by Jami Alden
“No, no, no,” he moaned. “It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s supposed to be perfect and you made me mess it up.”
He shoved her to the floor and raised the hand with the knife above his head. She heard Rosie’s terrified scream and saw her struggle to her knees, as though she could somehow save her. It was happening again. Except this time there would be no Jack to come to her rescue.
Tears stung her eyes as his image filled her head and she braced herself for the fatal blow. At least she would die knowing she’d been loved by the best man on the planet. Her only regret was that Jack would never know how much she’d loved him back.
But to her shock, she didn’t feel the icy pain of the blade sliding across her throat or stabbing into her chest. She looked up and saw Eugene slumped in a corner, the knife hand hanging loosely at his side as he muttered to himself. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he was saying. “We’ll fix it. We’ll fix it and when it’s fixed, we’ll start over.”
Without so much as a backward glance, he turned off the light, plunging them once again into complete darkness. She snuggled up against Rosie as she heard the door shut and the lock slide home.
“Are you hurt bad?” Rosie asked.
“No.” Her head throbbed and the cut on her side stung, but Talia clung to the pain. It meant she was still alive. And as long as they were alive, there was a chance they’d make it out of here.
Jack was arraigned and had posted bail by 1:00 p.m. Monday. He called Danny to score a ride back to his hotel only to discover his friend had spent the weekend in the hospital at Caroline’s side. She was coming home today, but he would need to pitch in at home for the next several weeks.
“I’m going to need everyone to pick up some slack at the company,” Danny said around a yawn. “Unless I can get some new hires, we’re going to have to put the Seattle expansion on hold for a bit and have you stay here for a little while longer.”
“You sure you want someone who’s just been charged with murder working for you?”
“Ah, that bullshit will be cleared up in no time,” Danny said.
“Let’s hope so. In any case, I’ll stay as long as I’m needed.” Truth was, he was in no hurry to get back to Seattle. Not when things were so unsettled between him and Talia.
As though he’d read his mind, Danny said, “Talia was great, by the way. She took Anna Saturday when Caroline went into the hospital, spent the night, the whole deal. Maybe she’s worth all the trouble after all.”
“Yeah, now all I have to do is get her to talk to me.”
With Danny unable to pick him up, Jack decided to take a chance and call Talia. The call went straight to voice mail like she was on the other line. He left a message to let her know he’d made bail and was hoping to see her later.
He finally called a cab to drive him back to the Four Seasons, where he showered and changed out of the suit his attorney had brought him for the arraignment. Despite Danny’s assertions, Jack wasn’t so sure he’d be able to get out of this murder charge so easily. The surveillance tapes showed him entering the hotel around the time Sutherland was killed.
But in the ten minutes he’d spent in the hotel, the surveillance cameras on Sutherland’s floor had inexplicably stopped working, so there was no footage of Jack leaving the building. And since he had no alibi and so far the cops had no other suspects, they were going to do their damnedest to take that surveillance footage all the way to trial.
Jack went to the Gemini Securities offices, where he could use their state-of-the-art technology and connections to dig deeper into Margaret Grayson-Maxwell’s dealings. He’d already found several links showing payments to Sutherland. The woman wasn’t nearly as good at covering her money trail as her husband had been. He’d forwarded all of the information to Cole and the Seattle PD, confident they’d have the old harpy back in jail where she belonged in no time.
Still she was denying she’d sent Sutherland and denying she’d sent anyone else to finish Sutherland off when he decided to roll over on her. But so far Jack hadn’t been able to uncover anything in her records to support that theory.
He worked for several hours until he finally gave up in frustration.
Even more frustrating, Talia hadn’t returned his call. Was she avoiding him? She’d freaked out again after they’d gone at each other like animals on her living room floor. He got it. She didn’t like to lose control, and some deeply scarred part of her was convinced that if she let down her guard too far, she’d find herself trapped again, living under the thumb of another man.
Jack couldn’t prove her wrong if she wouldn’t even return his damn calls. Irritated, he sent her a text. Understand you might not want to talk. But msg me back so I know you’re OK.
He went out to get a bite to eat and was back at his hotel by ten. Still no message from Talia. He was starting to get that tight feeling in his gut like something wasn’t right. He was grabbing the valet ticket for his car, ready to drive to her house—to hell with the fact she might be pissed off at him checking up on her—when he finally got a reply.
Sorry. Just need some space. Talk soon.
Jack’s mouth pulled in a tight line. Just two days ago she’d been tearing at his clothes, as desperate for him as he was for her.
He’d told her he loved her again. And she told him she needed space.
By the third day, at least she thought it was the third day, Talia was nearly mad from hunger and thirst. She and Rosie barely moved from their same spot in the corner, huddling together to provide some semblance of warmth. Every cell in her body ached with the cold, and she felt like the hard concrete floor was grinding her joints down.
Eugene came a few times a day to provide small sips of water, but she and Rosie were given no food. He gave them a bucket in which to relieve themselves and checked on Talia’s knife wound. Shortly after he’d left that first night, he’d returned with first-aid supplies. He’d carefully cleaned it with hydrogen peroxide, and when she’d gasped and jerked in pain, he’d scrubbed roughly at the wound with a piece of gauze and told her the pain wasn’t even close to what she deserved.
He pulled the sides together with butterfly bandages and covered it with gauze. “Now we just have to wait for it to heal.”
It was the only reason they were still alive, she knew. Or at least, it was why she was alive. Eugene wanted her “perfect,” unmarred except for the existing scars when he finished her.
But every time he came, she was terrified this would be the time he killed Rosie, just to make Talia’s suffering more profound. Yet he hadn’t made a move, and Talia decided he was planning to wait to kill them together. She knew he would kill Rosie first.
That’s why she’d immediately ripped off the bandages and reopened the wound. She would keep it open, festering into eternity if that’s what it took. To give them a chance to be found.
But the plan had quickly backfired. When Gene saw what she had done, he very deliberately took off his leather belt and walked toward her, slapping it against his opposite hand. As he brought it up, Talia swallowed hard and braced herself for impact. But at the last second, he turned and brought the belt down hard across Rosie’s bare arm. Her shriek filled the chamber and Talia threw herself across her sister, trying to deflect the blows.
Eugene picked her up and slammed her against the wall, and while she lay there, stunned, he bound her ankles and then looped another tie to join them to her wrists, hobbling her and making it impossible to move.
As Talia screamed herself hoarse, he pushed Rosie to her stomach and brought the belt down over and over until her bare skin was covered in ugly welts, some of them beading with blood.
Eugene stood over them, panting, as he slipped the belt back through the loops. “You pull anything else and she’s the one who will suffer, got it?”
Talia nodded and sat perfectly still as he rebandaged the wound, and she didn’t move until well after he’d gone.
She’d left it undisturbed and now, w
hat she was pretty sure was sometime on Tuesday, it was still raw and prone to reopening if she wasn’t careful. It would take a while to heal. Although, she thought morbidly as Eugene came in to give them each their paltry ration of water, by that time they might be dead of dehydration and starvation. It would serve him right if they died before he got around to killing them.
It wasn’t her first choice for an ending, but she’d take it over the violence Eugene had planned. Though she tried to keep her hopes up, the ending where someone—Jack—found them and came to their rescue seemed to be slipping further and further away.
Chapter 23
By Tuesday morning, Jack decided Talia had had all the space she needed. He called her and, predictably, it went straight into voice mail. He grabbed a coffee to go and headed to her house. If she got pissed at him showing up unannounced, too bad. He didn’t want to risk warning her and having her take off before he got there.
The idea that she would flee stuck in his craw, and some rational part of his psyche thought maybe this was a sign. When the woman you loved was avoiding your calls and you had to practically stalk her just to get her to talk to you face-to-face, maybe that was a sign this wasn’t the relationship he should be pursuing.
Nevertheless, ten minutes later he pulled up in front of her house and was knocking on her door. No answer. He went to the garage and, after a moment’s hesitation, keyed in the alarm code and opened the garage door. There was a small sense of relief when he saw her car wasn’t there.
Nice to know she wasn’t hiding in the house, refusing to open the door while he stood there like a loser. He checked his watch. This was around the time she went to Gus’s for a workout. He climbed back into his car and drove over. He didn’t see her car in the main lot, but she sometimes parked on the street and went in the back entrance.
Jack jogged up to the entrance, dialing her number as he went on the off chance she’d pick up. She didn’t, and he didn’t see her anywhere in the gym; the only place left to check was the locker room.
The uneasy feeling was building. Even as he told himself he was overreacting, he started to pull up the tracking application that linked his phone with Talia’s. He’d resisted using it before, knowing she’d been upset when he’d tracked her with it the other day. But something was off here.
As he started to log in, he heard a woman call his name. His heart skipped even as he turned and saw that it was Susie, not Talia, waving to him from across the gym. He waited as she stripped off her gloves and jogged over.
“Hey,” she said when she reached him. Her skin was shiny with sweat and she was breathing a little hard. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Is everything okay? Philip told me they arrested you.”
He nodded. “I made bail, so for now I’m a free man.”
“You’re not working out,” she said when she noticed his jeans, boots, and T-shirt.
He shook his head. “I’m trying to track down Talia. I figured this time of day she’d be here. Have you seen her?”
Susie’s eyebrows pulled together in concern. “I haven’t seen her since Saturday. I ran into her here. But she was supposed to meet me at the restaurant yesterday morning and she never showed up.”
The dread was amping up, coming to a head. “Did she call you and tell you why?”
Susie shook her head. “I called her but she never got back to me. Which is not like her at all, but I thought maybe with everything happening she needed a break from everyone or something.”
“Talia is all about accountability. The way she keeps tabs on Rosie there’s no way she’d let someone worry.”
“Do you think something happened?”
Jack took out his phone and reread the text he’d gotten from her last night. It sounded enough like her, but anyone could take a phone and send messages with it. “I don’t know. I’m going to check in with Rosie and see what’s going on.”
Rosie didn’t answer either. While that wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, it did nothing to settle the churning in his gut.
“I’m going to call Philip,” Susie said. “Maybe he can help.”
He left with a promise to call her as soon as he knew anything and headed to his car. Before he left, he finished logging into the locator for Talia’s phone and clenched his jaw when he got the Unable to locate message indicating the phone had been turned off.
He felt slightly better when he clicked on the last known location and it showed that she’d been at Rosie’s dorm, but that relief quickly fled when he saw the time stamp. It was from 10:13 Monday night, right after she’d sent the last text to him.
He covered the distance between Gus’s and Rosie’s dorm in record time. He waited until one of her dorm-mates was leaving and caught the door before it closed. Ignoring a voice asking who he was, he took the stairs two at a time and pounded on Rosie’s door.
“Are you looking for Rosario?” a female voice called from down the hall. It was Dana, Rosie’s roommate, and it was all déjà vu of the night last week when they’d come looking for her. “Because she’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
Dana shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said, sounding a little miffed. “First she totally lied about ditching the Yosemite trip to stay with her sister, and now she says she is staying with her sister but she won’t call me back and tell me why. I mean, if she’s mad at me about something, she should just tell me right—”
Jack cut her off. “What do you mean she lied about the Yosemite trip?”
“Friday, right before we were supposed to leave, she sent me this text saying she couldn’t go on the trip after all, and she was spending the weekend with Talia.”
“She didn’t spend the weekend with Talia.” Dread rippled through him.
“I know,” Dana said with an exasperated eye roll. “When Talia came to pick Rosario up—”
“When was that?”
“Sunday night. She was all, ‘Rosie wasn’t with me. She told me she was going to Yosemite.’ Then Rosie texted her to meet her outside and she left.”
“You haven’t seen Rosie at all?”
Dana shook her head. “No, not since Friday.”
Jack forced down the cold knot of fear that threatened to choke him. He had to stay cool. But holy Christ, it was Tuesday afternoon and Rosie hadn’t been seen since Friday and Talia had been gone since Sunday.
They could be anywhere. Anything could have happened to them.
He forced aside the horrible images pushing at the edges of his consciousness and focused on the here and now and gathering all the information he could to help find them.
“Let’s start with Friday. When exactly was the last time you saw Rosie?”
“Breakfast. We were walking back from the dining room, and for some reason her physics TA was here and wanted to talk to her.”
“Eugene,” Jack said, picturing the younger man in his head. His bland, unremarkable features. His wiry body.
Always there, hanging around on the sidelines, observing everything, listening to every word. So easy to overlook.
He’d insinuated himself into Rosie’s life and Jack hadn’t even given him a second look. Jack had no idea what his angle was with Talia or his connection with Sutherland, but somewhere, deep in his gut, he knew Eugene had them.
And Christ, if Sutherland hadn’t been lying about sending the DVD to Talia… that meant…
He had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting right there in the hall.
He could only imagine how terrified Talia must be, for herself and Rosario. Memories of the last time he’d pulled her out of a basement… the blood, her screams. What if he was already too late?
The thought left a gaping crater in his chest, and he knew, if Talia and Rosie were dead, there would be no getting over it.
He took a deep breath and forced the blackness aside. Later, he could beat himself up for not realizing it a week ago, but now he had to focus on finding Talia and Rosie before it was too late.
&nbs
p; He left Dana without saying good-bye, whipping out his phone as he sprinted to his car. His first call was to Toni, asking for a complete location history for Rosie’s phone since Friday and a home address for Eugene Kuusik. Then he called Detective Nolan and left a message to let him know the scoop.
By the time he got back to the car, Toni had sent all of the information to the iPad he’d stashed in his glove compartment. He did a quick scan of the GPS locations—most were on campus, and it also showed the phone being taken to an address in Palo Alto that matched what Toni found for a home address.
Rosie’s phone hadn’t traveled far and he hoped that meant Talia and Rosie hadn’t either. He started his car, intending to go to Eugene’s house, but thought better of it when he glanced at the clock. This time of day, Eugene was likely to be on campus, teaching class or working in the lab.
He made another call to Moreno. “I need you to get Novascelic and do me a favor.”
“Yeah, and I’d love a blow job from Katy Perry—”
“Talia’s missing,” Jack said curtly, “and Rosie too.” He gave him a brief rundown of all the particulars and who he was pretty sure they were dealing with.
At that, Moreno went all business.
“I need you to go to this address, find anything and everything that might show us where he takes them. I’m going to try to run him down at his office.”
He sped across campus, mentally cataloging everything Nolan had told him about what he’d done to the girls, where he’d kept them. None of them had seen the surroundings but they all described a place that was cold, damp, with concrete walls and floors.
It had to be isolated and well insulated, where no one would hear the screams. Like a basement or an underground bunker. He called Toni again and asked her to pull up the blueprints for all the campus buildings and see which ones might have underground facilities. It was a long shot and would take hours, but it was the only thing he could think of.