Sins of the Past

by Julia Derek

  Looking suddenly terrified, the girl nearly dropped her keys, but caught them at the last second. She brought the keys to the lock in the entrance door and managed to open it despite that her hands were trembling. By the time she held it open so Wil could enter, Wil was ready to meet Trevor, her Glock firmly in her grip.

  “Thanks,” she said to the girl. “Where do you live?”

  “On the first floor.”

  “Okay. I’m heading for an apartment on the fourth floor. Get inside your apartment and lock the door if you absolutely must go home now. If not, you might want to go to a nearby café and wait until we have resolved this situation. This street will be full of police soon.”

  “Okay, I’ll go to my friend’s house for a while then,” the girl stuttered and swiveled around.

  “Good idea,” Wil said and started up the stairs toward the fourth floor. She called Larry on her cell as she climbed each floor.

  “What’s the situation?” he asked by way of answering.

  “I’m inside and nearing Clementina’s apartment. Only two floors away now.”

  “Good to hear. Be careful, Wil. I don’t think he’ll be there for much longer. He’s smart enough to know that we’re not gonna just go along with what he wants without a fight.”

  “I’ll be careful. He’s not going anywhere.” With those words, she disconnected the call.

  She had reached the fourth floor when she felt something cold at the back of her head. It took her less than a second to realize that it must be the muzzle of a gun.

  * * *

  Chapter 43

  “Don’t say a word and walk toward the apartment,” a male voice she instantly recognized hissed behind her. “Then open the door. It’s open.”

  Wil already knew without having turned around that the man was Trevor. What she didn’t get was how he had ended up behind her. She would find out the answer soon enough, though. That is, if he let her live. She did as she was told and reached for the door leading into Clementina’s apartment. The door was indeed unlocked.

  “Now walk into the apartment and throw the gun on the floor,” the voice whispered, pushing the muzzle of his own gun deeper into the back of her head. He was so close that she could feel his hot breath against the skin of her neck. She entered the apartment and dropped the gun on the floor in the apartment’s short hallway.

  “Keep walking,” the male voice said and the cold metal against her head was suddenly removed. She felt some movement behind her as she put one leg in front of the other. The hallway turned into a bright living room with big windows that were fully covered by Venetian blinds. Wil immediately spotted Luis and Anna seated on a big, red couch, their mouths gagged and their hands bound together in front of them. They stared at her with big, fearful eyes.

  “Hi, Luis, hi, Anna,” she said and smiled at them with as much warmth as she could muster. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be okay now.”

  “Shut up and go sit in the armchair beside them,” the man behind her ordered sharply. She walked over to the brown leather chair next to the red couch and had a seat, trying her best to keep smiling reassuringly at the kids. She wasn’t sure she could keep the promise she had just made them. All she knew was that she would give her own life in order to save theirs. It might come to that.

  She finally got a chance to lay eyes on the man they had been chasing for the last few weeks, this man filled with so much anger and hate.

  “You’re damn lucky I don’t have a silencer on this gun, or you would have been dead already,” the tall, slender man snarled, glaring at her through bright blue eyes that turned into gleaming slits. “How the hell did you find me so fast?”

  “Good police work,” Wil said calmly. Trevor answered by slapping her face hard with the back of his hand. She couldn’t resist letting out a small groan of pain.

  “Tell me the truth or I’ll beat you to death in front of these two children,” he growled. “Would you like that?”

  “No,” she managed and rubbed her sore jaw that was still screaming from the blow she had just taken.

  “Then tell me how the hell you managed to find me so fast. That was not supposed to happen.”

  “Kate told us you used to date someone named Clementina Hayes that lives in Williamsburg. Given the fact that Clementina once worked for Nilsen & Nilsen that happens to be located a few blocks away from Lorimer Street, we figured that you may be heading for her place. Our tech located your disposable around the area where Kate believed she lived, and then we found Clementina’s exact address that corresponded with the location of your phone. It was just a strong hunch I had that turned out to be correct. So she’s in on this then?”

  “No, Clem is at work right now. That’s why I chose to come here. I made an extra set of keys out of the one she had given me so that getting into her place wouldn’t ever be a problem.”

  “I see,” Wil said. “Did she help you get the knife out of Nilsen & Nilsen?”

  He chuckled coldly. “Of course not. Clem would not be happy if she knew what I was up to. I borrowed her keys to the store when she used to work there and made a copy so I could get in when I wanted to and get the knife. Ever since I first visited that store years ago, I wanted to be the owner of that knife. It’s a beautiful, effective dagger. And it wasn’t very hard to steal it, either, as bad as their alarm system is. Clem told me all about that.” He smiled. “Leaving it next to Diego’s body was a great way to distract the NYPD and make you waste time at Nilsen & Nilsen, looking for the owner of the knife. It gave me the time I needed to make sure I would have a moment alone with Anna and Luis so that I could take them. For that, I had to be sure I had Kate’s trust. I really hope I won’t have to kill them. They’re not bad kids despite being part spic.”

  Trevor shot the two kids a glance; they gazed back at him with frightened eyes.

  “You know you won’t be able to get away with this, don’t you?” Wil asked slowly, glancing at the tall man.

  He met her gaze and said in a surprisingly calm voice, “That’s perfectly fine with me. I don’t mind dying if I don’t get my way. There isn’t much I have left to live for in this world any longer anyway. Only my mother, but she’s in a bad way. She’ll be gone any day now.”

  So he doesn’t know about her yet, Wil couldn’t help but think. She wasn’t about to tell him.

  He fished out a cell phone from his pant pocket, then said, “I think that’s enough talking. I need to see what your friends are up to. Forty minutes have passed of the deadline I gave them. They better have the sister with them now so Kate can kill her for me. I won’t settle for anything less than that.”

  With his eyes and gun on Wil, he pressed a button on his phone, and then he placed the phone against his ear. He brightened suddenly, asking, “Have you got your sister with you now, Kate?”

  The smile on his face grew wider. “That’s good, that’s good. Now shoot her and make sure to have one of the cops film it for me. When you’ve filmed it, email a copy of it to the email address I’m about to text you and make sure I can easily view it. You still have twenty minutes before I’ll shoot Luis, but don’t abuse that time. It’s best to take care of business right away. In a couple of minutes, I’m gonna have to leave, so tell the NYPD that there’s no point in bothering to seek me out. By the time they reach me, the kids and I will be long gone. The cop I caught, too. You got that?” A couple of beats went by, then he said, “Good. Text me back that you’ve received the email I’m about to send you. You only have nineteen minutes left now.”

  He disconnected the call and typed out a text, throwing glances at Wil all the while.

  “Done,” he said after a few seconds. He narrowed his gaze as he took in Wil for a moment, looking like he pondered something. Then he walked over to the open kitchen as he kept the gun pointed at her. He stretched out his free arm around the island, and when it reappeared, there was a kitchen towel in his hand. He strode over to Wil and told her to lie face-down on the floor. Sh
e immediately did what he wanted. She knew he wouldn’t hesitate to hit her in order to get what he wanted, which might make her unconscious, and she preferred staying awake even though she had a feeling he was about to restrain her.

  He placed a knee against her back to keep her down while he brought her wrists together. He tied them together so tightly she couldn’t move her hands at all, then he shot to his feet and strode into an adjacent room that she suspected was a bedroom. A few seconds later, he reappeared and hurried over to Wil. Sinking down to the floor, he tied her feet together with something. When he was done, he grabbed her and carried her into a bathroom, placing her in the bathtub.

  He opened a cabinet and pulled out a towel that he tied around her head as a gag. Walking over to the door, he turned to her.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid or one of the kids dies, okay? I won’t need to shoot a gun to snuff out a toddler, so rest assured it’ll happen. The only reason I’m keeping you alive is if your cop friends give me trouble and I need more leverage. So be a good girl now and you’ll live.”

  She gave a nod, watching him as he left the bathroom. She heard him walk away, his footsteps fading quickly. A door closed and then the apartment was completely still.

  He must have left to do something, but what? she wondered. She tried to move her hands and feet, but he had tied her too well for her to be able to set herself free any time soon. She didn’t doubt that he would keep his promise and kill one of the kids if he saw that she had tried. Thankfully, Trevor had told Kate that he’d caught a cop, which should be enough for Larry to get that Wil was with him and the kids. She wished he had also made it clear that she was alive and well. That way Larry would know that she wouldn’t let him kill the kids. Not that she thought that they would have Kate kill her sister while they filmed it, but it would at least make them feel less pressured about the situation.

  Who knew what would happen now?

  * * *

  Chapter 44

  “You need to let me shoot her,” Kate yelled at Larry in a screechy voice, tears pouring down her face with renewed force. She had just finished telling him and the other cops what Trevor had told her. “It’s the only way he’ll save my children. I can’t have him kill my babies!”

  Larry grabbed the hysterical woman by the arms and shook her lightly. “Please calm down, Kate. Wil is at the scene and she won’t let him kill your kids. You heard him say she was there yourself. Wil is a very good, very experienced cop. She’ll handle the situation. We can’t have you shoot anyone. What we’ll do is film your sister and have her tell him that she’ll stand trial for what she did. We’ll plead with him when he calls the next time. He won’t just shoot your kids. He’ll want us—you—to be aware of it when or if he does. Trust me on that one.”

  “Oh, God, no… What if you’re wrong?” Kate wailed. “I can’t risk going against what he wants! I have no choice but to shoot her. I can’t let my kids die. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Please calm down, Kate,” Larry ordered her sternly, trying to keep her from clawing him. “You will not shoot her.”

  He tossed a glance over at the other police car in which Kate McBride sat in the backseat together with a female plain-clothes detective. It was eerie just how much this woman looked like the one next to him despite their different outfits. They had reached each other at a point in Williamsburg a short while ago and were all parked in a lot outside a mega drugstore. They were only a few minutes away from the location where Trevor was with the kids and Wil. Larry had spoken with more confidence than he had felt, but he had had no choice or Kate would have totally lost it. Even though he was reasonably certain that Wil wasn’t dead, he had no idea if she was hurt and if so how badly. Would she be able to do something to save the children?

  “The phone is moving down the street,” Nick said in Larry’s ear then. “It seems it’s in a vehicle.”

  “Thanks, Nick.” Larry checked the time. Only fifteen minutes left before Trevor expected the footage of Kate killing her sister. Larry didn’t think that he and the kids and Wil were with the phone, but that the phone was planted the way Pete had done earlier to make the NYPD think they were going somewhere. He turned to Detective Johnson, a fresh-faced man who had joined him in the car, sitting in the backseat where Wil had been not long ago.

  He told Johnson what Nick had just told him and what he’d made of it.

  “So, if they’re not with that phone, my guess is that they’re in the same place as before,” Larry finished. “If we go now, we’ll get there and have ten minutes to spare before the deadline.”

  “And what if they’re not?” the other detective asked. “If they’re in a car, we won’t be able to catch up with them before the deadline. They’ll be too far away.”

  “We’ll have to have Ms. McBride talk to him in that case. Let him know that she’ll stand trial or, better even, that she’ll turn herself over to him in exchange for the kids. One way or another, we’ll make it work. The key is to buy more time if they’re not in the apartment.”

  “Please don’t let him kill my children…” Kate cried next to him.

  Larry put a hand on the woman’s arm, thankful that she had calmed down a little. “He won’t kill your children, Kate. We’ve got him. They’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, let’s head for the apartment,” Detective Johnson said. “I’ll tell the others to go there as well.” He found his cell and shot them a text; they were all still too worried about the fact that Trevor might have access to a police scanner.

  As they drove over there, Larry asked Nick back at the station if he could track Wil’s cell; with any luck, her battery was still attached to her phone. It turned out that Nick could find her phone, and that she was in the building where Larry had figured they had all remained.

  “Great,” Larry said to Nick. “They should be there then.” That is, unless Trevor had realized that Wil had a phone with a tracker on it, and had taken it from her and planted it in the apartment to further mislead the NYPD. Larry could only pray the guy wasn’t that sharp.

  They reached the street where Clementina Hayes lived and parked by the curb. They had seven minutes till the deadline.

  Preparing to get out of the car the way Larry was doing, Kate opened her side of the car. Larry grabbed hold of her arm, stopping her. “You’ll have to stay here. Detective Johnson will stay with you.”

  “I want to see my children,” Kate protested. “I have to see them, make sure they’re okay.”

  “You will see them much sooner if you let us do our job, Kate. Please. You need to stay here.”

  Reluctantly, she closed the door again. “Please get my babies back to me. I won’t be able to live without them.”

  “I will, Kate. I will.” Larry left the car and saw Detectives Juarez and Cho come toward him. He nodded toward the brown building in which Clementina lived on the fourth floor.

  “That’s where she lives,” Larry said to the other two as they reached him. “Let’s go in there.”

  The two detectives nodded and jogged toward the building entrance together with Larry. They tried the door, but it was locked. Having no time to waste, Detective Juarez used his gun to shoot open the lock. It took him only one shot and the door came open. They ran up the stairs toward apartment 4 B.

  Larry noticed that the front door to the apartment had been left ajar. Damn it, he hissed under his breath. That does not bode well. He couldn’t imagine that Trevor would leave the door open if they were still in there. Quickly, he checked his watch and noted that they had five more minutes before they’d hit the deadline. Nodding toward the door, he signaled to the others that he would go first; then he took off.

  Kicking the door fully open, he burst into the place, pointing his gun at the insides of the apartment. He could hear the other two behind him as he checked every room, his heart sinking more and more with each room he discovered was empty. When he got back into the living room, he s
potted a cell phone on the coffee table. He instantly recognized it as Wil’s.

  “Fuck,” he roared. “That’s Wil’s phone. They’re not here. He just left her phone here to make us think they were. They must be in that car with his phone after all.” He checked the time on his wristwatch.

  Three minutes and thirty seconds to go.

  * * *

  Chapter 45

  Trevor had taken Wil’s phone and then carried her into Clementina’s bedroom, where he had put her under the full-sized bed there. When he left with the two children, their hands free and their mouths no longer gagged, she realized why he was doing this; taking her with them out of the apartment would prove much too complicated, so he had no choice but to hide her from the cops that would inevitably show up very shortly. She was pretty sure the reason he had let her keep her life was because he needed literally every second to get away with the kids before the cops came. It was only a matter of a minute or two before that happened. While strangling her could go fairly quickly, he must have sensed that she would not make killing her easy, which might cost him several precious seconds. Shooting her was out of the question, she realized, as the noise would alert the neighbors. Hiding her alive but bound and gagged under the bed had been his best option.

  When she heard Larry and the two detectives bursting into the apartment only about a minute after the others had left, she tried to bang her heels into the rug-covered floor to alert them. The little noise she managed to create was drowned by the sound of the detectives running all over the place. It wasn’t until Larry found her phone and announced that he thought they were driving somewhere that she knew she had to do something extraordinary to make them notice her, or all would be lost. By now, she had a strong feeling she knew where Trevor and the kids had gone, and it had nothing to do with a car driving somewhere. No, he had just placed his phone in a bus or a cab or something to send them on a wild goose chase the way he had done earlier. That was also why he had placed her phone in the apartment. To trick the cops who’d come.