by S. R. Jones
Footsteps sound to the right of me, and a shadow appears, coalescing into human form as it nears me. The dim light of the room doesn’t let me see his features clearly, but it’s a male. Small built, about five feet ten, I guess, although it’s hard to tell from the floor. He’s holding something in his hands. Oh, joy, it’s a cattle prod. It doesn’t take genius to work out what it’s for.
“Hello, Reece. You piece of utter shit.” The man’s voice is rich, cultured. He sounds educated, upper middle-class, I’d guess.
“Hello…I don’t know your name, so I suppose you have me at an advantage.” My voice sounds like rusty metal.
I rein in my desperate need to scream and shout at this lunatic and instead use my training. People think the special forces is all about being some macho idiot who uses his fists first and asks questions later. It’s not. Yes, we are deadly fighters, but we’re also trained in psychological warfare, in interrogation techniques. In a situation like I’m in now, no good will come of me being aggressive. If I can keep things calm I can perhaps get a chance to escape if he leaves me alone again.
In fact, my best bet is trying to build a rapport with my captor. Only, my captor isn’t some foreign insurgent fighting for a cause, he’s a fucking bona-fide lunatic.
“You can call me Ian.”
If this guy is Kate’s stalker, I know it isn’t his real name. His real name is Duncan Jacobs, but maybe this isn’t him. What are the odds though?
I had found his details as he was the owner of the company, and I knew he’d done the work for the building society that had given him access to the women’s accounts, but I hadn’t seen his picture yet, or got into his life. That was going to be tomorrow’s task, along with admitting to Kate that I’d been digging around in her life.
“Hello, Ian.” I look around the dank room and figure it must be a basement, either to a block of apartments, or a commercial building. The thick concrete post my arms are fastened around doesn’t lend itself to a house. There’s one window, with bars on it, and the view from it seems to be of a stone wall of some sort. I swallow down the urge to say something snarky like nice place you’ve got here.
“You’ve put a spanner amongst the works, you have,” Ian tells me. “Fucked up all my plans.”
“What plans were those?”
“Oh,” he sing-songs at me. “I think you know what plans. Plans involving myself and one delectable lady novelist. You have to hand it to the girl, she’s got guts and resourcefulness aplenty. To get away from me, she changed her name to that of a man and wrote books good enough to be bestsellers.” He laughs. “I don’t think I’ve had a paramour do that yet.”
I want to grab his skinny neck and squeeze until his eyes bulge out of his head, and he dies gasping for air. I will, too, once I get myself out of this pickle.
“What have you done with Kate. Is she here?” I keep my tone conversational. Just two mates having a chat down at the pub.
“She’s not here. No use for her now, not now you’ve soiled her. Ruined her.”
My mind scrambles over what he’s saying, trying to make sense of it, above the pain and the bone deep foggy exhaustion.
“Aw, look at the big, tough soldier trying to figure it out. I like them un-sullied. Women who haven’t been touched for a long time. And then I like to sully them. You did the sullying yourself, so I have no need of Kate now.”
His words mean the profile we were building fits. I’ve been working on this. Not only with the contact I had in the intelligence services, but also myself, Ethan, Liam, Luka, and Maggie. We were all working on making sense of this guy, of his modus operandi, and we figured he preyed on women who had been single for a long time. Maggie said it must have been a kink of his. She also said judging from the way he waxed lyrical about using toys on the women, he possibly has erectile dysfunction. Felt like less of a man because of it, so he went after women who hadn’t had a man in a long time. No competition to live up to, and even then, he had to resort to using toys.
The women who survived being attacked by him said the actual sexual assaults by him were short lived, and often ended in failure on his part to ejaculate. But he used toys on them. If the same guy carried out those rapes, and the subsequent murders, he had escalated rapidly. If this is him, then I’m a dead man walking, but what about Kate? Has he killed her? Or left her alive if he has no use for her anymore. I try to organize my flitting thoughts into a coherent sentence.
“Ian. Where is Kate and is she alive?”
He sneers at me. “Oh, look at the concerned lover, so touching. She’s alive. Or she was when I left her, but I did bash her on the head, so maybe…maybe not now.”
He smirks. “She’s tied to the bed in your little love nest, naked. No phone nearby. No way to contact the outside world. She’ll probably rot there, which is what she deserves. You and me, though. We’re the ones who have to solve our issues now.”
His words hit me with the force of a hurricane. Kate is hurt, maybe dying. I’ve never felt so helpless in my whole life, not even stuck in that dark, arid room while a man was tortured and raped in front of Liam and me.
Rage fills me, but something else too. Something different to the sharp rage, this other thing is dreadful, and deep. Like a bottomless lake, and I realize it is sorrow.
Grief.
He has hurt the woman I love, and only now do I realize I love her. Somehow, over the days we’ve spent together, having sex, but also reading, talking, swimming…being friends as well as lovers, I’ve fallen for Kate.
I ruined it with my commitment issues. Her last memory of me will be of a coward who couldn’t face what was building between us.
Ian chuckles. “You seem to be struggling with something there, Reece. Want to talk?”
No, I don’t want to talk, I want to smash his face in, but I force myself to focus. To find a way out of here, so I can at least try to save Kate’s life.
Ian has let me see his face, whereas with the women he attacked early in his sick career, he covered it. One woman, he attempted to kill, he let see his face, but the sketch the police released of him was generic, and looking at him now, I can see the resemblance, but it’s also one to so many other men.
I doubt Ian is in the system, so there would be no photo of him for the police to see, and to his friends and family, he would simply have a vague, passing resemblance to a picture of a man who looks like thousands of others.
I know because he’s let me see him that he’s going to kill me, but I wonder if he’ll torture me first. Which will give me time. Time to talk to him. To try and build enough of a rapport for him to let me use the toilet, so I can overpower him. Maybe one way I can build solidarity is by playing on his issues with women.
“I’m sorry I ruined things for you and Kate,” I tell him as I struggle to get my upper body into a half sitting position. “But she wasn’t worth it, mate.”
The slap is hard and shocking. He backhands me, twice, left then right cheeks.
“You are not in any position to tell me what and who isn’t worth any fucking thing. I am not your mate. You’re not my friend. I’m not some dick you can manipulate, you know? I’m a genius. Literally, a fucking genius. I run a multi-million-pound software company, and you’re nothing but used up cannon fodder, so keep your opinions to yourself.”
He sighs, cocks his head to one side and observes me. “I’m not here to play games with you, Reece. The games are only fun with the ladies, and now I’ll have to find a new one. You’re here to die. For fucking up years of my work.”
He screams the words at me, and his spittle flecks my face like disgusting drops of rain. I don’t flinch. Don’t react at all.
He may mean to kill me, but the cattle prod tells me he wants to take his time about it, despite what he says. The only thing I can do, is pray that Kate gets away, or that when Liam doesn’t hear from me for our regular check in, he heads to the safe house to see what is going on.
Ian raises the cattle prod
and aims it right at the top of my thigh, poking it into the flesh and muscle there. I grit my teeth as he holds it way longer than you would normally. A cattle prod isn’t that bad. The voltage isn’t high enough to do any severe harm. Thank God he hasn’t got a US police force taser or something because those fuckers are set high! This cattle prod, though, it can cause pain and damage if held on for long enough, or in a vulnerable enough spot.
With a nasty little smirk, Ian takes it and slams it on my balls. This time I can’t stop the cry that leaves my throat.
Chapter Ten
Kate
My throat is burning from screaming.
No one can hear me.
This house is detached, and it is well made. With all the windows closed and the blinds down, I may as well be in a hermetically sealed box for all the good this noise I am making is doing me. But I can’t stop.
He has Reece.
I awoke to the terrifying thwack of metal against bone. Reece made the oddest sound. A sickening gurgle before nothing but silence. I knew then my stalker had found me, and I froze. Instead of running, or fighting, I laid still as stone under the covers while he sauntered into the room.
I saw his face. The man who has been terrorizing me for so long, is…ordinary. Horrifyingly so. Why is it that the most mundane monsters are the scariest?
Reece is like some sort of god, and I suppose I expected my tormentor to be devilish, larger than life in an evil way. Not to look like an accountant on his lunch break.
He was average height, and not big built, and for a crazy moment I thought maybe I could take him, but then he raised the thing in his hand and hit me with it. And the sick little fuck knew exactly how much force to apply. It knocked me dizzy, but didn’t knock me out.
Stunned, I couldn’t do anything as he bound me tightly to the bed, using thick, harsh rope he took from his bag. Then he pulled out a knife, and with me totally helpless, cut my nightdress from my body.
I thought for certain he would rape me, but instead, he shook his head as if in sorrow, and muttered, What a waste, before turning around and leaving.
How he managed to carry Reece out of the house I had no clue at first. What with Reece being massive, but then I remembered some research I had done for a story. I’d been looking up whether a small woman could carry a six-foot guy out of a burning house, and I remembered the videos I’d seen online of tiny women carrying big men. Apparently, getting someone much bigger than you into a combat lift isn’t all that hard, so yeah, he probably did that. However he managed it, the sick bastard took Reece, and left me tied up and naked.
Thank God there is an old-fashioned alarm clock on the dresser here. Someone who stayed before us must have brought it and I didn’t remove it, finding it ticked oddly reassuring at night as I dropped off to sleep. It meant I could see the time.
I’ve been stuck here for over six hours. Reece might well be dead, and I can do nothing to save him.
Tears roll down my cheeks as I confront the utter hopelessness of the situation. I expect my stalker will do whatever he has planned for Reece, and then come back for me. I try once more to get free of my ropes, but they aren’t budging, and my wrists are bleeding now from chafing against the wiry material.
I need a pee, and I know at some point I won’t be able to hold it any longer. Then I’ll piss myself in this bed, like the useless piece of crap I am, while the man who focused on me so long ago kills the man I’ve grown to love. And I do love him. I know it isn’t reciprocated and that’s okay, because it doesn’t matter. Reece has freed me somehow. Helped mend some broken part of me that couldn’t be near a man without my stalker’s vile words interrupting things.
Even if I never see Reece again, I make a solemn vow to live my life to the fullest if I get out of this alive. No more hiding. No more celibacy because of some stupid little man’s pathetic words.
I grind my teeth in anger, and scream at the ceiling so loud it hurts my ears.
There’s a huge crash below and I cut the noise. I bite off the sound, slamming my mouth closed so fast I taste blood where my teeth catch my lip.
Shit. He’s back. I start to run through crazy plans of how I can escape. Maybe if I pretend to be in love with him for real? Another great bit of knowledge from some research I did on stalkers, some can be kept calm for a while if you play along, give into them and pretend you want to be with them. Then, when he’s least expecting it, I can turn on him. Overpower him. Fucking kill him, if I get the chance.
Can I kill someone? I think with this guy, maybe I could. I only have to think of all the women he’s hurt. The sick, disgusting letters he wrote me, and what he may have done to Reece, to feel a rage so burning bright it’s cleansing.
“Kate?”
The deep voice doesn’t sound like the same guy who stood over me a while ago.
“Kate?” This time it’s a woman.
“Up here,” I shout.
My heart is beating a wild tango, and sweat breaks out on my body. Am I being saved? Holy crap, please let them be here to save me. More tears fall as I cry out again. “Up here.”
The door bursts wide open and Ethan, who I recognize from the Facetime chat a few days ago, and another dark-haired man, this one more severe looking, rush into the room before stopping.
It’s almost comical the way they both clock my nakedness at once and turn around, bumping into one another.
“Guys,” I yell at them. “I don’t care about the lack of clothes, the bastard has Reece. Can you come and untie me?”
Ethan turns back around, and stalks over to me. Another man enters the room, and this guy is hauntingly beautiful, and I recognize him from the photo Gina showed me, although it didn’t do him justice. I could write poetry about his face. He’s closely followed by a glamorous blonde, who comes straight to my side.
“Are you okay, Kate?” She’s staring at me with concern. “Did he…”
“He didn’t touch me. He hit me on the head and tied me up, naked, and left. I don’t understand it at all. He’s taken Reece, though.”
“We possibly know who he is,” Ethan tells me as he and the hard-faced guy work quickly at the thick knots on the ropes.
“Really? How?”
The man with the rough features speaks. “I’m Liam, Kate. This is Luka.” He points to the handsome man. Ethan you’ve chatted with online before, and this is Maggie.”
The blonde gives me a soft smile. “Reece has certain…skills. He can get into all sorts of information. He got into yours.”
What? What does she mean?
“Reece hacked your stuff, got deep into your business.” Liam takes up the story and the man’s words are as rough and unfeeling as his face. “It’s unorthodox but he did it to try and get this guy.”
His words cut me deep. I try not to let it show because I doubt Reece has told them about us, it might even jeopardize his job, but it hurts that he was screwing me and at the same time looking into my online private life. He could have told me.
“He then got into the other women’s info, too. You all banked with the same building society at one point or another. Too much of a coincidence to be ignored. A small-ish company in the scheme of things today. So, we thought, maybe this guy worked there.”
The glamorous blonde, Maggie, pipes up. “Except it didn’t fit the profile that either I or Reece’s other contact had built of him. I figured he’d be ordinary looking, but a risk taker. Someone who maybe started up his own business, or bought others and turned them around then sold them. Well off, not a billionaire, but wealthy enough.”
Liam takes over the story again. “We got Reece to dig a little further into the building society, and he found something interesting. A small tech company got called in by the society a few years ago to rationalize all their various computerized records. See, this building society still had some client records that had to be viewed on old-fashioned scanned documents. Some systems were ancient. The company they called in had software that meant al
l the various old files could be updated, modernized, and all the records put onto one system. The first victim we think we can safely put down to this guy, she got targeted a few months after this happened. The guy who owns the company does employ a few people, but he did the work for this building society himself, big client and all. We think he is our guy. He’s called Duncan Jacobs and if it is him, he’s fucking insane.”
It doesn’t make sense to me. How could someone’s bank details point to whether or not they were single? Then I stop and think. For me, it would be easy. All those ready-made meals for one, the specialist singles holiday I booked a year before I got the first letter.
“So, he targeted us via our bank details?” I ask.
Liam shakes his head. “Initially, but he went a lot further. He used those to trawl through and try to find single women. Then, from what we’ve guessed, he narrowed them down to a certain geographical radius. Then, he waited. He waited, watching these women, hundreds at a time possibly, until one of them signed up to some dating event or other. Every single woman he stalked had been at a speed dating event prior to it starting.”
Holy shit. The fucking effort this man went to, to make some woman’s life a misery!
“We think he would go to the events, meet the women, and if he liked them, liked the look of them, it would begin.” Maggie purses her lips. “He might have gone to hundreds of these things, and only ever picked a few select women. You’ve probably met him before.”
I try to think if I have. But he seemed so average I honestly can’t remember him. I met a lot of men on the couple of speed dating events I went to and only a few stuck in my memory. Either because they were massive creeps or because I liked them a little.
“I definitely don’t remember seeing him before,” I tell them.
“What?” The handsome guy turns his strangely colored gaze to me. “He let you see his face? When he tied you up?”
“Yes.” I’m confused now. Why does it matter?
“Sloppy,” Liam mutters. “He’s upset by something, not sticking to his routine at all. Why not take you? Why take Reece, and why let you see his face? Doesn’t fit with what the other victims who survived his earlier rapes told us. He never let them see his face. You see his face, and he means to kill you, and yet…he didn’t kill you.”
