It didn't quite look like footprints, but he moved fast and didn't analyze as quickly as he moved. When he reached the back gate, he saw it was unlatched.
He and Maggie had bolted everything. But now it had been opened and pulled almost shut, but it wasn’t as they had left it. He tried to convince himself that Maggie had gone into the woods and hadn’t told him … and had left her phone behind?
No. She wouldn’t do that.
Cold dread replaced the heat of rage again. If he looked back at the grass, and checked the marks from this angle, he could see now that someone had been dragged to the back gate.
Maggie was gone. And the La Vista Rapist had her.
Chapter Fifty-Six
“9-1-1, what's your emergency?”
Sebastian opened his mouth, but no words came out. His emergency was far too big to speak in a sentence or ten that had any clarity. He needed to run after Maggie, but he fought the urge because he knew protocol saved lives.
He could only hope that it would save Maggie’s.
The voice repeated, “How may I help you?”
This time, he took what should have been a deep breath, but was merely a short chop of his lungs, and said, “My name is Sebastian Kane. My girlfriend, Maggie Willis has been kidnapped.” He rattled off the house address. But he didn’t stand still—he couldn’t—so he bolted back into the house and looked around while he rattled off information.
The voice stayed too calm. And for the first time he understood why people got so frustrated with the dispatchers, even as he reminded himself it was her job to stay disturbingly calm. “And why do you believe your girlfriend was kidnapped?”
He wanted to yell but, instead, he snapped, “Damnit, Tracey. Talk to Officer Balero. She and the FBI have been working the Blue River Killer and La Vista Rapist cases. The rapist is Merrit Geller—” he didn’t care if he was wrong, he was naming the man, “—and he’s been breaking in and leaving fingerprints all over my girlfriend's house for the last four weeks. They know this.”
He took a breath as he heard Tracey tapping on the keys. At least he’d gotten someone he knew was competent, but as he dashed through the house, he didn’t see anything new. “As of right now, Maggie's not here and there are drag marks out the gate in the back yard. I'm following them. Send Officer Balero and FBI Agents Watson and Decker. Now.”
He hung up then, realizing he would have been better suited to call Marina directly. So this time he did that.
“Officer Balero—”
He cut her off before she even finished her own name. “Maggie's gone.” In a huff, he repeated what he had told Tracey at dispatch. He'd owe both of them an apology later, but he didn’t care right now. He bolted out the back door. Even if it was protocol, he couldn’t stand idly by.
“It looks like what?” Marina asked.
“Like someone was dragged through the grass and out the back gate, and you know that's how he's coming and going.” He looked at the grass even as he ran past it toward the back gate.
“Holy shit.” He heard her mutter the words and he could tell by the background noise that she was scooping her things off the desk—wallet? gun? badge?—and heading out the door.
What if he was running the wrong way? What if he should stay at the house?
He was practically yelling into the phone. “Come check out the house, Marina. We have to figure out where he took her. Get here ASAP.”
Once again, he hung up the phone before the conversation was over.
The back gate swung behind him as he headed into the woods. He should call the FBI directly as well, but Watson and Decker’s numbers were in Maggie’s phone. He’d have to trust Tracey and Marina to get them here.
What if Maggie hadn't been gone long? Had he wasted time checking the house and along main street? But if he’d barely missed her being taken, he might catch up … he was in the woods and heading toward the dock before he even thought about it.
It felt as if he wasn't breathing, but he must be because he didn't pass out. His eyes darting back and forth, he searched frantically for signs that Maggie might have been taken this way. But he couldn't tell. He wasn’t a tracker at all. So if a sign was there, he’d missed it.
He watched for other people using the trail today. They might have seen something. But the place was empty. Why was no one using the walking trail? He should have run into someone who’d seen a man carrying a grown woman through the woods.
But Sebastian was utterly alone. And before he’d realized how far he’d come, he was making the left hand turn to the short trail to the water.
He was running fast enough that he almost skidded to a stop, where the earth sloped down into the river, getting the tips of his toes wet. But the dock wasn't bouncing from someone who’d just walked across it. And the water was smooth as glass.
If Geller had brought her this way, it had been long enough ago that he hadn't left a sign.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Maggie sat in her little chair and seethed.
She heard voices coming from the room directly behind her. She was shut in her own small room but bound with tape and faced away from the door.
Not being able to see what was coming made her jumpy—which was probably the point.
She was livid. Mad with herself to the point where she was grinding her teeth. And Sebastian was going to kill her. He was right. She’d been wrong—so wrong.
She’d thought she was prepared to fight Geller, but she’d been ready for a scenario Geller had turned on its head. She’d thought he would come in at night, that daytime was perfectly safe. And she’d been so stupid that she’d drunk whatever drug he'd given her before she'd even known it was there.
She would have growled if she hadn’t needed to keep quiet. Though she hadn’t ever fully passed out, she’d definitely been unable to fight. Her thoughts had been sluggish and dream-like, escaping her grasp and changing to ridiculous even as she tried to hold onto them.
The worst part had come when she tried to hit or fight back. It was like punching through water. Nothing landed. For all the force she put behind it, she would merely tap him. Geller had laughed at her attempts more than once, then just pushed her hand out of the way. He’d simply readjusted her over his shoulder or under his arm and hauled her along. There was nothing she could do about it except feel the terror of knowing he was stealing her away and she might never be found.
She had managed to kick one shoe loose along the path. But it had bounced a bit and landed to the side of the trail. It meant that Geller hadn’t seen it, but it might mean no one else did either …
Her favorite business suit was now dirty and ripped in several places where she'd come into contact with branches and hadn't been able to even move herself out of the way. The suit was the least of her problems. But anger about her favorite clothing being destroyed helped keep her sane. Fear of what might come would immobilize her and that was the last thing she needed.
“I brought her to you,” the first voice whined. Maggie now recognized that it belonged to Merrit Geller.
The cottony taste was leaving her mouth, but the plea from one psychopath to another made her bile rise. She fought it back down.
“I don't want her. It's no fun being handed playthings,” the other voice had replied. Maggie didn’t know this voice, but she could only assume it was the Blue River Killer. If it wasn’t, then Merrit Geller had amassed a team of super-villains and she wasn’t ready to deal with that possibility.
“I know she's not what you would have picked, but we need her gone.” It was hard listening to two men discuss disposing of her body. But then it got worse. “She’s Sabbie’s granddaughter, so I wouldn’t have picked her, but what’s done is done. I play with her first, then you dispose of her.”
Her stomach turned again. He had some allegiance to her Aunt—not her grandmother, but now wasn’t the time to quibble—that made him not want to hurt her? But he said he still would, and that made her more determined
than ever to get out of here. Her hands and ankles were bound with tape—wider than standard duct tape and maybe a little sturdier. Damn.
The force of the binding on her forearms kept her elbows nearly touching in front of her chest. Another piece covered her mouth.
The second voice laughed. “I'm not your disposal system.”
Now Geller’s voice turned hard. “But we're in this together, your evidence was in that house, too. I've been hiding it for you for years and, if I go down, so do you.”
“Please,” the disdain was clear even from a room away. Merrit Geller wasn’t even the scariest man in the room. The other voice went on. “Do your own wet work.”
“It's not what I do.” Geller bordered on whining now, and Maggie hoped she never saw the other man. He would kill her without a second thought and lose no sleep over it. “I'm sorry, is it not fun for you? I thought you liked it.”
She was definitely listening to a conversation between the La Vista Rapist and the Blue River Killer. The comment about “hiding his evidence” was far too clear. She tried to remember what she could about the second voice, to think of descriptors for it. If she could get out of here, she would be full of evidence.
If …
Though Maggie had believed before that Geller would not let her live, this conversation was further proof of the things she suspected. But none of it mattered if she died. She could die full of all this evidence she had, but she’d still be dead. And they’d still be free.
The conversation moved further away and their voices garbled. While she could tell they remained at odds, she now had no idea what they were saying.
Swallowing hard, she took a deep breath and tried to think through her options. Geller had drugged her, but she was coming around. If she was smart, and lucky, that would be his mistake.
She had no idea how the hell she was going to fight off two of them though.
Her eyes darted out the window, this time not just focusing on sunlight, but gathering intel. The glass had multiple panes with wood molding between them. She was probably in a small, cute, old cabin. And ‘old’ meant it was probably well constructed. It also probably meant the panes were real glass, which meant she could break them. But it looked as if she was going to have to open the window in order to fit out of it. Opening the window meant getting across the room and that meant getting her hands and feet undone.
This was going to take everything she had.
Maggie thought she remembered something about exercising toxins out of her body. That a person could get through something like, say, drunkenness, faster by exercising to increase their metabolism. She had no idea if that would work in this case, because she had no clue what Geller had given her. There was always the possibility that she was only alive because she was metabolizing whatever drug it was slowly. But dying from poison would be far superior to dying at either of these men's hands. She'd seen what Merrit Geller did to his victims. And he left his victims alive.
Those were not his plans for her though.
She had only one option for survival—for getting back to Sebastian—she was going to have to get the hell out of here herself. She looked around the room as far as she could see from her position in the chair and began to make a plan.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Sebastian bolted back to the house. The run to the dock had revealed nothing and had wasted his time.
Maggie either hadn’t come here, or she’d been through long enough ago that there was no evidence. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out ready to answer … a social media notification.
He almost threw the phone, he was so angry. But he couldn’t afford to turn off any alerts. His fists clenched, his jaw ratcheted down so tight that he thought he might crack a few molars. Maggie was gone and he couldn’t even hit anything.
He thought about throwing his head back and screaming or growling into the air. He’d just found her. He’d argued with her so much that he hadn’t fought her on Seline staying at the house overnight. He’d been so stupid to leave her alone, even for a few hours in the daytime.
He swallowed down the bitter rage and tried to move forward. The only thing that would save Maggie was moving forward. He could survive the Miller boy dying in his arms. But if he found Maggie and she didn’t make it? If she was simply gone before he got there? He’d never survive that.
This was his fault.
His head fell forward and he squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the hot rush of pressure that wanted him to fall to his knees in the forest and give up.
When he reminded himself that he was trained to handle emergencies, he forced his mouth open, forced his lungs to suck in air, and forced his eyes open. Whatever he felt, he could suck it up. Maggie had it worse.
Through the sheen that blurred his vision, he caught a glimpse of pale blue to his right. He focused on it. Out of place in the forest, the color called to him, and finding out what the blue was seemed like a small task he could handle. As he pushed the shrub back, his heart clenched. A shoe.
A pale blue shoe that had to be Maggie’s.
Snatching it from where it lay, he looked it over as if he could identify the shoes she wore on sight.
“Fuck!” he yelled at himself. He’d just destroyed evidence.
Too late to undo his own fingerprints. He yanked his phone out, fumbling until he almost dropped it, and then he took pictures of the shrub the shoe had been under.
Clutching the one clue he might have found, he bolted back toward the house. Not even five steps further, his phone rang and his heart kicked that it might be Maggie.
But it couldn't be Maggie. Maggie's phone was left behind. Maggie was gone. Unless, he thought for a moment, everything he’d believed had happened was wrong.
Looking at the screen, he saw an unknown number. Normally, he didn't answer those, but he'd never hit the button so fast in his life. “Hello?”
“This is Special Agent Watson.”
“Yes?” Maybe there was good news.
“We're at the house. We've got techs dusting for fingerprints.”
“Yes?” Sebastian breathed the word out again, still running back toward home—a home that wasn’t anything without Maggie in it.
“It appears that everything you said is correct. However, you've walked through the grass in the back yard and ruined some of the evidence.”
“I know.” He felt like shit. What if he’d destroyed even more evidence that could help them find Maggie? Fuck. But there was nothing he could do to reverse time.
His adrenaline spiked at the thought and his muscles threatened to shake. He was afraid there would be long, long years ahead of him to feel guilty about how he lost Maggie. He couldn’t dwell on it now. “I think I found her shoe. What do I do?”
“Don’t touch it.”
He looked at it in his grasp. “Too late.”
“We need you to come back to the house,” Watson told him her voice turning sharp. “If we're going to find her, we need everybody in this together.”
“I'm almost there.” His words came in short, choppy phrases between breaths as he ran. “There was nothing I could see at the dock. So if he left with her from there, he's been gone for a while.”
Sebastian stopped where he was. His eyes burning and his heart clenching as he made that declaration. He was thinking about saving Maggie, but if she'd been gone for a while, maybe it was too late. Maybe Geller had already hurt her. Maybe she was already dead.
But Watson was talking to him and he needed to pay attention because he had to grab any chance he could to save Maggie.
“—spoke with her clients from this morning. The first one, an elderly gentleman, Mr. Horace, believes he didn't leave until twelve ten.” Okay, Sebastian thought, Maggie had been alive and well until just after noon.
“Her next appointment was at one-thirty,” Watson was still giving him information and he did his best to absorb it as he ran the last distance. “That couple says they came by on time,
but Maggie didn't answer the door. They called, left a voicemail, waited, and after a while they left. So we have a very clear window here.”
Sebastian looked at his watch. It was almost three pm.
She’d been gone at least an hour and a half, long enough for the wake to leave the surface and long enough for Geller to take her plenty far away.
He’d stopped moving as his crazy thoughts had taken over. Now he was standing in the woods on the verge of breaking down, but he couldn’t give in to the overwhelming urge. Standing here and crying about what might be wasn't his style. But his style was also taking care of other people's problems, not his own. He’d just gained a newfound respect for everyone who'd stood and watched their home and all their belongings burn right before their eyes. He was not handling this half as well as they did.
It wasn’t time to get lost in self pity. It was time to move, and Sebastian started to run again. Watson kept him on the phone, explaining that they'd found no fingerprints from anyone other than him and Maggie.
The good news, he thought, was that between him, Maggie, Kalan, Luke, and the Kellys, they’d cleaned the house so thoroughly that any prints could be pinpointed to the last handful of days.
The bad news was they weren't finding any prints but Maggie’s and his.
He spotted Watson as she held open the back gate and motioned for him to hop over the footprints at the entrance, and not further destroy any evidence. He handed over the shoe which she took without a word.
There were three officers in the yard between him and the house. One was taking photographs, another seemingly looking for samples, and a third cruising the perimeter. Inside the house was crawling with people in white paper suits. At least the feds had all hands on deck.
For Maggie, he thought.
“Don't touch anything.” Watson issued the stern reprimand as Sebastian walked through the back door. “Straight through and out the front.”
He followed her, walking like a dead man, still not certain if he was breathing. As he watched, she handed the shoe to a tech and rattled off a few instructions. The one thing he’d found of hers was gone. But maybe it would still help them find her.
Crash and Burn (Wildfire Hearts Book 1) Page 21
