Hidden in the Dark (Harper Flagg Book 1)

by Alyson Larrabee

  I wish I could remember something about that night, but I can’t. As soon as I was old enough to ride my bike to the library, I looked up the story in the local newspaper’s online archives. The reporter who covered the Bad Guy’s first crime overdramatized a tale that was already emotional enough, if you ask me. But no one ever has.

  Chapter 5

  Harper

  Forced to Wait

  The last time I saw my mother’s murderer, I was still toddling around on little baby feet, not at all ready for him. But I’m ready now. I can run fast and drive fast. I can punch and kick almost as hard as my father. I’m ready for anything.

  Anything except waiting. When I get home from the gun range, I’m too pumped up to do homework. So I go down into the basement and work out. First on the speed bag. Then on the heavy bag, punching and kicking. I spread out the mats and practice some handsprings and flips, forward and backward. I’m not graceful like a gymnast, just fast and lethal. Then I run upstairs to take a shower. My grandmother’s due soon. She usually comes over, makes dinner, and eats with me.

  Dad will be working all night tonight. Officially, no one’s sure my mother’s killer pulled off this kidnapping. No one except my father and me. If it wasn’t obvious to him, he never would have texted me. He’s sure. No one knows my mom’s case like Dad and I do. We knew her killer would be back, and he is. And, he’s returned to the scene of his first crime.

  This time he chose the parking lot of the biggest store in town: Target. It’s the same location as my mother’s abduction. There used to be a supermarket there, but the Target people bought them out about five years ago. Expanded the building and the parking lot. Painted a lot of stuff red and white.

  The cops managed to keep the details of the new crime quiet for a few hours, but now they’re out. The killer struck late last night, shortly after the store closed. The victim’s husband didn’t realize she was missing right away and report it because they had separated recently.

  The store’s manager arrived in the parking lot early this morning and heard a baby screaming its lungs out. When he walked over to see if the kid was okay, he found the backdoor to the victim’s new hybrid Lexus SUV open. There was a toddler in the car by himself, still strapped into his car seat, howling wordlessly for his mother, who was nowhere to be found. She was the same victim type as the other three from sixteen years ago. Twenty something, attractive, like my mother, only sixteen years younger than my mom would be today. The killer has aged, but his victims haven’t.

  This time, the security camera was state-of-the-art, and the parking lot was lit well enough so they could see the killer on the tapes, but he was completely dressed in black, with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled close around his face. He was also wearing black gloves, black workout pants, and black sneakers. The tape reveals nothing but his approximate height and weight. His escape vehicle wasn’t within range of any cameras, and the door of her car blocked the view of her actual abduction. All this info has been released to the media.

  The news websites don’t have the woman’s name yet. I’ll know as soon as they do. I have the websites of every Boston news station minimized at the bottom of my laptop screen, and I’ve been checking them every few minutes. I think about going for a run because I missed track practice, and running always helps when I’m stressed. I could win a marathon right now; I’m so hyper. But I need to be online, in case something happens, so I don’t go out. If the police release more information to the media, I want the whole story right away.

  Instead of running, I check out my Facebook page. A lot of my friends have one, but hardly anyone posts very often: only if something big happens in their lives, like getting into college. FB’s mostly for old people now. Really old people. My dad doesn’t have a page, but my Grandma does. I scroll through the statuses of the people I know. Grandma went bowling last night and her team lost, but they’re all smiling and raising their beers toward the camera in a group selfie. A couple of days ago, my track coach posted about making a smoothie after he worked out. He captioned it Nutri Ninja has changed my life. And there’s a link to the recipe. In the picture he’s sipping a slimy-looking green concoction through a straw. I think about posting a comment. Put down the damn smartphone and just drink the stupid thing. But I don’t. Not everyone deserves my hostility. I have to control it if I want to have any friends, virtual or real.

  I skim through who was tagged in whose photo. Who’s now friends with who. Who’s been accepted at what college. The latest cat, dog, turtle, and elephant memes. I watch a two-minute viral YouTube video of someone’s drunk dad dancing at a wedding.

  As I’m looking at all this meaningless stuff, one of the little icons at the top of the window lights up, so I click on it. It’s a friend request from someone I think about often: Shane MacGregor, the son of the Bad Guy’s third victim. Shane was four at the time, a little older than I was when my mom died. Like me, he watched from his car seat while a maniac cracked his mother over the head and carried her away. Natalie MacGregor was never seen alive again. The scene of her abduction was the next town over, just ten miles away from where the same thing had happened to my mother about four weeks earlier.

  The second victim’s kid, like Shane and me, was an only child. Her mother, Marianne Stone, was also young and attractive. Unlike Shane and me, though, Marianne’s daughter, Brittany, the only witness to her abduction, is now deceased.

  A few years ago, sixteen-year-old Brittany Stone fell victim to a drunk driver: herself. She didn’t hit another car, and no one else was in the car with her. She crashed into a tree going about ninety miles an hour at two in the morning. Brittany was the only casualty. No skid marks from hitting the brakes. No seatbelt. Died instantly.

  The details of her death make me wonder: Would she still be alive if her mother had been there to raise her? To love her? Would she still have gotten completely wasted, climbed behind the wheel, and pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor? There’s no way to know.

  I’ve never tried to contact Shane or Brittany. I’ve left them alone in case they weren’t as obsessed with their mothers’ murders as I am with mine. Brittany was living out of state when she died in the crash, so she and her dad must have moved away after the killings. Maybe they didn’t move far enough away, though. I wonder if Brittany was trying to forget but couldn’t. Consequently, she committed a desperate act. Her last.

  I’ve always assumed Brittany and Shane were attempting to lead normal lives. They wanted privacy. They wouldn’t appreciate me reaching out to them and reminding them about what happened when we were all babies. But now Shane seems to be done with his normal life, if it ever was normal. He’s reaching out to me. He knows. The kidnapping victim whose name hasn’t been released yet spent the last few moments of her life the same way Shane’s mother and mine spent theirs.

  I click Confirm, and Shane MacGregor becomes my 759th friend. He’s online now, and a chat window opens in the bottom right corner of my computer screen.

  It’s him. Isn’t it?

  I know exactly what he means and type Yes.

  They just showed her picture on WGBH. Jessica Phelps. She’s young and pretty like my mom was.

  Damn. I missed the breaking news. The police have released her name. I full screen the WGBH website. A woman, who’s about the same age my mother was, is smiling at me. The caption Jessica Phelps, age 26 appears under the photo. Her baby, Matthew, was left safely strapped into his car seat. Right now she’s merely missing. They haven’t found her body yet. Maybe she’s still alive. If she can be found, my dad will find her. I click back to my conversation with Shane and type out: She looks around the right age.

  Shane answers, Back in the same place after sixteen years. With no murders in between? Weird.

  He might have changed his MO so he could get away with it for all those years. Or maybe he was in prison. Maybe he got caught committing some other crime and they locked him up. But now he’s back. And he’s killing again.<
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  Maybe Jessica Phelps is still alive.

  Don’t count on it.

  They haven’t found her body yet.

  They will. I’m afraid to hope.

  Why would he come back here? He’s more likely to get caught.

  Maybe he’s bored.

  Maybe he wants to revisit his past.

  He’s feeling nostalgic.

  Are you scared?

  No, I’m ready. I hope he knocks on my front door today.

  Call me. And he posts his cell phone number in the chat window.

  I’m not going to call him. But I investigate his Facebook page for a few minutes. Only about four hundred friends. He hardly has any photos, either, just 53. Most of my Facebook friends have five times that many. In the pictures where he’s tagged, I can see he’s tall and thin. He also has red hair, and there are about two hundred stupid ginger comments on his wall. Gingers are the only people in the world you can still make fun of just because they were born that way.

  Shane probably finds ginger jokes about as funny as I find blonde jokes.

  Actually, Shane looks like he might have been on the wrong end of a little frivolous violence recently. Maybe he got in a fight with someone who told a few too many ginger jokes. His nose is crooked and there’s a noticeable bump on the bridge. It appears to have been broken once or twice. I wonder what the other guy looked like after the fight. In his profile picture he’s grinning at the camera and squishing a dark-haired girl in a headlock.

  Cruising through his friends list, I discover the girl’s his twelve-year-old sister, Emily. His dad must’ve remarried and reproduced, unlike mine. I click on Shane’s picture and zoom in so I can see it close up. He has blue eyes and those golden eyelashes gingers have. But no freckles. That’s pretty unusual for a redhead, but I won’t mention it unless he cracks a blonde joke.

  Chapter 6

  Gabriel

  Dumping Jessica

  “Sack of potatoes, sack of potatoes.” Gabriel repeated the phrase over and over as he lugged the heavy trash bag out to his new van, plunked the deadweight down, and slid the door shut. “I’m back,” he announced quietly.

  Even if he shouted the news, nobody would hear him. Located way up on an unpaved road in the middle of the woods, his mother’s family’s ancestral home was hidden by more than the darkness. Even in the daylight it was hard to spot. Gabriel’s great-great grandfather had built the old farmhouse in the middle of a large pine forest, at the end of a long, narrow, twisted driveway, behind an old burial ground. No one ever ventured back as far as the house; although occasionally, some local teenagers snuck into the cemetery to hang out and smoke weed. But even they knew better than to explore the surrounding woods.

  Harper would never smoke weed. She was perfect. A straight arrow. A track star. Her photo had appeared in an article about the Eastfield cross-country team this past October. Every week Gabriel read the Eastfield news online.

  And this fall it had paid off; there was a photograph of her, emerging from the woods with a rival close at her heels. The foliage was so pretty at that time of year.

  Harper’s beautiful face looked really serious in the picture. And a lot like Rosemary’s. Gabriel still had doubts about his decision to kill young Mrs. Flagg. But at the time he was in a hurry and needed to start somewhere, fast. Before he was absolutely sure, he had concocted a perfect plan and then acted on it.

  Sometimes Gabriel felt guilty about her. He hoped he hadn’t made a bad decision. Even though it had happened sixteen years ago, he kept picturing Harper’s face and remembering her voice. He felt the need to communicate with her somehow. He’d like a chance to explain how her mother’s death might have been a mistake, but it wasn’t his fault. He’d had to act fast because of an emergency situation. Once in a while, he felt so unsure about Rosemary that it weighed him down. And he didn’t like feeling weighed down. He liked to feel light and quick and ready for action.

  He decided to meet Harper face-to-face. Soon. So he could explain. After she heard his story, she’d understand. Her mother’s murder had happened at the beginning. He’d been a novice then. Taken a chance that maybe he shouldn’t have taken because he was pressed for time. Everyone makes mistakes when they’re in a hurry and they’re new at something.

  Harper would listen and she’d understand, because she was extraordinary. He realized it this past fall, when he saw her photo in the paper. Then her uniqueness really hit him when he finally saw her in person, for the first time in sixteen years. Even though he was looking at her from far away, through binoculars, Gabriel knew for sure. She was spectacular. He had sensed it immediately. She looked a lot like Rosemary, just as beautiful, but taller, more athletic and muscular.

  Harper was strong and smart. Unlike the deadweight sack of potatoes he had just thrown into his van. Jessica had been weak and stupid. Not as pretty as Rosemary or Harper, but a real looker nonetheless. And such a shiny, expensive new car. Cute baby, too.

  Matthew Phelps had looked especially pathetic and adorable with the cast on his arm. Bet Jessica got sick of answering questions about that. “Your baby is so cute! How did he break his arm?”

  Only last week, Gabriel had asked Jessica this very same question. They were both in the candy aisle at Walmart. She was shopping. Gabriel wasn’t. He had deliberately followed her. He never bought candy. Sugar was unhealthy and addictive.

  He had stooped down to smile at the baby before he looked up at Jessica. “How did your little guy break his arm?”

  She had answered, “Common toddler injury. He was walking across the ceramic tile floor in the kitchen. Stumbled and fell forward. Put both arms out to break his fall.” She demonstrated by sticking both of her arms straight out in front of her. “Fractured his wrist, actually, not his arm.”

  When the child started to fuss, instead of picking him up to comfort him, his mother opened the bag of lollipops she had just put in her cart, unwrapped one, and handed it to him. He sniffled a couple of times, then stuck it in his mouth and quieted down. She smiled at Gabriel and walked off, to another section of the store.

  Gabriel had followed at a safe distance. When Jessica got into the checkout line, the elderly woman behind her asked the same question.

  “How did your poor baby break his arm?”

  Jessica had answered, “Fell down the front porch stairs.”

  Different answer. She was lying. Gabriel had known instantly. Jessica needed to be next. His vacation was over. Time for the Bad Guy to reappear in his own hometown. Sixteen years after the first killings.

  He didn’t kill her that day, in the Walmart parking lot. That would’ve been stupid, and he wasn’t stupid. The cops would probably review the security videos from inside the store on the day of the abduction, to see if Jessica had talked to anyone or if anyone had been following her. That’s why he’d waited a couple of weeks and struck in the Target parking lot. No one saw him. And if anyone reviewed the security videos, he’d never entered the store. If he showed up at all on the videos, the cops would only see an average-height, average-weight guy with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled forward to hide his face. No evidence left behind. His identity would remain a mystery forever.

  Stooping down in the unpaved portion of his driveway, he rubbed a little mud from a nearby puddle onto the license plate of the dark-green commercial van, then jumped up, jogged around to the front, and climbed in. He hummed along to the music on the radio as he headed down the long dirt driveway.

  It’s good to be back. He smiled and tapped the steering wheel to the beat of the music.

  After continuing for about twenty miles north on 495, he got off on the exit for Wrentham Outlets, where Jessica had often shopped. She loved a bargain. Parking on the far edge of the parking lot, he whipped out his phone, activated the stopwatch mode on his fitness app, then hopped out, dumped her, jumped back in, and pulled away. The four-minute rule was important. He took his eyes off the road for a heartbeat, to check his phone screen
. Two minutes and thirteen seconds. He’d shaved thirty-two seconds off the time he’d taken to dump Rosemary’s body sixteen years ago. He could still move fast. Good to know. The Bad Guy. Slash ’em. Stash ’em and trash ’em. Jump ’em and dump ’em. In under four minutes. Every time. He laughed out loud.

  He felt great. At the beginning of his sixteen-year hiatus, he had moved away, bought a big house with a lot of land. From there he had traveled back and forth to a small, isolated cabin in the mountains. For a while he had kept busy and managed to steer clear of trouble, but then a couple of years ago, toward the end of his long “vacation,” he had unleashed the most savage part of himself again. Still, he had slaked his thirst for death less often than he would have liked. And not quite in the style he loved, the Bad Guy’s style.

  A young woman at a campsite near the Vermont border was partying with a group of young people. Big fire, lots of beer, noisy. Later, as she was staggering through the darkness, toward her tent, he came up behind her, whacked her on the head, and then finished her off with his knife. The leaves didn’t even rustle under his feet.

  Another time, Gabriel saw an elderly man walking his dog on a deserted road, near his cabin. The old guy kicked the dog when it stopped to sniff an empty ginger ale can. After he killed him, he made sure to tie the dog’s leash to a nearby tree so it wouldn’t run off and get hit by a car.

  And his favorite. It hadn’t gone down exactly the way he would have chosen, but it was the closest he’d come during his “vacation” from being the Bad Guy.

  Although he preferred the countryside and the suburbs, Gabriel had occasionally lurked in the dark alleys of New England’s cold cities. One Saturday night, near the end of his hiatus, he watched a drunken woman lurch out of a crowded bar, looking for a quiet place to make a call on her cell phone. She stumbled into a dark, deserted alleyway, and he tiptoed in after her, his knife at the ready.