He so looked forward to breaking her.
He’d rounded a curve in the road when he heard sirens and his heart simply stopped.
No. No, no, no.
He crept closer and silently cursed when he saw the flashing blue lights up ahead. It was a squad car. A fucking squad car.
There was a body in the road, covered by a black wool coat. The body had long black hair. Arianna Escobar. Maybe she was dead.
Please let her be dead.
The siren belonged to an ambulance, which came to a screeching halt next to the cruiser. A paramedic raced to her side and was waving his partner to hurry with a stretcher. When they rolled her away, her face was uncovered, an oxygen mask pressed to it.
Dammit. She’s alive
.
A second ambulance drove up as the first was driving away. Why two ambulances?
This paramedic went to the squad car, leaned into the open rear passenger door and helped someone out. Someone with dark red hair wearing a green suit.
His eyes narrowed.
Faith
. She’d called the power company. She’d called a locksmith. She’d been on her way to his house. She’d found Arianna.
Panic tried to choke him, but ruthlessly he pushed it back. He couldn’t panic now. He needed to get back to the house.
Get rid of the evidence
.
He backed away, careful not to disturb a single leaf, and when he was out of sight, he ran to his van. He barely pressed his foot to the accelerator, wanting to draw no attention to himself.
That the cops would connect the girl to the power company’s truck and the truck to the O’Bannion house was a given. There were no other houses around. How much time did he have to get away? Unknown.
He had to hurry and hope they’d knock, find no one home and go away.
But he knew that wouldn’t be the case. Not with Faith there. Fury simmered in his gut. He was going to lose everything. Because
she
had come back.
I should have killed her when I had the chance.
And he’d tried, but the bitch simply wouldn’t die.
Arianna was a setback, but not a complete disaster. Even if she lived, she couldn’t identify him. She’d been blindfolded the entire time, except for when she was running to the meter reader’s truck. There were a few seconds when he’d begun to chase her. If she’d looked in the rear-view mirror . . .
Unlikely
, he told himself harshly. It was only a few seconds and she’d been distraught.
He turned in to the gravel drive and pulled the van around to the back. He had two dead bodies outside and two live ones inside. The two live ones would be dead soon enough. Corinne Longstreet was now excess baggage. A liability. Once Arianna was identified, people would start looking for Corinne. He needed to get her out of here and dead and buried ASAP.
And the child? She’d better be very, very contrite. Showing even an iota of spirit meant that she was too dangerous to be retrained. Which meant he’d have to kill her too.
Mt Carmel, Ohio, Monday 3 November, 5.30
P.M.
You will not throw up.
Sitting in the back of the ambulance with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Faith had been repeating the same phrase for twenty minutes. She didn’t know if it was helping, but at least it wasn’t hurting. She hadn’t been sick all over the crime scene. Yet.
She’d held it together until the cops had arrived, but the moment they’d taken over, her adrenaline crashed. Nausea and uncontrollable shaking had commenced, accompanied by the playback loop in her mind.
Gunshots, screams. Blood on her hands. Gordon’s sightless eyes staring up at her. She kept telling herself that this was different. That the girl she’d found would live.
The first ambulance had rushed the teenager to one of the hospitals downtown. Faith would soon follow, but at a much more sedate pace. The EMT had advised her to have her head checked out by the ER, but Faith wasn’t sure she could ride in a moving vehicle just yet.
Besides, the detectives investigating the girl’s assault would be arriving soon. She knew they’d want a full report. The thought of which made her want to turn tail and run.
They’ll ask questions about you too. They’ll find out who you really are. Or were
.
If they asked, she’d answer honestly. Although she might get lucky. The detectives might keep their questions focused on the girl she’d found in the road and leave her alone.
And if they do find out who you were?
Well, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. She knew that not all cops were like Charlie and his friends. Some were like Catalina Vega, who’d believed her when she’d reported being stalked and terrorized by Peter Combs. Unfortunately, Vega was in the minority. Most of the cops who’d taken her reports had treated her like she’d deserved what she’d gotten from Combs. When he’d escalated from stalking to attempted murder, they’d thought she was making it up, that she was that desperate for attention. Unstable, even. The latter had likely been encouraged by her ex-husband’s trash talk, though she’d never been able to prove it. Even if that had been true, they still should’ve done their jobs, but they hadn’t.
And so here I am. Forced to flee and start all over again
.
So while not all cops were like Charlie and his friends, she really wasn’t in the mood to take the chance. She didn’t need their help and didn’t trust their motives.
The EMT came around the back of the ambulance to check on her. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Okay.’ Her head still throbbed, but the nausea was abating. ‘How’s my Jeep?’
‘I’m no mechanic, but it doesn’t look good, ma’am. I’m sure the detectives can give you a better idea. This is probably them now.’
Faith peered around the ambulance’s open door to see a black SUV rolling to a stop. The driver’s-side door opened and—
Holy hell.
Faith’s eyes widened, her headache momentarily forgotten. It was a man. A really big man. Over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, he seemed to dwarf his vehicle. But it wasn’t his size that had her staring.
He was . . . different. She blinked hard, thinking she must have hit her head harder than she’d thought. But when she opened her eyes, he was still there, standing next to his SUV, doing a visual scan of the scene from behind the darkest wraparound sunglasses she’d ever seen.
His hair appeared to be white. Not the white blond that came from the sun, but the snow white that came with age, even though he looked no older than she was. It was cut short, the ends kicking up haphazardly all over his head, like a churned-up frozen sea. In stark contrast, his face was a warm bronze, broken only by the white goatee that framed an unsmiling mouth.
And the
pièce de résistance
. . . the unbuttoned black leather trench coat that hugged his shoulders like a glove, the tails whipping in the wind. He looked like he’d stepped out of an action movie.
If she hadn’t been in pain, she might have thought she was dreaming. Of course, she had hit her head, so hallucinations were still a possibility.
‘I think I might get that CAT scan after all,’ she murmured.
The EMT huffed a strained chuckle. ‘Maybe I’ll join you.’
‘He’s . . . real, then?’
‘Yes, ma’am. He is most definitely real.’
Chapter Four
Mt Carmel, Ohio, Monday 3 November, 5.32
P.M.
S
pecial Agent Deacon Novak got out of his SUV, blinking rapidly against the sudden blast of cold air. They’d have a hard frost tonight. The victim had been discovered just in time.
A few more hours and she would have succumbed to exposure – if she hadn’t bled to death first. The young woman had been beaten, stabbed, shot, and then dumped in the middle of nowhere on the side of a road that did not appear to have been used in years.
Deacon had almost forgotten that places this isolated still existed so close to the city. The crowded Cincinnati suburb where he’d grown up was less than fifteen miles from here, but it felt more like a hundred. Here, the houses were few and far between, where those in his neighborhood were so close together that he’d only needed to open a window to talk to the cousin who’d lived right next door.
Here, there was no one to witness a young girl being dumped like garbage. In his neighborhood, there’d always been self-appointed sentries watching from lace-curtained windows, making sure that all the kids’ mothers knew every move they made.
They still did, in fact. The sentries had grown old, but they still watched the neighborhood with an eagle eye, still reporting misbehaviors. Deacon knew this because he and his sister, Dani, were now on the receiving end of their reports.
Their younger brother had fallen in with a very bad crowd, and Aunt Tammy, who’d raised Greg from an infant after their mother died, was at the end of her rope. Which was why Deacon had come home, not just for a vacation or holiday, but permanently. There were details to work out, but it was nothing he and Dani hadn’t been able to handle.
Until this afternoon.
God
. Greg had gotten into trouble at school
again
, and what had started as a conversation nearly escalated into a brawl. The angry, ugly words that Deacon and his brother had shouted at each other still echoed in his mind. Deacon didn’t often lose his temper, but somehow Greg managed to push every single one of his buttons with a simple smirk.
Deacon didn’t think he’d yelled so much in years, maybe ever. Not that it had done any good. Greg had simply turned down his hearing aid, which had made Deacon literally see red.
He was glad the victim had been discovered, for her sake, of course, but also for his own, because the call to the crime scene had forced him to walk away from his brother before he’d done something unforgivable. He’d seriously wanted to slap the smirk off the kid’s face. He didn’t think he’d have done it, but the very idea that he’d been tempted left him rattled.
He couldn’t afford to be rattled. He had a job to do. He pushed his guilt and worry aside. His focus had to be on the young woman who’d been assaulted and left to die.
Out here, no one watched through lace curtains. Whoever had left the victim had counted on that. Had counted on the fact that there were trees as far as the eye could see on either side of the pitted and potholed road. That beyond the trees to the south ran a lonely stretch of the Ohio River, miles away from the bars and restaurants of the Cincinnati riverfront.
That the victim had been discovered at all seemed like a miracle.
Deacon found miracles suspicious. The initial report stated that the victim had been found by a woman who’d swerved to avoid her, wrecking her vehicle. But there didn’t seem to be any good reason for anyone to be on this road. It was too cold for most hikers and campers, and deer season hadn’t started yet. He hoped the first responders hadn’t let the woman leave. He had a few questions for her.
One of the local cops had strung yellow crime-scene tape across the road. Ducking under it, Deacon started toward the flashing lights of the two sheriff’s department cruisers, parked on either side of an ambulance whose back doors stood open, revealing the woman sitting inside.
Red
was his first impression. Dark red hair the color of Bordeaux framed a pale but pretty face. Her cheek was smudged with blood, her forehead bandaged.
Not the victim. He knew she was already on her way to the trauma unit in Cincinnati.
This, then, had to be the Good Samaritan. About thirty years old, she sat huddled under a brown blanket. Her green skirt stopped an inch above the bandages that covered her knees. She wore thick white socks on her feet, leaving her lower legs bare.
Very nice legs, in fact. Shapely calves that he would have had to be blind not to notice. Deacon had issues with his eyes, but impaired vision had never been one of them.
The woman’s deer-in-the-headlights expression might have simply been leftover shock, but as her gaze was focused on him, Deacon doubted it. He got that reaction a lot.
‘Hold it right there, buster.’
Deacon stopped abruptly when a uniformed officer blocked his path. The officer eyed him with a mixture of incredulity, fascination and contempt. Another reaction that Deacon got a lot.
‘You can’t come through here, buddy,’ the officer said. ‘Please get back in your vehicle and go back the way you came.’
I’m not your buddy, friend
leapt to the tip of Deacon’s tongue, but he bit it back. Going for his badge with one hand, he took off his wraparound glasses with the other and fought not to squint at the intense glare of the setting sun. Leveling the officer an unamused stare, he gave the guy a few seconds to react.
Wait for it, wait for it . . .
The officer didn’t disappoint, flinching when his eyes met Deacon’s. ‘What the f—’
‘Special Agent Novak, FBI,’ Deacon interrupted, showing his badge. ‘Update, please.’
The officer’s eyes narrowed as he scanned Deacon from head to toe. ‘Nice contacts, asshole, but Halloween’s over. Now move along and take your fake ID with you.’
Dammit. I really hate Halloween.
Deacon had come to depend on that flinch. Had spent years honing the image he projected, maximizing the window of distraction his slightly less-than-normal irises offered. But Halloween ruined his rhythm, totally axing his advantage.
Now all he had left was his bubbling personality.
Shit.
‘Officer,’ he said, lowering his voice to a menacing growl, ‘I do not have time for this. Who’s lead here?’
‘I am.’ The dry reply came from an older uniform. ‘Deputy, get back to your post.’ When the younger officer was gone, the older man leaned forward to study Deacon’s badge, then straightened to meet his eyes. No flinch. Just a disbelieving blink from which the sheriff recovered quickly. ‘Sorry about that, Agent Novak. I’m Sheriff Palmer. We, uh, don’t get many FBI agents around here.’
And none that look like you
went loudly unsaid. ‘I have to admit that I’m surprised to see you. I called CPD, not the FBI.’
‘I work a joint task force with CPD – MCES, the Major Case Enforcement Squad. We cover homicide, abduction, and assault.’ Deacon had joined the newly formed squad the month before. CPD wanted an FBI member with joint task force experience, and Deacon had needed to come home, so his transfer from the Baltimore field office to Cincinnati had been a mutually beneficial one. ‘What’s the status here?’
‘We responded to the 911 at 5.14
P.M.
, eight minutes after it was called in. The victim was lying in the road, bleeding. Her face was bruised and she had a bullet hole in one thigh and stab wounds all over her torso. Deep enough to hurt, but not enough to kill.’
‘Her abductor was playing with her,’ Deacon murmured, stowing his anger.
‘Yeah. We haven’t found any ID around the scene. No clothes either, or personal effects.’
‘Did she at any point regain consciousness?’
‘No. When we got here, she was unresponsive. She was nude, but the woman who found her covered her with her own coat. She was also standing guard over the girl.’ Palmer lifted one eyebrow. ‘With a fully loaded .380.’
Surprised, Deacon turned to check the woman out more thoroughly. She was watching him, the stunned look gone from her eyes. Now he saw only intelligence. And a guarded calculation that put him on alert. ‘Was it her gun?’ he asked Palmer.
‘She said it was, and based on her grip and stance, I’d say she knows exactly how to use it. When I bagged it, she didn’t argue.’
‘Had she seen anyone around the girl? Anyone coming or going?’
‘She said she hadn’t, but she might have been in shock. When I asked for her weapon, she handed it over, then collapsed. Not a faint, but like her legs wouldn’t hold her up anymore.’
‘Is she hurt?’
‘Cuts and bruises on her hands and knees and a nasty gash on her head. She said she swerved to keep from hitting the victim, went down that embankment. This way.’
Feeling the woman’s watchful gaze as he walked away, Deacon followed the sheriff to the edge of the road. For a moment he stood there and gaped. He’d expected a small wreck. He hadn’t expected this. A red Jeep rested on some trees halfway down the embankment, looking like it had been hit in the side with a wrecking ball. The embankment was not only treacherously steep, but rocky as well.
He looked back in disbelief at the Good Sam. ‘She climbed up
here
from down
there
?’
The sheriff shrugged. ‘Unless she has wings or stashed a helicopter, she climbed.’
‘Was anyone with her?’
‘She says no. I checked it out myself once we’d secured the scene up here. I didn’t see any other footprints and there’s no one else in the vehicle. I have to admit that the climb back up was a challenge. I asked her about it and she said she used to wall-climb at the gym.’
‘Interesting.’ Deacon noted the tire tracks and broken trees that showed the Jeep’s path down the embankment. The tracks were pointed head on to the trees at first, but a wide swath of disturbed dirt indicated that she’d turned a tight circle at the last moment, slamming into the trees from the side. It wasn’t a move that many people could have accomplished, especially under stress. The Good Sam had serious driving skills.
He pulled a pair of binoculars from his pocket. The fading light made it hard to focus, but he was able to make out the Jeep’s Florida plates, making him doubly suspicious as to why she’d been here to begin with, on a road that didn’t even show up on the map as having a name.
He turned to study the skid marks. ‘She tried to stop.’
‘She claims she wasn’t speeding,’ Palmer said. ‘Skid marks appear consistent with that.’
The thick marks started about twenty feet from where an evidence marker sat in the middle of the road. ‘That’s where you found the victim?’
‘Yes.’ Palmer pulled a small digital camera from his pocket. ‘I took pictures before the medics transported her.’
Deacon clicked through the photos, grimacing at the girl’s wounds. He’d seen worse, but not by much.
‘I’ll need copies of these, please,’ he said.
‘I’ve already uploaded them to our server. I can email them to you.’
‘That’d be great, thanks.’ Sweeping the tail of his leather trench coat to one side, Deacon crouched beside the marker. It was a move that had become second nature over the years. He and his coat had been together a long time.
The asphalt had dark, wet patches. ‘She bled a lot,’ Deacon murmured.
‘Woulda bled more, but the Good Sam did some decent first aid. Applied pressure to the wound with her scarf.’
It seemed their Good Sam had all kinds of skills. ‘What’s the Sam’s name?’
‘Faith Corcoran. Says her ID is in her handbag, still in the Jeep. We don’t get many out-of-towners this far out. Seemed a little odd that she’d be here at the same time as the girl.’
‘And toting a .380, no less,’ Deacon said dryly.
A slight nod. ‘The thought crossed my mind,’ was the sheriff’s equally dry reply.
Deacon came to his feet and carefully walked to the other side of the road, his eyes on the pavement. There was a smeared path, dark and wet, that stretched from the marker to the shoulder opposite the side the Jeep had gone down. ‘The victim came this way.’
‘Crawled from the shoulder where they dumped her. She had dirt on her hands and knees.’
Deacon dug his Maglite from his coat pocket and, aiming the beam at the shoulder, started walking away from the scene into the setting sun.
‘We didn’t see any signs of tire treads on the shoulder or in the grass,’ the sheriff said. ‘Whoever dumped her stayed on the road.’
‘They might have, but she didn’t,’ Deacon said, focusing his light on the grass at the shoulder’s edge. ‘There’s blood here.’
‘Where?’ the sheriff demanded, then propped his fists on his hips as he looked at the illuminated grass. ‘I’ll be damned. Those eyes of yours function just fine, Agent Novak.’
‘They do indeed,’ Deacon murmured. People sometimes wondered if his unique eyes had impaired – or enhanced – vision, but they didn’t. He had a sensitivity to bright light, but other than that his eyesight was only average, though he’d taught himself to notice changes in color, texture. ‘I think the victim came from the woods.’
He paused at the sound of approaching vehicles. A few seconds later, the CSU van came around the bend, followed by a sedan that looked like his partner’s. But Detective Scarlett Bishop was supposed to be at the hospital with the victim. Unless the victim could no longer give a statement.
Shit. Please don’t let that girl be dead
.
‘Now that CSU is here, they can set up lights. Excuse me, Sheriff.’ Briskly Deacon walked toward the sedan, slowing as he passed the Good Sam in the ambulance. She’d been leaning forward so that she could see around the ambulance doors, watching him. Now she sat back so that her face was in the shadows. She appeared to be worried.
That wasn’t good. His attention swung back to the sedan, his eyes narrowing in confusion. The person who emerged was not Bishop.
Cincinnati, Ohio, Monday 3 November, 5.45
P.M.