“Did you enjoy the show?” He asked when he returned.
“I can’t believe you.... This can’t be happening.”
“I’m going out for I bit. When I come back it’s your turn.”
Lucas bolted out the door with one intention, to find information on whoever had Chelsea and fast. Sarah and Charlotte had said that it hadn’t been Wesley Robinson, but he wasn’t convinced. Perhaps it was Chad Wilson, working with Robinson in some way. It couldn’t be just anybody who had Chelsea, someone she didn’t know. That didn’t make sense. Wesley Robinson had to be behind it somehow. He needed that artist’s impression of Chad Wilson to show to Sarah and Charlotte.
He dialed Maggie’s number as he jumped into the car.
“Lucas,” she answered. “I was just about to ring you, one of the waitresses remembered Wilson and....”
“He’s got Chelsea,” he said, cutting her off.
“Who has? The killer? Who is it?”
“I don’t know. Sarah and Charlotte didn’t recognize him, but my gut tells me that Wesley Robinson is behind this, and that Chad Wilson has something to do with it. We’ve got to show that sketch to Sarah and Charlotte. I should have shown it to Chelsea while I had the chance. I wasn’t focused on the job. I got distracted. I should have been there to protect her. I could’ve stopped him. I should have done more. It’s all my fault.” His words were all rolling into each other in his panic. He couldn’t think straight or get his head around it all.
“It’s not your fault, Lucas. It wouldn’t have helped to show the sketch of Chad to Chelsea because she probably doesn’t know who it is anyway. We don’t even know if it’s him that took her and even if we knew, we don’t know where he is. We also don’t know if this has anything to do with Wesley Robinson. It wasn’t him that took her. If you’d been there, you’d probably be dead by now, like Lewis.”
Lucas cursed. “I’ll meet you at the station,” he told her. “We have to see if we can find out who Chad Wilson is and where he lives. Either he is Wesley Robinson or he’s the kidnapper working with him. We have to find out one way or the other. Only Sarah and Charlotte can tell us that. And I’m positive Wesley Robinson is behind this. I can feel it.”
Maggie strode in and joined him at his desk. She stood behind his chair and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“Dammit, Maggie, I didn’t protect her,” he said, his voice thick with despair.
“We had an officer on the door, Lucas. What more could we have done?”
“I should have done something, Maggie. I dropped my game and now Lewis is dead too. I should’ve been there. I should’ve shown Chelsea the sketch, then we would know who we are dealing with, and whether there’s one or two of them.”
Bang his fist on the table, he took several deep breaths to try and calm the fire burning inside him.
Maggie waited until he lifted his eyes to hers. “We were only speculating, we didn’t know for sure she was a target.”
“What about the calls? She was being threatened.”
“Yes, but the calls couldn’t be traced. We were hitting dead ends everywhere. We couldn’t even find out where Chad Wilson lives, or anything about him whatsoever, and we have no positive ID on Robinson either.”
“What are we going to do? I can’t lose her.”
“Let me go and canvass the street, I’ll take Peterson and Stewart with me. Maybe someone saw which way they went or what he was driving. Then I’ll take the sketch over to the hospital to show Sarah. You won’t be of any use to us tonight. Go home, go see your sister, but for tonight let us try and find her.”
“I can’t sit around and do nothing,” he shouted.
“You’re no good to us like this, Lucas.” She leant against the desk and placed a hand on his face. “Let me do this for you.”
“No, I’ll stay here and look over everything again, see what we’ve missed. Maybe there’s something, some piece of evidence that will point us in the right direction.”
“Fine, Lucas, I’m not going to argue with you.” She left to round up the other detectives.
Sarah rode in the ambulance with Charlotte, gripping her hand. The concern for both her daughters became a vice around her heart.
“Oh God, Chelsea,” Charlotte cried. “Mum, we can’t lose her. If that man does anything to her, I’ll kill him.”
“Please don’t talk like that, Charlotte. Just you get better. Chelsea will be fine. Lucas will find her,” she assured her and prayed she was right.
Something heavy pressed down on her chest. Chelsea opened her eyes, then yelped when she realized the killer was sitting astride her.
“Time to scream,” he said to her as he held the knife aloft.
He knelt forward and began to cut an R with slow precision into her chest. The sharp, searing pain took her breath away and she bit her lip to stop from crying out. Chelsea didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. She hoped it would end swiftly. Clenching her jaw, she went somewhere else in her mind. Lucas. She thought about his hazel eyes and his gorgeous manly giggle... Oh God it hurts! The pain overcame her, and she cried out, whimpered out her agony. Her captor simply offered her a disturbing smile.
“Finally, a full-on scream. I was hoping for that. You’re quite tough for a rich bitch.”
He stopped cutting, and she could feel the blood flowing in rivers down her chest towards her stomach.
“I wanted you to feel what it's like to have something done to you, something you didn’t want. I want to hear you beg me to stop but there’s plenty of time for that later.”
“Please, untie me. We can sort this out.”
“I don’t think so, sweetheart.”
His face is vaguely familiar. I have seen him before….
When hit her again everything went black.
Sarah sat anxiously waiting for Charlotte to be brought from recovery. The doctors informed her they had removed the bullet, repaired the damage and that she was going to be all right. Charlotte’s shoulder would be stiff and sore for quite a while and she may have trouble with it from time to time but overall, she would come through it okay. When they wheeled Charlotte in, she was sleeping. Sarah stroked her hair waiting for her to wake. Relief over Charlotte surged through her as her desolation over Chelsea consumed her. Her hands shook, and tears saturated her cheeks. Her baby, her Chelsea.
“Have they found her yet?” Charlotte asked the moment she opened her eyes.
Sarah discreetly wiped her tears.
“No, honey, but I’m sure it will be soon. Please don’t worry about that now, just rest.”
Charlotte closed her eyes. She was just so tired. She was afraid of life without her sister.
As Charlotte drifted off to sleep, someone enter the room. She turned to see a tall blonde approaching her.
“Mrs. Summerville, I’m Maggie, Lucas’ partner. How is she?” She said, indicating towards Charlotte.
“Please, call me Sarah. She’ll be a bit sore for a while, but she’ll be fine, thanks, Maggie. How is Lucas?” She furrowed her brow.
“About the same as you.” Sarah smiled slightly. “I told him to go and see his sister and to let us try to find Chelsea.”
Sarah nodded once before speaking. “What can I do to help, Maggie?”
Maggie sat in the seat beside her. “I need to show you something.” She handed her the sketch of Chad Wilson. “Do you recognize this man?”
Sarah frowned. “He looks a little like the kidnapper.” She studied it a moment. “He looks a bit like Wes too, not really like either of them. Who is he?”
“He’s a man we’re trying to locate called Chad Wilson. He’s a suspect.”
“Well, it could be the kidnapper. It’s hard to say. These sketches can look like lots of people really, can’t they?”
“So, you think it could be either of them?”
“Yes. I really can’t say for sure. I don’t suppose that helps….”
“Could Wesley Robinson have changed his a
ppearance? Could it have been him that kidnapped Chelsea?”
“I don’t think it was Wes. Chelsea didn’t recognize him, and she would know for sure. Charlotte didn’t recognize him either. It all happened so fast...” Her voice faltered, and she clasped her hands together tight in her lap.
“From what you know of Wesley Robinson, was he capable of doing anything like this?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. I suppose anybody is capable of almost anything when they put their mind to it. When he just disappeared on Chelsea, we were all surprised and couldn’t understand it. Something must have happened or perhaps he held some kind of grudge. It was all very strange.” She paused. “Please find my baby.”
“We’ll do everything we can, Sarah. I promise.”
Carrie located Lucas at his desk, head in hands. She couldn’t recall seeing him this distraught, not since that fateful night. With her heart hurting for her little brother, she walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Lucas, come home with me for a while, get some rest. You can come back in the morning, when you’re fresh.”
“How can I sleep, Carrie?”
He lifted his head and his expression broke her heart.
“Lucas, please come home with me.”
“I can’t lose her, she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said with such anguish that he worried Carrie further.
She grabbed his hand, guided him out to her car and took him to her house. The children were asleep, and Nathan was waiting when they arrived.
“Can I get you anything?” Nathan asked.
Lucas shook his head. Nathan said he would go and check on the children and catch up on some work in the study. Carrie sat him down beside her on the couch. He rested his elbows on his knees, his hands dropped despondently between his legs and his gaze was on the floor.
“Lucas,” she paused and waited for him to look at her. “She’s still alive and can be found.”
“Carrie, what he did to those girls…”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it. For the first time since becoming a cop, I don’t know what to do next.”
“Do you know who it is?”
Lucas shook his head and returned to his eyes to their scrutiny of the floor.
“Not for certain. He could be Chad Wilson, he could be Wesley Robinson. He could be anybody. Maggie showed the sketch to Sarah and she couldn’t be sure. I still think Robinson is behind this. Chad could be Wesley’s accomplice. There could be two of them doing unspeakable things to Chelsea, unimaginable things… we have no idea who has her or where she is...”
“Oh, honey.”
Pulling him into a hug she remembered another night. The night their parents died, and they held each other, just as they were now. Her heart shattered for him. This could break him. If he lost her, Carrie was afraid he would never recover.
Chapter 28
Anna
Friday
Maggie decided to get an early start and found Lucas already at his desk.
“You haven’t been here all night, have you?”
“No, I was at my sister's for a while. I’ve been here about an hour.”
“Well, I’m glad Carrie came and got you.”
“Ah, so you rang her then?”
“Yes, Lucas. I’m worried about you.”
“It’s okay. I’m better this morning and determined to find this son of a bitch and my girl. How did you go last night, Maggie? Any witnesses?”
“No, as usual, no-one saw much. One witness said she’d seen them leave the house but assumed they were going on a date because his arm was around her, which probably just indicates he had the gun on her. She said the car was a dark color sedan, but she didn’t know the make.”
“We can’t trace a car to either Wesley Robinson or Chad Wilson, so the vehicle is probably stolen or in another name entirely. We could look up all dark stolen cars, but it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. We don’t even know how long he’s had the car, if it’s even stolen.” He shook his head in frustration again. Why wasn’t anything falling into place when they had so little time? “The results came back on the hair from Lindsay’s autopsy, and the DNA matches the one found on Kate. It doesn’t really help us much as we have nothing to compare it to.”
Maggie’s phone rang and as Lucas listened to the one-sided conversation the realization hit him hard. A body had been found. Chelsea!
“Maggie?” he asked when she’d hung up.
“It could be Anna.”
“What if it’s not?”
“His MO suggests it is. It’s too soon for Chelsea.”
Lucas drove to occupy his mind. Every moment of the past week passed through his mind and his heart set up a permanent residence in his throat. He told himself it wouldn’t be Chelsea. Maggie was right, it was too soon. He couldn’t even comprehend or consider the idea of a life without Chelsea, a world where she wasn’t in it. He’d given his heart and soul to her. If she was dead, his life would be over too. Lucas pulled up at the warehouse where the body had been dumped in the back alley, as they all had been, but couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car.
“I’ll go and check,” Maggie said.
His hands gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white and the pain helped divert the torment in his heart. He closed his eyes, lent his head back against the seat and waited for the long excruciating minutes until Maggie returned. He didn’t want to allow the images of her into his mind, but they came regardless. A flash of her laughter and the thought of her kiss caused his chest to tighten and panic to surge through his body. What type of cruel world would take away someone else he loved, especially someone as lovely as Chelsea? He clenched his jaw against the pain threatening to consume him.
The last image of Chelsea saturated his mind - her engaging smile as he dropped her at her door the previous morning. As he’d driven away, she’d blown him a kiss. Would that be his last moment with her?
He nearly leapt out of his skin when Maggie tapped on his window. Lowering the window, he stared at her, waiting for the words he wasn’t sure he could handle.
She shook her head as she spoke. “It’s Anna Jones.”
Relief filled his chest, which instantly turned to guilt when he realized he was happy that it was Anna. This only intensified his fury towards the kidnapper, whoever it was.
“It’s perfectly normal to be relieved, Lucas.”
“Doesn’t make it right, though.”
“I asked Dave to do a preliminary ASAP so, if he finds anything, we can move on it straightaway.
When they got back to the station, Wesley Robinson’s file was waiting on Lucas’ desk.
“Anything in the file we can use?”
“Probably not.”
Opening the file, he read over the contents.
“His record is for manslaughter.”
“Who’d he kill?’
“His father when he was sixteen. After years of physical and emotional abuse, he slit his father’s throat one night after another particularly nasty bashing. The court went easy on him because of the abuse and he was released when he was eighteen after serving nearly two years. He grew up with nothing. His mother left, and his father was an alcoholic who drank his wages.”
“It looks like it could be Wesley Robinson after all. Same MO. He grew up poor and may resent Chelsea because she didn’t. They were getting married, weren’t they?” Maggie said.
“Yes,” he said with a clenched jaw.
“So, he could have just married into the wealth. Why leave her and then plan to kill her?”
“I guess that’s only something he can answer. I haven’t been able to work that out either. Years of abuse obviously affected him. He also worked in the kitchen as a baker’s assistant while inside.”
“There’s our flour. He must have been working somewhere, but where?”
“If we could find that out, m
aybe we could get his address. I already checked and haven’t found any employment records,” Lucas said and paused. “The thing is that Wesley still could be Chad because of the flour.” He growled in frustration.
“Perhaps we should show Wesley’s photo around at the café, see if he ate there. Maybe someone knows something about him. If he didn’t go there, maybe there’s another way he knows all the girls. This could be a way to lead us to him. We could also take his photo to Ben’s Bakery and see if he’s Chad. We can read over the files with Robinson in mind now too, particularly the calls. Maybe we’ll be able to link something up.”
“It’s worth a try, I suppose. What else do we have?”
Maggie’s phone rang as they were leaving. “The ME has finished his preliminary report on Anna and wants to see us,” she told him after hanging up.
They made their way down to the lower level to David’s office and lab.
“Good afternoon, Detectives.”
“What have we got, Dave?” Maggie asked him.
“Well, cause of death is consistent with the other four girls. The wounds again have different levels of clotting.”
“Did you find any trace substances?”
“Not this time. No trace of flour at all that I can find. This girl has either been cleaned or he didn’t transfer any this time. No seminal fluid or hairs from the rape kit but signs of trauma, so he may have used a condom or didn’t ejaculate. I would be more inclined to go with the latter as there were no traces of a condom having been used, same as before. We also found a hair on Lindsay, so this would again indicate he didn’t use a condom.”
“Any other differences, besides the flour?” Lucas asked him.
Rich Girl (Broken Wishes Series Book 1) Page 18