frank, Jimmy and Steve headed toward the door. Frank’s nerves jangled through him, his tension on the verge of explosion. There was no doubt in his mind that they’d identified the guilty party. He was certain that Chad Pope was the Avenging Angel.
What he didn’t kno
w was, when they finally arrived at his house, would Marlene be there, and more important, would she still be alive?
Chapter 17
It was right after they’d eaten lunch that Chopper had left the house, telling Marlene that he needed to make a score and would be back sometime later.
Before he’d left, he’d untied her hands and legs and had allowed her to use the bathroom, although he’d stood in the open doorway with his back to her to make sure she didn’t try to escape.
In the few minutes she had in the tiny room, she’d looked around, desperate to find a razor blade or something she could use to cut the ropes when he retied her, but there had been nothing.
Still, when he’d retied her he’d appeared distracted and she’d noticed that the ropes didn’t feel quite as tight as they had before. Once he walked out the front door, she began to work at them, attempting to loosen her wrists from the binds.
She worked steadily, ignoring the excruciating pain of raw skin, unsure how much time she had before he returned. Beads of sweat welled up on her forehead and a sob caught in her throat as she continued to attempt to get free.
She finally had to stop and rest, the pain of her efforts too intense to continue. As she looked around frantically, trying to figure out another way, something that she could get to that could cut the ropes, she realized how close she was seated to the front window.
A glance outside showed her nothing but a gravel-and-dirt driveway and thick woods. She craned her neck and could see no other structure, no house or shed anywhere nearby.
The cabin was old enough that the window would be made of single-pane glass. The chair she was tied to had a high back. Was it possible she could break the glass enough to get a piece in her hand?
It was a long shot, but she was out of any other options and all too soon she would be out of time. She had no hope at all that Frank and his partners would be able to find her. She had no real connection with Chopper except in his sick, twisted mind.
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