Blake Pierce - The Making of Riley Paige - 4 - Taking

by Blake Pierce

  Emily showed her the interior, which looked like it had everything she and

  Crivaro would need—a table and seats where they could eat and work, plenty

  of kitchen equipment, a bathroom, and two beds, one in the back of the

  camper and the other over the truck cab.

  Riley smiled. The RV reminded her of the old fairytale about Goldilocks

  and the Three Bears.

  Not too big, not too little, but just right.

  Riley was about to tell Emily that this was the one she wanted when she

  saw Crivaro emerge from the camping store. He was carrying a couple of

  bags of merchandise and his go-bag, which must be stuffed with the outfit

  he’d arrived in.

  Crivaro was dressed like Harry had been, in a T-shirt, denim shorts, and

  sandals.

  Riley couldn’t help but break out in a fit of giggles.

  She’d had never seen her partner in short pants before, and his bulky,

  hairy legs took her completely by surprise. Silliest of all, though, was the

  floppy fishing hat he was now wearing.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” Crivaro growled. “I’ll bet you come out of there

  looking pretty ridiculous yourself. Have you chosen an RV yet?”

  “I think so,” Riley said.

  “Good, I’ll sign for it. We’ve got to get going. Paco just called my cell

  phone and said he’d gotten the faxed information from Chief Webster. We’ve

  got to go over there and pick it up, then head to the RV resort and make like

  happy campers.”

  He handed her a credit card and added, “You go on over to the store and

  pick out some duds for yourself, and anything else you think we might need.

  I told them my daughter would be coming in to get her stuff. Don’t forget a

  swimsuit. You’ll probably need it.”

  Riley headed toward the store as Crivaro began to wrap things up with

  Emily. Before she went inside, Riley turned and saw that Emily was glancing

  back and forth between her and Crivaro with a perplexed expression.

  She doesn’t believe we’re father and daughter, Riley thought.

  God knows what she thinks we’re up to.

  Riley sure hoped they could do a better job of fooling other people they’d

  meet.

  Meanwhile, she had some shopping to do.

  For a few moments, she couldn’t shake off her giggles at Crivaro’s

  attempt to “make like a happy camper.” But then she flashed back to the sight

  of Brett Parma’s corpse in the morgue, her flesh a ghastly white where it

  hadn’t been eaten away by scavengers.

  Riley shuddered as she realized …

  Sooner or later we’ll find whoever did that.

  When they did, what would that be like?

  Terrifying, she was sure.

  And extremely dangerous.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Riley was seized by an unexpected and uncanny flash of fear.

  For a moment she wondered why she felt that way. She wasn’t in any

  danger. She was just sitting in a lounge chair beside a swimming pool. And a

  woman in a bathing suit was walking toward her, smiling at her.

  That was all she was doing—smiling.

  Why does that scare me? Riley wondered.

  Then she realized …

  Her partner’s stories had gotten under her skin, especially one about a

  giggling housewife who’d tried to hire him to murder her husband’s lover.

  Crivaro had said that case had taken a toll on his faith in human nature. It

  had made him wary of “polite people who smile even at strangers.”

  Shaking off that feeling, Riley applied the towel to her wet hair and tried

  to look relaxed.

  Can’t think every single person who smiles at me might be a killer.

  She’d just had a brief swim in the Wren’s Nest Campground’s pool and

  she was actually hoping to make some contact with other campers. She

  wanted to find out what they knew about Brett Parma. Crivaro was over in

  the clubhouse bar making the same kind of effort.

  The woman was still smiling when she reached Riley.

  “Honey,” she said, “you’re new to all this, aren’t you?”

  Riley forced herself to smile back. She wondered …

  Is it that obvious?

  The woman sat down in the lounge chair next to hers and said, “You’re

  going to get burned to a crisp if you don’t watch out. You’ve got to be careful out here, even this time of year. Here, put on some of my sunscreen.”

  The woman handed her a plastic bottle.

  Riley obediently began to spread the cream on her skin, feeling silly

  because it was late afternoon, and the sun was getting low in the sky. She

  thought that her new acquaintance seemed a little tipsy, probably from

  enjoying cocktails beside the pool.

  The woman said, “My name’s Holly Crim. What’s yours?”

  “Riley.”

  Remembering the cover story she and Crivaro had agreed upon, she added

  …

  “Riley Crivaro. And you’re right, I’m not used to camping. I’m not sure

  what I think of it so far. It was my dad’s idea. You see, he retired from the

  insurance business a few months ago, so he decided to get out and do some

  traveling. He’s a widower, so he thought he’d make it a father/daughter kind

  of thing, so …”

  Riley shrugged and added, “Here I am.”

  “Where’s your dad?” Holly asked.

  “Over in the clubhouse bar,” Riley said. “I’ll introduce you to him later.”

  “Oh, I do look forward to meeting him,” Holly said. She leaned forward

  and added in a reassuring tone, “You’ll get used to RV living. I wasn’t sure

  how I’d feel about it when Rick dragged me along on our first trip. But I

  guess I’m getting to like it. It gives us something to do with ourselves now

  that the kids are gone.”

  Riley studied the woman, trying to guess a few things about her. She

  seemed to be in her early forties. Her jaded tone of voice suggested that she

  was quite well off. Her husband was surely retired. Riley wondered—was he

  a good bit older than Holly? Or had he made a lot of money and retired fairly

  young?

  By that time, a couple of Holly’s friends had joined them. They sat

  together on a nearby lounge chair and politely introduced themselves as Bella

  and Doris. Doris looked about Holly’s age, while Doris appeared to be in her

  sixties.

  Riley was curious about all of them, but she knew she’d better start

  probing for the answers she was really here to find.

  In a worried voice, she told the women, “Dad insisted on this campground.

  I was worried. I wasn’t sure we should come here.”

  The women let out a murmur of surprise.

  “What’s wrong with it?” the woman named Bella asked.

  Riley looked around and said in a low voice …

  “Well, I guess what I want to know is—do you feel safe here? I heard on the news about a woman getting killed near here just the other day. They say

  she got killed just after leaving this campground.”

  The woman named Doris sighed and said, “Oh, yes. Poor Brett.”

  Riley’s ears perked up.

  “You knew her?” Riley asked.

  Doris shrugged and said, “Just enough so we knew each other’s names.

  She hadn’t been here long before she decided to leave.”

  The othe
r women also murmured that they hadn’t gotten to know Brett at

  all.

  Riley considered how to pose the questions she wanted to ask without

  blowing her cover.

  “It does sound a little odd,” she said. “Do you think she met someone here

  and, um, struck up a relationship?”

  “Not that I ever saw,” Bella replied. “I thought a girl like that might be

  here to pick up a man. Not that I’m narrow-minded about that sort of thing.

  But I never saw Brett hanging out with anybody. Apparently she just came

  here to use the general facilities. You know, showers and bathrooms,

  restaurants. Living in that little van couldn’t have been very comfortable.”

  “She didn’t even have a real RV,” Doris added.

  Holly shook her head. “Foolish girl. She ought to have known better than

  to travel alone like that.”

  A deeper voice chimed in, “I hear that the ‘Hook Man’ probably killed

  her.”

  Riley looked around and saw that a man had walked up behind her lounge

  chair. He looked like he was in his forties and had worked out in a gym quite

  a lot. Judging from his physique, he was going to a lot of trouble to appear

  young and sexy.

  The women obviously knew him.

  Holly rolled her eyes said, “Oh, Rodney, you’re so full of crap.” Then she

  told Riley, “Don’t listen to him. He keeps trying to scare us with stories about the ‘Hook Man.’”

  Doris said, “The Hook Man isn’t even real. Rodney got the idea from a

  movie. Campfire Tales, I think it was called.”

  Bella shuddered and said, “I saw that movie. It gave me the creeps.”

  Riley remembered going to that movie with Ryan. It hadn’t scared her at

  all, and she really couldn’t remember much about it. She did remember

  thinking at the time that Ryan had been too embarrassed to admit that the

  movie had gotten to him.

  The man named Rodney smirked and said, “But that part about the man

  with a hook for a hand was based on fact. I know that much for sure. My

  cousin told me about a pair of teenagers he knew who’d been making out in a

  parked car at night somewhere all alone. They’d gotten scared of some sounds they heard, and they drove away in a hurry. When the guy drove his

  girlfriend home, they found a huge deep gouge in the side of the car. The

  Hook Man had clawed at the car just when they’d driven away.”

  Doris laughed raucously. Holly and Bella giggled a little as well, but their

  reaction sounded more forced, as if the story actually had scared them—at

  least a little.

  Rodney sneered and said, “Hey, laugh if you like. The way I hear it, that

  girl who got killed the other day had her guts ripped right out of her stomach.

  Whoever killed her sure as hell didn’t do that with his bare hands.”

  The women all laughed again, this time at Rodney. He turned and skulked

  away.

  Holly said, “Ignore Rodney. He’s just a horny middle-aged guy, on the

  make with every woman he meets. Doesn’t even care if we’re married. He

  thinks scary stories will get us to jump into his strong, protective arms. So far he’s had no luck.”

  As the conversation turned to pointless campground gossip, Riley thought

  about the story Rodney had just told. She knew perfectly well what to make

  of this “Hook Man” business …

  A classic urban legend.

  It was the sort of story heard so often that people came to believe it. The

  person telling an urban legend like that almost always claimed some personal

  connection to the story—a friend or a relative who knew someone else who

  had witnessed or experienced it.

  And yet …

  Riley couldn’t help but be struck by what Rodney had said about Brett’s

  body.

  “She had her guts ripped right out of her stomach.”

  It evoked an awful image.

  In her mind she saw again the woman’s disemboweled body lying in the

  morgue.

  Of course, that corpse had been mutilated by scavengers, not by the killer

  himself. But had Rodney somehow found out about the condition of the

  body?

  Did he know more about this case than he should?

  She knew she shouldn’t be surprised if he did. Such details often leaked

  out to the public. Someone on the ME’s staff had probably mouthed off to friends about it, and news about the corpse’s condition was now circulating

  via word of mouth.

  Riley began to realize that she and Crivaro had a tough job on their hands.

  This whole campground seemed to be abuzz with gossip and rumors. It

  wasn’t going to be easy to tell fact from fiction.

  On the other hand, she was beginning to understand the appeal of this way

  of life. There was a real sense of community here. These women seemed like

  old friends who had been neighbors for years—and in fact, they possibly

  were.

  Bella and Doris had told Riley that that they lived in their RVs full time.

  They’d sold their houses. Bella’s husband still worked in Phoenix, and he

  commuted there every day. All three of the women seemed to have settled

  down to live in the Wren’s Nest Campground for good.

  Everything here struck Riley as laid back and even a bit old-fashioned. It

  reminded her of her teenage years when she’d lived with her Uncle Deke and

  Aunt Ruth in the little town of Larned, Virginia.

  Riley had been a rebellious teenager who’d had little patience for small-

  town life. But now that she was older, she missed that unhurried world with

  its close ties of friendship and family. She’d worried that maybe that kind of

  life was dying out due to the pace and overload of the digital age. These days

  people held their conversations in chat rooms, and not over backyard fences.

  Riley had wondered—would she ever discover that sense of community

  again? It certainly didn’t seem possible in the city neighborhood where she

  and Ryan now lived.

  And now she couldn’t help thinking …

  Wouldn’t it be weird if I found it right here?

  And what if she wound up not wanting to go home?

  She smiled at the unlikelihood of that happening. These women seemed

  pleasant enough, but she couldn’t imagine getting to be close friends with any

  of them.

  Of course, one big difference here was the elegance of the surroundings.

  This campground was called an “RV motor home resort.” It had more than

  one restaurant, a clubhouse with a bar, a big swimming pool, several

  Jacuzzis, showers, game rooms, and other facilities for people who didn’t

  want to spend all their time inside their motor homes. The gardens were

  beautiful and carefully tended by workers who probably went home to less glamorous surroundings.

  Riley suspected she might feel more at home with those workers than with

  these women passing time beside the pool.

  Holly said to her, “Rick and I are having a barbecue this evening.

  Everyone’s invited. Would you and your dad like to come?”

  “It’s nice of you to ask,” Riley said. “I’m tired from traveling and getting

  set up here, and I’m sure that Dad is too. We’ll probably turn in early. Maybe

  some other time.”

  Holly was about to protest when Bella in
terrupted …

  “Let the girl get some rest. There will be plenty of other barbecues.”

  Doris chuckled and said to Riley, “There’s pretty much a party going on

  somewhere in the grounds every night. I hope we don’t keep you awake. We

  get to be like a bunch of rowdy teenagers sometimes.”

  Holly said, “That’s right. If your neighbors get too loud, just go over and

  tell them to quiet down. That’s what we all do. Everybody’s cool with it.”

  Riley thanked the women and excused herself to head back to her RV.

  As she walked around the edge of the pool she thought about the

  conversation. She hadn’t succeeded in learning anything useful. Maybe

  Crivaro had fared better in the bar.

  The guy named Rodney stepped right in front of her.

  “Hey,” he said, “where are you off to all of a sudden? It seems like you

  just got here.”

  Riley remembered Holly saying …

  “He’s just a horny middle-aged guy, on the make with every woman he

  meets.”

  And now the guy was actually leering at her. She was suddenly aware that

  she was pretty bare in her new bathing suit.

  “I’ve got someplace to be,” she said, trying to push past him.

  But Rodney stepped right in front of her again.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “I didn’t even get a chance to learn your name. I

  guess you already know, I’m Rodney.”

  Riley wanted to say …

  “Pleased to meet you, Rodney. Now kindly get lost.”

  She kept trying to move around him, but he kept maneuvering himself in

  front of her like a basketball player trying to block a shot. Riley would have

  found him funny if he weren’t such a pain in the ass.

  “Did you come here alone?” he asked. “You know, a good-looking girl

  like you has got to be careful. This campground seems safe, but … hey, you

  heard what happened to poor Brett. My conscience is bugging me about her. I

  should’ve watched out for her, shown some interest in her. If I had, maybe

  such a terrible thing wouldn’t have happened to her.”

  Riley was determined not to waste a word on this guy. She knew he’d take

  anything she said as encouragement. She just wished she could get past him

  somehow.

  He said, “I get it, you want to go change out of that swimsuit. How about I

  come along with you?”

  When she just glared at him, he shifted his approach a little. “Or we could