[Kate Lange 01.0] Damaged

by Pamela Callow

“Quick, is it ready?” That was a woman’s voice.

  “Here,” John said. “You do it. I’m no good with these things.”

  “I’ll bet,” the woman replied, disgust in her voice.

  The woman’s name was right on the tip of her tongue. Which was dry, so dry. She needed a drink of water.

  Someone grabbed her arm, pushing her sleeve quickly up to her bicep. It was the woman. Her fingers were businesslike, practiced.

  “Look, while she’s out, I’ve got to check in with my wife. So she doesn’t get suspicious.”

  The woman’s fingers tightened. “No. You need to stay, John. I can’t face him alone.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “John!” The woman’s panic was evident in her voice. “Wait. Please, don’t go.”

  There was a pause. Then John said in his most soothing voice, the voice Kate knew even in her groggy state was his most dangerous, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

  The door thudded before the woman could respond.

  Cool air rushed over Kate’s skin. A piece of tubing pinched her above the elbow as it was tightened.

  Sweaty fingers tapped the skin over her vein. She wanted to pull her arm away but couldn’t. She turned her head. The white spots tilted sickeningly.

  Jab. Despite the woman’s palpable anxiety, the needle slid into her vein smoothly. Anna was good at this. Anna. That’s who the voice belonged to.

  Nausea surged through her. She moaned. Then came the undertow of sleep. A heavy, rolling sleep.

  Don’t. Don’t.

  Fight it.

  The heaviness rolled over the pain in her head. It rolled through her muscles, holding down her limbs.

  She let it take over.

  Blackness floated through her.

  * * *

  Friday, May 18, 7:16 p.m.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  She’d stood him up.

  Randall glanced at his watch again: 7:16 p.m. He’d called her more than an hour ago.

  Damn it. He needed her to cooperate. He ran a hand over his face. He’d let his anger override his professionalism and now this was the price he was going to pay. He’d thrown her an ultimatum and she’d stamped on it. Out of anger? He wasn’t sure. She’d sounded on the verge of tears. Maybe she was taking a few minutes to collect herself. Because he knew she wouldn’t appear in his office teary-eyed and vulnerable. No, she would stride in and give him a curt excuse for her tardiness, her gaze defiant in her red-rimmed eyes.

  At least he hoped so. Otherwise, there was only one conclusion to draw from her failure to appear.

  She was on John’s side, after all.

  * * *

  Friday, May 18, 7:20 p.m.

  “Ethan. Come to the war room pronto.” Ferguson’s voice was tight with excitement. “The lab just called.”

  “I’ll be there in five.” He threw his cell phone onto Lamond’s lap, checked his rearview mirror and did a quick U-turn. “They’ve got the results from the last victim,” he told Lamond.

  “Finally,” Lamond muttered. They were both frustrated. It’d been a fruitless day. Ethan had been interviewing surgeons, Lamond had been going through morgue records. So far, everyone was above reproach.

  They made it to the station in three minutes. Ethan and Lamond jumped out of the car and ran into the building. The war room was buzzing when they arrived. Ethan felt adrenaline surge through him. Something had finally broken on the case.

  Ferguson stood at the head of the board table. The other detectives crowded around her. As soon as Ethan and Lamond reached the table, Ferguson cleared her throat.

  They fell silent at once. Their usual banter had been worn out from the strain of too many days with too many disappointments.

  “Our killer has finally slipped,” she said. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation. “The lab found trace evidence on victim number three’s body.”

  “Semen?” Lamond asked.

  Ferguson shook her head. “Embalming fluid.”

  Chapter 51

  Friday, May 18, 7:24 p.m.

  He walked into the embalming room. The familiar smell embraced him, tantalizing his senses. It was like coming home. It was home.

  He strode across the room. The elevator door was sitting open, waiting for him.

  This was a good sign. He punched the button and waited, glancing at his watch: 7:24 p.m. He was early.

  But he couldn’t wait any longer.

  Adrenaline pumped through his body.

  Anna had called him in tonight for an “extra case.”

  There had been something in her voice—fear, desperation, anxiety—that he had never heard from her before. But he wanted to hear it again. When he was tightening his grip on her.

  He was happy to come in, he said.

  The elevator stopped. She would be on the other side of the door. His muscles tightened in anticipation. Spots flecked and foamed around his vision. The door slid open. His legs would not bend. Jesus. He didn’t know what was happening to him, but it couldn’t happen now. Not when the need was so great. Using all his strength, he staggered forward.

  Anna turned.

  His muscles relaxed in a liquid rush. Urge swamped his brain.

  Her eyes met his. Her face changed to a look he craved.

  Fear.

  She backed away. “Craig? You’re early.”

  * * *

  Friday, May 18, 7:27 p.m.

  Randall tapped his desk impatiently, staring out the window. Halifax Harbour at one corner, the Citadel at the other. They were the city’s two main strongholds: the navy commanding the water, the army manning the fortress. It was a fitting view.

  He thought of John Lyons. He’d held on to his superior harbor view with the tenacity of a two-year-old holding a lollipop. He didn’t even realize that Randall had no interest in it.

  Was he also blind to the fact that Randall was onto him? Randall hadn’t been fooled for a minute by John’s declaration that he’d only defrauded LMB with the CreditAngels loan. There were more skeletons in his closet. And they were just waiting to drag all the partners into their danse macabre.

  He glanced at his watch again: 7:27 p.m.

  His jaw tightened. She wasn’t coming.

  He certainly wasn’t waiting for her. He’d given her the benefit of the doubt. Whatever had upset her was no excuse for failing to appear. She’d have a hell of a lot to answer for come Monday morning.

  He strode to the elevator, punching P2 on the panel. The parkade was almost empty. He walked to his low-slung E-type, its gleaming green finish improving his mood. God, he loved driving that car.

  Despite his irritation, a small smile curved his mouth.

  It quickly faded when he noticed the other car sitting three spots away from his.

  It looked like Kate’s.

  He peered through the driver’s window. The car was empty. He scanned the interior. The backseats were covered with white dog hair.

  That confirmed it. It was her car.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed her cell number.

  A phone chimed in response. Somewhere around the corner.

  His flesh rose.

  He strode down the ramp, his heart slamming into his ribs. Kate must have come to meet him.

  Where was she?

  The chime was getting closer.

  He slowed down, scanning the parking lot.

  Silver gleamed against the concrete. He ran toward it, the chiming now sounding eerily foreboding.

  He snatched the cell phone from the ground and hurried to the elevator.

  Kate had been in the parkade.

  What happened to her? Could she be in her office, going through the TransTissue file? Could she have dropped her cell phone and not noticed?

  He punched the elevator button, practically diving through the doors when it arrived. The elevator climbed to the associates’ floor. His heart rate climbed with it. He ran down the hallway to her office. Ther
e was a stillness in the corridor. Where the fuck was everyone? Didn’t they have work to do?

  He was disgusted with the disappearance of the associates on a Friday night. The smell of burned coffee reached his nose. Someone had left the coffee on in the kitchenette.

  His heart rate bumped up a notch. If Kate had been here, surely she would have turned the coffee machine off. The smell was so pervasive, so foul.

  He lunged through her office door.

  His stomach sank. Her desk looked untouched, the files neatly stacked in preparation for Monday. No sign of her jacket or briefcase.

  What the hell had happened to her?

  A picture of her lying bleeding, her creamy skin waxy and white, flashed through his mind.

  With it came fear. Pain.

  And a shocking realization.

  It almost killed him to think of her being hurt.

  He took a deep breath. He needed to be calm. He needed to figure out what could have happened in that parkade. Something had made her run in panic. He was sure of that now.

  The hair on his arms rose.

  Had she run into John?

  Randall tried to put himself in John’s shoes. The man was desperate. Randall could smell it on him. Randall had pushed at that desperation, had fed it, effectively boxing John into a corner. He had wanted John off balance for the partners’ meeting.

  Had he pushed him too far?

  He hadn’t thought so. But he hadn’t anticipated that John would see Kate in the parkade. He’d called John at 5:15 p.m., expecting him to come right away. When he hadn’t shown forty-five minutes later, he was seriously pissed off. He wouldn’t wait any longer. He wanted answers. Now. He called Kate. She could fill him in on TransTissue. But her refusal to come in had ignited his fury. And then John showed up. At that point, he was so consumed with anger at the mess his fucking partner had gotten LMB into—and that Randall hadn’t spotted—that he hadn’t even thought about the fact that he’d ordered Kate to come right away.

  What an idiot he was. He’d assumed Kate had given him the finger. He hadn’t put two and two together. But he was sure John had. He would know Kate would be his bête noire.

  He would have every reason in the world to want little Ms. Lange silenced.

  Chapter 52

  Friday, May 18, 7:27 p.m.

  The pain was duller when she awoke. But in some ways she felt worse. Her body was sluggish. Her limbs felt as if weights sat on them. She was also freezing. Cold metal ran under the length of her body.

  She shivered. Her breasts jiggled.

  She was naked.

  She forced her eyelids open. A light glared directly into her eyeballs, drilling shards of white-hot pain into her nerves. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  An obnoxious smell flooded her nose.

  It was a smell of death and decay.

  She knew where she was.

  She was in Anna Keane’s little shop of horrors. She was lying on a gurney. She flexed her hands. Tubing secured her wrists together. She tried to move her legs. They were bound as well. Panic welled in her.

  “Craig?” a woman asked. It was Anna Keane.

  Kate’s pulse began to throb through her veins. Craig. It could only be Craig Peters. President of BioMediSol, Inc. The man who signed the disarticulation record of Vangie Wright/Mary Littler.

  There was a mumble. Then Anna Keane said, “Why don’t you come back in half an hour.”

  Silence.

  Someone stumbled. A body thudded. There was a muffled grunt. She needed to see what was happening. She turned her head away from the light and forced her eyes open again.

  Two blurry figures moved jerkily into her line of vision.

  She squinted. A man staggered, pinning Anna Keane against one of the freezers.

  “Jesus Christ! Get the hell off me!” Anna Keane pushed the man away from her. He fell backward against the gurney that Kate lay trussed on. She flinched.

  It was then that she saw his face.

  It was the blond man.

  The man from Lisa MacAdam’s funeral.

  The man from Dr. Gill’s lab.

  His face contorted.

  This was Craig Peters.

  “Craig, your girl is right there. Behind you,” Anna Keane said. Her voice was low, but fear caused it to tremble. “Look, she’s ready for you.”

  Craig Peters started mumbling again. He still hadn’t moved away from the gurney. The weight of his body pressed against Kate’s legs. She lay perfectly still. But her flesh rose at his words. “I need you…”

  Anna Keane backed away, stumbling into a meat freezer. Craig Peters pitched toward her. There was a loud crash as his arm caught the tray of instruments laid out by the gurney. The instruments that were meant to end her life and plunge her body, piece by piece, into the cold depths of BioMediSol’s freezers.

  The instruments went flying. She jerked as a hot needle of pain dug deep into her thigh. Something had stabbed her. She peered through slit eyes down her prone body. The handle of a scalpel was visible. The blade had embedded itself in her leg. The other instruments had clattered to the floor around her.

  “Craig, you don’t need me. You’ve got her. She’s waiting for you,” Anna cried. Then she added, “She wants you to!” The fear was unmistakable now. Kate could smell it in the close air of the room.

  “Doesn’t hurt,” Craig Peters panted. “Promise.” He sounded like an animal. A robot. His body was stiff, rigid, as if he was doing a grim impersonation of Frankenstein. It would have been laughable except for one thing: the look in his eyes. Anna Keane was dead meat.

  The funeral director turned and ran out of the tiny embalming room. Craig Peters catapulted himself after her. Kate looked frantically around.

  She was alone…for as long as it took Anna Keane and Craig Peters to have their battle to the death. Whoever survived would make her their next victim.

  Boxes crashed to the floor outside the embalming room. She tried to block the sounds of Craig Peters’ attack, of Anna Keane’s desperate cries. The scalpel blade in her leg burned flame into her muscle.

  You must get out of here. Focus.

  She bent her knees. Pain shot through her quadriceps. Her hands strained toward the scalpel.

  She couldn’t reach it.

  She pulled her knees toward her stomach. Thank God for all her running. Even though her right quad trembled violently, she was strong enough to hold her legs in position while her hands fumbled along her thigh.

  Blood warmed her fingertips. She was getting close.

  A muffled scream broke through her concentration. It was a desperate, angry cry. Her fingers began to shake. Anna Keane was losing. Panic clenched Kate’s stomach. She desperately needed to pee.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  She repeated it in her head.

  Anna Keane began to beg. “No. Please, Craig. No.”

  Kate squeezed her eyes shut and repeated her mantra, trying to block out Anna’s pleas. Her fingers scrabbled for the scalpel’s handle. She grabbed it. And pulled hard. It resisted, then slid out with a weird sucking sensation, as if her flesh didn’t want to let go of the source of its misery.

  Blood gushed over her hand. Warm, spurting. She ignored the weakness seeping into her quadriceps and turned onto her side. Her head buzzed.

  Focus. Look at the spot on the floor.

  It took her a second to realize it was her blood she was looking at.

  She bent her elbows and brought her bound wrists up to eye level. She carefully put the handle of the scalpel into her mouth and clamped her teeth above the blade. Then she aimed the point of the scalpel into the knot of tubing binding her wrists together.

  The knot swam in and out of focus. Sweat ran into her eyes.

  Fuck it.

  She rammed the point of the scalpel into the knot. It nicked the rubber.

  Yes.

  She moved her head back and forth. Vertigo dogged every move as she sliced through the knot. Sweat slid down her chille
d cheeks.

  Boxes crashed in the next room. Anna Keane was putting up an almighty fight. But she couldn’t last forever.

  The tubing snapped. Kate braced her hands on the gurney and pushed herself to an upright position.

  Spots filled her vision. She felt herself tipping.

  Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

  The spots began to recede. She reached down carefully to her ankles. It took only a few seconds to slice through the tubing. In those few seconds, everything fell silent. No boxes crashed. No bodies thudded.

  The silence pounded at her nerves.

  What was going on in the other room?

  Then she heard it. Breathing, harsh and ragged, on the other side of the wall. The victor.

  Craig Peters would be searching for her now.

  Chapter 53

  Friday, May 18, 7:38 p.m.

  Randall squeezed his eyes shut. Think. Where would she be?

  She could be anywhere.

  He grabbed the phone on her desk and dialed security. “Put me through to the police station.”

  As soon as the police switchboard answered, he said, “I need to speak to Detective Drake. It’s urgent.”

  He stood behind her desk, waiting for Ethan Drake to come on the line. He never thought he’d be in this position. That he’d have to ask Ethan Drake for help. The man who’d put his oldest friend behind bars.

  He wondered what had driven Kate and this guy apart. Whatever it was, he hoped it wouldn’t cloud the detective’s judgment.

  “Detective Drake.”

  “It’s Randall Barrett.” He fought to keep his voice calm.

  “Yeah?” The detective’s voice was unsurprisingly hostile.

  “Kate has disappeared.”

  His words had the effect he wanted. The hostility was gone, replaced by wariness. “What?”

  “I believe she’s been kidnapped.”

  “When?” Drake was now all business, although Randall thought he detected a hint of fear in his voice.

  He glanced at Kate’s clock. It was small, battered. Looked as if it had a few tales to tell. Right now it was urging him to hurry. “Approximately an hour ago.”