Kiss Me, Kill Me

by Maggie Shayne

  Sam nodded and closed his eyes. “Thank God it’s not her. Thank God.”

  “It’s not going to be her, either, Sam. Sadie’s not going to die. I know it,” Carrie said.

  The usually neat-as-a-pin lab looked as if it had been used for football practice. It was far, far worse than it had been the night before, when they had discovered the break-in. Chairs were toppled, files scattered over the floor, a lamp lying on its side with the bulb shattered and the cord no more than a frayed three-inch stub.

  “He’s in here,” Bryan said, holding the yellow crime scene tape down so she could step over it, and then leading Carrie carefully over papers and broken glass. “Don’t touch anything. Watch where you step.”

  The Burlington cops and crime scene techs were already there, dusting, gathering, photographing. There were little flags with numbers on them all over the floor.

  As she reached the end of a counter that was littered with equipment, Marcus’s body came into view. He was lying on his side, next to a toppled chair. His hands were tied behind his back, his ankles bound with duct tape. A puddle of blood lay beneath his head.

  “Is that Marcus Kenyon?” Bryan asked her.

  Carrie nodded. “Yes.” She closed her eyes to block out the image of his face. “He has a wife. Two boys in college. Good God, what happened?”

  “I have a feeling you might know more about that than we do.” Bryan moved closer to her, slid a hand over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Carrie.”

  “He was a decent man.” She looked around the room. “What was the last test he ran?”

  “I have no idea.” He looked at the chief, then back at Carrie. “Could you tell, do you think, if you took a look around?”

  “I doubt it. I’ll look around, but if it was related to this—then I don’t imagine anything obvious will be lying around in plain sight.”

  Just then someone came running with a pair of paper shoe covers and a set of latex gloves. Carrie donned them both and then carefully moved deeper into the lab.

  She noted the wheel marks the chair’s casters had left on the boring tan tiles of the floor. They criss crossed it like a star map. She could see Marty in her mind’s eye, pushing off from the desk with his feet and rolling across the floor to check on some piece of equipment, then back again.

  “You need to tell us everything you know, Carrie,” Bryan said when she’d finished her look around.

  She nodded and joined the chief and Bryan, along with a pair of Burlington detectives, in the small office in the rear. She took off the shoe covers and gloves, sat down and started to tell her story, starting with her noticing that several things about Kyle’s body didn’t add up. “I went down to the morgue after Dr. Butcher finished Kyle’s autopsy. I took some extra samples, even though I knew it wasn’t exactly…”

  “Legal?” Bryan supplied.

  “I figure it never hurts to take extra samples, just in case anything goes wrong with the initial specimens. A mix-up at the lab or accidental contamination, anything that means the lab needs to redo any of the tests. This didn’t seem any different to me.”

  “Except that it wasn’t your job,” one of the locals pointed out.

  She shrugged. “I’m aware of that.”

  “What else?” Bryan asked, sounding as if he already knew.

  Carrie cleared her throat. “I decided to run the toxicology screen through a private lab. I knew it wouldn’t be admissible in court, but I thought that if you knew in advance what the state crime lab was going to find, it would speed up your investigation.”

  Chief Mac glared at her. “You took it upon yourself to do this? Without my knowledge or consent?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you didn’t think that violated any laws, any ethical codes, any oath to which you’ve sworn?”

  “Not precisely, no. Though I admit I was skating on the blurred edge of legality and medical ethics.”

  “I think that’s putting it mildly.” The chief’s face was getting red, a sure sign he was good and pissed off.

  “I met Marcus here at the lab, and we went inside, only to find that he’d had a break-in. The file under the name John Brown—clearly an alias—was missing.”

  “Marcus told us that much when he reported the break-in early this morning,” the second detective said. “He said someone named John Brown had sent him a blood sample, and asked for a simple type and cross-match. Said it came through the mail and included cash in advance, and that the client’s note requested that it be done immediately.”

  Carrie nodded. “He told you more than he told me.”

  “He also said he kept a second sample, same reasons you stated,” the detective went on.

  “Yeah, and that sample he still had belonged to Kyle Becker,” she said softly.

  “You tested it already?”

  “Marcus did. He knew I suspected a link, so he compared the samples I brought him with the frozen one he’d saved. They matched.”

  “He told me that, too,” Bryan said. “Although he claimed the sample you brought him from the autopsy was just to double-check something—gave me a lot of scientific doublespeak.”

  “Marcus was a wiz at scientific doublespeak,” she said softly. She looked out the office door as Marcus’s body was loaded onto a gurney and wheeled away. Then she turned to the chief. “I know Bryan told you my theory.”

  “Mmff,” the chief grunted. “You think the kidnapper is after Shadow Falls’ sixteen-year-old Baby Doe for the reward.” He pursed his lips. “Frankly, I don’t think there’s any question about that now.”

  “So, what is this asshole doing?” Bryan asked aloud. “Kidnapping all the kids in town with birthdays that fit the Baby Doe scenario, then testing their blood to see if it matches? How, when we don’t know the identity of Baby Doe’s father?”

  “Maybe this guy knows the father,” Carrie whispered.

  “Hell,” the chief said. “Maybe this guy is the father. Maybe he wants his kid badly enough to find him by the process of elimination. You fail the blood test, you die.”

  “God, don’t say that,” Carrie whispered. She had to turn away to hide her face, and she pressed one hand to her stomach as it spasmed. All she could think of was Sam and that he might be next.

  “It makes sense,” Bryan said slowly. “A sixteen-year-old kid goes missing. Blood is drawn and tested here at this lab. Then the kid’s found dead, the lab is broken into, and all traces of that test are removed. Skip forward, and another sixteen-year-old goes missing, one with a birthday the same month as the first victim. More blood comes here to be tested. And there’s another break-in to remove the evidence.”

  The first detective nodded. “Only this time Marcus knew something was up. The guy probably didn’t use the same name twice. He might have been Jim Smith this time. Who knows? But either way, he comes in person, maybe to save time. And Marcus is suspicious.”

  Bryan nodded and picked up the story. “Maybe this time the kidnapper had to force Marcus to run his tests. But then what was he going to do? Leave Marcus alive to turn him in?”

  “I think that’s exactly what he did.” Carrie got to her feet, and walked back into the lab, but only far enough to point. “See that statue over there? That stone angel? Look at the wing.”

  The cops looked. The tip of one wing was broken off, and there was a spattering of blood on the angel’s skirt.

  “I think Marcus slid his chair across the floor and tried to reach that phone right there. And I think he tipped the chair over and hit his head on the statue, breaking the wing and leaving that blood spatter. And then I think his brain swelled and he died.”

  “You saying you think this was an accident?” Detective Two asked skeptically.

  “It’s the obvious scenario. I wouldn’t say for sure until the autopsy is done, but I always look at the obvious scenario first, before I make a single cut, and nine times out of ten, it’s the one.”

  “Why would he leave Marcus alive?”

/>   She shook her head slowly. “Maybe because the blood work didn’t show him what he wanted to see.” She swallowed hard. “And so now he’s got to find another specimen to test.”

  “As soon as he gets rid of the current one,” Bryan said. “Which means we’re running out of time to find Sadie Gray.”

  Carrie returned to Shadow Falls—to Sam and Gabe at the cabin. She did so without pointing out to the police that Sam’s birthday fit the Baby Doe profile, that he could be the next target, because she didn’t want to believe it was possible. And she didn’t feel she could tell them that much of the truth without telling them the rest. That he not only had the right birthday to fit, but he had the right DNA, too. Sam was Baby Doe. And she wasn’t ready to tell anyone that until she had told him.

  So she headed to Gabe’s place to be with Sam. And when she pulled into the driveway and saw the two of them looking out the window at her, she felt warm all over. Despite the disasters around them, despite the fact that it felt as if the world and everything in it was in danger of crumbling to dust, she felt good when she saw those faces in the window.

  She shut off the car and headed for the front door, which Gabe opened before she reached it. His arms closed around her like a protective shield that blocked out anything that could hurt her and soothed the pain from the things that already had. All the stress and all the tension and all the heartache seemed to dissipate, to fade, as soon as he held her against him. It was like magic. It was something she had never felt before.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as he held her.

  “I am now,” she whispered, and she was surprised she had said it. But it was only the truth.

  He held her a little tighter and rested his head against hers.

  “It was Marcus?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” She stepped away from him, turning to search the room for Sam. He had retreated to the big chair near the window, gazing out, but not really seeing, she thought. But he was listening, she could tell. She moved a little farther into the room, not wanting to keep anything from him.

  Or rather, anything more. She’d been keeping a pretty big thing from him for far too long now, she supposed.

  “Someone broke into the lab. They either murdered Marcus or he died trying to get hold of the cops. But he’s dead, and we don’t know if it’s related to the kidnappings here in town, but given that he typed Kyle’s blood sample, I think it has to be.”

  Gabe nodded, met her worried eyes as she waited for a response from Sam that didn’t come. Sighing, Carrie moved closer to her son and slid a hand to his shoulder. “We can go into town, join the next shift of volunteers, if you want. Or we can get a supply of posters and drive around putting them up.”

  He finally met her eyes—his so woefully tormented that she nearly gasped aloud. “I don’t know what to do.” Then he looked at Gabe. “What do you think we should do?”

  Gabe drew a breath, pulled a chair in front of Sam’s and sat down, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. “You shouldn’t take action until you get your head straight about a matter. I know it sounds like New Age fluff, but everything that exists was a thought before it was a thing. And the thing usually follows the thought. So we need to get our thoughts about Sadie into line with the outcome we want here, and I think we’d better do it soon.”

  Sam didn’t roll his eyes or wave a dismissive hand. He stared at Gabe as if drinking in every word. “How?” he asked softly.

  “Sun’s coming out,” Gabe said. “Let’s sit on the deck and look down at the water, and I’ll see if I can show you what I mean.”

  So they moved outside, and Gabe started slowly, carefully, talking about the first day he’d met Sadie and what he had thought of her. He repeated turns of phrase he’d heard her use, funny things she had said, and managed to make them smile as they remembered. And then he talked about things he would like to do with her and Sam and Carrie when she got back—hiking up to the top of the falls, playing his new song for her to get her feedback, asking her advice on a gift for Carrie.

  Pretty soon Carrie got the idea and joined in. Sadie had been dying to help rearrange the living room furniture, and Carrie had promised to let her be in charge of the design. In return, Carrie was going to help her pick out a dress for the upcoming Fall Formal at the high school.

  In a short while Sam was adding things he was planning to do with Sadie, too. He talked about college, about her becoming a vet, about how much she loved animals. Together, they talked about everything except the fact that she was missing and in danger. They talked about her and fell into the growing expectation that she would soon be back with them, fulfilling all the plans they had made, plans they were still making in her absence.

  And somehow they all felt better than before.

  Sadie woke slowly, stunned that she had awoken at all after the latest dose of whatever drug the bastard had given her. She’d refused to eat all day long, knowing the food might be drugged, but by afternoon, or what she thought was afternoon—it was hard to tell in a state of constant darkness—she gave in to the urge to drink. Just drink.

  But the water must have been drugged, as well, because it knocked her cold for hours.

  Now she felt as if her head were stuffed with cotton, and her stomach was queasy. A drug hangover, she suspected, and she silently vowed not to eat another bite of food, or drink even a sip of water, no matter how long it took her to get out of there. She was still groggy, but not so much that she didn’t know she was running out of time. If she couldn’t eat or drink, she was going to get weaker. She would never be stronger than she was right now, and she had to escape while she still had the strength to do so. All she needed was a chance.

  She scanned the room but saw only darkness and shadow. Every bit of light had been sucked away—from within, it seemed, as well as from without. And yet there was a spark of hope inside her as she tried to blink her way clear of the mists fogging her mind. That loose eyebolt she’d been playing with earlier—it was her only hope.

  She sat up in the bed and called out to her abductor, “Hello? Are you there?”

  But emptiness was all she heard.

  Swallowing hard, she tried again to see into the shadows. God, if the shadowy figure was there, watching her from the dark corners, if she were seen, she would lose her only chance of escape.

  And there was just no way to tell for sure if he were there or not. So she maneuvered her hand slowly along her side, and then thrust it down between the bed and the wall, feeling for the eyebolt, finding it, grasping it. And then, slowly, with as much strength as she had in one arm, she began pushing hard in one direction, then pulling hard in the other. All while trying fiercely not to move any other part of her, not to betray what she was doing to the shadowy, dangerous being who might be watching her.

  She pushed, she pulled, and bit by bit, she felt the bolt give. A little more. And a little more. And still more.

  And then that damned sound interrupted her, and she almost cursed out loud in frustration. She’d just begun making real progress. But the locks on her prison door were turning, and then the door was opening. The shadowy villain stepped inside, but not too close.

  God, Sadie thought, this might be the end. He might be here to kill her. She could be out of time. Trying to feign sleep, she gripped the bolt harder, shoved and twisted with all her strength, and tried not to let the effort show on her face.

  The form moved closer. No food tray this time. Something was gripped in its dark hand, however. Something small. Through slitted eyes she tried to make out what it was, and as the shape came up beside the bed, she saw its darker silhouette and realized her captor was carrying a needle.

  Sadie remembered Carrie’s remark about drugs as the possible cause of Kyle’s death. Had that been what had killed him? Had she found needle tracks in his arm? If not, why would she have mentioned the possibility?

  God, this maniac really was going to kill her!

  The shape reached out, and
Sadie’s fear surged through her like a flash of lightning, giving her previously unimagined strength. She yanked hard, a knee-jerk reaction, and was stunned when the bolt came free.

  The dark form’s gloved hand gripped her left arm, the free one, and Sadie felt the tip of the needle sinking into her skin. In desperation, she twisted the chain around her right hand and swung at the bastard’s head with everything she had in her.

  Like a mace at the end of its chain, the eyebolt flew and slammed into the side of her attacker’s head. Her captor dropped to the floor like a sack of bricks, and Sadie scrambled to her feet, yanked the partially filled needle from her arm, then jumped over the prone form on the floor, lunging toward the still-open door.

  But a hand closed on her ankle, yanking so hard that she fell facedown on the floor. Already she could feel the effects of the drug, making her head swim. She had no idea how much she’d taken into her body, or what it was. She only knew there was still a little left in the syringe, because she shook it and could feel it there.

  The killer began pulling her backward as she tried to claw her way across the floor to the door. Sadie shrieked at the top of her lungs. It wasn’t a word, it was a primal growl of pure rage and the ancient, unstoppable drive toward self-preservation. Twisting around, she drove the needle into flesh—a shoulder, she thought—and depressed the plunger by driving a fist into it.

  The hold on her ankle faltered, and Sadie’s leg sprang forward as if released from a rubber band. Pushing herself upright, she lunged once more and was through the door a second later.

  Her vision swam, but everything was black as pitch anyway. She hit a wall, then turned, arms out in front of her until she felt emptiness, a stairway. She went up, arms still extended, and hit her head on something above her. Raising her hands overhead, she felt wood, and pushed against it.

  It moved up and outward, a hatchway door. Dizzy, God she was so dizzy. She almost fell, but the energy of raw adrenaline drove her on, and she made her way to the top of the stairs and out into what turned out to be the night.