Every inch of the walls had been covered. Floor to ceiling, a collage of pictures stared back at Nate. The face inside those pictures, the haunted eyes and the guarded smile, was painfully familiar to him. Above the desk, a small patch of the wall held several pictures of Karen. One of them had a large, red X drawn through it.
Mark may have killed Karen, but his obsession was Olivia.
“There have to be hundreds of pictures of her,” Vincent said after unplugging the stereo so they could hear. “How is this possible?”
“I knew he had a thing for the professor, but I didn’t know he was batshit crazy,” Kent said, spinning in a slow circle.
Nate’s heart was starting to race. “Do you know where Mark is right now?”
“I thought he was in here. I haven’t seen him in a few days.” Kent’s eyes were wide and frightened.
“Call this in,” Nate said to Vince. “Then start looking for anything that can tell us where to find this guy.”
“Should I help?” Kent asked uncertainly.
Nate needed to get him out of the room before he ruined some potential evidence. “Go to your room and reach out to anyone that might be in contact with Mark. Don’t tell them why, but see if you can find out where he is. Understand?”
Kent nodded and fled the room.
Nate had already pulled on his gloves and started rifling through drawers. Vince joined him in the search, flipping through a stack of schoolbooks.
It was a tedious task, looking for a needle in a haystack. Nate wasn’t expecting them to find anything, but he also wasn’t going to give up until they had searched every inch of the room.
“I see a charger, but no phone. No computer either.” Vince scanned the room. “What college kid these days doesn’t have a computer or laptop?”
“One that is hiding evidence because he killed a coed,” Nate responded. He had found a stack of photos in the desk drawer, all of which were not pictures of Olivia. After flipping through three in a row of Mark, he suddenly remembered how he knew him.
“Shit.” He snapped one of the photos in the air. “This bastard is in Olivia’s class. I saw him in there last Tuesday.”
“You mean to tell me that Gilliad killed Karen Monday night and then went to Olivia’s class the next day like nothing happened?” Vince let out another whistle. “This guy is a special kind of fucked up.”
Nate reached for his phone and called Olivia’s number. He let it ring ten times before hanging up. “Liv isn’t answering.”
“Do you want to go over there? I can finish up here.” Vince gave Nate a knowing look.
“Not yet. She might be in the shower. I’ll wait a while and try again.” Nate was trying not to be the overreacting boyfriend. Besides, he had a job to do. He needed to find Mark as soon as possible.
Nate was already on edge just thinking about what Mark might have planned for Olivia, but then he found a receipt from a local hardware store. “Shit.”
“What is it?” Vince had just finished going through the closet and noticed that his partner was frozen in the middle of the room, clutching a rectangle piece of paper.
“Rope, duct tape, shovels.” Nate’s heart was pounding as he reached for his phone and dialed Olivia again. Still no answer. “I’m going to Olivia’s. You question the roommate again and find out where I can find this psycho.”
As Nate left the house and started jogging toward the car, he realized that he was in fact abandoning his partner again. Oh well. Vince would get over it.
He called Olivia three more times on the way to her place and she still didn’t answer. By the time he pulled up in front of her apartment, he knew that something was wrong. Olivia would never ignore his calls under these circumstances.
He used his copy of her keys to get into the building and raced up the stairs. It was just a few steps until her landing, where a wide open door greeted him.
“Olivia!” Her name came out as a croak. “Liv!”
When he saw the broken glass table in her entryway, he reached for his gun. The mess just inside the door was the only sign of a struggle. Nate finished checking out the rest of the apartment, but he knew Olivia wasn’t there. Mark Gilliad had taken her.
It took less than ten minute for support to arrive. Olivia’s apartment was now a crime scene. As Nate watched his fellow detectives invade her home, he found himself thinking about how much she would hate the invasion of her privacy.
“You don’t need to keep searching,” Nate told them as they started opening her drawers. “I already know who took her. Nothing you find in there is going to help find her.”
“Settle down, Tucker,” Nate’s sergeant, Phil Russo, said. “This is standard procedure. Right now, you think this Gilliad character is responsible. You don’t know it. We need to cover all possibilities.”
“This is a waste of time,” Nate snapped. “While we’re standing here going through her sock drawer, Olivia is probably being tortured by a psychotic murderer.”
Sergeant Russo clapped a hand firmly on his shoulder. “Either you pull it together now, or you get out of here. I don’t need you interfering with this investigation based on half-baked theories and suspicions.”
Nate had a string of expletives ready to launch at his boss, but he was saved from a certain suspension by the ringing of his phone.
“Tucker.”
“Hey man. Good news.” Vince’s words came through in a rush. “The roommate wasn’t helpful, but I had the guys at the station do some digging into Gilliad’s background. He’s from the Joliet area originally.”
“Any surviving family?” Nate stepped into the hallway so that he could concentrate on the call. Staying inside the apartment was just going to infuriate him more.
“Mother died during childbirth. Father had a farm ten miles outside of Joliet.” Vince sounded smug. “But he moved about six months ago and the farm has been for sale ever since.”
Nate was already walking to his car. “A farm? Can you get me that address?”
“Sending it now. But Tucker- be careful.” Vince lowered his voice. “You really shouldn’t go after this guy without backup.”
“There isn’t time for that,” Nate said. He revved the engine to life. “I’ll give you a call if I find anything out there.”
“Do that. Good luck, partner.”
Nate appreciated that Vince didn’t try to change his mind. No doubt he knew that it would be futile. With Olivia in danger, Nate would break all of the rules to keep her safe. That included driving twenty miles over the speed limit as he raced toward the farm.
The directions Vince sent along with the address got Nate pretty close to the actual location. Unfortunately, the road accessing the farm was blocked by a locked gate. Nate reluctantly left his car and hopped over the gate. He stuck to the shadows as he moved toward the farmhouse.
From the distance, it appeared to be well maintained. The two-story structure loomed in the dark, windows even darker. Nate had his gun in hand as he approached the wraparound porch. He was just about to ascend the stairs when a loud scream pierced the night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Everything around Olivia was covered in darkness. It was so dark that at first she wasn’t even sure that her eyes were open. But then she caught the faintest sliver of light about ten feet to her right. She sucked in a tentative breath and winced as the numbness of shock started to fade away. Her head was throbbing horrifically and she couldn’t remember what had happened.
The last thing she could recall, she had opened her apartment door to greet Nate. The next thing Olivia knew, she was waking up in the dark. It only took a second for her to realize that her hands were tied behind her back, bound together by what felt like duct tape. The surface beneath her was soft. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that she was seated in the middle of a large bed that had been placed in the middle of a small room.
Olivia was so distracted trying to break her bindings that it took her a few minutes to realize t
hat she had been stripped of her clothes. She had been left in the middle of the bed in her underwear.
“Fucking pervert,” she muttered as she struggled.
“My name is Mark actually.”
The voice came out of nowhere, just as a light flickered on overhead. Olivia stifled a scream as her heart jumped.
The figure near the door grinned maliciously at her. He had been watching her, possibly since placing her on the bed. Olivia shuddered involuntarily. “Who are you?”
“You don’t recognize me?” Mark stepped further into the room until he was standing under the lone lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. “I’m your biggest fan.”
Olivia studied his face closer. “I do know you… You are in my Intro to Criminal Behavior class.”
“I knew you would remember.” His smile widened. “I never missed a class.”
“Where are my clothes, Mark?” Olivia didn’t want to encourage any delusions that he had about her. She just wanted to find an opportunity to escape. But she also knew it was cold outside and she was going to need her clothes to protect her from the elements. “It’s cold in here.”
“I always knew you had a great body underneath those stuffy clothes you insist on wearing,” he said, ignoring her question. When he saw the look of disgust on her face, he snapped, “Your clothes got some blood on them. I’m washing them for you.”
That explained the throbbing in her head. “What did you do to me, Mark?”
“I didn’t do anything to you.” His voice held a hostile edge. “You slipped and fell onto the glass table in your entryway.”
Even with a loss of memory, Olivia knew that she hadn’t just fallen. Mark had tried to grab her and she had tried to flee. “My head is really hurting. I need to go to a hospital. I might have internal bleeding.” She tried to sound calm and convincing.
“You’ll be okay,” he said confidently. “I’m going to take good care of you.”
“Why am I here, Mark?” Until she understood his motives, it was going to be hard to know how to manipulate him.
“Isn’t it obvious?” He looked at her with genuine surprise. “Because I love you.”
“Oh.” She swallowed hard.
He perched on the edge of the bed and she instinctively recoiled a few inches. Hurt passed over his face. “I don’t want to hurt you, Olivia. I just want us to be together at last. It’s been so long.”
“It has?” If Mark knew her because of the class, their “relationship” hadn’t existed for longer than a couple of months.
“You really don’t remember?” He shook his head disbelievingly. “I assume you remember Tanner?”
Olivia flinched. Of course she remembered him. She had just pointed him out to Nate at the Lucky Lady. What she didn’t understand was how he was at all relevant to her current situation. “How do you know Tanner?”
“Do you remember that Tanner had a brother?”
It finally clicked. “Tanner and Mark Gilliad. You’re little Mark.”
“I’m not so little anymore,” he said with a leer. “I think you’ll agree that I’m all grown up now.”
Olivia didn’t know what to say. She had last seen Tanner’s little brother twelve years ago, a week before they broke up. Mark was in the same class as Olivia’s brother. With a six year age difference, she had never thought of him as anything more than her boyfriend’s cute, and sometimes annoying, baby bother.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said softly.
“You were always nice to me,” Mark said, not even acknowledging that she had spoken. “I know that I was just a bratty kid at the time, but you always treated me like a friend. I had the biggest crush on you, even though you were dating my brother. But I’m sure you knew.”
That thought had never occurred to Olivia. Mark had been so young at the time. “That was a long time ago, Mark.”
“It hasn’t been that long for me,” he said cryptically. His hand crept along the bed, moving a few inches closer to Olivia’s bare leg. “You and your sister were always so beautiful. Of course, her beauty was frozen forever at eighteen. She never got the chance to grow into a mature woman like you.”
“You remember what happened to her?” Olivia asked, not at all surprised. Rosie’s murder had been a huge story for a small town like Mercy. Almost everyone had shown up for the funeral.
“My mother cried for days over it,” Mark said, eyes slightly guarded. “I remember watching the updates on the news each night. Everyone was so sure that the killer would be caught. When that didn’t happen, I would lie awake at night worrying that the killer might strike again. I worried that he might come after you.”
Olivia swallowed hard. That was a very strange thing for a young boy to obsess over. She hadn’t even known Mark at the time of murder. It wasn’t until over a year later that she started dating Dylan.
“How much do you remember about the murder?” she asked. It was important to keep him talking. She needed to learn as much as possible about his mental state.
“Everything.” Mark was eager to talk about it. “On my first day of freshman year, I opened my history textbook and found Rosie’s name scrawled inside. What are the odds that I would end up with the used textbook of a murdered girl?
“Some kids might not have even thought twice about it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It felt like some kind of sign and from then on, I had to learn everything I could about Rosie. I was obsessed.” He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by his admission. “I was lucky that Dad worked at the police station. I had plenty of access to the old case files.”
Olivia sucked in a sharp breath. Now she knew how Mark had found out about the rose in her dead sister’s hands. He had seen the crime scene photos.
“Why did you hurt Karen?” she asked, hoping to keep him distracted as she struggled against the tape binding her hands. Her heart had been racing since she regained consciousness and her skin was slick with sweat. The tape was slowly losing its grip on her wrists.
“I didn’t want to, but she found out about my plan to bring us together at last.” His face turned dark. “I had been planning it for so long, ever since I first saw you on campus last year. When I found out you were a professor in the criminology department at Randolph, I just knew I had to apply. Then I was accepted into the Master’s program and it was like destiny was bringing us together.”
Olivia’s hand started to cramp and she stifled a groan. “You came to Chicago because of me?”
“Because we are meant to be together.” The urgency in his eyes was frightening.
“I don’t remember your name on my roster.” She was certain she would have recognized the name Gilliad.
“I’m not officially registered,” he said shyly. “It’s more of an auditing situation.”
The tape was loose enough now for Olivia to be able to slide one wrist a half of an inch in either direction. If she was going to slip completely free, she needed to be able to struggle harder. The only way she was going to be able to do that was if she could convince Mark to leave the room.
“I’m really thirsty,” she said, making her voice as hoarse as possible. “Could I please have some water?”
“Water?” He eyed her suspiciously. “Okay. I’ll get you some water. Are you hungry?”
She nodded.
“I’ll make you a sandwich.” He smiled, pleased. “We can have our first meal together.”
“That will be nice,” she said with a forced, quivering smile.
He stood quickly. “Don’t worry. I won’t be gone long.”
The second he was gone, Olivia got to work. She was able to slide both of her wrists now, but the tape wasn’t stretching. She was never going to be able to work it over her hands. What she needed was a sharp object that could cut through the tape.
The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room. Since her legs hadn’t been bound, she was able to move around the room. Olivia took very small steps, being careful not to make the old floorb
oards creak too loudly. After two tortuously slow trips around the room, she began to lose hope. The room was empty.
With the light still on, she could see that the room had one window. Upon closer inspection, she found that it had been completely covered in black paint. Not only could she not see outside, no one outside could see in. She banged her head against the dark glass in frustration and a tiny movement caught her attention.
There, in the corner of the window frame, a lose nail peeked from the dark wood. Olivia turned her back to the window and scraped her fingers along the wood until one of them found the tiny piece of metal. She pinched it between her finger and thumb and wiggled hard. The nail moved slightly. She kept wiggling until the movement increased. Then, with a hard pull, she pried it free.
Mark could come back at any time so Olivia went back to sit on the bed. If he did return, she didn’t want him to suspect what she was attempting to do. It took a bit of twisting to get the nail in the right position against the tape. Then it took a lot of tedious sawing. She hoped that once she got a small tear it would weaken the bindings enough for her to break free.
She paused when she heard footsteps on the other side of the door. Mark hadn’t been gone very long at all.
“Told you I would be right back,” he said with a friendly smile. He was holding a tray with two sandwiches and water. She also noticed that he had poured them each a glass of what appeared to be whiskey. He saw the look of surprise on her face and said, “We can’t have our first date without a drink.”
“Right.” Olivia frowned and started working at the tape again. Mark was clearly delusional about their relationship and if she did or said anything wrong, there was no telling what he might do to her. She asked, “How am I supposed to eat?”
“I’ll feed you,” he said.
She pushed harder. “It will be easier for both of us to enjoy the meal if you remove the tape.”
“No.” His eyes flashed angrily.
Olivia struggled as hard as she could against the tape as he bent down to set the tray on the floor. She felt the tape beginning to rip where she had created a small tear. “Mark, this date would be more romantic if we could sit at an actual table. Maybe you could untie me and-”
Ring Around the Rosie (An Olivia Thompson Mystery Book 1) Page 13
