by Stella Hart
When I opened my eyes, reality hit me like a cold slap in the face. Literally. Icy winds picked up around us, howling and whipping a nearby pile of twigs into a frenzy, and Alex pulled back and looked down at me, an unreadable expression on his face. It was just us, and I was still a prisoner with no idea what the future held. “Let’s head inside. I’ll make hot chocolate,” he said.
At least some of the fantasy was true, I guess.
We trudged back to the house, and I stood by the fire in the main sitting room, warming my hands. Alex prepared our drinks, then came to stand by me. “I forgot to tell you. The cat shelter sent a thank you card after our donation,” he said as he handed me a mug. “I’ll put it in your room later so you can read it.”
“Thank you, sir,” I murmured. I knew I didn’t have to call him that—I was allowed to call him Alex now, and sometimes I did—but it was such a force of habit that I still called him ‘sir’ at least seventy percent of the time.
I’d decided to finally accept his bribe and let him donate a big chunk of money to my favorite animal shelter. I figured even if he did turn out to be a raging sociopath who wanted to kill me one day, at least something good would come out of my captivity. I’d watched him transfer the money the other day, so I knew those cats were really getting help. It wasn’t just a lie he told to make me feel better.
“Is there anything else I can do?” Alex asked, his brows drawing together in a curious frown. “To make you feel better.”
I swallowed hard. “Yes. You could let me go.”
He shook his head sadly. “I wish you would understand that I can’t,” he said.
“Right. Because there are people after me,” I muttered. Allegedly.
“Yes. People who will hurt you.”
By now I was certain that wasn’t true, but there was no point arguing. Alex wasn’t going to let me go. Not now, not ever.
I turned my head to face the fire again so that he wouldn’t see the tears glittering in my eyes. No matter how much he looked at me like he was in love with me, no matter how much he acted like a wonderfully caring boyfriend, I couldn’t be convinced that he actually loved me.
When it came down to it, I was still a captive, trapped here against my will. I would never be allowed to see my friends again or go wherever I wanted. I would never feel the rush of endless possibilities that freedom brought; the good and the bad. I wanted all that, and Alex refused to give it to me. He wasn’t my boyfriend, he wasn’t truthful about why he was keeping me here, and he didn’t love me.
If he did, he’d set me free.
16
Agent Jason West
Rubbing my eyes, I tossed the paper I’d been reading aside. Dead end.
After speaking to Cora Rossi a couple of weeks ago, I’d been going through the DMV records of all possible owners of the vehicle she’d spotted so many times around the corner of her and Celeste Riley’s block. Unfortunately, I’d run into two major roadblocks in my hunt for the car and its registered owner. No pun intended.
Firstly, I had to work this angle on the down-low, as Foley had made it clear a long time ago that I was to drop the search for Celeste and focus on my ‘real’ work, even though I was beyond certain she had been taken by the Heartbreaker, which was my real work. He disagreed, obviously. And after yet another Heartbreaker victim was found a few days ago—George Baldwin, a Supreme Court Justice, found on the outskirts of the city with several parts missing—we had more work on the case than ever. Things had been hectic.
Secondly, 3941 seemed to be the most common number combination on Mercedes vehicle plates registered in this state. Even though Cora had given me enough information to be helpful (new-looking silver Mercedes), it was still a tedious slog to get through all of the possibilities. In Allegheny County alone, there were over seventy silver Mercedes with that number on their license plate, and my search encompassed the entire Greater Pittsburgh Region, which included several other close counties as well. All in all, I had well over a hundred and fifty possibilities to go through. It was taking forever.
The option I’d just looked at was another no-go. The owner of the car was an elderly female and had been out of the state during most of the murders. She lived alone and didn’t have any family members who would use her car. Not a suspect. Not even close.
With a sigh, I grabbed the next sheet from the file. This car was a 2014 model with the serial HLE-3941, registered to an Alex Magnusson. Magnusson was almost thirty-six years old, six foot two. No criminal background. Not even a parking ticket.
Hmm. Off the bat, I’d say he wasn’t a suspect for the Heartbreaker—or Celeste’s captor—based on the lack of criminal record, which knocked him right off the profile that’d been established for the killer. However, I had to operate under the assumption that the damn profile was incorrect, otherwise we would have found the guy by now.
I put the paper down and typed his name into my computer to search through more records on the guy. Apparently he owned three properties: an apartment in the golden triangle downtown, a house on a small block in Shadyside, and a two-hundred acre property between the towns of Burgettstown and Hickory, about twenty-five miles from downtown Pittsburgh.
He had no family living close by, and he was a doctor based at Morrison Wright Memorial Hospital, a new health campus that’d opened downtown a few years ago. He always paid his taxes on time, made regular donations to charities, and occasionally volunteered his time for pro bono work at a few free clinics. An upstanding citizen, by all means.
My forehead creased in a frown, and I tapped a pen against my chin. This guy was perfect on paper, but something was still bothering me, a little needling thought squirreling its way through my brain, trying to touch on something else relevant. Something I heard recently….
My eyes widened as it hit me. Paula Halloran said something in particular to me a few weeks ago when I interviewed her. She said the guy who came to her house not long after her husband’s murder (the same guy I assumed to be posing as an FBI agent to trick her) had strongly resembled a ‘handsome young doctor’ who once treated her for a chronic wrist condition. She said the man who came to her door was blond, but she also said she thought he was wearing a wig—ostensibly to cover up his real hair color.
Alex Magnusson had dark hair, and judging solely by his license photo, he fitted the conventional standards of ‘handsome’. Hardly anyone looked good on their driver’s license, but this guy looked like he should be strutting down a damn catwalk in Florence or wherever the hell they held fashion shows these days.
He was also a pain specialist, according to hospital records. He could’ve certainly treated Ms. Halloran for a wrist condition years ago, by pure coincidence. On top of that, I’d also found an article lauding him for a recent breakthrough he’d made in deep brain stimulation surgery. He’d developed a technique for the surgery that was far less invasive than the usual technique of having to remove a rather sizable chunk of the skullcap. With his method using microelectrodes, only a tiny hole was required.
Some of the Heartbreaker victims had tiny holes drilled in their skulls, and while this had fallen under the umbrella of the usual mutilations—the victims were almost always covered in holes, or had chunks of flesh missing—it occurred to me in the most macabre sense that the victims with the holes in their skulls may have been forced to undergo this surgery as part of their torture.
The research Dr. Magnusson had published certainly indicated that a person could be made to feel the utmost pain with a few electrodes implanted in their brain, without any actual physical damage being done. His study was apparently carried out in order to find solutions for chronic pain, not causes, but still, it was all in there. Pain could be helped with the electrodes, or it could be caused. I wouldn’t put it past someone as sick as the Heartbreaker to do such a thing.
My heart pumping slightly faster, I did more searches on the guy, hoping to find something more solid to link him to the Heartbreaker case. While I wa
s excited, I couldn’t very well arrest the guy for simply being a doctor and pain researcher. I had to find real connections, not forge them myself from tenuous coincidences.
An old newspaper article popped up, and I leaned closer and stared at the screen, my pulse tripling. Shit. This could be it. A possible link.
I printed out what I’d found, stuffed it all in a file, and headed to ASAC Dwyer’s office. He was speaking to Foley, who gave me a filthy look and swept out of the room.
“He’s as friendly as ever, as you can see,” Dwyer joked with a wry grin as he adjusted a framed photo of his kids on the desk. “How can I help you this morning, Agent West?”
I closed the door behind me before carefully placing my file in front of him. Then I sat and told him what I’d discovered. He was quiet, listening to everything I had to say—unlike Foley, the prick—and then he leaned forward.
“To start off with, this is all purely circumstantial,” he said, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “We aren’t sure that there’s any secret group operating in the city that our killer might be going after, and like you said, we can hardly arrest a guy for simply being a doctor who may or may not look similar to a man who visited one of the victim’s wives years ago.”
“Sir, I—”
He held up a hand, cutting me off. “Having said that, I agree with you. I think there’s a lot more to this case—and our killer—than is suggested by that profile the buffoons at the BAU gave us. And this guy.…” He swept a hand over the Magnusson file. “Yeah, it could all be a coincidence. But I’m like you, West. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“So what are you saying?”
He leaned forward again, eyes sparkling. “I’m saying I think you’re right. I think this might actually be our fucking guy.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I don’t know what it is, but when I look at him in these photos, I just get a feeling in my bones. Probably not very professional of me to claim such a thing, but still, I feel it.”
I nodded slowly. That was exactly how I felt. “Me too, sir.”
“Be proud, West. I think you got him.”
Others might have dollar signs in their eyes right now, imagining the book or TV talk show deal they might score for being the agent who cracked open the Heartbreaker case. Not me, though. I just wanted the satisfaction of catching him and finding out what the hell this secret organization he was going after actually was. Moreover, I wanted to get Celeste Riley home safe and sound. Provided she was still alive, that is.
“I guess we should tell Foley,” I said.
“Fuck Foley.”
My brows shot up. “Sir?”
Dwyer snorted, and his forehead crinkled in an exasperated look. “You’ve done such good work here, West. You wouldn’t have found this guy if you hadn’t been so doggedly searching for Celeste Riley, which Foley demanded you stop doing. And we both know he’ll try and take all the glory for this, shady old bastard that he is.”
I nodded. “True.”
He tapped the side of his head with one finger. “I have an idea. You go and sit tight at your desk. Don’t breathe a word to anyone about this yet; we don’t want it getting back to Foley from any of his loyal minions. I’ll spend the next few hours assembling a team of our own, and we’ll start checking out Magnusson’s properties. If you’re right, and we get our guy, Foley will just have to suck it up and save his gloating bullshit for another case.”
I chuckled. “Yes, sir.”
I stood and turned to leave, but Dwyer spoke up again. “Oh, West?”
I turned back to him. “Yes?”
He smiled and winked. “Call your wife and tell her you won’t be coming home tonight. We might actually have the Heartbreaker in our sights, so it’s gonna be a long fucking day.…”
17
Celeste
Curled up on my armchair, I stared out my bedroom window, watching rain bucket down. The last few days had been warmer than the rest of this month, which meant clouds could actually shower instead of sleet or snow, and so all I’d heard since late last night was the sound of raindrops hitting the roof. It was usually a comforting sound to me, but right now, it wasn’t. All it did was remind me that I couldn’t be out there, free, dancing in the rain like a wild child.
I’d never actually wanted to do that in the past, but now that the option had been removed entirely, I wanted to do it, just so I knew I could.
There was a knock on my door—as if I could actually open it to let anyone in—and Alex entered a few seconds later, carrying a breakfast tray and a plastic bag filled with god knows what. He put it all down on the coffee table near the TV, then strode over to me. “I made you a big breakfast. All your favorites.”
“Thank you, sir. I mean, Alex.”
I’d been trying to remind myself to get out of the habit of calling him sir, but it was a difficult habit to break. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t remember to stop… it was more that I actually still liked calling him ‘sir’. I didn’t want to like it anymore, though, so I was trying to force myself out of it.
“I have to go into the city today for a surgery. It’s a very delicate procedure, so it’s going to take hours.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost nine now, so I’d say I should be home by about seven or eight this evening, in time to make us dinner. Nine at the latest. But I brought you a bag of snacks to tide you over, seeing as it’ll be a late dinner.” He pointed to the plastic bag. “Is that okay?”
“Yes.”
I turned to look out the window again. I knew I was being rude, turning away like that, but I didn’t want to look at Alex’s face. Every time I did, it felt like a little piece of my heart was being ripped out. I knew I couldn’t keep loving him, not when things were like this. I had to stop. I had to remind myself that he was a liar, a kidnapper, a killer.
“I’m sorry that you have to stay cooped up in here all day,” he said. “But I know you hated the collar, and without it I—”
I waved a hand and looked back in his direction. “I know, I know. If you let me out to roam, I’ll run away and get killed by the Circle, right?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, and Alex stiffened. “I know you’ve been comparing me to that Slovenian child snatcher, but I’m nothing like him. You are in danger.”
I arched an eyebrow. “The Slovenian guy kidnapped girls and told them they were in grave danger from devil worshippers to make them love him and feel safe with him. So they’d never leave. Isn’t that what you’ve done here? Tried to scare me into staying?”
“No. You really are in danger.” He frowned and knelt down before me. “Tell me why you don’t believe me.”
“I already told you. It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore,” I said listlessly, watching the rain spatter against the barred window again. “If the Circle knew I’d seen some of their stuff and knew they existed, why not just kill me years ago?”
He sighed impatiently. “We’ve been over this. I presume they thought there was a chance you’d never even remember, because you were so young, and they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves by killing you. If you died suspiciously, some people might start to dig and realize the connection between your father’s death and yours. They’re powerful people, but they aren’t completely untouchable. And the last thing they need is attention drawn to them.”
“Okay, but it’s not just that,” I said, my eyes narrowing. “You say this is a group of men and women who are almost all rich or powerful or influential… or all of the above. They have all this money and all these resources. And I’m supposed to believe they have nothing better to do with their time than stalk a young girl for decades, who may or may not eventually remember something about them? Honestly, it seems like it’d be way easier to just kill me, even if there was a risk that people might do some digging and connect it with my father’s death.”
“You’re looking at it the wrong way. It’s because they are so rich and powerful that they
can afford to have their little henchmen check up on you over the years, even though you might never remember. It’s not like they followed you every day, anyway. I presume they only checked up on you every few weeks. Maybe even months.”
I smiled. He’d walked right into my trap. “If they only checked up on me every few weeks or months, then why did you tell me ages ago that you saw men looking for me at my house the day after you took me? As in, just two or three days after I had a therapy breakthrough and started to remember things? Could it be because those men don’t exist and were never there, and you just told me that to scare me?”
“They were there.” Alex scraped a hand through his hair. “I suppose that was a coincidence. They just so happened to check up on you around that time. Or maybe they were checking up on you every single day. I don’t know.”
I held up my index finger. “But how did they actually find out what I said in therapy?”
“I assume they were able to hack the therapist’s computer and gain access to her notes.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Is that what you did?”
He shook his head. “I had to do it the old-fashioned way and spy on your therapist to listen to her record her session notes.”
“Why? I thought you could access all patient records, being a doctor and all.”
“No. The mental health section of Morrison Wright isn’t accessible to all doctors; only the ones who work there. It’s a whole separate wing. I can access the records if I need to, of course, but I need permission, so I can’t just access whatever I want. And as good as I am at getting into other people’s networks, I couldn’t get into those computers. Too difficult. Crazy firewalls.”
