Hunted: A Suspense Collection

by J. L. Drake

  She placed her hands on her hips. “Now you’re just being a jerk.”

  “Just thought I’d lay everything out on the table for you,” he replied.

  “You could have stopped me.”

  Exasperated, he said, “I tried.”

  She threw her arms up in the air, spilling coffee. “Next time try harder.”

  She put down her coffee mug and stormed to the base of the stairs. At the sound of his voice she stopped and turned around to face him.

  “Is there going to be a next time?” he asked.

  God, I hope not, she thought. Although it had been quite fun looking back on it. She flashed him a smile. Best to tell the truth.

  “More than likely,” she replied and turned and ran up the stairs leaving Matt shaking his head, a huge grin on his face.

  God help her, she was looking forward to it.

  Chapter 21

  Lara Russell looked up as the elevator binged indicating that a patient had arrived. The man wasn’t dressed in Ralph Lauren. So many of them weren’t. She had taken the job as a receptionist at the shrink’s office in hopes of snagging a rich husband, but so far no takers. She had assumed that all Doctor Miller’s patients would have some money. She had seen the invoices the accountant had left on her desk to post out and wow! But not one of the many men walking through the office had anything she was looking for. She wasn’t picky. Young, old, handsome, ugly—who cared? It was the money that was important.

  Some would say it was risky using the shrink’s office as a possible dating pool, but she had it all worked out. When a suitable candidate came along, she would use the emergency key to Doctor Miller’s office to go through her files, just to make sure he wasn’t a psycho or anything. A girl had be sure.

  But after six months at the low paying job she hadn’t met anyone even close to what she considered a match. First there was the fact that most of the patients were women. If she thought she could get any money out of the hags that came through the door, she could gladly swing that way for a while but no, they wouldn’t do at all.

  Second, there were the little trust fund shits that found their way into the office. They would be perfect except she would have to wait a few years until she could get at their money and thirdly, all the men that came here were completely unsuitable. She had tried to flirt with them but they were either married and didn’t have the balls to have a mistress, or they were gay. A complete let down. How was she supposed to get out of this nine to five hell if the Doc didn’t start bringing in some fresh meat?

  The man stood at the other side of the reception desk. His wrinkled shirt was untucked from his jeans and he looked about sixty. He smelled like sweat—not just any kind of sweat, nervous sweat. She smelled it all the time. Some people were just downright paranoid about seeing a psychologist.

  She flashed him her five thousand dollar smile that one of her many previous boyfriends had paid for. The man’s tension did not ease up. He ran his hand over his five o’clock shadow.

  “Hello. How can I help you?” she asked, playing on her bubbly voice. People always underestimated a bubbly person and if that person happened to have blonde hair like she did, no one took stock of her. Unless of course they were checking her out.

  The man cleared his throat. She caught the waft of toothpaste as he spoke and wondered if he’d swallowed the whole tube. She resisted the urge to step back. She had found that many patients went psycho if she made any sudden movements.

  “I’m here to see Natalie Miller,” the man said, his voice like gravel.

  No shit, she thought. That was why he was in her office, after all. The door outside did read:

  Doctor Natalie Miller BA (Hons) MPsych PhD MAPS.

  Lara had no idea what it all meant and couldn’t care less. Her smile remained plastered to her face as she thought the unkind words. Since she had started in the office she had trained her face to show no emotion except friendly. She always believed you caught more flies with honey than you did vinegar. Her hands stayed in sight, her fingers twitching to smooth out the creases on her face. If she kept this up she would need a plastic surgeon before she was thirty.

  “I’m sorry. Doctor Miller isn’t in the office right now. Do you want to leave a message?”

  The man shook his head, turned around and stalked back to the elevator. She watched as he got into the next available carriage and the doors closed on his face.

  Good riddance, she thought. What a freak!

  Doctor Miller sure saw some wackos. Maybe she’d better revise her game plan.

  She barely got that thought out when she saw Doctor Miller open the door that led to the staircase. Lara didn’t mind Natalie. She was all right for a woman—at least for a brunette. She never looked down on her because she was just a receptionist like other people had. Sometimes she dreamed of having a practice just like Natalie’s, to be in a position to command respect for once instead of at the bottom. She smiled brightly as Natalie drew near. Even from the small distance, Lara could see the dark bags under her eyes and she imagined a blackboard with ‘be like Natalie Miller’ written on it and then along came a piece of chalk drawing a line straight through it.

  Natalie returned her smile. “Morning, Lara, any messages?”

  Lara shook her head, her blonde curls floating around her face like a halo. She spent good money on hair products and clothes and makeup. Which was why she needed another sugar daddy. She was burning cash quicker than she could earn it.

  “No, but a man was just here looking for you. He’s gone now,” she added when Natalie looked about the waiting room.

  Natalie frowned. “A man? Did he leave a name or number?”

  Again, Lara shook her head. “No. He didn’t say anything. He just walked off.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Tall, edgy. A little scruffy looking and rude,” Lara added as an afterthought.

  Natalie sighed. “Unfortunately, you have just described every guy I know. Thanks anyway.”

  ***

  Natalie stopped inside her office and closed the door. She slumped against the wood. A man, she thought. Could it have been the same man who was at her home last night? She shook her head. There was no way of knowing since the waiting room didn’t have video surveillance. Although, now that she thought about it, that was a brilliant idea and she made plans to call a security company later in the day.

  She headed straight for her coffee maker. She was going to need every bean in Columbia if she was going to make it through to the afternoon.

  Chapter 22

  No matter what she did throughout the day, Natalie couldn’t stop thinking about her late night visitor and the unknown man who came to her office the other morning. Was there a connection between the two? Were they the same person?

  Matt had called the day before arranging a time she and a sketch artist could sit down and go through what she could remember of the face at her window. She wasn’t particularly looking forward to the task. Every time she closed her eyes she saw his. She couldn’t seem to remember much more about him except for those cold, dark eyes. Even though she had sketched a picture herself, Matt thought the artist could help her remember more details since they were trained to ask specific questions, and could even suggest some different types of looks. Matt even asked her not to review the Butcher files. He wanted a clean sketch, not wanting her to be influenced by any outside source.

  She leaned back in her chair. Could they really find the man who killed Hallie’s parents? It had been five years after all, half a decade, and still no one had any clue who he was. No one had ever seen him, or at least as the Butcher except for Hallie. Then there was also the small possibility that she too had seen him. The police believed him to be still in the area, that he had unfinished business and that could only be Hallie. If that was true then, the Butcher could be keeping tabs on her, waiting for the opportune time to get to Hallie. And since she was her doctor it was entirely possible she had caught his eye,
and she knew what happened to people who sparked interest in him.

  She couldn’t stop the shiver that went through her. She would have to be careful and watch for anyone suspicious and never allow herself to be caught alone. One thing was for sure, she couldn’t allow him to win, for Hallie’s sake. Natalie didn’t want anything to happen to the girl she’d come to care so much about.

  Why had the Butcher attacked the Walkers? It was a question that had nagged at her until she thought she would scream. But then, why had he killed all those other women as well? What made them special? Did they, in some way unbeknownst to her, resemble someone important to him? Did they remind him of someone he had loved or hated? Had he just seen them and desired them or was the whole thing completely random?

  That last thought was what truly scared Natalie. Sometimes you just don’t know. She could deal with rhyme or reason but complete serendipity took too much control from her. She didn’t like to think of chance or luck. Life was what you made it and it just plain sucked when you didn’t get what you wanted out of it. For your life to be prematurely ended—well, that just bought the big one.

  Natalie thought about Hallie and not for the first time wondered how different her life could’ve turned out under normal circumstances. She removed Hallie’s file from her drawer once more and opened it. Something ate away at her that she couldn’t put her finger on. Like so much of this case, it seemed to her that the answer was right in front of them if only they looked. But she along with the detectives of Harbour Bay had searched and hadn’t yet found it.

  She flicked through the pages, skimming the words. She had read the file enough times to know what was on each page and knew what was useful and what wasn’t, which unfortunately for her, the latter outweighed the former. She reached the end and glanced at Hallie’s drawings. Sometimes she forgot that Hallie was still a child. She acted so grown up all the time it was a fact easy to overlook.

  She moved the drawing to look at the picture of Helen Teller’s grave and frowned. Why did her brain always come back to Helen Teller? What was it trying to tell her? Of all the things that didn’t make sense the picture was right on top of the list. What had possessed Hallie to draw the grave? On her own admission, she herself didn’t know why. Where had she got the image? Was it locked up somewhere inside her brain, buried deep down? If so, why was it so important? What did the grave represent? Was it just Hallie’s way of dealing with her parents’ deaths? Of her own incarceration and fear? Questions whirled around inside her head, almost making her crack under the pressure.

  Natalie sat up straighter. She could feel a headache coming on. She woke her computer up from its hibernation and waited impatiently for the webpage to load. Her fingers began skimming across the keyboard as she typed Helen Teller’s name into Google and was immediately rewarded with three thousand results. Natalie scrolled down through the list of websites containing the words ‘Helen Teller’ until she found the one she was looking for. It was the online edition of the Harbour Bay Herald, one of the local newspapers that had been in circulation since the beginning of the last century.

  She moved her mouse and clicked on the webpage and found herself looking at the newspapers archives from 1992. Helen Teller had been the Business Woman of the Year, an annual competition held for Australia’s most respected and prominent business women.

  “Holy hell, she does exist,” Natalie murmured as she scanned the article. Helen Teller had been thirty-three and an executive at a computer firm that had revolutionised the way offices around the country worked. She was described as being very intellectual and had a head for business which had earned her company three million dollars. Quite the accomplishment for a woman in the nineties, Natalie thought. More power to you.

  She reached the bottom of the article and noticed the link to another article within the newspapers archives. She clicked on the link and was brought to 1995 and the front page of the Herald. Helen Teller’s name was the headline.

  Natalie quickly skimmed the article, her blood pumping faster in her body as her heart pounded in her chest. Her head practically screamed at her like some sort of radiation detecting device that beeped louder and faster as it got closer to the source. She knew she was on the right track.

  Helen Teller had been murdered, her killer never found. She had been found by her teenage son at her home in Sydney’s Western Suburbs and stabbed repeatedly, her throat slit—the trademark of the Butcher. Her service had been a quiet affair closed to the public. Her son had been reported to have placed a white rose on her coffin before sobbing uncontrollably. She couldn’t help but feel the child’s pain and wondered what had happened to him. His name was not in the article, probably to protect his privacy, but Natalie doubted if he had grown up unscathed and felt the anger bubbling up inside her.

  So many lives had been ruined by just one man. How had he managed for so long without detection? Right now she didn’t care who he was or what his reason for killing was, she just wanted to find him and put him in the ground herself. She could do it, too, without remorse. This monster certainly felt none, so why should she give it?

  She clicked on the photo attachment at the bottom of the webpage and her breath caught in her throat. She sat there as the minutes clicked by staring at the photo of Helen Teller’s grave. She would recognise that unusual gravestone anywhere. She enlarged the photo to read the inscription:

  Here lies the body of Helen Teller.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. She could feel the chill in the air and shivered. A thought popped into her mind and she shook her head at the irony. She felt like someone had just walked over her grave.

  Chapter 23

  Matt flipped through the photos on his desk, each one a shot of the victims. He had hit a brick wall and he knew it. He had Donovan going over any connections that the victims might have shared once more, combing through financial records, credit card receipts, and society columns. They’d been down this road before, but sometimes when cops got tired they overlooked things. Better to have fresh eyes and a new perspective. They had to know how the bastard chose his victims. It couldn’t merely be chance and Matt was tired of calling the bastard the Butcher. He wanted the man’s real name.

  He heard muffled talking and looked across the Pig Pen—the nickname for Harbour Bay’s second floor work area which housed the Detective Unit. He spotted Amelia Donovan flanked by the two burly men in his team. At six-foot-four and six-foot-three, Dean and Nick both dwarfed her. Dean was wearing one of his trademark light coloured shirts. He favoured pastels after an old girlfriend had bought him a peach shirt as a gift, and to spare her feelings wore it to work one day, putting up with the constant jokes and ribbing he got from his fellow workmates and in particular, his partner, Nick. Ever since then, he had worn the light shirts to prove he was man enough to wear what was considered feminine attire and still get the job done. Dean had been on the force for ten years and his face showed the wear and tear of the job. His honey-blond hair looked like it hadn’t been combed for a while let alone cut, long enough to curl around his shirt collar. His chocolate coloured eyes were always serious.

  Nick, on the other hand, was easy going, always one to joke in the face of a bad situation. It was how he dealt and he was so good-looking he was never without female company, though he never played the field and wasn’t one to favour one night stands or count the number of women he’d slept with. He was the second youngest member of the team and had a good mind for the job.

  They were a tight group, a makeshift family. They all took care of each other and watched each other’s backs. None of them were in it for the glory. Only the knowledge of a case closed and a job well done was their reward. To get the bad guys and lock them away for the rest of their pitiful lives. Which was why they made such a good unit.

  Dean leaned down towards Amelia and said something to her but Matt was too far away to hear. She smiled at him before slapping him with the file folder she held in her hand as they all headed to
wards Matt.

  “So I hear you’ve taken me up on my suggestion in regards to the psychologist,” Nick Doyle said, his dark eyebrows wiggling suggestively.

  He knew his and Natalie’s visit to Tanner’s would eventually make it to his team but he hadn’t expected it to be so fast. Must have been Glory, he thought. She had a thing for Nick and was always trying to put the moves on him. Unfortunately for Glory, Nick considered her much too young for him.

  “Yeah, I bet she can’t wait to examine your head.” Dean smirked.

  Matt rolled his eyes. “Things must be slow for you to be coming up to the big boys’ area to bug me. We’re trying to stop a serial killer here if you haven’t noticed.”

  “So…tell me,” Nick said as if Matt hadn’t spoken. “What exactly does she look like?”

  “Oh, about five-foot-six. Brunette hair. Cobalt blue eyes. Killer body,” Amelia said, looking past them.

  “Nice,” Nick added.

  “I’d have to agree,” Dean said as his gaze followed Amelia’s.

  Matt frowned at her. “How the hell do you know all that, Donovan?”

  Dean cleared his throat and Amelia swung back around to face Matt.

  “Lucky guess, Einstein,” she said, rolling her eyes as she moved away from his desk. The party quickly dispersed and Matt found himself looking at the gorgeous woman in stiletto heels fast approaching his desk. He gave her a once over—the first time with sexual interest, the second time as a police detective.

  Natalie was pale and looked spooked. He stood as she reached his desk. She gave Dean and Nick a fleeting glance as they moved away.

  “Did I interrupt something?”

  Matt saw his colleagues puckering their lips and miming kissing in his peripheral vision. He was going to kill them. He really was. If Natalie hadn’t been there, he probably would’ve shot them.