LET ME GO (Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Book 5)

by Willow Rose

  “Oh, good. You’re awake,” said the person behind the mask. The voice wasn’t one she knew or recognized either.

  What do you want from me?

  She wanted to scream the words, but she couldn’t. They remained muffled sounds behind the ill-tasting gag. Susan felt like she was about to choke and breathed raggedly through her nose while panic threatened to devour her.

  Take my computer. Take my credit cards, take anything, just leave my baby and me to live. Please, don’t hurt my baby.

  Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared into those cold eyes above her. There was something about them so terrifying it made every fiber of her body want to scream. Instead, Susan cried. She cried because she was scared and because she wanted to wake up from this horrid nightmare and because she wanted her life back; she wanted to feel happy again like she had this very morning when kissing Rob goodbye and waving to him, promising him that she wouldn’t spend all day on the computer, that she’d go for a walk and smell the flowers or do something that felt good.

  She hadn’t done any of that. She had been playing all day, wanting to do her best in this last tournament that was approaching, wanting to keep up with the younger generation that was surpassing her in all levels these days, refusing to admit that it was possibly over, that she was ready to retire.

  Please, don’t hurt me or the child. Please. I’ll retire, God. If you spare us, I’ll retire today and never play again for other than fun.

  The masked person walked to the front door and peeked out the window next to it. Susan didn’t understand what was so important out there until she heard the familiar sound of a car door slamming and footsteps approaching the front door, followed by a gentle whistling. While her eyes grew strained in terror, Susan saw the masked person get ready behind the door, lifting his gun.

  Susan’s eyes grew big and wide, and soon she screamed desperately behind the gag.

  Not Rob! Please. Not Rob!

  Chapter 46

  My mom made us some vegan dinner, and I ate fast without complaining since I was just so glad she wanted to cook for us, so I didn’t have to. As soon as I was done, I rushed back to my computer in my bedroom, continuing my research.

  Later that evening, I put Alex to bed, read from his favorite book about the firetrucks, and sang a couple of songs for him—or more like twelve since he kept asking for more before I could return to my work.

  I stared at the wall in front of me, where I had put pictures of all the victims, trying to connect them, comparing things they had in common. I had been at it all day and still not found anything useful. It bothered me greatly that I couldn’t figure out this killer. What was his deal? I didn’t believe anyone killed just for the fun of it. There was always a deeper meaning, always a deeper motive, even if he killed people with whom he had no immediate connection. It was all about finding that deeper purpose of his killings that would bring me to him. But I still couldn’t see it clearly enough.

  I closed the lid on my computer when Christine came in and sat on my bed with a deep sigh.

  “What’s going on, sweetie?” I asked, knowing my thirteen-year-old daughter wouldn’t come to my room unless there was drama in her friend group or if there was something she wanted from me.

  She cleared her throat. “I was just wondering…”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t we ever go to church?”

  I stared at her, quite surprised. We had gone to church back in Washington, D.C. when the kids were a lot younger and we had more time, but once I got busy with my work, it had slowly faded out of our routine. Chad had never wanted to go much, so I started to feel like I was forcing him, and I didn’t want to have to fight about it once I was finally home on a Sunday.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we just haven’t been in the routine of going for the past few years. We haven’t even looked for a church here. Why do you ask? Do you want to go to church?”

  She shrugged and looked away shyly like she was embarrassed to ask this of me. “Kind of.”

  I nodded and sat next to her on the bed. I took her hands in mine, then looked into her eyes, making sure she knew it was okay.

  “Because of your dad?”

  She swallowed, then nodded. “I just keep thinking…wondering… Do you think he’s in Heaven?”

  “Of course, he is,” I said with the most reassuring voice I could muster at this moment. I was fighting not to tear up like always when the conversation fell on Chad. “He risked his life to save someone else. If that doesn’t qualify for going up there, then nothing will. God’s totally into that stuff.”

  Christine’s face lit up. “Like Jesus. He sacrificed his own life, too, right?”

  A tear shaped in the corner of my eye. I nodded while moving a lock of hair from my daughter’s face. It amazed me how, at times, she seemed almost like an adult, and then at others, she was still just a young child who needed her mother’s comfort.

  “Yes, just like Jesus.”

  “I like that thought,” she said with half a smile. “Do you think he’ll meet Pebbles up there?”

  Pebbles was a cat we had for about two months before it ran out in front of a car. I had never liked that cat much since I was more of a dog person, but the kids had begged and begged, and I had finally given in, probably mostly due to the terrible feeling of guilt I carried everywhere back then. They could probably have asked me for anything at that time, and I would have said yes; that’s how bad I felt for never being there for them. The cat had ended up scratching our couch to pieces, my favorite couch, and it peed in one of my best shoes, so it is safe to say it wasn’t exactly popular with me.

  “I’m not sure he made it in, to be honest,” I said with a sly smile.

  Christine laughed. “He was kind of annoying; wasn’t he? Remember how he always scratched us when we tried to pet him? I’m not sure he even liked humans very much. At least not us. Dad was the only one who could handle him. Pebbles was always nice to him for some reason. Do you remember that, Mom?”

  I nodded, caressing her hair, then pulling her head close so I could kiss the top of it. The talk about Chad made my stomach churn, and I felt the tears well up in my eyes. I didn’t want them to do that. I didn’t want to feel them or the grief nagging inside me. I just wanted it to go away. Just like I wanted my children never to feel this way again. I wished so terribly that I could go back in time and stop what had happened to their father.

  But then Matt would have died, and I hated that outcome just as much. So many times, I had gone through that event, and so many times, I had thought that if only Matt had never gone there, then it wouldn’t have happened. But then again, Matt had saved my life and my grandmother’s as well, and naturally, I was thankful for that. I just wished that it hadn’t ended the way it did.

  If only…

  “So, will you go to church with me this Sunday?” Christine asked. “And say hi to Dad?”

  I stared at my daughter’s adorable face. She still had a little baby fat around her cheeks that she would lose within the next year or so, but it made her look so incredibly cute, and I felt like kissing her small cheeks the way I used to when she was younger.

  I nodded. “Sure. Let’s all go this Sunday.”

  Christine smiled widely, then got up and pecked me on the cheek. “Yay.”

  She left, almost skipping out the door and closed it behind her. I sat on the bed for a few seconds as a thought popped into my mind. It was one of those thoughts that wouldn’t let you go again until you finally realized its importance.

  Then I gasped and stared up at the wall in front of me, wondering why I hadn’t seen this before now.

  Chapter 47

  “Drone camera caught eyes on two people inside the house.”

  Deputy Gailor, or GayLord as he was lovingly called among peers, approached Sheriff Howard. He looked at him nervously. He hadn’t been in uniform long, only a few months, and this was his first real situation. The sheriff was standing
behind his car, gun directed at the house.

  The call had come in just before nine o’clock: an active shooting situation, a domestic dispute. A man threatened to shoot his wife and their unborn child. Howard had seen his share of husbands killing their wives in anger and even the children too. Just a few weeks ago, they had recovered the bodies of three children that the father had admitted to killing with a baseball bat. The wife, he had stabbed to death, he said, and she had been thrown in the river. There was also a guy six months ago who drove around with his wife’s dead body in the car for weeks before he was caught when he crashed the car, and the arriving police smelled a foul odor.

  It wasn’t uncommon, and Howard hated it.

  “One man and a woman,” Gailor continued. “The light coming from the living room made it easy for the drone to take a picture.”

  He showed the picture that the drone had taken to Howard. It was hard to see what they were doing, but there was a woman on the floor kneeling, holding her hands above her head while a man hovered above her, holding something in his hand. There was no doubt about it in Howard’s mind. It was a gun.

  “So, we’ve got a hostage situation on our hands,” he said. “We need to get the SWAT team.”

  “I’m on it,” Gailor said and walked away.

  Howard felt his pulse quicken when thinking about the poor woman in there. Howard had lost his own sister to an abusive husband who ended up beating her with a hammer in a fit of rage. There was nothing that angered him more than when men misused their physical superiority and took it out on poor defenseless women and children. He had seen so many of them in his time as sheriff in Indian River County. Those poor women even made excuses for their men’s bad behavior.

  It was disgusting.

  “I am not losing one today. Not on my watch,” the sheriff mumbled to himself and pointed the gun at the door in case the man decided to come out. Last time Howard had been through a hostage situation, it had ended in a nine-hour standoff. In the end, the guy had gotten himself killed, and the child he was holding hostage had been saved and returned to her mother. But Howard had also had a deputy get hurt, and he wasn’t seeing that again today either. Deputy Towers never returned to active duty and was now retired and on a disability check at the age of only thirty-two.

  “SWAT team is en route,” Gailor said as he returned. “Two minutes out.”

  Howard felt his Kevlar vest and nodded. His deputies had surrounded the house and were covering all exits. Howard felt sweat prickle on his forehead and wiped it off with the back of his hand while wondering if they had minutes to spare…if the woman inside had that long. He wasn’t losing her and her unborn child.

  Not today.

  Chapter 48

  “They do all have one thing in common,” I said, almost yelling it into the phone.

  Liam paused on the other end.

  “I’m waiting,” he said, “for what it is.”

  “They’re all outspoken atheists.”

  He went quiet for a few seconds, then said: “Atheists, you say? You think it’s a religious thing?”

  “I don’t know. It kind of surprised me too. But it’s the only thing I’ve been able to find that they all have in common. Well, all except for Peter James, victim zero. I haven’t been able to find out anything about his religious beliefs, but the rest of them, all of them have clearly stated that they are atheists on their online social profile or even publicly in interviews, like Amal Bukhari. She has been very outspoken about denouncing her family’s Islamic religion and told the world how her parents had turned their backs on her because of it and because of what she does for a living. And you have been very clear about this in the past too, right?”

  Liam exhaled into the phone. I could almost sense his deep feeling of guilt and how he blamed himself for his son’s death through the phone. He already did, after I warned him and he didn’t take it seriously. Now, I had added another dimension to it, another thing he could blame himself for.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to…”

  “No, it’s okay. I asked you to keep me updated,” Liam said. “I’m a big boy, as you might know. I can take it.”

  “Anyway, I’m not sure that’s the connection, but when something is this clear, then I have to go after it. It was something my daughter said; she asked me why we didn’t go to church, and that led me to realize this.”

  “Clever.”

  “But the fact remains that if this is part of his pattern, then I can find the next victim in the list my dad gave to me. And I think I have.”

  “That’s the good news, then,” he said.

  “Only one of the players on the list is an outspoken atheist, which I could see in her profile. Her gamer name is SSweatpea, and it was pretty easy to find her real name…”

  “Susan Johnson,” Liam interrupted me.

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “She’s one of the biggest names in gaming, or at least she used to be. I met her once at some charity event in California. Tim used to watch her videos all the time when growing up. You sure it’s her?”

  “Sure sounds like someone our killer would pick, right?”

  “You’re the expert,” Liam said.

  “Now, I just need to figure out how to find her,” I said. “I thought that maybe you could help me with that?”

  I stared at the TV screen in front of me. I had turned on the local 24-hour News Channel but muted it while I was on the phone. My mom was asleep on the couch next to me, and the big kids were in their rooms getting ready for bed, while Alex was sound asleep. At that moment, as I was talking to Liam, the picture shifted, and a banner appeared, reading: BREAKING NEWS.

  Then the anchor returned with a serious face while the text underneath her said:

  POLICE IN FELLSMERE DEALING WITH HOSTAGE SITUATION.

  The blood ran cold in my veins.

  “Hold on a sec,” I said and turned the sound up so I could hear better.

  “What’s going on?” Liam asked.

  I stared at the screen, listening to the anchor telling the details. They didn’t know much yet, she said, but it was a developing story, and they would return to it later. They did, however, tell me exactly enough.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but I think I found her,” I said.

  Chapter 49

  “Elijah, it’s nine-thirty, and I told you to go to sleep a long time ago. What are you doing up?”

  Matt stared at his son, eyebrows lifted. Elijah had come downstairs while Matt was watching TV.

  The boy stopped in his tracks. That was when Matt realized the boy looked like he had been crying.

  “Are you okay, buddy?”

  Elijah barely dared to look at him. He stared at his feet as a tear fell from the tip of his nose onto the floor below. That made Matt jump to his feet.

  “What’s wrong? Elijah, look at me.”

  Finally, he lifted his glance and stared at Matt, eyes filling.

  “Did you have a bad dream or something?”

  Matt’s heart raced in his chest. Elijah had never shown any emotion like this before. It was overwhelming.

  Elijah nodded as his lips cringed downward and tears spilled down his cheeks. Matt stared at him, not knowing what to do. Following his intuition, Matt simply grabbed him in his arms and hugged him, holding him tight. Elijah didn’t protest. Instead, he wrapped his small arms around Matt and put his head on his shoulder.

  Matt could barely breathe.

  “Mommy,” Elijah said between sobs.

  Matt’s heart dropped. “You dreamt about your mother?”

  Elijah nodded and sniffled.

  “I bet you miss her, huh?”

  Elijah nodded again.

  Matt placed a hand on his back and held him as close as possible as his own eyes filled up as well. His love for the boy had been growing so rapidly lately, and he had to admit he had been longing for this kind of closeness with him.

  “I think I kno
w how you feel, at least a little bit,” Matt said. “See, I lost my dad when I was a teenager.”

  Elijah lifted his head. “Really?”

  Matt nodded while memories of his father rushed through him. “I used to dream about him all the time. Back then, my mom said that it was a way for my dad to tell me he was fine. She believes that the dead come to visit us in dreams, so we’ll know that they’re in a better place and so we can continue our lives. See, all they want is for us to be happy. Did you know that?”

  “No,” Elijah said, shaking his head.

  “They don’t want you to go around being sad all the time. Remembering them is okay, it’s good actually, and we can talk about your mother as often as you want to, but we need to move on. It’s not doing them any good if we stop living our own lives, you see?”

  Elijah nodded with another sniffle. It was amazing to Matt how this boy suddenly seemed so fragile. Everything had been a fight with him from the beginning, and Matt had believed he’d have to be tough and hard on him, and he did have to create boundaries, but he had to remember that all he really was, was sad. And he just needed a little guidance, that was all—a little love and help to get through his grief. It wasn’t as complicated as Matt often made it out to be.

  “How about some hot chocolate, huh? Would you like that?” Matt asked. “That usually helped me when I was sad. My mom would make it for me and then put a marshmallow in it. Do you like marshmallows, Elijah?”

  His eyes grew wide, and he nodded. Matt put him down on the ground, grabbed his hand in his, and they walked into the kitchen. They talked about Elijah’s mother and even laughed while drinking the hot chocolate before Matt finally put the boy back to bed and left his room with a deep sigh. In the hallway, he met his mom, who had been in her room all night, reading. She smiled and kissed his cheek.