The large wardrobe is filled with clothes and the chest of drawers is crammed to overflowing. Junk and dust bunnies under the bed. There’s an indent in the duvet near the top and the pillows have been fussed with.
This is where I’ll sit and wait for Sophie Templeton to return.
I open the window a crack and the noise from the street rushes in. Then I go back to the bed to sit and wait. Every time a car passes my ears prick up. Whenever someone walks by on the sidewalk my ears prick up.
Footsteps on the path that leads to the front door.
A key rattles in the lock.
There are two ways this can play out. Either she’ll come in and head straight upstairs to change out of her work clothes, or she’ll head to the kitchen to feed the cat. I move quickly out onto the landing so I can be ready for both possibilities.
*
So near, yet so far. I stared at the indent in the duvet and realised that if we’d arrived two hours earlier we’d be looking at the unsub right now. A seventy-year lifespan can be measured out at 613,620 hours, so two hours is nothing. A faint trace of aftershave lingered in the air. That’s how close we were. Hatcher was at my shoulder, his gaze fixed on the indentation, and from the way he was staring it was a safe bet he was thinking along the same lines as me.
I could picture the unsub sitting on the bed. Medium build, five-ten, brown hair. All that was missing was his face. Templeton’s cat padded into the bedroom and jumped onto the bed. It stared at us like we were a lower form of life, then meowed for food. According to the collar tag his name was Mr Bojangles. I tickled him under the chin and he let out a long, satisfied purr.
‘Acquisition is the riskiest part of any abduction,’ I said. ‘There are too many things that can go wrong. Somehow the unsub incapacitated Templeton and got her from the house to his car, and he did all this without anyone noticing. How?’
‘I’ve got to call this in, Winter.’
‘No, what you’ve got to do is answer my question. You’ve already told me that Fielding is incompetent. That means it’s up to us to get Templeton back. Which means doing our job. So, focus. How did he do it?’
‘He drugged her.’
I shook my head. ‘Then what? He carries her out the front door to his car without anybody noticing? Not going to happen, Hatcher. Not in an area like this.’
‘Okay, maybe he was armed with a gun or a knife.’
‘A gun is a false threat. If he fired a gun around here a hundred cops would descend on this place within minutes. The unsub would know that, and so would Templeton. The problem with knives is that they are really only effective at close quarters. Templeton is trained in self-defence and she would have had a good idea who the intruder was. She would have fought him. Can you see any signs of a struggle?’
Hatcher shook his head. ‘So how did he do it?’
I tickled Mr Bojangles under the chin and he gave another meow. ‘Good question.’
59
The lights slammed on, the door opened and Rachel shrank back into the corner. There was a woman with Adam, and to start with Rachel was convinced her mind was playing tricks. She blinked but when she opened her eyes the woman was still there. This was no hallucination, this was real.
The woman was walking unsteadily, her head wobbling from side to side like she was having trouble supporting its weight. Adam led her to the dentist’s chair and strapped her in. She was more or less the same height as him. Long legs and long blonde hair. Beautiful, too. Even dishevelled and drugged, there was no disguising that fact.
Rachel’s hand throbbed in time with her heart and each beat brought fresh waves of pain. The last thing Adam said during his previous visit was that the syringe had contained a saline solution. She’d stabbed that needle in her hand for nothing. Another game, another way to mess with her head.
She glanced at the open door and pictured the route to the front door in her mind. Along the corridor, up the stairs, along the high-ceilinged corridor that led to the entrance hall, past the staircase, then out through the front door to freedom. She glanced at Adam, glanced at the open door again.
‘How far does Number Five think she’s going to get?’
Adam didn’t even bother looking over. He made no move to shut the door. They both knew she wasn’t going to try anything, not after last time. Rachel sagged against the wall and pulled a blanket around herself.
‘Number Five thinks she can’t take much more, but she’s wrong. She’s stronger than the others. Much stronger.’
‘Go to hell.’
Adam reached the mattress in four long strides. He brought his leg back and Rachel cowered against the wall. She shut her eyes and braced herself. Nothing happened. Rachel opened her eyes and saw Adam hunkered down in front of her.
‘That’s a bad word,’ he said in Eve’s voice, and laughed.
Adam went back over to the blonde woman in the chair and slapped her face a couple of times.
‘Wakey, wakey.’
‘Leave me alone,’ the woman mumbled. The words were indistinct and mashed together.
‘Wakey, wakey!’ he screamed in her face. He grabbed hold of her ponytail and pulled hard, kept on pulling until her eyes were wide open and he had her full attention.
‘Sarah Flight isn’t dead, is she?’ he said.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Adam wrapped the ponytail around his hand and pulled harder. ‘Let’s try that again. Sarah Flight is not dead, is she?’
‘She’s dead.’ The words came out as a gasp.
‘That’s what they said on the five o’clock news. It was the lead story. And then at six, there’s no mention of her whatsoever. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? It strikes me as odd. So, I asked myself what was going on, and, I have to say, the conclusions I reached weren’t good. Third and final time: Sarah Flight is not dead, is she?’
The woman met Adam’s gaze. ‘No.’
‘Do you think I’m stupid?’
‘No, I don’t think you’re stupid.’
Adam moved in closer. ‘I was clever enough to find you, wasn’t I? I’ve known where you lived from the start. I know where you all live. I saw you in the park where I left Number One, and I saw you at work, and I followed you to that pathetic little hovel you call a home, and you didn’t suspect a thing.’ He straightened up again. ‘You definitely look better as a brunette, though.’
Adam took a deep breath, then smiled. Rachel almost shouted out a warning. When Adam smiled like that, that’s when he was at his most dangerous. She looked at the space where her little finger had been and kept quiet. If Adam was hurting this woman, then he wasn’t hurting her. Rachel stared at her hand, guilt-ridden and conflicted. She kept staring at it so she wouldn’t have to look at the blonde-haired woman in the dentist’s chair.
‘I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that,’ said Adam. ‘Here’s how it does work. I’m going to hurt you and you’re going to tell me what I want to know. Everything. Then I’m going to hurt you some more because I don’t like liars. And then I’m going to hurt you some more because I can.’
He took the orbitoclast from his pocket and held it up for the woman to see. ‘Do you know what this is for?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman.
‘When I’m done hurting you, I’m going to use this on you. And then I’m going to deliver you back to your colleagues. Maybe they’ll think twice before they try playing me again.’
‘If you do that they’ll just come after you twice as hard. Kidnapping me was a mistake.’
‘We’ll see.’
Adam left and the lights went out.
‘Are you okay, Rachel?’
Rachel started to say yes. It was an automatic response. She stopped and thought about what the woman just said. ‘How do you know my name? Who are you?’
‘My name’s Sophie Templeton. I’m a police officer.’
All Rachel heard was one word: police. She glanced through the dark in the direction of the nearest camera then moved carefully over to the chair.
‘You’ve got to be quiet.’ Her lips were right up against Sophie’s ear, her voice more breath than sound. ‘I think the room’s bugged. Are you working undercover? Nod if you are.’
Sophie shook her head.
‘What do you mean no? Someone must know you’re here?’
Another shake of the head.
‘The police are coming, though? They must know where you are.’
‘They’re going to find us, Rachel.’
Rachel pulled the blanket more tightly around herself. ‘They’re not coming, are they? Nobody’s coming?’
‘They’ll find us. You’ve got to believe that.’
60
‘The bedroom light was on,’ I said.
‘And?’ said Hatcher.
‘And that means this is where he staged his ambush. Templeton came in and switched on the light and the unsub attacked her.’
‘I thought we’d already established that.’
‘No, what we’d established was that he waited for her here. I couldn’t decide whether the actual abduction happened downstairs or up here. But it must have happened up here because Templeton switched the light on. It couldn’t have happened any other way. There’s no way the unsub switched it on. He waited for her in the dark.’
‘How can you be so sure about that, Winter?’
‘Because if the light had been on when she got back from work she would have noticed it from the street. Just like we did.’
‘Assuming you’re right, how did he incapacitate her?’
‘Hold on a second. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here.’ I put Mr Bojangles down on the bed, gave him a stroke and got a purr for my troubles. ‘The cat is the big problem here. The second Templeton stepped through the front door he would have been all over her, demanding to be fed. She would have gone through to the kitchen, and she would have seen the broken window, and she would have got the hell out and called for back-up.’
Hatcher asked a question and I shut my eyes to block out the distraction. A good hunter will always choose where to stage their ambush. If you control the environment, you stand a better chance of success. The unsub had chosen to ambush Templeton here in the bedroom. I was sure of it. Earlier I’d thought the living room was a possibility, but there was no way he could have got down the stairs quickly enough. Also, because of the layout of the house, he would have been ambushing her after she’d seen the broken glass in the kitchen. By that point, she would have been on her guard, and possibly armed. It was a complete non-starter.
The bedroom made much more sense. But how did the unsub lure her up here? The cat would have started shouting for food the second she stepped through the door, and he would have kept on at her until she relented and fed him. He would have had Templeton conditioned to feed him, because that’s what cats did.
Unless he wasn’t downstairs.
‘The cat was in the bedroom with the unsub,’ I said. ‘Templeton got in from work and the first thing she heard was Mr Bojangles calling out from upstairs. The unsub probably tugged his tail, something like that. Anyway, Templeton assumes that the cat has shut himself in one of the bedrooms so she rushes up the stairs.’
I closed my eyes again and pictured the scene. Ran scenarios until I found one that worked.
‘The unsub would have been standing behind the door when Templeton came in,’ I said. ‘That’s the most obvious place to hide. She would have opened the door and switched on the light and seen the cat. Then she would have marched in and headed straight over to the cat and picked him up. She would have been talking to him, telling him off for getting himself locked in the room. By the time she realised she wasn’t alone it would already have been too late. Which brings us to our earlier question. How does he incapacitate her?’
‘We’ve already ruled out guns and knives,’ said Hatcher.
‘My money’s on electricity.’
‘A taser?’
I nodded. ‘That would be my guess. He zaps her with 50,000 volts before she even knows he’s there.’
‘That still doesn’t explain how he got her to his car.’
‘The most likely scenario is that he did drug her, but rather than knock her out completely he used a smaller dose, just enough to keep her compliant. The effects of a taser wear off pretty quickly, but so long as he moved fast he would have had enough time to inject her.’
‘Okay, so what happens next?’
‘Once the drug takes effect, the unsub can get her out to the car. And once she’s strapped into the car, he gives her the full dose of the drug and knocks her out. Then they drive off to wherever the hell it is he takes his victims.’
‘Somewhere north of the Thames,’ said Hatcher.
‘Somewhere north of the Thames,’ I agreed.
I put the cat on the bed and headed for the landing. Hatcher made his call as we retraced our route through the house to the backyard. He finished his call and closed the phone. I took off my latex gloves and booties, balled them up and stuffed them into a pocket. Hatcher did the same.
‘We need to wait here,’ said Hatcher.
‘No we don’t. What we need to do is find Templeton. And we’re not going to do that by hanging around here answering a whole bunch of useless questions. I have no intention of finding out first-hand how incompetent Fielding is. I’m happy to trust your judgement on that one, Hatcher.’
Hatcher sighed. ‘Where are we going?’
‘My hotel’s not far. We can work from there.’
We hurried around to the front of the house and out onto the quiet street. The snow had held off for the best part of the day but it wasn’t going to hold off much longer. The clouds were lower than ever and the air was heavy and oppressive. There was a cold wetness in the air that chewed at my bones. I climbed into the car and buckled up, and fifteen minutes later we were back at the Cosmopolitan.
While Hatcher parked up, I hurried to my suite. There was no way Hatcher would approve of what I was planning. He would try to talk me out of it, and I would ignore him and do what I was going to do anyway. My way saved time and energy. I dumped my coat on the back of a chair, then fished out my wallet and found Donald Cole’s business card. Cole answered on the first ring, like he had the phone in his hand and was just waiting for my call.