Hidden in the Dark (Harper Flagg Book 1)

by Alyson Larrabee

  He learned a lot about many types of medications and found out which members of the hospital staff used what drugs, either through talking to the person directly or listening to gossip. Long before Harper injured him, Gabriel had known for certain whose house he’d break into if he ever needed painkillers or a little something to knock someone out. And of course, when he finally did need those drugs and crept into his ex’s house, she had been out cold from the sleeping meds she’d taken. Her eyelids hadn’t even fluttered when Gabriel had quietly ransacked her bedroom, grabbing bottles of pills, hypodermics, and tons of other stuff. He’d been in her house countless times when they were dating and had memorized the floor plan. She’d even given him his own key. He kept it after they broke up, too, just in case he ever needed prescription meds.

  Insomnia was a horrible affliction for many people. Gabriel usually slept just fine, but he had benefitted from his ex-girlfriend’s struggle with this common problem. She had treated herself liberally to medications designed to help people fall asleep and stay asleep. There were so many to choose from.

  The night after Harper injured him, the killer had waited for the darkest hour of the night to descend before he crept out of his house and into his car. He had driven straight to the attractive female doctor’s house and stolen a whole pharmacy’s worth of drugs. The poor woman couldn’t report it, either. She would lose her license to practice medicine if the authorities found out about all the drugs she had confiscated and stashed away in her home, not to mention how many of these medications she was addicted to. Now Gabriel had a lot of the valuable drugs hidden away in his home, but he only used them when absolutely necessary. He had taken some of these medications, in small doses only, to help ease his pain when Harper had injured him, and today he had used the propofol so he could subdue Harper before she got a chance to injure him again.

  He adjusted his sunglasses, checked in the rearview mirror, smiled his Tom Cruise smile, and drove down the Flaggs’ quiet residential street. It was impossible to be 100 percent sure, but he didn’t think anyone had seen him grab her. Such a beautiful day, and no children were outside playing. No bike riders. No joggers. Everyone was inside today, enjoying their dark, silent environments, cooled by central air conditioning so the sound and heat of real life wouldn’t intrude on their Saturday morning. He guessed that the parents were all still sleeping and the kids were all hooked up to video games. Lucky him.

  As he drove with his left hand, he reached his right down behind Harper’s back to see what it was he’d felt when he had put his arm around her waist. He moved his hand up under Harper’s shirt, near the waistband of her jeans, and touched the hard object again. Then he grabbed hold and pulled it out. He wasn’t very familiar with pepper spray, but he thought the item he was holding in his right hand was a canister of either pepper spray or mace. This girl was full of surprises. He’d take a better look at it after she was hidden safely away in the old root cellar.

  Next, he pulled a surgical glove down over his right hand and reached into the right pocket of her jeans. Harper was right-handed, so her cell phone would most likely be tucked in there. Sure enough, it was. She hadn’t locked the screen, so he quickly checked out her number and memorized it, just for the hell of it. Then he turned it off. As soon as someone realized Harper was missing, which would be very soon, the police would try to track the GPS on her phone, so he tossed it out the window. Track that, Thomas Flagg. Maybe Gabriel would call it and leave a voicemail message. If anyone ever found the cell phone, her worried-sick father could torture himself by listening to it over and over again. Laughing, he turned down a cul-de-sac, drove around the circle at the end, and exited, traveling in the opposite direction.

  He chuckled as he spoke to his unconscious passenger. “Now that your phone’s gone, I won’t have to worry about you texting while driving.”

  He tried not to exceed the speed limit as he finally headed toward Mother’s house with the object of his obsession riding shotgun.

  Chapter 27

  Harper

  Dark Night of the Soul

  Slowly, I sit up and take inventory. I’m a little groggy, but nothing hurts. I can move my hands and arms freely, but he’s cuffed my ankles. I take a few deep breaths of cool air to clear my head and realize something’s horribly wrong. Something worse than being knocked unconscious and kidnapped. Either he has somehow rendered me blind, or it’s darker than death in here. The blackness is impenetrable. Only four of my senses seem to be working, and I feel completely disoriented. I blink to make sure my eyes are open and try to focus, but there’s no adjusting to the strength and force of the hammering darkness. Total, soul-sucking black surrounds me. A vortex of fear and madness. I flail my arms around, groping at the dark with both hands, and find nothing but emptiness. Panic squeezes my chest and forces out one long, loud sob after another. After the echoes of my hysteria die out, the heavy silence returns. The air is so thick with unmovable darkness that I start choking on it and can’t catch my breath. Stop it. And gradually, I do. You’re better off than his other victims. At least you’re alive. Now think. And I do.

  I pat my right front pocket to look for my cell phone. Not there, of course. And the pepper spray’s missing from its usual place above my rear end. I hold my breath for a few seconds and listen as hard as I can, but the silence is as profound as the dark. Unless I make a noise, there’s nothing. A whimper crawls out of my throat, and the surrounding void swallows it whole. I gulp down a panic so thick it will choke me to death if I let it take over. I need to stay calm and remember exactly what happened so I can figure out a way to escape.

  Gabriel Stone. How could I not have known?

  Regret crashes over me like a huge wave with a strong undertow. Now that I know the truth about him, I realize that the signs were everywhere. And I missed them all. The depth of his madness was crazy obvious. And I failed to notice. My sanity and self-control take wing again like a colony of bats rushing out of a cave at sunset. I need to find something real before they disappear into the night. Salt. The salty taste on my lips is real. My hands flutter up to my tear-soaked face. I pull the neck of my T-shirt up and wipe it dry. After sniffling a couple more times, I manage to stop crying.

  Think, Harper. You’re still alive. That’s a good thing. Stay positive. Hang tough. Keep on keeping on. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Every idiot cliché about survival streams through my mind. Thank you, Vince Lombardi, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Frederick Nietzsche, and Kelly Clarkson. Whoever said all that crap. Thank you.

  Explore, I tell myself. I can’t see and it’s completely silent in my new environment, but I still have three senses left: smell, taste, and touch. Because the ankle cuffs inhibit my ability to move around so I can feel stuff and the only thing to taste is the salt of my own hysterical tears, I begin with smell. It smells like dirt in here: the kind of dirt you have to dig deep to find. The kind Grams and I dug up when we built a raised bed for the vegetable garden in her backyard. She calls it clean dirt because it’s so deep underground that it’s uncontaminated. As the centuries rolled on, the wind ground up ancient stones and plant matter until layers and layers of the stuff built up. I breathe in fast and deep and instantly feel more awake. I’m not as groggy and nauseated as I was the last time he knocked me out. He must’ve used a different drug.

  Next I focus on my sense of touch. The hairs on my arms are standing up from both fright and cold. It’s chilly down here, and it smells like dirt. All of the sensory evidence I’ve collected so far points to an underground shelter of some sort. That’s where Gabriel has stashed me, somewhere deep beneath the earth. Now that I’ve established this reasonable theory, it’s time to move around and feel things.

  Reaching down with both hands, I explore the plasticuffs around my ankles. They’re too tight to slip my feet through, even if I take off my sneakers, but they’re loose enough, and spaced
far enough apart so I can probably stand up without falling over. I try it and discover I’m right. I don’t topple. I should be able to shuffle around and stay on my feet if I’m careful. It’s no worse than trying on a pair of tied-together shoes and attempting to walk around the store. A pitch-dark store managed by a homicidal lunatic. After a few awkward hops and stumbles, I come up against a wall, feel ahead a few inches, and then cautiously shuffle forward.

  I stop to rest my cheek against the cool, rough surface of cement and curse the fetters around my ankles. I hate moving slow, and I’m not a patient person, but it’s not a choice, so I inch along, bending down and touching the floor and then reaching back up as high as I can, every few feet. Even if my ankles weren’t shackled, I couldn’t speed up without risking injury because it’s so dark.

  At the first corner, my right toe clunks against something, and I almost trip over what seems to be an empty metal bucket. I sink down onto my knees, feel around, and discover two of them. One’s filled with clean-smelling cold water, but I’m not going to drink any unless I feel desperate. He may have put something in it: drugs or poison. Close to the bucket of water, there’s a small, smooth rectangle of soap and a towel that smells fresh, like laundry detergent.

  Next I find a roll of toilet paper. Ugh! Now I know what the empty bucket’s for. My mother’s killer has arranged a crude bathroom for me in one corner of my prison. After I recover from an initial attack of disgust, I think about how I haven’t had to pee yet, so I couldn’t have been unconscious for long. I would’ve wet myself or woken up having to go. Good to know. I’m pretty sure he took me around eight thirty in the morning, so it must still be light outside.

  After leaving Gabriel Stone’s makeshift restroom behind, I continue my slow progress along the next wall and eventually arrive at a closed screen door. One handed, I push it open and step through into a narrow passageway. With my arms held out straight on either side, my fingertips skim both walls, and I cruise along a little faster than your average slug but slower than a turtle. When I reach up, my nails graze the ceiling. Shane or my dad would probably have to duck if they were here. Thinking about them makes my eyes fill up with tears again, so I stop and focus on my surroundings.

  Keeping my right hand on the wall and trailing the fingertips of my left hand along the ceiling, I explore the rest of what seems to be the only entrance or exit to this hellhole. Just as I suspected, there are no light fixtures and no bare bulbs hanging anywhere, either. Damn. No electricity. Nothing.

  Finally I find the door. The way out. Also the way I must’ve come in. My fist makes a dull thumping noise when I pound on it. It’s made of thick, solid wood. There’s no door handle on the inside, just a thin rectangle of plywood, about six inches by four, nailed into place where the handle used to be. I start picking at the edge of the wood, thinking maybe I can pry it off, but nothing budges, and my fingertips hurt after a few tries. So I give up, place one ear against the door, and listen. Nothing. I push my face away, start sliding my palms over the thick boards of the door, and discover dozens of closely spaced, vertical grooves carved into the surface of the wood.

  “Shit.” My voice echoes through the dungeon, growing smaller and smaller as it travels through the darkness and fades away. The ragged grooves are too wide and shallow to be scratches from an animal’s claws. Human fingernails must have made them: small fingernails, like those of a child. My heart drums faster and faster. Gulping in huge mouthfuls of air, I fight down the panic, because I know it will be my undoing if it takes over. Hopping and stumbling, I grope my way back through the long narrow hallway, past the screen door, and into the main chamber, then slow down and proceed along the opposite wall. My prison appears to be a large, rectangular room with a narrow hallway that leads to the only exit. And I’m definitely underground.

  Soon my curious hands find a shelf and then another one on top of it. On the bottom shelf, there’s a medium-size cardboard box with a cover that fits exactly and opens easily. Inside are several bottles of what I assume to be water and some food that smells like fresh fruit. This one feels like an apple. Next to it, I touch the familiar dimpled skin of an orange and the smooth, oval shapes of six hard-boiled eggs. At least he has no immediate plans to starve me to death. I pull out one of the bottles and twist it open it. When I feel the resistance caused by the seal of the plastic cap, I know it’s never been opened before and is safe to drink. It tastes cold and clean and delicious, the best water I’ve ever drunk in my whole life. I chug the precious liquid for about a minute straight. Once I’m hydrated and calmer, I stand still and focus on my other senses, testing them out once again. I still can’t see a blessed thing, though. The insides of my eyelids and the darkness surrounding me in this dungeon are exactly the same shade of impenetrable black. I don’t know how much time has elapsed since he dumped me in here, and I start to wonder when and if he’s coming back.

  I rub the prickly gooseflesh on my arms and wish out loud for a sweatshirt or a blanket. The sound of my own voice startles me. Listening carefully, I examine the silence and find that it’s pure, no creaks or clicks, like the settling noises a house makes at night, no chirping birds or whining mosquitoes. No airplanes flying overhead or cars passing by. So the walls of this bunker are extremely thick and solid, and I’m not close to civilization. Damn. I take two more sips of water and then resume my journey around the perimeter of this mysterious prison.

  The thick, wide metal shelves are long and scabbed with rust. Groping along each one, top and bottom, I search for anything that might help me escape or keep me alive. A weapon I can use against Gabriel Stone, the man who killed my mother, probably in this very room. This is where she died, where they all died. I’m sure of it. My intuition screams the truth silently into the darkness. But I don’t smell anything weird, like blood. I’ve read about its distinctive odor when it’s been shed in large quantities. Jessica Phelps’s blood spatter would be recent, too. I’d still be able to smell it. But the only thing I can smell down here is pure, clean earth. He must use a disposable drop cloth of some sort when he kills them. And then he carries their corpses away, to dump someplace else. So no odor of blood lingers.

  I keep feeling along the shelf until my hand bumps up against something dry and round. Even with both hands I can’t lift the object clear of its resting place, because it’s attached to something that rattles and rasps against the metal as it moves. Carefully, I hold the round thing up an inch or so off the shelf with my left hand and move my right hand over its surface, where I find a smallish hole and poke my index finger down into it. Now I know for sure what I had only suspected. My finger’s inside an eye socket, and my left hand’s cupping the back of a human skull. For the past few seconds, my right hand has been moving over the surface of a fleshless face. The rest of the skeleton is still connected to the skull. Struggling once again to keep calm, I place my grisly discovery back down on the shelf where it has rested for many years. I’m not sure exactly how many years but at least a couple of decades. I’ve seen photographs and read articles about forensics and autopsies, but I’ve never seen or touched an actual dead person. The shock almost sends me into a state of panic all over again, but after a few deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth, my composure returns and I continue. Curiosity and common sense take over, and I think about how to approach the important task of examining the skeleton. I’m going to have to do it bare-handed because there are no gloves available, but I can wash my hands with the soap and water Gabriel left for me.

  Slowly and lightly, my hands skim over the bones. Thanks to conversations with my father and the books in his home office, I know something about the decomposition of the human body. It’s cool down here, so her corpse would have decomposed more slowly than if she’d been left, say, on the floor of a locked closet in someone’s house. Also, there’s a surprising lack of dampness, considering I’m underground. I’ve read a lot of forensics articles, and I can make some reasonably accurate assumpt
ions about the woman who was abandoned down here at least two decades ago.

  First, because of the size and weight of the skull, the lack of any ridge at all on the superciliary arch, and Gabriel’s MO, the skeleton probably belonged to a woman, a young one. In this particular environment it would take longer than normal for her remains to decompose because it’s cool and dry. Hence, the good condition of her skeleton. She was very likely his first victim, because he must’ve been pretty young when she died, probably less than twenty. A serial killer’s first kill is often times someone he knows. A girlfriend? A relative? A family friend or neighbor? I don’t think there are any houses near by, so probably not a neighbor.

  I don’t want to think too much about how she may have been alive when he locked her in here. Those might be her scratch marks on the door. The marks are small, but a child might not have made them, as I originally thought. The fingernails of a petite woman could have scratched those grooves into the wood. Whoever this was, whatever she did right before she died, I think she drew her last breath while she was curled up in a fetal position. Unless, of course, someone arranged her body like this postmortem.

  After examining her skull, I begin to carefully touch each bone to see if there are any cracks or breaks. Moving down slowly, inch by inch, I eventually come to what I recognize as her right foot. Lightly, I trace the fibula at her ankle, and then explore the calcaneus bone of her heel, the tarsals and metatarsals, and finally the bony fan of phalanges: the unfortunate woman’s long-dead toes. Everything’s intact, no obvious fractures or injuries.