by Cindy Dees
Joe pulled out another folder. “You ready for the kicker, Wes?”
“There’s more?”
“Yeah,” Joe answered heavily. “A few days ago, the tenor of the emails changed. They stopped being threats and started being promises.”
“That sounds ominous?”
“The FBI profiler thinks it’s ominous. He’s forecasting that our stalker has decided to take action to, uhh, punish both Jessica and you. Consider this an official warning from your local law enforcement official that you may be in danger. I’m formally offering you police protection if you desire it. Both the FBI and I deem your life to be in significant danger.”
Wes just stared at his cousin. This was Sunny Creek. Where everyone knew each other and nothing really bad ever happened. Hell, they hadn’t had a murder in close to twenty years, and the one that had happened in town had been from a drunken knife fight between two drifters passing through.
“Why the hell is Jessica showing herself in public?” he blurted. “She knows to take these threats seriously!”
Joe answered soberly, “I tried to convince her to lay low, but I get the impression she doesn’t much care about her safety. I don’t think she cares if the stalker kills her.”
Wes stared at his cousin in dismay.
Reluctantly he picked up the second folder and read the last half-dozen posts. They were, indeed, different from the others. The blustering and threats were gone, replaced by cold calm and a declaration that his and Jessica’s time was up to do what the writer wanted. Now they were going to pay for their crimes.
What crimes? Giving a damn about each other?
A shiver rattled down his spine. Whoever was writing these emails was certifiably crazy. And not just a little. This stuff was serial killer worthy. And the bastard’s sights were firmly locked on him and Jessica.
Wes leaned back in his chair, staring at the files of threats. “How come I’m not getting any threats?”
“Do you have an email account?”
“Not at the moment. No need all by myself on my ranch.”
“That’s your reason, then,” Joe said.
Wes blurted, “And she has no idea who’s sending these to her?”
“None. She claims not to have any enemies, and not to know anyone who hates her enough to kill her. Would you say that’s an accurate assessment? You knew her back in Washington, DC, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did know her. And yes, I’d say she’s correct. Everyone who met Jess loved her.”
“Someone apparently didn’t. And he or she has developed a sick fixation on our girl.”
“You have to protect her, Joe. She won’t let me anywhere near her, or I’d do it myself. But stick to her like glue. Promise me.”
“Dude, I’ve got this. Nobody’s getting hurt around here on my watch.”
Wes nodded grimly at his cousin. “If you need more manpower, deputize me. I’ve still got my concealed carry permit and weapons certifications from the Marines.”
“You’re not exactly an objective third party, my friend. And besides, I need you to keep a sharp eye on your own six o’clock.”
“No one’s sneaking up on me.”
“Don’t underestimate whoever’s writing those emails. This guy’s sitting around all day long plotting out whatever he’s planning to do. He’ll be meticulous and thorough, and potentially very dangerous.”
Wes swore and didn’t bother to hide his frustration from Joe. “You can’t let anything happen to her. I’m the reason she came out here in the first place. If something bad happens to her, it will be all my fault.”
“Unless you’re the whack job writing those emails, it won’t be your fault. Get your head in the game, Wes. You have to set aside your guilt and whatever else you’re feeling about her. I need your head clear and you thinking on all cylinders if you’re going to help her. My gut feeling is that both of you know whoever’s writing those emails. Go home tonight, stay sober and think as hard as you can about who might be stalking Jessica. Will you do that for me?”
“I’m not a damned drunk—”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I just know that if I had lost a woman like Jessica I’d be hurting powerfully. And I might try to self-medicate away some of that pain so I could sleep and eat and breathe. Just sayin’.”
Wes sighed. Joe was right. There was no need to rip off his cousin’s head because Jessica had left. “I’ll think on it.”
“Call me if you come up with anything, Wes.”
“Will do.”
He stood up to leave, and a lump settled heavily in the pit of his stomach. Something bad was about to happen. He could feel it coming. He just didn’t know what it was or what direction it would come from. He’d gotten this same instinctive intuition of impending danger when he’d been a combat officer in foreign war zones. The intuition had never let him down and had never been wrong. It was part of why he’d brought almost all of his men home alive—his gut was uncanny at warning him.
And it was screaming at him now. Something—someone—was coming for him, and more importantly, for Jessica.
Wes went straight out to the barn when he got home to finish repairing his tractor. Although he got the machine up and running, it was too close to dark to start dragging the lower pasture today. The job would have to wait until tomorrow. He fed the cattle, checked on the cows still getting close to calving and then went into the house.
It was undoubtedly Joe’s fault that the back of his neck tightened as he entered the house. He felt silly doing it, but he searched the place, peeking under beds and in closets and behind doors, wherever a human being could hide. Nobody was there, of course.
Shaking his head at his paranoia, he sat down in his armchair with a frozen pizza to watch a baseball game on TV. He was jumpy through the evening and finally had to laugh aloud at himself. He was a former Marine who had lived and fought in some of the most dangerous corners of the planet. And here he was acting like a nervous civilian without any idea how to handle himself.
He checked the shotgun he kept loaded by his bed, and he slept fitfully. All was quiet inside the house and out. But he couldn’t shake the foreboding feeling that had settled in the pit of his stomach. Something bad was about to happen.
Chapter 16
The next morning, just as Jessica was knocking off for lunch after spending the morning stripping paint, her cell phone beeped an incoming text. She picked it up to glance at it and then gawked in shock.
Jessica, I need your help with a big problem. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. And frankly, you owe me one. Please come up to West Lake, to the White Pine Forest State Park. Go to the cabins by the lake. I’ll be in the last one. Number Eight. Hurry.
Holy cow. Wes really must be in trouble if he’d asked for her help the day after being so rude to her in the diner. Or maybe he’d only been that way yesterday because he was in front of his friends and family.
Why didn’t he just call her? Why the text? Was phone reception bad up by the lake? God knew, her cell phone hated these mountains and her coverage could be spotty in the high mountains.
Then there was the fact that he had never played the “you owe me one” card before. It was certainly true that she did owe him—many times over. But he’d always insisted that helping people in trouble was not the sort of thing he kept a tally of. He did it because it was the right thing to do. His problem must be dire, indeed, if he felt a need to twist her arm like that to get her to come to him.
She texted back, Leaving now. There as soon as possible.
Wes didn’t reply. Which was also unlike him. In the past, his texts were generally chatty. Conversational. And always polite. He didn’t just cut them off like that. What the heck was going on with him? He didn’t sound like himself at all.
Worried, she pointed her sporty little car up into the
mountains west of Sunny Creek. This wasn’t an area she’d visited before, and she was amazed by the alpine beauty of the mountains rising up around her.
As advertised, the White Pine Forest State Park was full of tall, lush-needled white pine trees along with aspens, birches, spruces and a bunch of other trees she couldn’t identify. A paved road wound into the state park, following the shore of a large lake, which she glimpsed through the trees from time to time. It was sapphire blue and the sun glittered across its rippled surface like a diamond. No matter that it was pretty. She still didn’t like lakes. It looked deep and cold, and she shuddered a little at the reminder of how her mother had died.
Rebecca, an experienced swimmer and strong athlete, had gone out for a swim in the lake behind their house. The assumption was that she’d had a cramp or some kind of physical distress and never made it back to shore. Her body was found eventually, submerged in the middle of the lake, by rescue divers.
Jessica spotted the wooden sign pointing toward the cabins and took the turn. The road wound through a copse of pine trees that carpeted the ground in brown needles. The pines gave way to a thick stand of brush and deciduous trees, however, before she got to the last cabin, which was set a ways beyond the others.
She didn’t see Wes’s truck, which was weird. In fact, no vehicle at all was in sight. Was he even here? Or maybe she’d beat him. Frowning, she got out of her car and climbed the steps to the small, covered porch. She knocked on the door.
“Wes! It’s me. Are you there?”
The door opened, and Wes was not standing there. In fact, the last person on earth she would have expected to see was standing there.
“Daddy? What on earth are you doing here? I got a text from Wes—”
He cut her off, ordering, “Come in, Jessica. We need to talk.”
She stepped through the doorway, blinded by going from the bright light outside to the relative darkness of the tiny cabin’s interior. She had started to turn toward her father to give him a hug when something—two sharp somethings—suddenly poked into her back.
A massive jolt of electricity slammed into her and her entire back clenched and spasmed, jerking uncontrollably. Her legs collapsed out from under her and she fell to the floor as she started to lose consciousness. What the—
Everything went black.
* * *
She regained consciousness sometime later. She was flat on her back on what felt like a bed. What the heck had happened to her? Had she fallen? Hit her head? No...
Good grief, her brain was sluggish. She’d gotten an electrical shock of some kind.
“Awake, are you? We can’t have that, now, can we?” a gruff voice said from outside her line of sight. She tried to turn her head to see the source of the vaguely familiar voice, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. At all. As in she was completely paralyzed. Fear surged through her, abruptly clearing the cobwebs from her mind.
What was wrong with her?
She tried to wiggle her fingers and was stunned when even that much movement took more energy than she could summon.
A wasp or a bee stung her in the upper arm, and the wooden walls and ceiling began to spin around her very slowly. She was sinking...sinking...
And the blackness absorbed her into its soothing embrace once more.
* * *
The next time she woke up, the first sensation she became aware of was thirst. Her lips were dry and cracked, and her throat felt bruised and tender, like she’d been swallowing rocks.
“Water,” she whispered.
“Oh, now you want to drink,” someone said sarcastically. “I try for hours to get you to swallow and nothing. But as soon as you wake up, you’re begging for it. Ungrateful child.”
She knew that raspy voice. Why couldn’t she place its owner, though?
A plastic straw scratched her cracked and tender lips roughly, and she sucked greedily at it. A hand came under her head to lift it up, and she sucked even more thirstily. The water was tepid and tasted like sulphur. And she totally didn’t care. It was wet.
That damned bee stung her arm once more, and she drifted away yet again, this time into a cloud of spun cotton that tangled around her arms and limbs so tightly she couldn’t move a single inch.
* * *
The next time she woke, she desperately had to use the restroom. “I have to go to the bathroom. Now.”
The raspy voice responded to her announcement with, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. You’ll have to stand up and walk to the john because I’ll be damned if I’m gonna wipe your ass for you.”
The crudity shocked her into a higher state of consciousness, but she was far from fully awake. Strong hands hoisted her upright and dragged her to her feet. Her legs felt oddly disconnected from her body, and her entire body felt puppetlike. Her limbs were weak, her joints uncooperative. If she had become a marionette, she really wished the puppet master would tighten up the strings a little. She felt all floppy and on the verge of collapsing.
“Stand up or you’re going to pee in your pants.”
Blinking, she squinted at the room. It was daylight again. Maybe late afternoon based on the rosy tint coming in the window. She had the sense of a full night having passed and most of another day. How could that be?
She was shoved roughly into a tiny bathroom and told to go and go fast. Or else.
Or else what? Too groggy to understand what was happening to her, she fumbled at her jeans button and zipper. How she managed to get her clothes out of the way before she sank onto the toilet seat, she had no idea. Instinct, maybe. And long years of muscle memory.
How long she sat there after relieving herself, she had no idea. She became aware of fists pounding on the door. A voice shouting that he would come in there and drag her off the toilet if she didn’t hurry up.
It was an act of supreme effort to haul herself upright. She pulled up her pants, zipped them and belatedly remembered to flush the toilet. Man, she was out of it. The room began to spin and she clung to the towel rack convulsively, struggling to stay upright. Something was terribly wrong with her. But what? She couldn’t focus her mind long enough or hard enough to puzzle out what was wrong with her.
She staggered out into the main room, which was now flooded with orange-red light. Yup. Sunset.
And then the bee sting, and night descended upon her again. The last thing she heard was that raspy voice, swearing as she thudded to the floor.
* * *
Wes finished dragging and seeding the lower pasture in the morning. Next up on the never-ending list of chores was to go to the grain elevator and buy a couple of tons of corn to restock his dwindling supply. He’d already planted a field of his own corn, but it would be late this fall before it was harvested, dried and ready to feed to the cows. Until then, he was stuck buying it. The sun was dropping behind the mountains, and the feed store would close in a half hour. But if he hurried, he could get there in time to buy the corn he needed.
He was heading for his truck when he spied a familiar SUV coming up his driveway. It parked beside him and the driver got out. Wes said, surprised, “Hey, Joe. What brings you up here?”
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all day, Wes. Why haven’t you been answering your phone? You scared the hell out of me.”
Wes frowned. “No one’s called me.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve called at least a dozen times. Left messages. Told you over and over to call me the second you got the messages.”
“I lost my phone...yesterday, I think. What’s up?”
“Jessica’s gone missing.”
“What?” Wes jolted as a surge of adrenaline ripped through him. “What do you know? When was she last seen? Have you got any leads?”
Joe threw up his hands as if to ward off the barrage of questions. “We’ve got nothing at the moment. I was hoping she was with you and that t
he two of you had decided to go off-grid, to ground, until the threat blows over.”
“She’s not here. You can look if you want.”
“I believe you,” Joe said briskly. “You may be a jerk, but you’re an honest jerk. You wouldn’t kidnap your ex.”
“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence,” Wes replied sourly.
“Anytime.”
Wes stared at Joe while his brain churned like mad. Something was trying to bubble up to his consciousness. A connection between recent events. Something important. It broke through and he blurted, “What are the odds my disappearing cell phone has something to do with Jessica’s disappearance?”
Joe frowned. “I dunno. Do you lose your phone often?”
“Never. I always know where it is. There are specific places I lay it down, and nowhere else.”
“Then I suppose it’s possible the two are linked. You were included in the threats for a while. Do you have reason to believe someone broke into your house or truck to take your phone?”
“Two nights ago, when I got back from Sunny Creek, I was convinced someone had been in my house. But then I put it down to paranoia. What if someone was in the house and stole my phone?”
“Why? And how would that be connected to Jessica?” Joe asked.
“If someone called or texted Jess from my phone and said that I was in terrible trouble and needed her to come rescue me, she would go. At least, I think she would. My phone would be the perfect way to lure her into going somewhere she wouldn’t normally go.”
Joe grimaced. “Unfortunately, that makes a certain sick sense. The good news is I’m more optimistic about tracking down your phone than I am Jessica.”
Wes frowned. “I have a tracer program installed on my phone. We can run it from my laptop computer in the house.”
“Trace away. It may be the best lead we have on her.”
