Already Missing (A Laura Frost FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 4)

by Blake Pierce

  “I’m thinking that we’re running out of time,” Laura said bluntly. “We don’t know what kind of timeframe he’s working on, but this killer has already given us a view of his MO that we can’t ignore. If he has his next victim already, we only have about five and a half hours before they’re dead.”

  Nate checked his watch, verifying her count. “In a case like this, I think we assume he has a victim until we have some kind of conclusive proof that he doesn’t,” he said. “I would normally point to the fact that there was a two-day gap between the first and second victims, but we both know that killers escalate. And if he’s smart, he’ll know that the chance of getting caught increases as the deaths rack up, and he’ll want to get as many done as possible.”

  Laura couldn’t help but shiver. It was chilling, to hear it in those terms. As many as possible. Yes, that was normally what sadistic, brutal killers like this went for. Putting as many people through their tortures as they could. Racking up a body count. Whether it was some kind of conscious decision, some crusade to clean up the world or end personal grudges, or simply an insatiable hunger to keep doing it again, the count was often part of the point.

  “And we have no leads,” Laura said. She closed her eyes momentarily, rubbing the bridge of her nose. She’d had more challenging cases than this one, but hardly by much. There were so few clues to go on, and she hated the idea that they might need another death in order to start putting the pieces together.

  Two was a coincidence. Three was a pattern. Everything they thought they knew… it could still be changed.

  “Maybe,” Nate said, thoughtfully. “We do know that both women had to have been abducted more than twelve hours before they died. That’s a long enough time for someone to get suspicious.”

  Laura looked at him, starting to understand what he was saying. “Someone doesn’t come home from work, or turn up for their shift, or answer calls about how they were supposed to meet a friend for dinner.”

  “Maybe they didn’t even show up to work this morning,” Nate pointed out. “We could have a missing person report already.”

  “So, we start there,” Laura nodded. “Prioritize any local women who have been reported missing in the past day. Get Blackford and his team going out to conduct interviews, get as much information as possible. Anyone whose disappearance is out of character, especially.”

  Nate put his phone to his ear again, nodding. “I’ll call again, get this all set up. I just hope there are enough leads to make this work. I don’t know how many missing person cases there can be in such a short space of time. And there’s always a chance the next one, whoever she is, might fall through the cracks. No one noticing until it’s too late.”

  “Then we use the other piece of information we have,” Laura pointed out. “The locations. He always chooses abandoned locations. We should have as many units as are available sent out to any abandoned buildings they know of. Even if he’s still in the process of setting up a new platform somewhere, we could find it, set a team to stake it out and wait for him.”

  “Good idea,” Nate said, turning around to make the call.

  Laura watched Milford, making sure he wasn’t about to make another break for it, without really seeing him.

  If they didn’t get any immediate leads, this was about to be a long night. She hooked her hands under her arms, crossing them tighter across her chest, thinking about how the temperature was going to drop as night fell. Somewhere out there, in a cold, abandoned building, she couldn’t help but picture another woman. Bound and alone. A clock ticking around her neck.

  And they only had a handful of hours to check all of the abandoned places in a city as big as Atlanta.

  What were the chances, Laura wondered, of them actually getting it right?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lincoln tried and failed to get his breathing under control, attempting to remember some techniques a therapist had told him once, years ago. What was it? Count five things you can see?

  Well, that wasn’t easy, in itself. The light outside was fading, and though he’d been able to see a little further earlier, now he was barely able to make out anything. The clock on his chest, that was one. It only had a few hours left on it, now. The timer ticking down.

  A fresh wave of panic ran through him at the thought of that timer. He’d asked. He’d been conscious enough when the stranger was setting him up on the platform that he’d been able to ask, even if he wasn’t able to struggle away.

  No, don’t think of that now, Lincoln told himself. He needed to calm down first. Calm down, work out a way out of this, and then consider everything that had happened later.

  What else could he see?

  The ropes around his body. That was another thing. They tied his hands together and his ankles, and wound across and over his chest as well, pinning his arms to one side. He felt like a pinata, about ready to drop. He couldn’t see the one around his neck, could only feel it.

  The third thing he could see was the window opposite him. It was so filthy that it barely let in any light and seeing anything through it was mostly out of the question. At least he’d had a little muted daylight, earlier. Now that was gone, too.

  The fourth thing was the platform he was standing on, which he could make out if he tilted his head. It was some kind of rough wood, not polished or painted, and clearly only a temporary construction. The fifth thing he could see was the floor, not so far down he couldn’t make it out but definitely far enough to be out of reach.

  Okay, good. He was doing it. Now, what was next? Oh, yeah – four things he could feel. The ropes, that was easy, because it felt like they were cutting into his skin. The fabric of his jacket, right under his fingers if he tried to stretch them out. What else? He felt… cold. It was cold in here. And he could feel the bounce of the platform under his feet, how unstable it was if he tried to move. The wood was kind of springy. Maybe because it wasn’t attached to anything at the other end, like a diving board. He’d been afraid, at first, that it wasn’t going to hold his weight.

  Next was three things he could smell. Huh. It was musty up here; he could smell that. Like the place hadn’t been disturbed in a long while. And a faint smell of something that he thought was probably the rotting hay he’d seen in the corner when the sun was still out. He hadn’t ever smelled it before, but he had a feeling it had to be that. And the gag that had been pushed into his mouth, wrapped around his head so it wouldn’t come out, that had a kind of oily smell to it. At least, he thought so.

  Two things he could hear. He listened, hard, for a moment. The ticking of the clock. And out there… nothing.

  No, not nothing. Some kind of bird call. He didn’t know anything about birds, didn’t know if it was an owl or a sparrow or something he’d never heard of before. But Lincoln could identify it as a bird. Which in itself worried him, because he wanted to hear traffic and people’s voices and things that might save him.

  The last thing was something he could taste. He could taste his own blood. He’d bitten his tongue trying to get the gag out of his mouth.

  Lincoln breathed deeply, trying to surround himself with the immediacy of it. That was what his therapist had said to do. Be in the moment.

  Okay, well, in this moment, he was trying not to die on a goddamn platform in the middle of an abandoned building with a timer telling him exactly how long he had to live.

  As it turned out, meditation techniques weren’t much use in this kind of situation.

  Lincoln thought back, trying to retrace the conversation he’d had with the man who left him here. The stranger. He’d been so calm. That was he weirdest part of it. And firm, too. Like Lincoln was a little kid acting up and the stranger had a job to do, and he wasn’t going to take any sass from him.

  Lincoln wasn’t sure if he’d been supposed to come around when he did. He’d looked up, found himself lying on the old wooden floorboards, and made some kind of noise. A gasp, or something. If he’d been more awake, he woul
d have kept himself quiet, but then it was too late before he had a chance to realize. The guy had been working on something up there, on a ladder, and he’d come down to check that Lincoln was still securely tied up.

  He'd tried to struggle, of course. But the ropes were holding him so tightly. He couldn’t even crawl effectively. And when the stranger pulled him over towards the ladder and then hauled him up by the ropes, Lincoln hadn’t been able to do anything at all. Once they got up high, he’d stopped struggling out of fear that he would fall to the ground and break both his legs, or his spine, or his face. Without his arms free, there was nothing he could do.

  “Why are you doing this?” he’d asked, before he even really understood what ‘this’ was.

  And the stranger had stopped and looked at him with that odd kind of strict calm. He’d said, “Because you cheated.”

  And Lincoln had no idea what he was going on about.

  There had been some kind of desperate rush in his head to try and understand. To connect it to anything he could. To his fourth-grade math test, when, yes, he’d looked at his friend Bobby’s answers because he’d forgotten to study the night before and couldn’t remember how to do a certain sum. And that was the only thing he could think of, and it was totally stupid, but he’d blurted it out anyway. “At school?”

  And he could have sworn the guy looked at him like he was an alien. This guy, who had hauled him up a ladder to a section of half-rotted floorboards up on a second level of the building, and then onto a short, homemade platform. The thing he’d been setting up when Lincoln woke.

  “No,” he’d said. “You cheated death.”

  And Lincoln had realized exactly what he meant, and at that moment something inside of him went very cold. Because he’d known. He’d known that much was true.

  “What are you talking about?” he’d asked, anyway, because why not? He had to try and get out of here. Keeping the stranger talking meant at least they were having a conversation, and nothing worse than that was happening to Lincoln. At that moment, he’d still had no idea of the full extent of what was coming.

  “You cheated death and got a second chance at life,” the stranger had said, with that weird patience, working on something just outside of Lincoln’s field of view. “That’s not fair. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

  “It wasn’t really my fault,” Lincoln had said, starting to feel more than a little panicked. “I didn’t ask to get saved, or anything. I mean, I’m grateful I was. But it’s not really cheating. Not if you don’t do it on purpose.”

  “Even so,” the stranger said. And then he reached over and hauled Lincoln to his feet, and that was when he put the rope around his neck for the first time.

  And by the time Lincoln had thought to try and get away, somehow, anyhow, the noose had hit the back of his neck and the front of it at the same time, and he realized there was no way to get out of it.

  Not without his hands.

  “You’re gonna hang me?” he’d asked, his voice coming out high and strained and weird to his own ears.

  “Yes and no,” the stranger had said. “You’re going to hang. I won’t be here. I suppose you could say that time is going to hang you.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Lincoln had asked, struggling to try and get his arms free. Fruitlessly, of course.

  “Well, if you look down, you’ll see a timer,” the stranger had said, with that same eerie calm. Lincoln looked at the clock on his chest. It was set for 0:00. Then the stranger reached out and started to push buttons, changing it. Above the timer was a clock face, and Lincoln realized it was almost exactly twelve noon. “Now, when this timer goes off, this platform that we’re standing on is going to drop. You see that hinge over there?”

  Lincoln looked, taking it in. “What?” he’d said, which was about all his terrified mind could manage.

  “That’s going to swing downwards, pretty quickly,” the stranger said. “I’ve been making some tweaks, trying to make sure it will drop fast enough. It ought to break your neck. It’s going to be quite quick, don’t worry about that. The point is: your time is almost up.”

  “Why give me the time?” Lincoln asked desperately. Not because he wanted to push the guy into hanging him right now. Because he wanted to stop him. To make him think. To maybe, against all odds, make him see that he was doing something crazy.

  The stranger didn’t answer. He pushed a final button on the timer, setting it going, and stepped back with a look of satisfaction. “I’m going to have to leave now, Lincoln,” he’d said. Like a teacher telling a child fairly and calmly what was going to happen to them as punishment. There was no anger in it. Just like it was a thing he had to do. Not his own choice, but not something he disagreed with either. “I would recommend that you use this time wisely. I’ve not been through it myself, but I imagine it will give you a chance for some introspection.” And he’d tied the gag around Lincoln’s mouth.

  And then he’d gone.

  And that had been more than six hours ago.

  Lincoln let out a desperate whine behind the gag, wishing at least this bit of cloth was out of the way so that he could breathe properly, so he could call out. That was the point, obviously.

  He turned in a small circle, the most amount of shuffling his legs could manage. He’d already tried to walk towards the hinge. The rope wasn’t long enough. He pushed against it again now, feeling it scrape against the skin of his chin and neck. Maybe if he forced it…

  Lincoln pushed forward until he was forced to give up, stepping back with a cry that was felt more than heard in his throat. It was too tight. Step that way, and he’d pass out before he got anywhere.

  He turned in a small circle again, looking for something that might help him, tears spilling over his cheeks as he saw the same nothing again and again with each rotation.

  He only had a handful of hours left before it was all going to be over.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Nothing yet?” Laura asked, searching Nate’s face for signs of an answer.

  He shook his head grimly, making her shoulders sag.

  It had been hours of searching, and they were still no closer to finding the location of the killer’s next victim. “How many spots do we still have left to search?”

  Nate took the map from her, spreading it out across the dashboard of their parked car. It was already littered with rings and marks and lines, the first of them drawn on hastily during the briefing Captain Blackford had put together and the rest updated throughout the night. Whole areas of the outskirts of Atlanta, plus some central spots, were shaded out. Marked as checked.

  And nothing had been found.

  “We’re here,” Nate said, finding the old church they were standing in front of and marking it off with a wide-tipped blue pen. It was burnt out, almost completely. There was nowhere for a platform to even attach, and even if there had been, it wouldn’t have been easy for the killer to hide what he was doing. “The latest updates have crossed off everything marked in the east. Those teams are going to move up, split up through the city and cover any properties that we aren’t yet aware of, doing a grid pattern search through the city blocks.”

  Laura looked over the map again, feeling the frustration mounting. All she wanted to do was slam her hand down on the dashboard and swear loudly, but she didn’t. Both because it wouldn’t help, and because she didn’t want to inadvertently set off any airbags. Or stress Nate out any further, which he didn’t need either.

  “Where are we going next?” she asked.

  Nate pointed to a larger circle on the map. “Here,” he said. “I think it’s probably time we split up. It’s already past ten, and we only have a couple of hours left. We need to cover more ground.”

  “We only have one car,” Laura pointed out.

  “I know that,” Nate said, giving her a look in the harsh yellow glow of the car’s overhead light. “This here is a whole industrial complex that fell out of use. According to t
he map, it’s a factory and a bunch of warehouses. Probably some smaller outbuildings as well. I’m thinking you drop me off there and head on to the next site. It’ll take me long enough to get through them all. If I need to, I can call you to swing back and pick me up, or I can get a cab or something. Anything to speed this up.”

  “What if the killer’s there?” Laura asked, a fear seizing her. She hadn’t touched Nate in a long time, deliberately so. She knew that if she did, even for a brief moment, that shadow of death would be waiting for her. Waiting for him. Waiting to claim him.

  What if this was the moment? He went off alone, and the killer found him and attacked him before he could raise the alarm?

  “I’ll be careful,” Nate promised. “I’ve got my cell phone, and I’ve got your number on speed dial alongside Captain Blackford’s. I’ve got my radio. I’ll stay quiet and cautious. What else am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to stick with your partner so you’re at less of a risk,” Laura argued.

  “If he can ambush me and take me down, then he can ambush both of us pretty easily anyway,” Nate said. It sounded like he was trying to be reasonable, but he was actually only making Laura more nervous for his safety. “And what else are we going to do? Let him get away with it? Let someone else die? We only have two hours left, and even with all the other teams searching right now, Atlanta is a big city.”

  Laura took a breath. He was right, of course. If it was the other way around, she wouldn’t hesitate to put her own life at risk in order to save the life of a potential murder victim.

  That was part of the job.

  She sighed out that breath heavily, starting the engine of the car. “Fine,” she said. Not because she was definitely agreeing, but because she figured the drive would give her more time to think of objections. And because Nate’s point still stood. The night wasn’t getting any younger.