Books by Jane Haseldine
THE LAST TIME SHE SAW HIM
DUPLICITY
WORTH KILLING FOR
YOU FIT THE PATTERN
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
YOU FIT
THE PATTERN
JANE HASELDINE
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Jane Haseldine
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2018912507
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1098-7
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: April 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1099-4 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 1-4967-1099-1 (e-book)
To my agent, Priya Doraswamy, constant advocate,
pitchwoman extraordinaire, super cool soul sister, dispenser
of excellent parenting advice. And friend.
CHAPTER 1
Heather Burns coiled her perfectly highlighted blond hair into a tight bun and frowned as she gave her face a brutal inspection in the mirror of her parked yellow Range Rover.
Dissatisfied with her appearance, Heather pulled the skin back from the corners of her jawline and took in the wistful reminder of what she used to look like when age meant nothing because the onset of its ravages hadn’t yet struck.
God, getting older really was the ultimate bitch, the thirty-nine-year-old thought, and scanned the empty parking lot of Mayberry State Park in Northville, a suburb of Detroit, where she and her teenage daughter, Carly, lived.
Heather gave up on her face momentarily and spun around to the backseat to make sure she remembered the four FIND YOUR NEW HOME HERE! signs dotted with cheerful red-house emojis for her nine AM open house, her day’s next order of business after her early-morning run. Satisfied when she spotted the signs poking out from underneath her briefcase, Heather took to the rearview mirror to resume her search for any new wrinkles.
She needed new headshots for her latest batch of business cards and beat her French-manicured fingernails against the dashboard as she fretted over the stone-cold fact that a pretty face sold more houses and raked in bigger commissions. She had learned early on that looking good was a job requirement for a successful Realtor. And Heather had already bore catty witness to a younger crop of thinner and blonder girls already jockeying at her RE/MAX office for a chance to snag her clients.
Heather dug her hand deep inside her bag and retrieved a business card her friend had given her over drinks at a downtown Detroit bar during a recent girls’ night out. Heather studied the phone number on the card and recalled how her friend swore to her with the enthusiasm of an infomercial host that if Heather just made an appointment, she’d feel so much better about herself. Presto chango, renewed self-esteem courtesy of a couple syringes of Botox and assorted fillers stuck in her face.
Heather tossed the card back in her bag and decided she’d stick with her crow’s-feet. At least for now.
The sharp bite of the early-October Michigan morning hit Heather as she exited the Range Rover and she began to shiver. Heather worked through her usual series of stretches and felt a renewed pang of guilt for giving Carly a new phone. Her daughter had ultimately worn her down, complaining about the sheer humiliation of being the only person in her group that had a flip phone. Carly had hammered home the injustice that even elementary-school kids had iPhones, and there she was, a ninth grader, forced to use a relic.
Carly was a good girl, a straight-A student, and a solid athlete who excelled on her county-rec baseball and soccer league teams, despite the grenade Heather’s dad had thrown into their lives after he walked out on his family to take up with a pharmaceutical sales rep he met at his physician’s practice. After her ex had bailed on his latest weekend with Carly, Heather had caved on the phone as some sort of half-baked consolation prize to make her daughter feel better.
She was sure her good girl would never abuse the privilege of the phone. But three weeks later, Heather soon learned that phones with cameras, where images could be quickly snapped and texted to boys or girls who fluidly changed their allegiance of friendship in a teenage hormonal nanosecond, were dangerous toys, not modern-day commodities for kids to communicate.
One stupid slip of judgment and the selfie of Carly in her underwear had spread like wildfire around the school. But Heather would make it right. She hated confrontation and usually choked under pressure, her voice melting into a quaking stutter when she had to face down a hostile encounter. But this was for her little girl, so Heather had made an appointment to talk to the principal after the open house.
Moms would go to any length for their kids.
A cool gust of wind sent the fall leaves scattering like a swirl of bright copper pennies across the ground. Heather ignored her chattering teeth and took a quick glance at her watch: 6:00 AM. Her Range Rover was still the only car in the parking lot. But Heather wasn’t worried about running alone. The park was an old friend, one that she had discovered during her sophomore year of high school when she first ran track. A sad smile played on her lips as she recalled the state record she set senior year for the eight-hundred-meter race, a crowning residual jewel she sometimes pulled out as a reminder of a time when she believed the world was brimming with endless possibilities just waiting for her with a beckoning hand.
Glory days, baby.
Heather’s feet found their pace as she started her run. She completed her first loop around the lake, the one-mile mark of her four-mile run, and pushed herself faster and harder for her second round.
Running for Heather was like meditation. Her mind was usually clear of any worries or regrets when she ran, and the sound of her sneakers slapping against the pavement was a soothing white noise, a temporary respite from memories of her last date with her ex-husband who announced over a plate of shared pasta puttanesca that he wanted a divorce.
She discovered later that his new lady was at the restaurant waiting for him, watching the scene unfold from a seat at the bar.
Heather felt the tears come, but she forced herself not to cry. She was fine. Just fine.
The sun crested its way up to the top of the tree line and Heather checked her watch again: 6:45. Time to head home for a quick shower and to make Carly lunch before she went to school. Heather slowed her pace to a
fast walk and made her way back to the empty parking lot, where she spotted another vehicle cutting around the corner, breaking her solitude.
As the car got closer, Heather could see that it was an older-model tan Buick driven by a gray-haired woman, who gave Heather a quick, friendly wave with a mittened hand as she passed. The Buick stopped at the other end of the park by the duck pond, where Heather frequently saw a group of people from the senior center do tai chi.
Heather did her usual routine and headed to the public restroom before she left the park. She always downed a large bottle of water before she ran, so the women’s room was her final stop before her twenty-minute car ride home.
The door to the women’s room creaked as she opened it. Heather hurried inside, grabbed a handful of brown paper towels from a dispenser near the sink so she wouldn’t have to touch the icky bathroom door handle, and entered the stall closest to the door.
Heather began to come up with her strategy on how she could steady her nerves during her meeting with Carly’s principal, when the bathroom door opened, the rough screak, screak, screak of its hinges sounding like a rusty nail being dragged across the floor.
Plodding footsteps thumped past Heather and then a stall door banged shut on the far side of the room.
Heather flushed the toilet with the toe of her sneaker and approached the sink. She did a quick look in the mirror and saw the reflection of someone’s feet planted underneath a stall. The wearer had on a set of black orthopedic shoes and tan pantyhose that poked out from the elastic bottom of a pair of gray sweatpants, the outfit likely belonging to the older lady in the Buick, Heather figured.
Heather finished washing her hands and decided to slip a note in Carly’s lunch box before she left for work, letting her daughter know she loved her and that everything was going to be all right. Something along the lines of, “I know this all seems terrible now, but it will be okay. I promise.”
“Oh no,” a woman’s voice creaked. Heather turned to see a roll of toilet paper drop onto the floor from inside the occupied stall and then make a slow crawl in her direction, the tissue unwinding in a wide strip until it abruptly stopped and landed on its side next to the garbage can.
Heather started to move to the door, thinking she had to hurry if she was going to get Carly to school on time, but stopped when she realized she needed to do the right thing.
“Are you okay?” Heather asked.
“Just old age,” the woman answered with a dry laugh. “I have arthritis and my hands don’t work as well as they used to. Can you hand me the roll if it’s not a bother?”
“Sure,” Heather said. Something in the woman’s voice niggled in the back of Heather’s head, but she quickly moved on to the upcoming open house, hoping to God she’d get some actual prospects instead of the neighborhood looky-loos who usually showed up.
She carefully picked up the toilet paper, thinking how gross the outer layer was, since it rolled its way across God knows what was teeming on the gray cement floor. She wound a few loops of tissue off until the spots of wetness and dirt were gone and then shoved the wad of soiled tissue into the garbage.
“Here you go,” Heather said. She bent down and reached her hand up under the woman’s stall.
“Thanks so much, Miss Burns.”
The thin chime of a warning bell went off inside Heather over the sound of her name being spoken so intimately by the stranger.
Heather tried to quickly retract her arm from under the stall door, but the vise grip of an unseen hand latched itself around her wrist.
“Hey! What is this?” Heather cried out. “Let go!”
The lady was senile, she had to be, Heather reasoned as she fought to keep her balance from her crouched position and free her hand, figuring the old woman inside the stall would be no match for her. Heather reared backward to try and break away, but her arm was pulled forward with such force, Heather was sure it would rip out of the socket.
“Help! Please! Somebody help me!”
Heather felt a second hand wrap around her forearm and she pitched forward, slamming her face into the gray stall door.
A sharp pain pulsed like a jackhammer from her nose as Heather’s thoughts screamed out to her, Don’t give up, can’t give up! She started to cry and wondered how this old woman could be so strong.
“Please, I have money in my car. And my credit cards. You can have them. Just let me go.”
An unexpected surge of hope spread through Heather as her attacker released their grip and Heather’s arm slipped free.
This was her chance. She knew she needed to run, to get out of the confined space as fast as she could. But Heather Burns, the queen of choking under pressure, kept her title and froze in place as the stall door banged open.
Her attacker ran a large hand across their mouth, leaving a smeared trail of bright pink lipstick down their chin. Heather slowly crabbed her body toward the door and spotted the tendrils of a gray wig spilling out from a small trash can in the back of the stall.
Two minutes too late, Heather realized she made a critical mistake by ignoring the off-sound of the woman’s voice as a tall, well-built man with sandy-blond, short-cropped hair and a smile so wide, it almost split his face, exited the stall and loomed over her.
“Don’t fight,” the man said. “It’s going to be much easier if you just give up.”
“Please, I’ll give you my money. You can have everything. I swear.”
“I don’t want money,” the man said. He pulled out a folding knife from underneath a bulky dark blue sweatshirt and snapped open its six-inch blade. “On your stomach. Now.”
Heather felt a sickly panic move through her as she stared at the weapon, which had a green-fatigue, military-like handle and a black blade with an inch of serrated teeth by its base.
The man was going to rape her. She was sure of it. She closed her eyes and wondered if it would be better if he just killed her instead.
“On your stomach, I said.”
Heather thought of her daughter, who would be waking up for school about now and wondering where her mother was. She mustered a reticent nod, knowing she needed to do anything to get back home, and flipped over on her stomach in a prone position.
She shook as she waited for the man to pull off her running shorts. But he reached for her hands instead, roughly pulling them behind her back and then binding her wrists together with something that felt to Heather like hard plastic that bit into her skin.
“Let’s go,” the man said, and pulled her up. “We’re going to take a ride.”
* * *
Heather had stopped trying to find the emergency release latch in the trunk of the Buick, where the man had stuffed her. After realizing the car was an older model and didn’t have a release pull, she had resorted to pounding her feet against the top of the trunk in a futile effort to get it open.
During the beginning of what Heather thought was so far a thirty-minute ride, she could hear what she decided was city traffic. But for the past ten minutes, the honks and revved engines of aggressive Detroit commuters had ebbed and all Heather heard now was the Buick’s wheels humming underneath her as she sat, crammed in a fetal position in complete blackness.
The Buick came to a sharp stop and Heather tried to scramble to come up with a flight plan. She cursed herself for not leaving Carly a note to tell her where she was jogging, so her daughter could call the police with a location when Heather didn’t come home.
Daylight flooded the Buick as the trunk swung open, and Heather squinted to see her attacker looming over her.
“If you try to run, I’ll kill you,” her abductor said, and flashed his ugly black and camouflage-green knife from the pocket of his sweatshirt, as if Heather really needed a reminder.
Heather could smell the sour musk of the man’s sweat not quite masked under his cologne when he pulled her out of the trunk. He wrapped his arm around her waist, and Heather felt the dampness of his sweatshirt on her back.
Heath
er took a quick mental snapshot of her unfamiliar surroundings to come up with an escape route if she could get away. The Buick was parked on a desolate side street next to an old brick church that looked like it was about to crumble. A sliver of the remote Detroit skyline was visible from the side of the church, which meant the man had likely driven them to one of the city’s run-down, left-for-dead neighborhoods that skirted Detroit. What that meant to Heather was, the likelihood of anyone stumbling by to help her was going to be as likely as her winning the lottery or getting crowned Miss America.
“Move,” the man whispered in her ear.
In lockstep, the two entered the abandoned church. The depressing, cavernous space was littered with a few ruined leftovers of the church’s likely golden era when parishioners filled its now-gutted pews. A splintered, keyless organ lay hangdog on its side in the middle of the aisle, and what was left of a broken stained-glass image of Jesus on the cross framed the rear wall of the church.
Heather shivered when she reached the end of the aisle, where someone had tagged I love weed in black graffiti letters, and she turned slowly around. She did a quick mental picture of the man’s face so she could describe him to the cops if she was able to get free, and was struck by the odd realization that the man who abducted her was good-looking.
“Please. I have a daughter.”
“No, you don’t. You have two sons.”
“You’re wrong! This is some kind of mistake.”
“No mistake. But you’re not right yet. I need to fix you.”
The man pulled out his knife, reached behind Heather, and sliced apart the twist ties. He then dug into a green-fatigue duffel bag and pulled out a long, dark wig and a piece of blue clothing.
“Put these on.”
You Fit the Pattern Page 1