Wicked

by Jana DeLeon

  “I hired a private investigator. If anything happens to Ethan and you had information that could have helped us find him, you’re going to have to answer for it.”

  Brenda rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You don’t have to be a bitch about it. What’s your number? You can have the text. Just don’t tell anyone where you got it.”

  “Fine,” Tara said, and gave Brenda her cell number.

  Brenda stabbed her finger at the phone, then stuck it back in her pocket, whirled around and stomped off without another word. Tara stared at her a couple seconds, then accessed her texts and read the message. She sucked in a breath and her fingers tightened on the phone until her knuckles turned white.

  It was a message just like the one Ethan had gotten.

  A wave of nausea washed over her. Ethan had been right. Amber Olivier had been the girl in the text he’d received. Which meant whoever had taken her now had Ethan and put Brenda next on the list.

  The surly girl thought she had trouble now. She didn’t know the half of it.

  He watched them from across the courtyard, Brenda and the nosy one. He knew Brenda wouldn’t attempt to find Ethan. Even if the girl had been certain it wasn’t a prank and that Ethan would be killed, she still wouldn’t have been bothered. Brenda had a single-track mind and it was always focused on herself.

  But he hadn’t expected her to talk to the nosy one. Hadn’t even been aware they knew each other or that Brenda knew Ethan. They weren’t anything alike and based on watching her for a couple weeks, Brenda tended to run with those who could provide her with free passage to the things she couldn’t afford on her allowance, mostly booze. Still, it was a college campus, not a city. It was possible for students of opposite temperaments and interests to run across each other.

  Unfortunately, it presented a problem.

  He had no doubt Brenda had shown the nosy one the text. Now the nosy one had proof to take to the police. They might not have believed her before, but if she produced the text, they might give her more credence than they did before. And regardless of what the police thought, Shaye Archer would definitely pursue it.

  The question was, could she crack the code?

  He didn’t think so, but he supposed if she did and she managed to free Ethan before he returned to finish him off, he’d be a sport about it and let Ethan live. After all, he wasn’t the one who had broken the rules of the game. But Brenda and the nosy one would have to pay for circumventing the rules. They would have to pay for Ethan’s potential freedom.

  Everything had a price.

  Some people didn’t think so.

  They were about to find out just how wrong they’d been.

  Tara punched in Shaye’s number as she hurried across campus. She cursed when it went to voice mail, then left a message asking Shaye to call her as soon as possible and it didn’t matter how late it was. She was as likely to sleep as she was to sprout wings and take flight across the courtyard. She shoved the phone into her purse and picked up her pace.

  The sun had dropped behind the library and the last glimmers of sunlight faded with each step she took. Tall lampposts were scattered down the sidewalks, but the huge magnolia trees and heavy shrubbery blocked their light completely in many places, leaving dark stretches to traverse before reaching a patch of light again.

  She pulled a can of Mace out of her purse, clenching it as she increased her pace until she was almost jogging. Tara had always been cautious, but she’d never been scared to walk across campus alone. Now she imagined a bogeyman behind every bush. In every tree. She needed to get to the dorm where she would be surrounded by walls and other people and doors with locks.

  A stick snapped somewhere behind her and she sucked in a breath as she looked back. The only students she could see were at least fifty yards away. Whatever or whomever she’d heard was much closer.

  It could be a stray dog.

  She’d never actually seen a stray dog on campus but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Or maybe a squirrel had broken a branch in the tree. It might not have been someone stepping on it. Someone hiding in the shadows, making sure she couldn’t see them. Because why would anyone do that? Why would anyone want to stay hidden?

  All the reasons why rushed into her mind and she let out a cry as she took off running. At first, she couldn’t hear anything but her own breathing and the sound of her heart pounding in her ears, but then she heard it—someone was running behind her. Keeping pace with her. Completely panicked, she glanced around, looking for other people or just one other person, but all she saw in front of her was empty sidewalk.

  Her dorm was at least a hundred yards away from the courtyard. No way could she keep up her current pace for that long. Given her heart condition, running wasn’t exactly her strong suit, and running while scared to death was probably doing a real number on her.

  She turned to look behind her and her feet got tangled up. Desperately, she tried to regain her balance, but it was too late. She crashed down onto the sidewalk, dropping the Mace, the skins on her palms tearing as they slid across the concrete. Her right knee banged onto the ground and she cried out as pain shot up and down her leg. She scrambled to get up and stumbled forward, her arms flailing about as she struggled to pick up speed and maintain her balance.

  The footsteps were louder. He was getting closer.

  She veered off to the right and ran toward Ethan’s dorm. It was the closet building to her and she knew the door code to get in. Tears pooled in her eyes, causing her vision to blur, but she didn’t slow her pace. Her hands and knee throbbed and she could feel a trickle of blood running down her shin.

  By the time she reached the dorm entry, she felt like her chest was going to explode. She punched in the entry code, yanked the door open, then bolted inside, pulling the door shut behind her. As soon as she heard the lock click into place, she pressed her face to the glass and looked outside, scanning the courtyard.

  Empty.

  She started at the right, scanning slower this time, looking for any sign of movement, and then she saw it, a shadow peeking around a bush. She squinted, trying to make out a shape in the shadows, and then it moved, separated from the shrubs.

  It was a guy. Or person. She couldn’t be sure what sex from this distance. They were average height and build, but that was all she could make out. The silhouette began to fade as they hurried away, then it disappeared into the darkness and she couldn’t see it at all.

  She turned around and leaned against the door, expelling the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She wasn’t crazy. Someone had been following her. And it couldn’t be for any good reason because if so, they would have followed her all the way to the dorm and knocked. First Amber, then Ethan, the text to Brenda, and now someone chasing her. What the hell was going on?

  She checked her fitness watch and a second wave of fear passed over her when she saw her heart rate was well into danger territory. She took a deep breath and slowly blew it out, trying to slow her racing heart.

  “Are you all right?” A voice sounded in front of her and she lifted her head up and saw a guy who lived across the hall from Ethan staring at her.

  “Yeah. I was jogging and I’m in worse shape than I thought.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That’s a stupid outfit to jog in. You should really get some running shoes before you do it again. Then you might not trip and skin yourself up.”

  Her knee. Her hands.

  She looked down and saw the tear in the knee of her jeans and the dark bloodstains on the denim. Both her hands were scratched and one still had blood oozing from one of the deeper tears.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I guess I should clean this up. Thanks.”

  He shook his head as she hurried past him and continued down the hall to the girls’ showers. She rinsed her hands off first and was happy to see that the scratches weren’t as bad as they’d seemed. They stung something awful and were throbbing, but only one scratch was still bleeding and it
was only a tiny bit. She wrapped a paper towel around it and bent over to assess her knee.

  The jeans were history. A tear stretched from the top of her knee and a good three inches down the leg. It was also torn on the sides, so it flapped around like a denim door to her kneecap. She grabbed another paper towel and dampened it, then cleaned off her knee. There was a pretty decent-sized gash right in the center that was going to need a bandage, and she needed to clean all of it with peroxide to prevent infection. She had a small medical kit in her dorm room, but her fear of going back outside was much larger than her fear of infection.

  Maybe Ethan had something in his room. He wouldn’t care if she used something. Besides, she needed to sit and control her breathing until her pulse was down to a safe level. She headed out of the bathroom and down the hall to Ethan’s room, then knocked on the door. She heard banging inside, then the door swung open and Brett stared at her, blinking. He must have finally regained focus because he nodded and stood back to allow her inside.

  “Sorry, Tara,” he said. “I must have dozed off. I was trying to study for a history exam.” He grinned. “That explains the dozing off part. Are you here about Ethan?”

  “Sort of. I guess you haven’t heard anything.”

  The grin disappeared. “No. I’m sorry for being a douche the other day when you said he was missing. I mean, college dudes sometimes need to take a break from stuff, you know? Sometimes a break with some beer and a hottie, but then I guess that’s not really Ethan.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “I hope he’s okay. We’re nothing alike but he’s a good guy.” He looked at her hand and noticed the paper towel. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “I…uh, fell, on my way over here and skinned up my hands and knee. I was hoping Ethan had some peroxide and a bandage I could use.”

  “I don’t know what he has but I’m sure he wouldn’t care if you looked through his stuff. If you can’t find anything, the nurse has everything. Between football and doing stupid shit when I’m drunk, I’m sort of a regular over there.”

  “Thanks.”

  He looked outside and frowned, then grabbed his phone from his rumpled bed and checked the display. “Shit. I’ve got to run. If you can sit still until the bleeding stops on your knee, you’re better off. It’s impossible to keep from bending it when you walk. I’ve tried.”

  “You don’t mind if I stay here for a while?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t care. There’s a few sodas left in the refrigerator. Without Ethan here, I had to make a store run myself.” He opened the door, then turned around and looked at her. “Let me know if you hear anything, okay?”

  She nodded and he closed the door. Seconds later, she could hear his footsteps as he ran down the hall. Instantly, her back and neck tensed as she recalled every frightening second of her run across the courtyard. It was the footsteps that reminded her, right? She looked over at Brett’s side of the room and frowned. A black hoodie, inside out, was tossed on his desk chair, about to slip onto the floor.

  She reached over and picked up the hoodie and turned it right side out. When she pulled the fabric straight, pieces of leaves fell out of the hoodie and onto the floor. She picked up one of the leaves. It was just like the ones from the shrubs in the courtyard.

  Stop!

  Before she got all hysterical, she needed to think. Plenty of people had black hoodies and while most of them probably didn’t go running through shrubs, she definitely wouldn’t put it past Brett. Besides, he was in the room sleeping when she knocked. Wasn’t he?

  But then, he could have slipped into the building while she was in the bathroom and pretended to be asleep.

  You’re talking about Brett here. He’s not that smart.

  But was she sure about that? If Brett was some genius killer but didn’t want people to catch on, wouldn’t playing the dumb college jock be the perfect disguise? She turned the hoodie inside out again and put it back on the chair, trying to remember exactly how it was lying when she’d found it. Then she pulled open Ethan’s closet and located a first aid kit.

  She knew a guy on the second floor who worked part time for campus security. He usually had one of their golf carts at the building. She would doctor up her hands and knees and ask him to give her a ride to her dorm. She’d limp if she had to in order to convince him. Originally, she’d thought about staying in Ethan’s room in case whoever had chased her knew where she lived. But now, nowhere seemed safe. At least in her own room, she had another can of Mace.

  And first thing tomorrow, she was going to buy more.

  Shaye stepped out of the shower and wrapped her long hair in a towel. It had been a long and trying day, and she knew she needed to rest, but part of her was excited about taking on a new investigation. She’d worried that she wouldn’t be able to commit to it again. That the service she’d wanted so badly to offer would become part of a big nightmare constantly recycling in her mind and leaving her unable to perform well enough to do the job.

  But as she’d listened to Tara’s story, everything that she’d known from before came filtering back in. Her assessment of the client and the story, even that tickle in her gut. It was all there. Now she just needed to make sure she stayed sharp and watched her back as she’d never watched it before.

  Corrine was right. As soon as the press latched onto her, it would make things harder, and the last thing she wanted was for the New Orleans police to find out she was investigating a case that they’d declined to look into. It was typical Vincent, but at what point did the department learn from past mistakes? Vincent had turned her away the first time she’d gone to the police on behalf of a client. That hadn’t work out so well for him or the victims.

  She dried off and walked into her room and pulled a wrinkled pair of shorts and tee from the travel bag she still hadn’t unpacked and probably wouldn’t. Unpacking meant she was staying a while, but that wasn’t what Shaye wanted. As soon as she felt Corrine was stable and occupied enough to manage everything, Shaye would return to her apartment in the French Quarter and continue her efforts to move on with her life.

  She didn’t have a choice in becoming a victim, but she definitely had a choice in remaining one.

  Shaye wasn’t about to give the people who had abused her the satisfaction, just in case they could see her from the grave. If all her years talking with Eleonore had taught her anything it was that a person should be judged by what they do, not what was done to them. She was determined to help people get through the worst times in their lives so that they could regroup and move on to better things. And she truly believed better things were always out there for the taking.

  She checked her phone and saw she’d missed three calls from Tara. Crap. She’d left her phone upstairs while she was talking to Corrine and hadn’t checked it before getting into the shower. The first call was thirty minutes ago, then two more within ten minutes of each other, the latest one just minutes before.

  She put the phone on speaker and listened to the first message while she dressed. Tara sounded excited and scared but hadn’t given any details. The second message was different. Again, Tara asked her to call as soon as possible, but her voice had taken on a tone that was all fright and no excitement. On the third call, she’d disintegrated into frantic.

  Shaye reached for the phone and dialed Tara. The girl answered on the first ring and started talking so fast that Shaye had to interrupt her and ask her to repeat what she’d just said.

  “This girl, Brenda, got a text with one of those messages like Ethan got,” Tara said. “It had a picture of Ethan with it.” Her voice broke as she delivered the last sentence.

  “You’re certain it’s Ethan?”

  “Positive. He has this mole on his left cheek. He looked…looks dead. Oh my God, what if he’s dead?”

  “Don’t panic. Until we are certain of anything different, we have to operate on the assumption that Ethan is still alive.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I can do that.�
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  “I know this is scary,” Shaye said, “and it’s a lot to deal with, but we’ll get through it.”

  “Someone was following me.”

  Shaye’s hand clenched the phone. “When?”

  “After Brenda left, I started across campus for my dorm. I heard someone behind me but I couldn’t see anyone. He must have been in the bushes, which just freaked me out even more. I mean, why would someone hide in the bushes unless they were, you know…so I started running and he came after me.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No. I could hear him behind me and he was getting closer. I tried to look back, and I tripped and fell. I didn’t even think about looking then. Just got up as fast as I could and ran straight for Ethan’s dorm because it was the closest.”

  Shaye’s heart clenched as the girl described her experience. She’s been in the same position before and it was terrifying. “Did you hurt yourself when you fell?”

  “I skinned up my hands and knee and they’re probably going to hurt like heck tomorrow, but I was more worried about having a heart attack. My pulse rate still hasn’t dropped to normal.”

  Shaye’s grip tightened even more on the phone. She’d forgotten about Tara’s heart condition. “Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve been monitoring my pulse and it’s coming down, just not as quickly as my doctor says is acceptable, but I’m sure fear is keeping it from moving any faster.”

  “I’m sure it’s making things harder, but if it doesn’t continue to drop, you have to go to the hospital.”

  “I will. But why was he chasing me? What if he knows where I live? The dorms have pass codes, but people leave windows open and buzz anyone in without even checking.”

  “You have a lock on your room, right?”

  “Yeah, but they’re cheap. I forgot my key last week and opened it with my driver’s license.”

  “What about your family? Can you go home until we figure this out?”

  “My parents are missionaries in South Africa and the rest of my family is out of state.”