“Caleb, you aren’t making sense,” Brett said, still not quite understanding what he meant.
“Kara doesn’t like being a drain on our resources. She knows that we’re stretched pretty thin. He knew if I wasn’t there to keep her at my side, it would be easier to lure her away.”
“Motherfuck!” Brett shouted.
Cathy was already running to the car as Caleb called the police station. He was climbing in and shutting the door and she already had the car moving, Caleb held his phone to his ear with his shoulder as he buckled in. After what felt like forever, someone finally answered.
“Black.”
“Officer Black, is Kara there?” Caleb shouted.
“Nope. She had to run home to pick up some papers to run to the hospital.”
“You let her go alone?” Caleb bellowed into the phone.
“No, sir.” Black’s uninterested tone quickly changed, and Caleb could tell he was all ears. “Officer Grisham took her. She was told she couldn’t go alone and I got called out on a bogus traffic accident so I couldn’t take her. But I made sure she had coverage.”
Caleb’s stomach sunk. First, the bogus call to investigate the shed. Then a bogus traffic accident. That was two too many coincidences to sit well with him. Fuck!
“Officer Black, listen to me, this is very important. Have you ever seen Officer Grisham before?”
“Well, no, but I assumed he was a transfer. I was about to leave to bring Kara home when the call came in. I had just told her she had to stay there; she turned to sit down and crashed into the guy. I asked if he would mind taking her. He said he was just getting off shift and he would have no problem bringing her home and then to the hospital. Then I left. She should be at the hospital.”
“What was his first name and how long ago was this?” The silence on the other end of the phone landed like a boulder in Caleb’s stomach. “Black?”
“I’m not sure what his first name was, but his name badge had a J on it.”
“How long ago?” When Black was silent, Caleb practically screamed into the phone. “How. Fucking. Long. Ago?”
“An hour ago. Do you want me to call the hospital and make sure she got there?”
Caleb cut him off.
“Description?”
“Tall, six feet one. Slim build. Brown hair. That is all I can give you. I can have them pull up video.”
“Do it and call me ASAP!”
“Do you want me to call the hospital, too?”
“She isn’t at the hospital. She walked out the door with the fucking killer.” Caleb hung up and punched the dash.
“Motherfuck! J. Grisham?” Caleb felt like he was suffocating. “As in John Grisham. The motherfucker has had her for an hour.” He was furious, but Black had no reason to second guess someone in a uniform. “We need to go faster.” Cathy slammed her foot down on the gas as they got on the highway.
“The bastard thinks he’s funny, has quite the sense of humor, doesn’t he? Won’t be laughing when we get a hold of him,” she stated.
Caleb was terrified. There was no way this was a coincidence. None at all and the bastard had her. Not only that, but he had taken her an hour ago. When he got his hands on that son of a bitch, and he would find him, there was no other option; he was going to make him sorry that he touched what was his.
Kara sensed as much as felt something was awry when she entered her house. Stop it; you are just spooked because of what happened earlier, nothing is wrong, she told herself. Samsonite had greeted her at the door, eager to go to the bathroom. She had grudgingly let him out to go to the bathroom without her to watch over him because she wanted to get the papers and get to the hospital as fast as possible. For some reason, Officer Grisham made her nervous. Sam had been given the cue to be on alert with the officer before Kara turned and went deeper into the house, leaving the door open so he could get back in. Telling herself that leaving the door open was why she felt so apprehensive, she walked into her kitchen and stopped short when her eyes landed on her counter top. Something was wrong, something was very wrong. The block on the counter that held all her knives had one ominously empty slot. She knew that there was no way that a knife would be missing.
Why the hell had she left the police station? She knew better than to leave there. At the police station, she was protected. Here, she was vulnerable. What kind of an idiot was she to leave with an officer she’d never met before? Hadn’t she agreed with Caleb that it was the safest place for her right now? Why had she let Suzanne Abfall guilt her into leaving the safety of the police station? Fight or flight kicked in, and Kara decided it would be a good idea to leave and go back to the police station because an eerie feeling had settled over her. Not only did she sense something off, but she could feel malevolence in the air. This time, what she sensed was a shift in the air and an acute awareness of no longer being alone in the kitchen.
Being stupid, or perhaps it was just trustworthy, Kara had asked the officer to stay outside and keep an eye on Sam. All she needed to do was to grab the papers in her office, and if she were being honest, she didn’t want him in her home. Rushing into the house, she stopped in the kitchen first to grab her bag that had stuff to occupy her while at the hospital and that was when she noticed the knife. Now, the walls were closing in, and Kara just knew she had made a grave mistake.
Kara whistled for Sam, suddenly wanting nothing more than to have him in the house. When thirty seconds went by and she hadn’t heard Sam come barreling into the house, panic really set in. Hoping that he was just too far from the front door to hear her, she whistled again and got the same response. Which was nothing.
Frantically, she turned around to face the entryway between the kitchen and hallway, the same entryway she had walked through only moments before, and that she had expected to see empty. However, it wasn’t, and she froze to the spot when her eyes locked on a big figure standing half hidden in shadow in the entryway.
“Geez, you scared me, Officer Grisham. I was just grabbing my bag, but I still have to grab the papers. They’re in my office. You really could have stayed outside. Is Samsonite all right? Did he run off?” Kara didn’t believe that Sam would have run off, not with her in the house, but she wanted to act as normal as possible.
He took a step toward her. She didn’t know why, but she took an instinctive step back and then he reached up to his neck and started to peel the skin away. What the fuck! She took another step back and bumped into the island in her kitchen. She felt behind her, hoping to encounter some kind of weapon. Her fingers touched nothing, her OCD had failed her because everything was put away exactly where she wanted it to be. Which wasn’t on the island.
Swallowing, she inched down the island, hoping to get to the knife block that was on the other counter. Just as she got to the end of the counter, Officer Grisham pulled the rest of the skin off his face. Only it wasn’t skin at all. What it really had been, was a very high-end latex mask used to disguise his face. Everything started to crumble around her as if the floor had just dropped out and she was in a freefall.
Kara felt dizzy as all her blood rushed to her head, bile rose to her mouth, and her knees turned to Jell-O. She slumped against the counter that she’d been navigating around when it seemed as if her knees would buckle and she would no longer be able to hold herself up. Struggling to right herself, she tried to think of an escape route.
The hulking figure took a step into the light, and Kara’s world exploded and splintered into a million pieces. The face staring at her was the face of her nightmares and broke into a sinister smile as he took one giant step toward her and watched the fear spread across her face. There was no way she could get by him. She was trapped.
“Tsk, tsk, now you’re not thinking of running, are you?” he asked.
The small control she had over herself evaporated as panic took over because standing before her was a man that sounded just like Devon Bristol and looked just like the monster who had abducted her. But if that
was the case, he had risen from the ashes of a burned-out car. And as the monster took another giant step toward her, the hysteria she had been trying to control, bubbled up and erupted from her as she sputtered out a nearly incoherent string of sentences.
“You’re dead, you died. You can’t be here, you can’t be here.”
Kara swallowed hard, trying to stop the flow of words. She had to do something; she was not going to let Devon get the upper hand on her again. Subconsciously, she remembered she had been inching to the side and had been trying to get to the knife block. Except she had kept going and instead of going to the other counter, she bumped into the kitchen table. The kitchen table that had a heavy centerpiece on it. Without thinking twice and with as much speed as possible, she grabbed the heavy fruit bowl and threw it at Devon with deadly accuracy, hitting him in the head.
She didn’t wait around once the bowl connected; as he stumbled backward, she took the opportunity to run around the table, hoping that she would be able to get to the entryway before he regained his composure. But the bowl had been heavy, and she wasn’t able to throw it as hard as she had wanted and had subsequently only stunned him. She had nearly gotten around the table when he straightened and advanced toward her. Quickly, she grabbed a chair and threw it at him. Once again hitting her mark, she deftly maneuvered around him.
Sprinting toward the front door, the hair on her neck stood on end when she heard him tearing after her. As she passed the table in her entryway, she grabbed the vase on it, and spun, throwing it at him in one quick motion. Her aim was not as good on the fly, and this time she missed as the vase flew wide and crashed into the wall, shattering glass everywhere. With nothing left in her path to the door, she knocked the table over to try to slow him down.
No time left and no weapons left meant her only chance was to get outside where she hoped she could outrun him long enough to get to a neighbor’s house or garner someone’s attention. Unfortunately, she had not had time to introduce herself to her neighbors and ask them if they saw anything suspicious to call the police. Of course, in the last few days, with as often as the police had been at her house, they might already be keeping an eye out for suspicious activity. Hoping that was the case, she spun and ran to the door, but stopped dead in her tracks when another man stepped out of her living room and into the foyer. Her realtor, Marshall Abfall, was standing in front of her.
“Marshall? Oh, thank God, please help me.” Kara was already frozen, but if she hadn’t been, the look in Marshall’s eyes would have paralyzed her with fear.
Still, Kara took a step toward him, until he reached up and began to tug at his facial hair on his face. Her eyes drawn to the movement, she noticed the burns on his neck. Burns that the Marshall Abfall she had met the other day did not have. Then after he slowly peeled off his beard, popped out the contacts that had turned his eyes brown, pulled off the wig that made his hair thick and blond and the fake blond eyebrows, he reached into his pocket, where he retrieved a cloth and scrubbed his face until the bronzer he was wearing wiped off.
Before her very eyes the man standing in front of her no longer looked like Marshall Abfall, rather he looked like the man standing behind her, but with burns. Her head started to swim at the implication that the man who sold her the house had just turned into her worst nightmare. No longer paralyzed with fear, she clumsily turned in a circle, taking in both men, who looked identical in every way, except for the burn scars on the neck of the man in front of her, the man who was brandishing her missing knife.
“What …?”
“You are so right; it was definitely worth all the trouble to see her shocked expression.”
Dumbfounded, she just stood before them, swaying from side to side, taking shallow breaths. She knew she was hyperventilating, but there was nothing she could do to stop herself. Aware that if she didn’t calm herself, she would pass out, she bent over and took in a couple of deep breaths. Both men must have taken this as a defensive move because the one standing in front of her threw her hard against the wall, while the one who had been standing behind her rushed her and held her to the wall. With his body hard against her, she could feel his arousal, as well as the sharp knife, pressed to her neck. Slowly, he ran his tongue from her chin to her temple.
“Don’t you move, you fucking cunt. I would prefer not to kill you right now, but I will slice your neck like butter if you so much as flinch. Which would be a dirty shame since we spent so much time planning for this moment. Ten long fucking years, as a matter-of-fact. We would have liked to have toyed with you a little longer before we took you, but our timeline got pushed up.” He must have been confident he had her full attention because he loosened his grip enough for the other man to tie her hands and gag her mouth. “Time to take a little nap,” he said before he injected her with what she could only assume was the same drug as the last time.
30
Cathy pulled the car up and onto the lawn of Kara’s front yard. He noticed two things right away as he barreled out of the car. That there was a large object lying on the side of her house and that her front door was wide open. He sprinted to the front door with Cathy on his heels as Brett ran to what he could only assume was the body of Samsonite. Caleb found himself praying that Sam was all right because Kara would be devastated when he got her back if Sam was gone.
When he rushed into her foyer, he stopped dead in his tracks as he saw the devastation in the entryway. He felt cold-blooded rage rise in him when he saw the destruction, but then he also felt a certain level of hope. She had put up a fight, a good fight, and he didn’t kill her here. The monster wouldn’t do that because he would want to play with her for a while before he killed her. But he also felt a crippling fear when he saw drops of blood. Hers or his? He hoped to hell it was his and that she got in a good enough hit to cause him to bleed. There wasn’t much blood, which was good and bad. Bad if it was his because he wouldn’t bleed out. Good if it was hers because she wouldn’t bleed out.
Cathy was calling in the crime scene as Caleb followed the path of destruction into her kitchen. The fight had started in there, for sure, he thought as he scanned the room looking for anything that would help him. His eyes alighted on the knives; he noted the missing knife and the lack of it anywhere else in her normally pristine kitchen. The thought that he had taken her by knifepoint made his blood run cold.
Carefully stepping over debris to maintain the scene as much as possible, he saw something on the floor that grabbed his attention. He was crouching over it when Albrecht came into the kitchen.
“Don’t touch that!”
“You think I am fucking stupid? This is the woman I love; do you fucking think I would do anything that would jeopardize her safety?” he roared. Taking a deep breath through his nostrils, he looked at Albrecht, and suddenly he was nearly brought to his knees with the emotional devastation he was feeling. “I’m sorry. I just...how is Sam?”
“You have no reason to apologize, I get it. Sam will be fine; he was sedated somehow.”
“Good, that’s good. What am I looking at here?”
“If I had to guess? That is the face of J. Grisham.”
“What?”
“A latex face mask. It looks exceptionally high end and quite expensive.”
“Good God, just when I thought we would be able to identify him with the video footage at the police station, we’re back to square one, and we have no idea who we’re looking for.” Caleb stood and scrubbed his hands through his hair. They were well and truly fucked; there was no way that they would be able to find her.
“That isn’t the worst of it.”
When Albrecht paused, seemingly for no reason, or perhaps to gauge Caleb’s well-being, Caleb was so frustrated he saw red.
“For fuck’s sake, say it already. I am not going to go off the deep end.”
“I think we’re dealing with two assailants.”
Alarmed, Caleb stood straight; he hadn’t even realized he was stooped.
&nbs
p; “What would make you think that?”
“There’s a wig in the front entrance. Blond.”
Black had called from the precinct when they were en route to Kara’s house to confirm his earlier description and tell them that he would send a picture to Caleb’s phone. The man in the picture from the video was not a blond.
“She always said she thought Devon had an accomplice, but how could there be two here tonight? It should only be his accomplice. What the hell is going on?”
“We can triangulate where her cell phone pinged last.”
“Only useful if he didn’t throw the phone; he’s too smart for that.”
Standing with his fingers still tangled in his hair, his mind was locked down with fear. Until a thought hit him. Kara wasn’t stupid. She was a fighter, and she would have a plan to make sure that this couldn’t happen to her again. And, if, on the long shot it did happen, Caleb knew she would have some sort of backup plan. If she had any plan in place, the only person she would have trusted with the information was Ethan or possibly his Aunt Vanessa or Dr. Chiglo.
Caleb jerked his phone out of his pocket and called Ethan’s room, pacing while the phone rang in his ear, until finally Ethan picked up.
“Hello?” he answered, his voice thick with sleep.
“Ethan, it’s Caleb. Listen, I need you to help me.”
“What’s wrong?” Ethan asked, his voice suddenly alert and no longer sounding tired.
“Kara’s gone.”
“What the fuck do you mean she’s gone? As in you had a fight and she left, or you can’t find her?”
“He got her, the psycho got her, and I need you to help me, I can’t lose her. We can’t lose her. I am losing it, brother. I need to know if she had any kind of fail-safe in case of an emergency?”
“Let me think.” He paused for a second while Caleb paced. “Her watch has GPS tracking, and her ankle bracelet has a tracking device called Project Lifesaver. I can call Project Lifesaver, and they can tell us her location. It was designed for dementia patients. Normally, they would respond for us, but in this situation, it wouldn’t be advisable. She has other tracking devices sewn into articles of clothing. The other items I can track from an app she and I have access to. Her preparedness will pay off, as long as she has one of those items on her.”
In the Night (Darkness Falls Book 1) Page 25
