by Cari Hunter
Minutes later—as a flush began to creep upward from Caleb’s neck—a news bulletin broadcast the make and model of his car, its color, and its full license plate. If Leah hadn’t been so certain he would shoot her in spite of the number of witnesses, she would have taken her chances and flung herself onto the road. He stabbed a finger at the radio to silence it, turned off the main street, and hit the wheel with both hands.
“Fuck!” he yelled. “Fuck them all!”
Leah wasn’t sure to whom he was referring, but there was nothing she could say to appease him, so she waited for the inevitable fist in her gut or open-palmed slap.
It never came. Instead, he turned to her, his expression eerily composed. “They said no. Every fucking one of them.”
She nodded as if in sympathy, but she was shocked by the revelation. He had always led her to believe that his people, his father’s people, would follow him to damnation. It seemed that those willing to assist anonymously and from a distance were less eager to get their hands dirty now that he was headline news.
A siren wailed behind them, approaching at speed, and he drew the pistol from the holster on his belt. He held it out of sight, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror, his breathing rapid and short. They both saw the ambulance at the same time, and she sagged back into her seat. He pulled aside to let it pass, and then set off again behind it as if to prove he wasn’t fazed, shaking his head in derision at the cars he overtook. Nevertheless, he kept his gun on his lap within easy reach. From the corner of her eye, she studied the position of the weapon, but concluded that there was no way she would be able to grab it before he figured out her intent.
As he made the turn to rejoin the main road, he seemed calmer, as if he had come to a decision. “Nothing else for it, baby. Time to rattle that cage,” he said, and dug a hand into his pocket for his cell. “Got an uncle on my daddy’s side. Used to work the docks in Charlestown. Figure he might know a good place.”
“Does he still live there?”
He was too preoccupied with dialing to answer her, so she took the opportunity to turn her face to the window. The only person to show any interest in her was a kid who crossed his eyes and flipped her the bird.
Caleb didn’t notice the exchange; he already had the phone to his ear. “Hey, Aunt Ida, it’s Caleb. Yeah, yeah, been a long time. No, everything’s fine. I just wondered if Uncle Landon could help me out some. That’d be great, thanks.”
Leah listened to him pouring on the charm, chattering to his aunt as she went to fetch his uncle and then explaining that he was in a bit of a “tight spot” and needed somewhere he could go to ground. He seemed confident that neither relative would have tuned in to the news that morning.
“No, not a motel, somewhere vacant,” he said. “Lockup or warehouse. Yes, sir, that sounds ideal.” His brow furrowed with concentration as he listened to his uncle’s directions. As soon as he ended the call, he switched lanes and began to scan the road signs in earnest.
“He and my aunt moved back down to Raleigh ten years ago,” he said, surprising Leah by returning to her earlier question. “While he’d been working twelve-hour shifts at the docks, my aunt had been fucking their neighbor.” When he grinned at her, his teeth were stained pink by his soda. “Don’t know why he bothered to move. Would’ve been easier just to kill the worthless whore.”
*
A man in a suit, his hand already outstretched in greeting, made a beeline for Alex and Castillo as they entered the police station.
“I’m Agent Somers. I was told to assume the lead on the case until you arrived. I’m sure you can appreciate it’s difficult to keep things coordinated when the investigation is moving so fast.” He pumped Castillo’s hand with enthusiasm and a certain amount of awe. “Sorry I missed you at the hospital, but we caught a break that was definitely worth chasing down.”
Despite having worked through the night, he showed no signs of fatigue. His eyes were bright, his hair kempt, and his suit barely creased. He smiled, displaying pristine white teeth, which ruled out excess coffee as the cause of his perkiness. He made Alex feel older than her years; she wondered whether his mom knew he had been out so late.
“What break?” she asked as he shook her hand. She had to raise her voice above the bustle of police officers and clerical workers passing through on their way to start their shifts. Somers gestured for her and Castillo to follow him into a quieter corridor, counting down the offices until he came to the one he was using. He held the door open for them.
“Caleb and Leah Deakin were recognized by a gas station clerk in Hampton Falls at 5:02 a.m. We have the video from the security camera.” The screen of a laptop came back to life when he hit a random key. “Sarah isn’t on the tape,” he told Alex gently. “But we have reason to believe she’s still alive.”
“What reason?”
He pulled out a seat for her and she sat gratefully, hunched forward, too weary to hold herself upright. The office was stuffy and smelled like it had recently been crowded with tired, unwashed people. She watched him open a file on the computer and skip through a grainy video recording. At last, he stepped aside, inviting Castillo to take his place. When the video resumed, it was at normal speed.
“Just watch what Leah Deakin does here,” Somers said.
Wearing a dirty cap that kept his face shadowed, Caleb Deakin was already at the counter as Leah approached. She hesitated but then set a first aid kit, two packs of pain pills, and a bottle of Gatorade beside his pile of junk food. Deakin paid for everything with obvious resentment and strode out of the store. In contrast, Leah took the time to smile at the cashier, either unconcerned by the camera or deliberately giving it an excellent view of her. The video ended seconds later.
“Do you think she’s trying to send us a message?” Alex asked. Sitting up properly now, she scrolled through the footage again. A first aid kit and a box of Advil would be completely inadequate to treat a wound as serious as Sarah’s had looked, but neither Leah nor Deakin seemed to be injured, and Deakin’s reaction to the purchases spoke volumes.
Alex looked up to meet Castillo’s gaze and saw him nod once in confirmation. She let her breath out slowly, daring to allow herself to hope.
*
A sharp slap to the side of her head brought Leah out of a restless sleep. She had drifted off as Caleb zigzagged his way across Massachusetts, following a route she had plotted to keep them away from toll roads and freeways.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She pushed up in the seat, bewildered by how long she must have slept; the sun had disappeared and dusk seemed to have fallen. “Where…” Her question trailed into nothing as she dispelled the lingering drowsy haze and focused properly on her surroundings. It was still daylight, midafternoon according to the clock on the dash, and the misleading gloom had been created by the rows of tall brick buildings through which Caleb was negotiating a path. Rubble and glass strewn across the road forced him to drive at a low speed, weaving around the worst of it, trying to keep the tires intact.
Holyoke. She remembered the name of the city now; close to the Connecticut River and apparently once home to a thriving industry of some sort.
“Paper mills,” Caleb told her. “Whole town’s gone to shit since the spics moved in.”
She wished she had the courage to challenge him, to argue against his hatred and prejudice, to ask when he had ever held down an honest job and contributed to the country he claimed to love so fervently. But then she wished for a lot of things she was never going to have, and in any case, he was too intent on driving to continue his diatribe. He turned a corner and braked hard, cursing at the unexpected expanse of murky water that carved a straight line alongside the empty road.
“There are three canals,” she said, peering at the map, trying to be useful. “I think they all connect.”
He tore the map from her hands and tossed it into the rear seat. “Don’t need a fucking geography lecture,” he said, angling the car away from the canal a
nd easing it into a gap between two of the broken-down mills. “Perfect.” He grabbed his flashlight from his duffel bag, clicked it on, and directed it at her face. “Stay here.”
She nodded, jumping as his door slammed. She was already feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic, and the thought of Sarah, trapped in the trunk for more than twelve hours now, made her shudder. Craning her neck, she peered out her window, her eyes adjusting to the dim light. Tall redbrick walls loomed on either side of the car, their windows opaque with grease, their fire escapes poised to disintegrate the second anyone attempted to use them. How long would it be before anyone thought to look for her and Caleb here?
Within minutes, he returned, almost bouncing with enthusiasm as he dragged his bags from the rear seat. “Bring the food,” he ordered, but he was in a good enough humor to wait and light her path for her.
She followed him through a shattered section of wooden hoarding into a dilapidated building and stopped beside him just over the threshold. A sudden flutter and clash made her step back in alarm, and he chuckled, tracking the panicked flight of a bird with his flashlight as it fled from their intrusion. It ventured as far as one of the smashed windows and settled on the sill, apparently unwilling to relinquish its home.
“Here.” Caleb thrust a spare flashlight into her hand. “See that?” He shone his own beam on a door to the rear of the cavernous space. “Go through there and wait for me.”
“Okay. Sure.” She didn’t move, though, until he shoved her in the back. As she stepped forward, she could hear his footsteps retreating rapidly. Using her light, she picked her way over and around the detritus left behind by years of neglect and misuse: garbage, syringes, excrement, and machines long since rusted. It was a relief when her fingers closed around the handle of the door. She gingerly pushed it open and entered a smaller room, subdivided by a wall with a single jagged hole leading into the second office-sized space. One unreachable, partially boarded-up window provided the sole source of light, and the rooms were cold despite the warmth outside. Folding her arms across her chest, she turned in a full circle and tried to imagine what it would be like to die there.
Chapter Twenty-one
Deakin had opened the trunk and pulled Sarah into a sitting position before she managed to focus her eyes. The pain, coupled with the abrupt movement, made everything even more blurred, and she heard Deakin laugh as she swayed backward in his grip.
“What?” he said, using the collar of her jumpsuit to keep her upright. “You not gonna try and run?”
A wave of nausea stole her breath. She swallowed, and then shook her head, panicked, as she began to gag uncontrollably, bile pouring into her mouth.
“Oh, you fucking—” Deakin lifted her from the trunk and carried her into a building a short distance away, where he dumped her in a heap just across the threshold and ripped the tape from her lips. She retched, forcing him to step back while she vomited what little remained in her stomach onto the floor. The exertion was too much for her; she leaned her cheek on the cool concrete, aware of little else but the resurgence of agony in her leg and the sour taste in her mouth. As she calmed, more details began to filter in: vast brick walls stretching up toward metal rafters, the intermittent cooing of pigeons high overhead, and a pervasive stench of mold and excrement.
Deakin’s boots splintered glass as he circled her. He stopped, and she felt him wrap the material of her jumpsuit in his fists and start to drag her across the floor as if she weighed nothing at all. Her leg jarred repeatedly as he hauled her, but she didn’t have the strength to plead for respite and she wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction anyway.
He took her into the farther of two rooms at the rear of the building and propped her up against a wall. Kneeling beside her, so close that she could smell a sweetness on his breath, he uncuffed her left wrist, threaded the chain behind a metal pipe, and recuffed her. The links rattled on the pipe as her arms sagged; she had spent so long bound in one position that she could barely feel them yet, let alone keep them raised. An insidious needling sensation had just begun to spread through her shoulders when Deakin yanked her hair, wrenching her head back.
“What’s her phone number?”
She stared at him, the question taking a long time to sink in, and she continued to stare at him even when it had, because there was no way she was giving him an answer.
Despite the awkward angle, his punch connected forcefully enough to slam her into the wall.
“One more time,” he said, holding up his fist to watch her blood drip from his knuckles. “I’m only gonna ask you one more time.”
She lowered her head and let the blood trickle from her mouth. “Fuck you,” she whispered; she didn’t know if she was making a sound or not. Everything around her was turning gray at the edges. “Fuck you, fuck you…”
*
Alex used her fork to nudge her slice of meatloaf alongside her uneaten mashed potato. It made her plate look neater, but it didn’t make the food seem any less unwanted. Abandoning her attempts to salve the feelings of the chef, she reached for her coffee.
“You should eat something,” Castillo said, even though his own meal was barely touched.
“I know that.” Coffee splashed over the rim of her mug as she slammed it down. “I should eat, I should sleep, I should think positive thoughts, but mostly, I should sit on my ass and do nothing but wait for someone to tell me they’ve found a lead that doesn’t actually lead anywhere.”
“You finished?”
She glared at him. “Yes.”
“No,” he said, indicating her meal, “you finished with that? It looks better than mine.”
His non-reaction to her outburst had the desired effect: she laughed and pushed her plate toward him. “What did you get?”
“Lasagna. You want to do a swap?”
She shrugged but picked up her fork again to taste a small piece of his meal. The tiny cafeteria at the Concord PD definitely made a better lasagna than it did meatloaf, but Castillo seemed happy enough with the new arrangement. Having spent the last four hours staring at a telephone, Alex was just glad to have a change of scenery.
“Do you really think he’ll call?” she asked.
Castillo chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said. “No one seems to know what the hell he’ll do, or when he’ll do it.”
The frustration evident in Castillo’s tone was beginning to spread through the team working the case. There had been no verifiable sightings of Deakin’s car since a tip on the hotline had placed it in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, the FBI’s psychological profiler was vacillating between the two most obvious scenarios: Deakin cutting his losses and killing Sarah, or him using her to lure Alex into a standoff. With nothing more concrete to go on, Alex had been instructed to sit with an agent and wait for a hypothetical phone call. It had been late afternoon by the time Castillo persuaded her to take a half-hour break. His pager would alert them to any developments meanwhile.
“They can’t stop me from going, can they?” She looked at Castillo, who raised an eyebrow in confusion. “If he does call, and if he wants me to go to him, can the FBI or SWAT or whoever stop me?”
“They could try,” he said.
“Yeah.” She stabbed a final piece of pasta with her fork, making her own feelings perfectly clear. “Yeah, they could try.”
*
Sarah didn’t know at what point Deakin had left her alone. She felt better for having slept, and she was on the verge of closing her eyes again when Leah stepped through the gap in the wall, a bag in one hand and a flashlight in the other. A flickering orange glow outlined her shape; as Sarah listened, she could hear the faint crackle of a fire, together with a deeper, guttural noise.
“Caleb’s asleep,” Leah said.
Sarah nodded. It was obvious—now that she had been told—that the sound was snoring. “Can you get help?” she whispered. She didn’t have anything to lose by asking, and this was as good an opportunity as she was g
oing to get to see where Leah’s allegiances really lay.
Leah walked closer, placing the bag down before answering in a low tone. “He’s done something to the door. There are wires all around it. I don’t dare try to open it.”
“No.” With mounting anger, Sarah watched her unzip the duffel bag. “You haven’t dared to do anything for weeks, have you? How does it work? You just follow him wherever he goes, do whatever he tells you, and turn a blind eye to the shit he’s involved in?”
Leah froze, as if terrified that Sarah might somehow be able to get free and turn the hatred of her words into physical violence.
“How could you do that?” Sarah felt tears slide down her cheeks. “How could you stay with him after what he’s done? Why haven’t you told someone?” Her rage vanished as suddenly as it had flared, replaced by a yearning to understand, to have something about this make sense.
Leah unscrewed the cap from a bottle of water and tentatively crouched by Sarah’s side. “We’ve been married for three years now. He made sure we never had a phone, just his cell,” she said, holding the bottle so Sarah could drink. “He locked me in if he needed to go out. About four months after we married, he caught me trying to pick the lock on the front door. He broke my leg. It was four days before he took me to the hospital. Four days of me promising not to tell. I guess I learned my lesson after that.”
When she offered the water again, Sarah shook her head, feeling sick to her stomach. She remembered how easily she had been controlled and intimidated by the police officer in the cells following her arrest, how it had been safer to do whatever he told her, and how she had lied to Bridie to try to protect herself from further punishment. He had completely degraded her in a matter of hours. Caleb Deakin had had years to work on Leah.
