The Drowned Woman: An absolutely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller (Jericho and Wright Thrillers Book 2)

by CJ Lyons

  He pulled a knife from his pocket and flicked the blade open. Leah tried to lunge for him, but couldn’t even make it to standing, her muscles were all twisted into painful knots.

  He stopped and turned to scowl down at her. “Don’t make me dose you again, Leah.”

  “What did you use? Chloroform?”

  “Nothing so crude and imprecise. It was a 6.75 percent concentration of monochloroethane. I had to titrate it precisely as anything over 8 percent is lethal.” He adjusted his grip on the knife. “Relax. I’m not going to hurt Risa.” He stepped toward Risa, focusing on her. “I’d never hurt you.”

  “No. You just wanted to cage me like a canary. To sing your praises, something like that?”

  He crouched down and cut her bonds, then gently helped her to her feet, one arm wrapped around her waist, keeping the stun gun close to her body. “Maybe. Yes. But only because I wanted to take care of you. I never loved anyone the way that I love you.”

  “How can I be sure of that, Jack? When everything else was lies? How do I know what’s true and what’s stage dressing?”

  “Me. I’m here, right here. The man you fell in love with.”

  “I fell in love with Jack. Not Chaos.”

  “No. You see the truth in people, Risa. That’s your gift. So when you fell in love with me, when you saw me, you saw my true self. You fell in love with all of me. I’m more than the man you call Chaos, more than Jack O’Brien.”

  He raised his hands, not to strike her, but to emphasize his point. “Robert Louis Stevenson called it Mr. Hyde. But this need, this drive, this urge I have, it isn’t uncommon. Some men turn it on their families, abuse them. Others pick fights in bars. Many allow it to consume them in the form of addiction or being so competitive at work that they’ll ruin lives to climb to the top.” He shrugged. “I found another path.”

  As he spoke, Risa leaned her weight so that in order to face her, Jack turned his back on Leah. Leah struggled to regain her feet but could barely manage to breathe through the pain that consumed her.

  “You’re saying you’re like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? A split personality that doesn’t know what the other half is doing?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m in complete control at all times. But so was Dr. Jekyll. He chose to release Mr. Hyde, to vent all those repressed feelings of violence and rage. He did that so he could be a better Dr. Jekyll.”

  “You’re trying to be a better man by killing strangers?” Her voice was taut with disdain.

  “Honey, I know this is a lot to take in. But I’m still the man you fell in love with. After all, I could have run. I risked everything to come back. For you.”

  “You want me to come with you? As your hostage? As the poor, sick woman who depends on you for everything? Isn’t that just another game, another living lie?”

  “No. Come with me as my partner. My equal. I’ve never met anyone as smart or beautiful as you, Risa. You’re wasted here, telling other people’s stories. Isn’t it high time you lived a life worthy of legend? A story people will talk about for generations to come.”

  Leah barely caught all his words, focusing instead of getting up. Using the railing for support, she clawed her way upright, despite the pain. Silently she crept up one step, and caught Risa’s eye. Leah continued trying to blend into the shadows so Jack wouldn’t notice the movement behind him.

  “My story? Or a bit role in yours?” Risa asked. Then she met his gaze head on, took his face in both of her palms. “What if I want to take control this time, what if I want to take care of you for a change?”

  “You mean, keep me safe from danger? Hide me? While you—”

  “While I have some fun. I mean, why is it always men who are free to explore their dark side? Why not a woman?”

  His breath caught. Leah cheered Risa’s ingenuity—it was exactly the right thing to say to gain Jack’s complete attention. She used the diversion to make it past the halfway mark.

  “I could teach you,” Jack said. “So many things I could teach you.”

  “And I you. See, that’s what really upsets me, Jack. That you didn’t trust me—”

  “I couldn’t. Not until I was certain—”

  She held a hand up and he stopped. “You lied, you cheated me out of so much, you made me feel like crap, and you didn’t trust me. I love you but I won’t live like that. Not ever again. Do you understand?”

  He nodded, eyes locked on hers, waiting for permission. Leah held her breath as well, taking another step. Only six more…

  “Say it,” Risa commanded.

  “I understand. I’m sorry. I should have never doubted you.”

  “How will you make it up to me? Will you let Leah go?”

  “Yes,” he breathed. “If you stay with me.” He gripped both her arms and turned his head, looking right at Leah. Her stomach dropped—he’d known what she was doing all along. This was just another one of his damned games. His laughter echoed from the walls. “Go on, Leah. Run. But run fast. As soon as I have Risa situated, you’ll have my undivided attention.”

  Leah was torn. He held Risa tight, so tight that she whimpered in pain. “Please don’t hurt her,” Leah called down.

  “I’d never hurt her. She’s just going to take a little nap. And then we’ll be leaving. For good.” He marched Risa backwards until she was pinned against the wall. Then he reached into his pocket for a syringe.

  Risa’s eyes widened with terror. “Run, Leah!”

  Leah was powerless, unable to help Risa. So she did the only thing she could do to maybe save them both. She ran.

  The door opened up into a darkened hallway. There were no lights except one coming from the front of the house, barely reaching the shadows back here. Weapon. Phone. Some way to bring help or stop Jack.

  She stumbled toward the light. It led to what appeared to be some kind of reception area. Dom sat on a couch positioned in front of a computer. From his pallor and sagging, expressionless features, it was clear he was dead. An old-fashioned phone was on the wall beside the door. She grabbed the receiver. Dead.

  She had to find help. Leaning over the coffee table, she spun the laptop away from the corpse and clicked out of the video site, hoping to be able to message Luka or the police. The screen filled with images from surveillance cameras showing multiple views of an empty road, and a building with a white van parked in front of it—the old pumphouse.

  Jack’s boots pounded up the steps.

  But now that Leah knew where she was, she had options. She ran outside, the wind catching at her open parka, billowing it like a cape. Jack’s van was parked at the front door, covered in mud, and wet grass clung to its wheels. She tried the door as she passed it. Locked.

  With every breath she expected to hear Jack calling her name, taunting her as he closed in on her. No way in hell would he leave without ensuring Leah’s silence. One way or another.

  She sprinted across the overgrown lawn, avoiding the muddy dirt drive where she’d leave footprints. Wait. Think, Leah. Jack would expect her to try to outrun him, head straight to the road. It would be anyone’s first instinct. But he had a car and she didn’t.

  When she was a kid, she had played in the woods between the pumphouse and the railroad tracks—sometimes even on the tracks, crossing the bridge. It was against Nellie’s rules, making it irresistibly tempting to a bored, lonely young girl.

  The tracks. There’d be no help there, but with the bridge over the marsh, they took a more direct route to Route 11 than Old River Road did. Plus, if Jack got too close, there was a place where she might be able to trap him. The marsh.

  As a kid, she’d watched them with their digging machines laying the foundation for the new railroad bridge. Once they’d finished, she’d seen the water reclaim the area as marshland. Land that no matter how dry it appeared was always shifting, greedily pulling in anything that dared try to cross it. When she was a little girl she used to pretend it was quicksand and throw various sized rocks over the new b
ridge, see how long it took them to vanish.

  The larger and heavier, the faster the marsh devoured them.

  A bright beam of light stabbed the ground beyond her feet. Jack had found her.

  Forty-Nine

  Through the Honda’s open windows horizontal rain pelted Luka as the car swayed and lurched in the current. If he was lucky, it’d be weighed down in the mud and silt of the shallows and his only worries would be wet shoes and finding a phone so his guys could intercept Jack.

  He pulled his left knee up as high as it would go and with his foot felt blindly for the manual trunk release. Just as he was rewarded with the pop of the latch opening, the current, roiling and swollen with the weeks-long deluge, caught the front end of the car and swung it away from the bank.

  The car spun, water gushing in through the floorboards and open windows. Luka spared a moment to glance in the rearview mirror. The trunk had popped all the way open but there was no sign of anyone escaping. What if Leah was unconscious, unable to swim past the water rushing into the trunk? Had he just doomed her?

  The car ground to a stop a short distance downstream, its hood facing toward the bank, the rear sinking in the deeper water. Luka’s teeth ground together as he tried to keep them from chattering. Still no sign of Leah.

  Jack had searched Luka’s pockets and taken everything. But he’d left Luka’s badge clipped to his belt. Probably so the entire world would immediately know that the corpse in the Honda was the detective who’d failed to catch the Chaos Killer.

  It was a mistake. Because behind Luka’s gold shield was a small pocket with his credentials and a keyring with two keys: one the universal key for the department’s pool vehicles and the other a spare handcuff key. Luka twisted his body and slid as low in the seat as he could go, arching his hip up until his fingers could reach his belt.

  They were already numb and clumsy with the cold, and the water surging all around him wasn’t helping, but he was able to hang onto the clip and slide it free of his belt. Now came the hard part—fitting the key into the lock.

  He closed his eyes, took a breath, and focused on the tiny key slipping between his fingers. It caught on the keyhole, the angle wrong. Slowly, carefully, he stretched to reposition it and finally it slid in, clicked into place. He twisted it and the cuff opened.

  Free of the handcuffs, he pushed himself through the open car window. Wind and rain lashed at his face. He didn’t try for any kind of fancy dive—no idea what lay below, snags from downed trees, rocks or other debris. Instead he lowered himself into the water, hanging onto the car, fearful that if he slipped or if the current stole it from his grasp, he might not be able to reach it again in the darkness.

  The cold was a shock that made him gasp out loud. At the front of the car, the water was not so deep—he could touch the bottom with his toes. Moving as fast as he could, he worked his way toward the rear of the car.

  He’d made it to the rear door when his foot slipped on a slime-covered rock and he plummeted down, the water closing over his head. Despite the unrelenting black and the freezing grasp of the current, Luka remained calm. In a way, he’d been preparing for this moment for seventeen years.

  After Cherise’s death, when it felt as if the entire world blamed him for pushing her over an emotional cliff, he’d been obsessed with what had happened to her, trying—and failing—to understand what she’d gone through and why she hadn’t saved herself. The coroner’s report said she’d been alive when she went into the water, she could have fought; he was so furious at her for not fighting—for him, for them.

  As a way to deal with the maelstrom of emotions that had overwhelmed him, he’d begun swimming obsessively—not just swimming, but drowning. Or as close to it as he could force himself to come. Every time his instinct for self-preservation forced him back to the surface; he lacked the willpower to surrender his life.

  Tonight, as he kicked his way back up, aiming at a churning in the current that he hoped marked the location of the sedan, Luka realized that Jack O’Brien was wrong. Not only was Luka not responsible for all the lives after Cherise that Jack had taken, Luka was also not at fault in Cherise’s death—and, most importantly, neither was Cherise. Finally, the burning question that had nearly destroyed Luka’s world was answered. There was no why. She’d never chosen to leave Luka or their life. They were both Jack’s victims, one living a life he’d never asked for, the other who had her life stolen from her.

  Relieved of the burden of seventeen years’ worth of guilt and doubt, Luka felt energized. He quickened his stroke, a calm certainty filling him, propelling his actions. His hand hit smooth metal—the Honda’s rear panel, angled down. He followed the curve, but the car was fully submerged.

  His lungs burning with the effort, Luka pushed through the water, kicking against the current until he made blind contact with the sheet metal of the trunk’s lid. Ignoring his lungs screaming for oxygen, he felt his way down to the trunk itself, practically folding his body into the space, searching blindly. Breathe, he needed to breathe, but still he forced himself deeper inside until he hit the back seat. Where was she?

  His vision darkened and he could barely feel his feet as he kicked to the surface. Rain pelted him as he broke free, the night almost as black as the water below. A few more kicks and Luka could stand, although the mud-and-algae-covered bottom made for precarious footing. He gulped down air, bracing himself for another dive into the black, when he heard Leah’s voice in his mind. Chaos lies.

  Leah wasn’t there. She’d never been there. It was just another of Jack’s games.

  He fought the current, finally hauling himself onto land, and glanced around. The rain and swirling fog weren’t helping. The pumphouse was out of sight behind a bend in the river, but he could make out the reflectors that marked the railroad bridge downriver, over the marsh.

  Jack still had Leah and Risa. Luka couldn’t stop him, not alone. He needed help. Shoeless, numb and shaking with the cold, he fixed a route that would lead him to the closest phone—the Homans’ place, God help him. But odds were there’d still be officers there, processing the scene. A scene he’d never have found without Nate and Emily, the thought instilling him with warmth and giving him the energy to keep fighting. Then he took off running.

  Luka sprinted through wind-whipped knee-high grass, his sock-clad feet growing numb as the mud clutched at them with every step. He tried to steer a course that would skirt the treacherous marshlands but get him to the road as quickly as possible. The marsh was tricky to navigate in the best of times, grassy meadow giving way to swampy mire without warning. Tonight, with the river at flood level, water skimmed along the soggy ground, making it impossible to tell safe ground from dangerous.

  If not for the occasional flashes of lightning reflecting off the river and giving him a brief glimpse of the landscape surrounding him, he’d be totally lost. He was almost to the train tracks when a sudden beam of light bobbing through the trees startled him. Too bright to be anything but manmade, it came from upriver, the direction where the house was.

  Jack. It had to be. But who was he chasing after? Luka hurried, heading in the most direct route to the tracks, which would place him just behind Jack. Once he reached the trees that ran alongside the tracks, he grabbed a stray fallen branch to use as a potential weapon.

  From this angle he could barely make out the flashlight since Jack’s body and the trees blocked it; but crossing into the clearing the train tracks created would leave him too vulnerable, so he kept to the shadows, skirting the tree line, following Jack downriver toward the bridge.

  Luka hated the bridge. It didn’t attract suicide attempts like the taller bridges in Cambria City, but instead it was catnip for stupid, drunk teens bored and restless. They’d dare each other to walk the length of the tracks over the bridge wearing a blindfold. The bridge was too short to require anything more than a minimal wooden railing—definitely not enough to prevent a drunk teen from toppling over it into the marsh. As a
uniformed officer, Luka had lost count of how many idiots they’d been called out to rescue with the help of the river patrol guys. Not all the kids had made it—if the water level was low, they pancaked against a few inches of mud; if the river was high, like now, they could easily be pulled under by the current and swept out into the main channel.

  Jack, of course, hadn’t grown up around here, and would know nothing of the terrain. Luka sped up, hoping to use that to his advantage. Maybe he could ambush Jack on the bridge, stop the killer before he caught whoever he was pursuing. It had to be either Risa or Leah. If it was Risa, that meant Leah was probably dead already. But if it was Leah, it meant that Jack had Risa under control.

  He sidled through the trees, taking the gamble of traveling along the tracks where he could move faster, thankful now for his numb feet, impervious to the biting gravel.

  Ahead of him, the bobbing light suddenly stopped, lasering in on its target: a woman standing on the bridge. Luka pushed himself faster, the wind covering the noise of his footfalls, he hoped. Jack seemed focused on the woman, saying something to her that Luka couldn’t hear clearly, but he made out her name: Leah.

  What the hell was she doing? Leaning against the bridge railing as if she’d given up, that wasn’t the Leah he knew. What had Jack done to her?

  The wind carried Jack’s laughter back to him. Luka sprinted forward, only five or six yards away. If Jack heard him, he was doomed—no cover and in easy range of Jack’s semiautomatic.

  Jack hesitated at the end of the bridge—any sane man would, given that the train tracks were open to the air below, so you had to cross by stepping along the railroad ties. He called out to Leah, gesturing with his pistol, but Leah sank further against the wooden railing, her body almost sagging through the opening below it. Jack yelled again and finally walked onto the bridge, his gait turning awkward as he lurched from one tie to the next.

  Luka sped up, reaching the bridge just as Jack reached Leah. Lightning speared down, illuminating the marsh below with a ghastly green glow. Leah clutched the railing, her wet hair whipping against her face, head hung low, ignoring Jack’s threats—and his gun. What was she thinking? She was smart enough to know Jack could just shoot her—which meant she knew something he didn’t. If Jack wanted to kill her, he could have just shot her from the end of the bridge, didn’t need to go to her, get so close.