Justice

by Karen Robards

  Jess frowned thoughtfully at the tiny black square on the upper-right-hand corner of her screen, which showed her what Allison’s computer was looking at: still nothing.

  “Where are you?” she asked it aloud.

  Fiddling around, checking various settings just as something to do while she turned the various things she knew and suspected over in her mind, trying to see how they fit together, she noticed something: the amount of space remaining on Allison’s hard drive was surprisingly small, considering the number and sizes of the files she’d seen.

  Staring at the number, considering the discrepancy, Jess almost smiled. Of course, Allison had hidden the most important, and sensitive, of her files. It only made sense.

  But what a lot of people failed to realize about computers was the fact that nothing was ever really gone. You could delete, you could scrub, you could smash that puppy up with a sledgehammer and throw it in a river, and somebody, somewhere, could still retrieve the files.

  Somebody like her.

  Working remotely through the link with her office computer, Jess downloaded a program onto Allison’s laptop that allowed her to restore lost files. Then she activated it.

  A blink of an eye later, there they were.

  Four files, each labeled with a name: Shelly Smithers, Ellen Hunter, Cassandra Maheu, Tasha Gupta.

  Opening them one at a time, first skimming and then reading every word, Jess started to feel sick to her stomach.

  The first, Shelly Smithers, was from eight years ago. There was a photo, clearly a school picture, showing a pretty blonde with long, straight hair. Fifteen years old, the daughter of a mechanic and a nurse, she was found raped and strangled in a woods near Redfern Academy, an exclusive private prep school in New Jersey. Her killer was never found.

  Ellen Hunter was eighteen. Her picture showed that she, too, was a pretty blonde. A senior in high school, the daughter of a single mother who was a nurse, six years ago she was found raped and strangled in a garage on the outskirts of Bar Harbor. Her killer was never found.

  Four years ago, nineteen-year-old Cassandra Maheu, another pretty blonde, was found raped and strangled just off the Lake Trail in Palm Beach. Her killer was never found.

  Twenty-two-year-old Tasha Gupta, pretty and blond like the others, was found raped and strangled in a New Haven, Connecticut, park. That was two years ago. Her killer was never found.

  Looking at the pictures, reading the files, Jess already had an inkling of what she was seeing: four different, heinous crimes. One perpetrator. A serial rapist/killer at work. The girls were too similar in appearance, the crimes too similar in execution, to lead to any other conclusion.

  But there was more. Another file. Its contents tied the four crimes together. One exhibit was a virtual map that marked with a red star the place each body was found, and labeled it with the victim’s name and the date of her death. The map also marked a location near each body by surrounding it with a translucent blue square. The first blue square was labeled Redfern Academy, along with the year in which Shelly Smithers was killed. The second encompassed a house in Bar Harbor, along with a period of two weeks that included the date Ellen Hunter was killed. The third square surrounded an exclusive hotel in Palm Beach, along with a three-day span in which Cassandra Maheu was killed. The fourth was set down on top of Yale University, along with dates that included the date of Tasha Gupta’s death.

  Besides the dates, which clearly indicated when another person had been in those nearby spots, something else was written in the blue squares, too: a name.

  Rob Phillips.

  According to the map, he had been present at all four locations at times spanning the dates when the four girls had been killed.

  More evidence had been compiled: a sighting of a car matching one Rob had been known to own leaving the scene of Ellen Hunter’s murder; bite marks on Cassandra Maheu that matched Rob’s dental records; the fact that Shelly Smithers was known to have been an acquaintance of Rob’s and he’d been considered a “person of interest” by the local police at the time; and a physical description by an eyewitness of a man seen with Tasha Gupta the day before she’d been found dead. The description matched Rob Phillips to a T.

  The killings were in four widely separated locations. By themselves, the details wouldn’t add up to much, certainly not enough to allow local police departments to solve the crime. But put them together, and the evidence they provided was damning.

  Jess was willing to bet anything she possessed that Rob Phillips had committed all four crimes.

  Tiffany looked enough like the other victims to fit right in. If Tiffany’s recantation had been false, if she’d been telling the truth about what had happened to her, then Rob was following his pattern of attacking a woman approximately every two years. Would he have ended up killing Tiffany, too? Had he ended up killing her?

  But the man Jess had seen her with outside the metro had definitely not been Rob.

  Jess didn’t realize she’d quit breathing until a tiny beep made her jump and sharply inhale at the same time.

  The beep came from her computer. It was an alert, cluing her in to the fact that the tiny square in the right-hand corner of her screen had just come to life.

  Jess’s pulse began to race.

  Someone was there. A small face was looking back at her. Jess frowned at it. Her first thought was a disappointed, not Allison. Enlarging the square with the click of a button, her eyes widened. Her heart thumped. Her stomach clenched.

  She was looking right into the narrow, dark eyes of the man she was almost sure had tried to kill her in Mr. Dunn’s pool. The man she’d seen with Tiffany outside the metro.

  Shoving the wheeled chair back from her desk in a panic, Jess almost jumped up and rushed from the room. Then she remembered that what she was looking at was an image captured by a camera. The bad guy was where Allison’s laptop was, not right there in her office with her. And while she could see him, he couldn’t see her.

  Jess let out a breath, picked up her cell phone, and dialed Mark.

  But whether the bad guy was physically there or not, even watching him through a camera lens was unnerving. When Mark answered, she found herself almost whispering.

  “I’ve found something. I accessed Allison’s computer and turned on her webcam, and I can see the guy who tried to kill me on it. Oh, God, he’s looking right at me. Come up here now. You’ve got to see this.”

  “Sit tight.” Mark’s answer was short and terse. “I’m on my way.”

  Mark had no sooner disconnected than the image vanished. The now enlarged square went black again. Jess frowned at it in consternation, to no avail. Her attacker was gone.

  Or maybe the connection had been lost. Jess tried activating the camera again, just on the off-chance. She really, really wanted Mark to see …

  She was so busy trying to restore the connection that in the first seconds after she heard her office door open she didn’t even look up.

  “I lost him,” she said distractedly to Mark. “He was here, but he’s gone.”

  A closing door and a couple of quick footsteps preceded by perhaps a fraction of a heartbeat the sure knowledge that something was wrong.

  “Mark …” Jess glanced up to find her attacker standing just a few feet in front of her desk.

  Horror shot cold as ice through her veins. Eyes popping, heart jumping, she leaped to her feet and opened her mouth to scream, only to have him fire something at her before the sound could emerge.

  A stun gun. She realized it even as the probes hit her in the center of the chest.

  Her breathing stopped. For a split second she felt like she’d been kicked by a mule.

  Then she crumpled bonelessly to the floor as the world went black.

  At first, when the lights went out and the elevator stopped, Mark wasn’t too worried. He and three others—a man and two women, lawyer types all—were inside it, facing forward as elevator passengers tended to do. As they stopped with a jo
lt and were plunged unexpectedly into Stygian darkness, one of the women (he thought it was one of the women, although it was impossible to be sure) gasped, and the man said, “What the hell?”

  An emergency light came on, glowing pale from the button panel.

  “We’re stuck in the elevator,” the shorter of the two women, a white-haired, matronly type, announced in a tone of disbelief.

  “Will it fall?” The other woman, maybe fortyish, had short auburn hair and a frightened expression. Like the other two, she wore a suit and clutched a briefcase.

  “No.” Reaching past the white-haired woman, who stood in front of him, Mark leaned forward and pressed the emergency button. He had to press it twice before anyone answered.

  “Is there an emergency?” The security guard who answered was female, with a sweet voice.

  “Elevator five has stopped, with four people trapped inside,” he told her.

  “Oh, dear,” was the response. “Just stay calm. I’ll get somebody right on it.”

  But by then Mark was beginning to feel anxious.

  I accessed Allison’s computer, and I can see the guy who tried to kill me on it.

  Mark’s blood ran cold as he remembered Jess’s words.

  “Do you think we’re going to be in here long?” The other man had edged around to the front and was pressing the floor buttons with desperate jabs.

  “I don’t think you should do that,” the auburn-haired woman said nervously. “If they jam—”

  “We’re already stuck,” the man replied.

  “We should just stay calm like we were told and await rescue,” the white-haired woman said.

  Meanwhile, Mark had tuned them all out. Having begun to feel as jumpy as a cat on hot bricks, he was on his cell phone, calling the backup agent, a newbie, whose name he couldn’t recall right off the top of his head, who’d pulled stakeout duty in front of the building for the afternoon.

  “I’m trapped in an elevator,” he told his counterpart, trying hard to stay calm. “You need to get in here stat and get up to the subject’s office on the sixth floor. And I mean as fast as you can possibly move. Secure the subject and stay with her until I can get there, then call me and let me know she’s safe. And send somebody to get me out of this damned elevator now.”

  “Yes, sir,” came the reply.

  “Are you some kind of cop?” the auburn-haired woman asked as he disconnected, regarding him with a fascinated eye.

  “Secret Service,” he answered, terse rather than polite, and she started to tell him some convoluted story about her nephew in the FBI.

  The last thing he felt like doing was talking. His internal radar was giving him fits. Jess summoned him with urgent news, the elevator taking him to her stopped. Maybe a coincidence, but in his experience bad things going down didn’t come much more obvious than that.

  He had to restrain himself from tearing into the door with both hands. If he hadn’t been pretty sure they were between floors, that’s just what he would have done.

  A few minutes later, just in time to keep him from totally losing his mind, the lights came back on and the elevator started up again with a lurch.

  He was just bolting through the open doors on six when his cell phone rang. He answered it on the run.

  “Ryan.”

  “Sir, the subject’s not here,” the newbie said.

  This was, Lucy calculated as she sat on the hard concrete floor with her back up against the hot metal wall, the second full day of their captivity. They’d spent this one locked in this hellish garage. Last night, when they’d escaped from the trunk to hear someone walking up to the overhead doors, they’d practically died of terror on the spot, sure it had been their captor coming to finish the job of murdering them. Staying quiet as mice, they’d prayed that whoever it had been would go away. And whoever it had been had gone away. They’d listened as the footsteps had turned back the way they had come, only moving more quickly, as if the walker had been called away. At the time they’d been almost giddy with relief. But as the hours had ticked away and they had faced the horrible truth that there really was no way out of this damned garage, the true scope of their predicament had become increasingly clear. It had dawned on them only gradually, as the sun had risen and the heat inside the metal building had increased to a nearly unbearable level. The fact that they had no food and very little water had also started to assume larger and larger significance. No electricity, either, which meant they had no lights and no air-conditioning. Lucy was so hungry that she was sick with it, but the thirst was the worst thing. She craved water. Her throat burned, her tongue felt thick, and her mouth was so dry that she couldn’t even swallow anymore.

  If it hadn’t been for the half-full bottle of water they’d found in the car’s front seat after smashing a window in hopes of finding a garage door opener or cell phone or OnStar system or something—to no avail—Lucy guessed they already would have died of thirst by now. Or been close to it, anyway.

  “He’s going to come back and kill us, isn’t he?” Jaden sat slumped beside her, her head resting on her raised knees. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. Thin before, she was skeletal now. Her cheekbones were so sharp that they seemed about to poke through her pale skin.

  “We’re ready for him.” Lucy said that with more confidence than she felt. They’d wedged the trunk back down so that it wouldn’t be apparent at first glance that they’d broken out of it. They’d kicked the glass from the broken window under the car. She was armed with a shovel she’d discovered in a corner, along with a couple of bags of mulch, a wheelbarrow, and a rake. Jaden was armed with the rake. If—when—the killer came back, they meant to hide in a corner near the door, concealed as much as possible behind the wheelbarrow and the mulch, which they’d moved into position, then slip out and run for their lives before he noticed them. If that didn’t work, they were going to fight him off with the shovel and the rake.

  Lucy really hoped it didn’t come to that.

  “If he doesn’t hurry up, we’re going to be dead anyway.” Jaden’s glance at the nearly empty water bottle sitting on the concrete between them said it all. After another twenty-four hours, they’d be unconscious or dead, Lucy was pretty sure.

  “We could try banging on the walls again.” As their desperation had increased, they’d given up on the whole quiet-as-a-mouse thing and tried screaming, banging on the metal walls with the shovel and rake, honking the horn—useless, because the car battery was dead—prying at the doors, digging away at the concrete. None of it had worked. They’d just ended up exhausted and thirsty.

  It was getting dark inside the garage now, not the pitch dark of night but a creeping gray that told Lucy twilight had fallen. Expecting the heat in the garage to ease seemed reasonable, but so far it hadn’t happened. Probably because with all the metal and the concrete, the place was a natural oven.

  “Why don’t you try going to sleep in the car?” Lucy suggested to Jaden and licked her dry lips. Not that it helped much, because she was fresh out of saliva. “I’ll keep watch.”

  Jaden shook her head. “I think we ought to—”

  She broke off. Her head came up. Her eyes widened. Lucy heard it too: the purr of an engine, the rumble of tires on gravel.

  He—somebody—was coming.

  They scrambled into position, behind the wheelbarrow, behind the mulch, just as the garage door nearest them started to rise with a nerve-jangling rattle. No light came on inside the garage. Lucy’s take on it was that the building was too makeshift to have one.

  “Wait until the car’s all the way inside, then run,” Lucy whispered. Jaden nodded.

  Lucy’s heart began to thud. Jaden was breathing so hard that she sounded like she was wheezing. Just in case, Lucy’s fingers curled around the shovel’s wooden shaft. It was about five feet long, with a sturdy metal scoop. A great weapon—if he didn’t have a gun.

  Like the car they’d been locked in, this one was big and black, although it looked to be a
lot newer. The sound of its engine made Lucy shiver. The thought of the carbon monoxide it emitted caused her to glance longingly out the opening door. It was all she could do to keep herself from bursting from their hiding place and running toward the gravel driveway and shadowy strip of grass and sliver of woods she glimpsed beyond it. Jaden made an abortive movement as if to do exactly that.

  “Wait,” Lucy cautioned, her voice the merest breath of sound, warning herself as much as Jaden as the blaze of headlights revealed by the opening garage door sliced through the gloom.

  As the car nosed into the garage, Lucy shivered. Fear tasted as sour as vinegar in her mouth.

  They waited until the car was all the way inside. Then they would have run for it, but they couldn’t.

  Another big black car pulled up behind the first. Another set of headlight beams sliced past them. This car stopped just outside the garage, on the gravel, and a man got out. It was too dark to see anything much about him except that he was tall and wore a suit and carried a gun.

  Sick with horror, Lucy grabbed Jaden’s arm. She shook her head at her. Jaden’s eyes gleamed wildly at her through the gathering dusk.

  Footsteps on the concrete brought Lucy’s attention back to the car that had pulled into the garage. Its headlights and engine were off now, and the driver was coming around toward the trunk. He gestured to the man with the gun, who walked toward him.

  Heart pounding, Lucy held her breath. The man with the gun would have to pass within just a few feet of their hiding spot. Dizzy with fright, she ducked her head, afraid to look, afraid he would feel the weight of her gaze or see the pale gleam of her face. Beside her, Jaden did the same thing. Lucy could feel her friend’s arm shaking as it pressed against her.