“Where are we going?” she asked. Hadn’t she figured out enough? What was left? Was it a coincidence that he had taken the same exit?
“We’re going to your dear brother’s cabin,” Madsen said. “Carrie’s meeting Trina’s boyfriend there—she thinks he’s going to help her figure things out—another loose end.” They reached the fork Sadie remembered. Jack’s cabin was to the right. Madsen turned left.
Sadie had to clench her lips together to keep from asking the next question out loud. But Madsen followed her line of thought anyway.
“No, Carrie doesn’t know I’m the boyfriend and Trina doesn’t know that the guy she’s been seeing is also a detective on the case. Neither of them know that this guy has been asking dear Trina subtle questions for months about her family, more specifically her father. How much money does he make? What kind of investments does he make with his money?” Madsen shook his head and met Sadie’s eyes in the rearview mirror, his eyes cruel and confident once more. “No offense, but your niece isn’t the brightest girl I’ve ever met. And I think I know more about Jack’s finances than Carrie does.”
“You’re a terrible man,” Sadie said, trying to catch up with this new information. “Trina took Trevor?” Sadie asked, almost to herself.
Madsen laughed and Sadie would have slapped him for being so delighted with what he had to say if not for the handcuffs chaffing her wrists. “Dumb girl,” he said, shaking his head. “I knew she was at her parents’ house so I called her after I left Anne’s. She thinks I work as a security guard on the night shift. I often call her late and she always takes my calls. That’s when she told me about her father’s affair, that she’d found out that afternoon and confronted the hussy—that’s what she called her, is she eighty years old or what?” He laughed and Sadie considered boxing his ears for his callousness . . . after she slapped the grin off his face. “I got her all pumped up and told her a hundred other things she should have done. When I suggested she go over right then and confront Anne with the demand that she leave and never come back, she was all over it. She called me an hour later, hysterical. She’d found Anne’s body in the field. I expected her to call the police.”
“And because of the confrontation that afternoon she thought they’d suspect her,” Sadie filled in. Poor Trina. “But what about Trevor?” she mused, yet even as she said it, she knew the answer. Trina was a girl, but she had a woman’s heart.
“That was stupid,” Madsen said, shaking his head. “Taking that boy was the dumbest thing they could have done. She was supposed to call the police and get it over with. Even if Trina told them about me, she thought my name was Randy Sharp and that I worked for Aglimate Security—they’d never find me.”
“But they couldn’t leave Trevor home alone,” Sadie said, this part making perfect sense. No woman could abandon a little boy late at night after his mother had been murdered. “And they didn’t call the police because they were terrified Trina would be a suspect.” She paused, still sorting through all the information in her head. “The filing cabinet,” she said under her breath, then understood. “They thought maybe they could hide everything, make sure no one ever knew Jack was Trevor’s father. Carrie had already taken the papers from Susan Gimes’s office and then took the filing cabinet, just in case.”
Madsen shrugged Sadie’s assessment off as if Trevor and the filing cabinet were incidental issues. “Stupid.”
This man was a sociopath. “Why didn’t you find Trevor right away if you knew who had him?”
He shrugged again, causing heat to rise up Sadie’s spine. “It was kinda fun seeing people scramble, and I wondered how far Cunningham would get—about as far as I predicted. He’s a lost cause. I figured they’d come up with nothing and the case would go cold—I sure didn’t expect it to get this dramatic.”
His superiority complex, his thinking he was so much smarter then everyone else, was infuriating. And yet she realized that in the right circumstance it could possibly be used to her advantage. She filed it away for later.
“Jack’s expecting Trevor to be found,” Sadie reminded him, wondering how much Jack knew. Surely he knew Carrie had Trevor, but what were her intentions with the child? What did she plan to do with him? Sadie understood that the panic amid everything else Carrie had learned about her husband and his life could keep her from thinking rationally. She’d proved that already.
“He will be found,” Madsen said. “By me. What Jack doesn’t know is that Carrie’s agreed to pay me—or rather, Randy Sharp—a large sum of money to keep Trina out of this, to drop Trevor off where someone can find him and not trace him back to Trina or her mom. When they find out that Randy Sharp is really me, the money will become even more important in order to ensure Trina isn’t implicated. It’s all falling into place.”
Madsen made eye contact with her again. “You, however, have become a real problem.”
Sadie knew there was no way he would keep her alive after telling her all of this—he had too much to lose. Sadie scanned the back seat, looking for . . . something. But of course the back seat of a detective’s car wouldn’t have anything in it she could use as a weapon. She was left with only her ingenuity—something she feared was not quite up to this challenge.
The road they were on was no longer straight, winding one way and then another, causing her to sway with each bend of the road. Huge trees stretched upward on both sides of the car and Sadie’s mouth went dry as she realized how secluded this area was. In fact, they hadn’t passed a single car since leaving the highway. He was going to kill her and leave her in the woods. As if aware of her suspicions, Madsen turned onto a side road, not nearly as well maintained as the other road had been. Sadie was bouncing on the seat like popcorn.
“You killed her, didn’t you,” she said again, straining for him to confirm it once and for all. She pressed herself against the door for stability.
Madsen said nothing, but suddenly pulled over to the side of the road so fast that she flew forward and hit her chin on the front seat, unable to brace herself with her hands still cuffed together. Madsen turned in his seat to face her. He drew a gun from underneath his jacket and pointed it at her face, causing her to pull back. “We’re getting out of this car and then we’re going to take a little walk.”
Sadie stared at the black chiseled metal in his hand. It could have been a child’s toy, something she’d have bought for Shawn when he was younger. “Why on earth would I go willingly when we both know you’re going to kill me?”
“Who says I expect you to go willingly?” he said, half his mouth pulling up in a sadistic smile as though he anticipated her putting up a fight and it made this experience all the sweeter for him. At least she knew now why he’d rubbed her wrong from the beginning, though her own skill at judging character provided her a very small amount of bittersweet satisfaction. Had she figured this out just fifteen minutes earlier, she’d have run into oncoming traffic before she’d have let him put her in the car. It was unnerving how much could happen in fifteen minutes.
Madsen continued, causing her to look away from the gun and meet his eyes. “But as you said, we both know you’ve done all the damage I can allow you to do. And we also know that an old lady like you is no match for a man like me.”
Chapter 35
Old lady, she repeated as he got out of the car and pulled open her door. She was barely fifty-six years old—and felt a good fifteen years younger than that even if she was a bit oldfashioned at times. She glared at him and drew upon all the fury and anger of a lifetime—those things she usually refused to dwell on. But she called them up and felt them begin to ball up in her chest as she prepared herself. This was something he didn’t have, a lifetime of fortitude a punk kid like himself could never muster. Rather than panic, she felt calm and began taking measured breaths, sending all the oxygen to her muscles and tissues. She balled her fists, still locked in the handcuffs, and got out of the car on her own accord, scanning the ground as she did so.
> There was nothing but trees and pine needles covered with half an inch of snow from this morning. He grabbed her arm and began pulling her toward the trees. He didn’t seem to think this would take long enough for him to bother locking up the car. That meant he didn’t expect much—a point in her favor. She noted that he’d left the key ring full of keys—including a small key she assumed was for the handcuffs—in the ignition.
She dug her heels into the frozen top layer of forest floor, prepared to fight it out here and now, but he simply pulled on her arm more sharply, causing the metal cuffs to cut into her wrists. She determined to be more patient—not one of her greater virtues—and wait for the right moment. Good conquered evil all the time. Surely God could spare her a moment or two of his intervention to help her right now. She tried to remember exactly where Jack’s cabin was. If she got away and didn’t make it to the car, could she find her way to the cabin? She didn’t like her odds so she abandoned that idea. She’d have to make it to the car.
Other than their feet moving through the snow and leaves on the ground, there was hardly any sound, save for a rustling wind that caused the tops of the trees to sway in a very languid, peaceful motion that seemed a betrayal of what was happening to Sadie at this moment. They’d gone perhaps fifty yards to where the trees thickened so that there was barely a skiff of snow on the ground, and approached a downward slope. She looked at the incline he was pulling her toward and the tangle of brush at the bottom—the perfect place to hide a body. No one would find her until spring, if they found her at all.
Madsen was a foot or so ahead of her, pulling her forward, when she stopped suddenly and pulled back hard. He didn’t let go of her arm as she’d hoped.
“Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be,” he said in a droll tone, tightening his grip and yanking her forward, nearly pulling her off balance.
“I plan,” she said, pushing her feet into the ground, “to make this as difficult as possible.” She pulled again, but when he planted his own feet for leverage she took a step, not backward as he expected her to, but forward, throwing him off balance as she pulled hard, managing to get her arm out of his grasp.
“I don’t have time for this,” he growled, forced to take a step back to rebalance himself. The split second his emphasis was not on her, she kicked his hand that held the gun, taking him completely off guard. Thanks to her once-a-week yoga classes she was pretty flexible. Especially for an old lady.
Madsen craned to watch the gun disappear into a pile of leaves and then turned back to her, his face twisted in rage. He immediately lunged forward, and she lifted her handcuffed hands as high and fast as she could, catching his chin with a hard snap and sending him reeling backward down the embankment. Then she turned and ran for all she was worth. She broke out of the trees, stumbling and almost losing her balance, but she caught herself and with her hands held to her chest she focused on her destination. The car was only ten yards away when she heard him behind her. She didn’t dare glance back, intent on the door handle ahead of her.
Oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please, she repeated as she got closer and closer. Madsen was shouting behind her but she could barely hear him over the rushing blood in her ears. She didn’t know how far behind her he was, but she knew he could run much faster than she could, even if her hands weren’t cuffed. She braced herself for a gunshot, but knew he’d have had only moments to decide whether to shuffle through the ground cover to find the gun or run after her. Since she could hear him, and she had no bullet holes through her body, she assumed he was without his weapon.
In her mind, she choreographed what she needed to do to get inside the car, amazed at how detailed she could review the plan in the remaining yards and ignore doubts that it might not work. It had to work! She’d only have one chance.
When she reached the car door she pulled up on the driver’s door handle with both handcuffed hands, then used her foot to kick it open before turning to jump backward into the driver’s seat. The turn afforded her the first glance of Madsen since she’d sent him careening down the embankment. He was less than a dozen feet away and looked as if he could take one leap and grab her. She practically fell into the car, landing hard on the seat. The steering wheel caught her right shoulder but she leaned forward, grabbed the armrest of the door—he was literally three feet away—curled her fingers around it, tucked her feet inside, and threw herself backward across the front seat to slam the door.
She expected a slam of molded door fitting into molded metal made just for its connection. The crunching of bone and Madsen’s agonized scream took her completely by surprise. With her feet wedged at odd angles between the seat and steering wheel, she felt her stomach drop as she realized that in his attempt to keep her from shutting the door, he’d managed to catch his hand in it.
He looked at her from the other side of the glass, pain thick in his wild eyes as he pulled at his trapped hand. It wasn’t coming out, vised in the door. It made her stomach roll to imagine the crushed skin and bone, but she took advantage of his panic to lock the doors before he realized she hadn’t done so yet. Oh, but she felt horrible. In any other circumstance she’d have done all she could to help a man in a situation such as his—she’d been first-aid and CPR certified for the last thirty years and didn’t take such training lightly. But considering that he had just minutes earlier admitted that he planned to kill her, she felt justified to leave him screaming on the other side of the glass. His feet kicked wildly at the loose ground cover, and he twisted and pulled as if a new position would help his plight. She couldn’t look at him.
It was awkward maneuvering around the car’s interior with her hands still cuffed and she fumbled the keys from the ignition, feeling through them with her fingers to identify the small one she suspected would open the handcuffs. She muttered a prayer as she wriggled her hands around, then poked around for the lock on the cuffs. She felt like singing the Hallelujah Chorus when the ring around her left wrist sprung open.
She righted herself in the seat, her shoulders aching from her acrobatics, and looked at Madsen. He was staring at her, not with the glaring arrogance she was used to, but with the absolute shock of his situation, begging her to help him. “I’m so sorry,” she said as in one fluid motion she unlocked and opened the door so fast and so hard that not only was his hand released, but the door caught him on the side of the head and propelled him to the ground a few feet away. She pulled the door shut, locked it again, and turned the key in the ignition. Without looking back at the man struggling to his feet, cradling his grotesquely misshapen hand, she punched the gas and U-turned sharply. She regained the road and, with the handcuff still dangling from her right wrist, managed to put on her seatbelt. Safety first.
She was back on the dirt road in mere seconds and felt secure enough to start pushing buttons surrounding a CB radio thing as the main road came into sight. She held the wheel with her left hand and picked up the speaker thing, the handcuff banging against the console of the car.
She pushed the button on the side of the radio, then released the button and listened to the static for a minute. “Hello?” she asked. Someone had to be there! She glanced in the rearview mirror to see if Madsen was behind her and though she’d only driven a few hundred yards, the road was empty. Her hands and voice were shaking as she pushed the button again. “This is Sadie Hoffmiller. I just got away from Detective Madsen. He admitted to me that he killed—”
The radio tumbled out of her hand and fell to the floor. She groaned before leaning forward and grabbing at it with her still shaking right hand—taking her eyes from the winding road for a moment as she searched the floor for the radio.
The impact threw her forward for a split second before another force—a big white billowing one that felt like concrete—threw her back against the seat. She heard crunching metal and felt the loss of level ground beneath the car’s tires. Pain shot through her face, head, neck, and shoulders. The entire world spun as that charg
ing force pushed all air from her lungs, leaving her choking on her own tongue and gasping for air that no longer seemed to exist. The air bag deflated just as her lungs had done a moment before, leaving her crushed against the seat, moaning and trying to remember where she was. Her face burned and she could barely open her eyes, but when she did, she could see the trunk of a large tree that seemed much too close. The windshield was intact, but had it been gone she felt sure she could reach forward and pull off a strip of mangled bark.
She’d run into a tree? She’d never hit anything in her life—well other than Shawn’s bike when he was ten and parked it behind her car, but she didn’t count that. It was nothing like this. The stinging in her eyes persisted and she continued to try to blink it—whatever it was—away.
A disembodied female voice seemed to be speaking to her from the floor of the car. “Do you copy? Mrs. Hoffmiller, please give us your location, do you copy?” The voice faded into static.
Copy what? she thought to herself as she continued to blink, trying out the muscles in her body to see if any of them still obeyed her. Most of them did, though not without laborious protesting. Where was the voice coming from? She looked around and saw a black speaker attached to a curly wire dangling from the dashboard. Her chest still felt as if it were being crushed into the back of the seat. She reached for the speaker, but something was wrong with her depth perception and she simply brushed through air.
Air! She took a breath, a gasping, painful breath, and was reminded of the moment she’d stood on Anne’s back porch and heard the police say they were calling in a homicide unit. She’d had to suck in air then too, but that was based on shock, not physical inability. The memory filtered through and she wasn’t sure if that had happened yesterday, last year, or this afternoon. Her brain still seemed to be bouncing around in her head.
Lemon Tart Page 24
