Identity--A Tale of Murder, Mystery and Romance

by H. D. Thomson

  Biting down hard on her lower lip, she let go of the knob without opening the door and eased back a step. She suspected Ferguson waited inside with a full-blown trap. He had to be. What else could she think? No one left their front doors unlocked anymore.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing or no one was going to stop her tonight.

  After inching toward the right of the entrance, she rested a shoulder against the wood siding and focused, centering her mind’s energy on the doorknob. The handle turned without much pressure, and the door opened. A black well of nothingness yawned back at her, defiant, fearless, as if mocking her. Neither object or person flew out of the house to attack her. Still, Skye was far from relieved.

  Taking in a fortifying breath, Skye moved forward along the wall and slipped into the mouth of the house.

  ~~*~~

  David watched Skye disappear toward the front of the house. He wanted to race after her, shake her until she realized running off on her own was a terrible idea. Knowing how foolhardy that would be, he instead moved stealthily toward the back of the property. The cloying, almost suffocating scent of grass and roses permeated the air as a warm breeze kicked up, scraped across his buzz cut and flicked at the leaves above.

  He hated the idea of Skye out there alone. Damn it. His chest tightened. If anything happened to her...

  He’d never cared for another woman before, but now... everything had changed. With Skye... Having blown away all his preconceived ideas of love and relationships into fragmented lies, she’d tunneled a path into his mind and heart. Hell. His life had been so damn shallow.

  He couldn’t fail. He needed to save Tyler. David was too close to achieving unimaginable happiness. Way too close.

  Fear for Skye’s safety urged him through the shadows and closer to the back of the house. From behind the thick trunk of a tree, David drew to a stop twenty yards away from the sliding glass doors on the ground floor. He waited five minutes, giving Skye enough time for her to get inside.

  Squaring his shoulders, he inched closer to the house and centered his mind and telekinetic powers on the back entrance. The door opened. Silence carried across the distance. No alarm sounded, unless Ferguson had one wired to a local security company.

  Over a minute passed.

  David hunkered low to the ground and moved stealthily through the shadows toward the door. As he slipped inside a master bedroom, a cloud drifted across the sky to reveal the moon. Light shot through the slats of the window’s blinds. He caught sight of his reflection in the dresser’s mirror as he moved past a king-sized bed with a massive wood frame. Even though no one appeared from the corners of the room, unease rippled across David’s back.

  The room was too silent, too still as if waiting for him to make one stupid, thoughtless mistake. He left the Arcadia door open behind him as he crept deeper into the room. The air conditioner kicked on, thrusting cold air against David’s exposed skin and shoving his heart deeper into his chest.

  From the hallway, he walked into the main part of the house, his step muted by the carpet. At a sound, faint and indistinguishable, David pressed his back against the wall, brushing up against a picture. The frame scraped against the wall. His pulse kicked up into a crazy rhythm and drummed into his temples.

  David waited, suspecting he’d given himself away. He listened for Skye or for someone far more dangerous, his senses attuned beyond his loud and erratic breathing.

  Then he heard a noise he couldn’t decipher. Frowning, he inched down the hall, his hands fisted at his sides, his gaze able to form the shadows into solid objects. The sound intensified and clarified into a faint, but distinct voice.

  Ferguson? Tyler? The voice sounded more like an adult male than a boy. Did Skye also hear it? Was she cautiously moving toward the same sound in another part of the house? He needed to confront this person first. He wasn’t about to let Skye get in the line of a kidnapper and possible killer.

  But what if he found Tyler dead? What then? He wouldn’t be able to ease Skye’s anguish. It would be too much. The agony of having a father near death in the hospital would be incomparable to the loss of a child.

  Hell. David couldn’t go down that route. He’d find a way to fix things. For Skye’s sake.

  Tyler might not even be here. He could be somewhere completely safe. Frightened, uncertain maybe, but still unharmed. Skye’s son had to be safe. She’d been through too much as it was. She didn’t deserve what these assholes had put her through. And there had to be more than one. The way Tyler had been snatched this time and those previous times had to involve more than one person. And if for some reason only one person was involved, then they were just as deadly as they were intelligent, which—

  Sudden silence.

  David froze.

  A good ten seconds passed. Then the male voice sounded again. David crept closer and paused by the doorway leading into the kitchen. He searched the room, not liking the open cabinets and how the pots and pans littered the floor. Some type of struggle? For a wild second, he thought of Skye. But no. He would have heard a fight between her and an assailant in here.

  The air vibrated with latent anger as David carefully sidestepped the metal pans flung across the room, hating how his shoes against the ceramic tile echoed into the stillness.

  A man’s voice grew louder and more distinguishable as he crossed the kitchen. Moonlight spilled from the window over the sink and cut a path along the floor to edge past a doorway where steps lead into a black void.

  “You must move the ball into the numbered slot. Twenty-two. Focus only on that number and the ball. Push the ball into twenty-two,” the husky baritone drifted up the stairs and into the kitchen. “If the white ball goes into any other numbered slot, I will hurt you. You won’t want me to hurt you, now do you? We don’t want you screaming like a little pig, now do we?”

  As the man’s voice drifted into silence, tension cut a vicious swath across David’s shoulders. Those words. The tone, the cadence, the cool, detached voice crawled across his flesh. David had heard those words before. And with them came the pain. Always excruciating pain. The chill of sweat clung to his brow. Memories like slivers of cut glass scraped his mind.

  Shit. Gaze narrowing, David edged toward the stairs and peered into the darkness, but a wall of impenetrable black blocked him from seeing further than a foot away.

  “Never.” The voice turned dark and baleful and echoed from the basement to slide across David’s skin like a snake’s tongue. “Do you understand? If you even attempt to remember, you will be savagely attacked by a lizard-like alien. Its teeth will rip at your flesh, cut your throat until your life drains from your body.”

  The air caught inside David’s lungs. He recognized that voice now. Jesus. Its insidious tone filled his nightmares and had the power to torment him. Along with the images of a lizard with yellow hate-filled eyes and a rabid mouth.

  All this time, his fiendish dreams hadn’t been based in reality or fears from his childhood but false memories carefully and systematically drummed into his head.

  Too many nights he’d lain awake as a teenager, wondering if his horrific nightmares were frighteningly...real.

  The meaning behind his fascination with the roulette wheel and the number twenty-two David now understood. He’d been forced to play some telekinetic game, but unlike any childhood board game, if he lost, he would be punished. Unlike the phantom monster from his past, the pain had been all too horrifyingly real. He remembered the screaming. His screaming.

  With the back of his hand, David wiped the sweat from his brow, but he still couldn’t rid himself from the fear. He inched onto the first step and pressed his back against the stairwell’s wall. He didn’t try to find a light switch, knowing if he did, he’d quickly expose his presence and possibly get himself killed. David had no idea if the person attached to that voice carried a weapon or how he had his victim restrained.

  Was Tyler that victim? Was the boy drugged, tied up and being forced to subm
it to these unholy, hypnotic suggestions? David didn’t dare wait and find out what this freak intended to do next and he sure as hell wasn’t about to let Skye take the risk of finding out the situation beyond the stairs. He could easily be walking into a trap or into a wall, but it didn’t matter. He hadn’t come across the country to do nothing.

  The need to do something—anything—propelled David from the kitchen. With his back still against the wall, he descended onto the first riser, then the next and the next as the voice gnawed at his concentration.

  A red light cast a bloody glow through the thick, black stillness. He slipped down to another stair as confusion pulled his brows together. The voice sounded unnatural, almost tinny even. As if...

  Four more steps and David reached the floor without incident. Black now faded to several patches of deep charcoal. Still, he was unable to make anything out other than what looked like a counter, blocking his ability to move closer to the red beam. Then he realized a window above the counter separated him from the pinprick of light. With a hand against the counter’s edge, he moved parallel to its length, forcing his breath to remain slow, quiet and controlled. But he felt far from controlled.

  As he reached a doorway leading into another room, David finally understood that strange tinny quality to the man’s voice. A recording. Not a live person after all.

  “October House is a foster home. Nothing more than a place you stayed as a child seeking refuge after the death of your mother. If you even attempt to delve into anything to do with the foster home, you will experience a certain death. Your life inside the home has always been normal. So normal you can’t remember anything of consequence.”

  Again, those words. Bile rose in David’s throat. He’d also heard them before. All those years ago he’d been brainwashed to believe something else. A vise-like pressure squeezed around his.

  He stepped into the room, but something pressed against his thighs, halting any movement forward. Tensing, David searched the area in front of him. His fingers grazed something soft and cool. Then his touch grew bolder. He jerked his hand back.

  Flesh.

  An arm.

  Blinding light shot into the room. David blinked, focused. His gaze snagged on a man sprawled across the length of a dentist’s chair in front of him. With skin tinted to match the gray of his hair, the man’s eyes stared back at David, sightless, dead.

  “Jesus,” David swore under his breath.

  The man from his childhood past and the creator of his nightmares.

  A noise grazed the air behind him. Pivoting, David caught a glimpse of movement in his peripheral vision. Something hit him across the neck.

  Then a black wave crashed in on him.

  Chapter 27

  “David?” Skye whispered. “Ty?”

  Her words sounded like an explosion in the silence of Ferguson’s house. She paused at the head of the stairs on the second floor. Again. Another noise. The same as seconds earlier. A muffled whisper. Somewhere on the first floor.

  As she peered over the side of the balcony to the living area below, she gripped the handle of the wood railing with taut fingers. Dark rectangular and square shapes melded with the other shadows. No movement. No sound. Only the wild beat of her heart against her ribs.

  She knew she wasn’t alone. Unease trickled down her nape. Swiveling, she glanced behind her toward the hall she’d just left.

  Empty. Like every room on the second floor. She’d searched beneath the beds, inside the bathroom cabinets and bedroom closets. She hadn’t found Tyler, and she hadn’t found anyone else. But that wasn’t going to make her start acting rash by rushing through the house and yelling for Tyler or David.

  A noise yet again. From downstairs. David or someone else? It sounded different than a person’s sigh. Almost like rustling clothing.

  She pressed up against the balcony and peered to the right to try to make out the other section of the house. Swallowing her frustration, she started to creep down the stairs of the carpeted U-shaped stairs. Walls bracketed her. They blinded her to the rest of the house and anyone who might rush up the first section of stairs.

  A cry ripped through the rooms. Loud, high-pitched, short. As if abruptly cut off.

  Her breath grew agitated. She stole down the remaining stairs to the landing between the two flights of stairs, mindful to keep her step silent.

  More rustling. It had to be David. Because if it wasn’t...

  “Mom!”

  Skye stumbled, almost fell on the landing. She caught the side of the wall with the flat of her hand. “Ty!”

  “Mom! Help!”

  Fear and joy exploded inside her chest. Tyler. He was here. Alive. His cry for help came from the ground floor and what she suspected was the dining room or kitchen. She turned around the landing and surged down the remaining stairs and out into the living area. She peered through an archway and recognized the faint gleam of a chrome refrigerator. She pivoted around a sofa and rushed toward the kitchen. Ferguson must have also heard her son’s cry. She needed to get to Tyler first.

  Body trembling with anticipation, she stepped into the kitchen.

  There. She saw his shadowy form.

  Wonder and excitement bubbled up her throat. “Oh, Sweetie, I’m here.”

  Odd. He sat in a kitchen chair in the middle of the room and not by the table off to the side. He didn’t get up to rush toward her, didn’t even move. Unease prickled across her flesh.

  And David hadn’t appeared. He must have heard Tyler. He would have come running if he were capable, if he were okay...

  For a wild moment, she thought the child was someone other than Tyler as she moved deeper into the room. But no. She recognized his slender frame, his short dark hair and his eyes... The whites around his irises gleamed against the moonlight that speared between the slats of the kitchen blinds. Tape bound him to the wrought iron back and legs. As his body shivered against his bindings, terror glittered in Tyler’s eyes.

  Dread crawled down her spine.

  From behind, someone grabbed her throat and dug a finger and thumb into the tender muscle of her neck.

  Only one thought tumbled into Skye’s consciousness as her body gave out. She’d failed her son.

  ~~*~~

  David woke up. With his cheek pressed against the cold floor, he lay sprawled on his stomach. A headache pounded against the back of his neck and skull and stabbed at the sides of his head and temples.

  Darkness wrapped around him. David realized he was on the floor of the basement. He hadn’t gotten far. He’d been attacked. Or had he? He didn’t remember anything beyond the flaring light and the dead body. A dead body still probably draped across a dental chair. At the idea, nausea threatened to rise up his throat.

  Question was, was it Ferguson? David wasn’t sure. He’d managed to glimpse translucent skin and the gray hair of an old man. But he’d seen enough to recognize the man of his childhood nightmares. Years before he’d been a man in his prime, a man with a cold smile, passionless eyes and a white lab coat. He’d administered needles and terror. Memories of being strapped in a chair, of being forced to play game after game of roulette, of being wheeled down corridors of sterile halls and into hopeless rooms bombarded his head. David hadn’t been the only one. They’d been others. He’d heard their cries as they were also experimented on, witnessed the fear in their eyes before David was briskly led into another room.

  He didn’t want to remember. He didn’t like these memories, but the present was worse. A man lay dead in the same room with him. David hadn’t seen any visible wounds that revealed how he’d died. At least none that David managed to see. The man’s death was no accident. Of that he was positive. He’d had been killed deliberately.

  Murdered.

  Within the four walls of a house that Skye searched. And would she find her son just as David had found this man? Dead?

  Panicked, David placed both palms against the tile and lifted off the floor. It felt like a sledgehammer sl
ammed into his skull.

  “Shit.”

  Groaning, he dropped back down to his stomach. He needed to move, to get out of wherever the hell he was and find Skye.

  Unlike the man in here with him, David’s attacker had let him live. Why? It didn’t make sense. Unless the killer had a crazy motive that David could only attempt to guess at? Or was he playing a twisted game? One where David somehow was one of the pawns?

  David bit back an oath as he shoved off the ground and into a sitting position. Ignoring the pressure that cut into his head, he wiped at his face. His hand came away wet. He rubbed his damp fingers beneath his nose and smelled the metallic scent of his own blood. When he fell, he must have hit his head.

  He searched the room. Impenetrable blackness surrounded him. Not one discernible item. Not even the glow of red light from before. How easy it must have been to lure him into this room. He’d been stupid and fallen for the rouse, blinded by feelings evoked by that damn tape. The words, tone, and everything about that voice had left him raw, exposed and feeling like the child he’d been years before.

  Light flashed on from the door to the kitchen and illuminated the empty staircase. David’s eyes narrowed. The games were beginning.

  A muffled scream carried down into the basement.

  Oh, God. Skye.

  ~~*~~

  Skye opened her eyes, winced at the searing light and closed them. Shifting in what felt like a straight-backed chair, she moved her hands in her lap and stilled in shock. Her wrists were bound together. Oh, God. Her legs too. Rope or tape fastened her ankles to the legs of the chair.

  She tried reopening her eyes. The bright glare in her face forced her lids closed. She couldn’t look beyond the light. She wanted to see her captor, to see Tyler and ensure his safety.

  The whisper of a footstep sounded from somewhere in front of her and to the right. Stiffening, she angled her ear in that direction. She shifted and squinted into the light. Pain throbbed against the back of her eyes. At the fierce glare, tears crested over her lashes. Panic welled in her throat.