SAY YOU LOVE ME (Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Book 4)

by Willow Rose

“So, why did he do it?”

  “To protect Allyson,” David said.

  “For love,” I said.

  David nodded. “Yes, for love.”

  “And the people at the hotel who we believe were poisoned with champagne?”

  “What about them?”

  “They were celebrating, having a great time when they were killed.”

  “That’s true. What are you getting at?”

  “And the nursing home, what does that represent?” I asked.

  David looked confused. “Old people? Aging? Resting?”

  “Exactly. Peace.”

  I stared at David, waiting for him to get there too. He didn’t seem to.

  “So, what are you saying?” he asked. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “We have Love, Joy, Peace, and Patience,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Love, Joy, Peace, and Patience. Didn’t you go to church as a child?”

  He scoffed. “A few times, maybe.”

  “It’s the Fruits of the Spirit. It’s biblical. From Galatians 5, I just looked it up. There are nine Fruits of the Spirit. They are Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-control. All the fruits are in contrast to the works of the flesh.”

  David stared at me, his eyes wide open, mouth gaping slightly.

  “I know it sounds mad,” I said.

  “Oh, thank God,” he said, breathing, relieved, “because, for a minute there, I was worried you couldn’t hear it.”

  “Nevertheless, I believe it is his pattern. He is killing the Fruits of the Spirit, so to speak, one after another, letting evil win, telling us good will never triumph; the flesh is too strong.”

  “Okay, okay,” David said and reached out his arms. “Before you go all Bible camp on me. Let’s say you’re right. I’ve promised to indulge you, so that’s what I’m doing. Let’s say this guy is killing the Fruits of the Spirit, destroying all goodness, then what is he up to next?”

  “Kindness,” I said. “He’s reached kindness.”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  “I think I may have found something too,” David said. He had told me to come with him downstairs to his office, and now I stepped inside, and he closed the door behind me. The room was packed with computer screens and looked like a hacker’s den.

  “Is this your office?” I asked and touched one of the keyboards gently. David looked terrified at my gesture, and I removed my hand.

  “Yeah, well,” he said and sat down in his office chair and rolled to one of the screens. “I work from home.”

  I realized I knew nothing about the man that was my father and felt a little bit embarrassed. I hadn’t even asked what he did for a living. I had been so busy being angry with him and punishing him.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  He sent me a wry look. “I can’t tell you, or I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m in Cyber Security. Companies pay me to find their weak spots and possible breaches in their security. I help them detect it, so they won’t be hacked.”

  I stared at him. This was the last thing I would have imagined him doing. I guess I had been wrong about a lot of things.

  “I see,” I said, suddenly very interested. “What did you want to show me?”

  “Chan3,” he said and tapped on his keyboard, letting his fingers dance across it. “It’s a website. Two months ago, a shooter who shot up an arcade in Wilmington posted a manifest in there. It is known to be a place where people like our Leech live out their fantasies and a place where you find likeminded people if you will.”

  “Okay, that’s terrifying. And you think the Leech might be visiting that page too?”

  “As soon as you said the part about him needing to live out the part of his nature where he was able to tell the world about his endeavors, that’s when I thought about this webpage. Guys like him hide in plain sight, you know. And they can do that here. In places like these, they can brag all they want and post videos, and it’ll never get seen by anyone but their peers, people who will be their fans. It’s quite nasty. It’s all user-created message boards. Each owner regulates their own board with no interference by the administrator. That’s how they can keep it a secret. It was created as a free-speech friendly alternative to the supervised society we live in. It was created for people to be able to speak without being watched after what the creator defined as ‘rapidly escalating surveillance on the net and loss of free speech.’ Users create their own boards, and then they can pretty much post anything they like.”

  “But … there might be hundreds of these boards. How do we find his?”

  David looked up at me. “You’re not the only one who’s been up all night.”

  He clicked something and opened it.

  “It’s encrypted,” he said, “but I know how to get around that.”

  David tapped very fast on the keyboard, and I watched as he gained access to the message board.

  “Now, I’ve narrowed it down to around five different boards based on geography. These guys think they can hide their IP addresses by sending it across the world, but they can’t trick me. I can narrow them down to Florida, and these five are from here. So here we have them, five message boards that he might be a part of or even run himself. None of them store anything, so if it has been sent, then it’s gone, kind of like Snapchat. Makes it harder to come after them later on. You’ll have to be there right at the moment when it is broadcasted. I’ve created alerts for when anyone goes live in any of the five message boards, so if they start a broadcast, I’ll be notified.”

  “So, now we wait? Is that it?”

  David nodded. “That’s about it, yes.”

  I exhaled, feeling tired, yet excited to finally be getting somewhere. “I’ll get us some coffee.”

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Eileen made us pancakes and scrambled eggs, and we ate together, all four of us. I kept staring at the pictures of Adam on the walls, wondering if I would ever get the chance to get to know the kid. He liked fishing; that much was obvious from the photos, and so did David. He was in all the pictures with him, holding up one big fish after another.

  “I’ve filled the kayaks,” Eileen said when we were halfway through. “So, they won’t fly away in the storm, and then we can use the water to flush the toilets once the water is cut off. I’ll also fill a couple of gallons of water and freeze them. We can use it for keeping things cold when the power goes out.”

  “I think you’re overreacting, Mom. It looks like it’ll make landfall down south,” David said. “I watched the spaghetti models this morning, and they pretty much all agree that it’ll hit Ft. Pierce. We’ll be fine up here.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But it won’t hurt to be prepared, just in case. I’ve stocked up on water and canned food, and bread, and toilet paper, so we won’t need anything once it is over. You know how it takes a few days before everything works again. Once, I went two weeks without power. It’s no fun; I tell you that. Even if it makes landfall down south, there’s no harm in being prepared. I have lifejackets behind the couch in the living room in case of flooding. I’m filling the tubs with water and putting duct tape on the outside locks, so they won’t be filled with sand again. I’ll put all our important papers in the dishwasher, where they’ll keep dry; let me know if you have any that need to be put in there with them. There’s plenty of room. My neighbor will bring over sandbags later to guard the house.”

  I thought about my kids and whether they’d be fine too. Since they’d be north of the storm, they’d get hammered pretty severely. I reminded myself to call Chad later on and make sure he stayed on top of it. We needed to have a plan in place for them and my mom. I had talked to him about it earlier in the week, and we agreed they’d all go to Orlando and stay at a hotel there until it was over. Now, I wondered if I should go back home to be with them. I had grown up in Florida myself, so I was used to this, and ha
d evacuated many times in my life, and often ridden big storms out in our house in Cocoa Beach as well, but for my kids who had grown up in Washington, it could be scary. They might need their mom there with them.

  I sipped my coffee when David’s phone rang, and he picked it up, walking outside on the porch for better reception. He came back a few seconds later, holding the phone tightly in his hand, his eyes staring into the air without really looking at anything in particular.

  “That was the hospital,” he said, looking like he could pass out.

  “What is it, David? Is it Adam?” Eileen asked.

  David nodded.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “H-he … he woke up.”

  “What?” Eileen shrieked. “What are you saying? Don’t tease me, boy.”

  David nodded, smiling. “They said he woke up this morning and mumbled something to the nurse that she couldn’t really understand. But his eyes were open, and he was looking at her. They called the doctor down, and he examined him, and he’s fully awake now. They say it will take a little time before he’ll make sense and be normal, but they believe he will be.”

  I clasped my mouth. “Oh, Lord. We should go see him.”

  David nodded. Sydney made a half-choked sound.

  “Let’s all go,” she said. “Let me just grab my purse.”

  “I can’t believe it,” David said, panting happily.

  For a second, I felt like hugging him, but I held myself back. I wasn’t quite ready to go that far yet, and a second later, the moment was gone. Sydney came rushing down the stairs, holding her purse, wearing a hat, a wig, and sunglasses, so she wouldn’t be recognized. Shortly later, we were all in the car, backing out of the driveway when David’s phone beeped again. He looked at it, then glanced nervously at me.

  “They’re live in one of the message boards. Someone is making a live video right now.”

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  I jumped out of the car. David came up right behind me, and we hurried back inside and into his office downstairs. David found the message board and opened the live-feed on one of his big screens.

  A swing set.

  “What are we looking at?” I asked, confused.

  David shook his head. “I don’t know. It looks like a playground?”

  “Look at the comments,” I said. “People are tuning in and cheering him on. But for what?”

  “The number is rapidly rising. Now it passed two hundred viewers from all over the world, look. I have them on the screen over here. They’re pinging in from India, South Africa, The Maldives, even Sweden.”

  “What is he about to do?”

  “That’s hard to tell,” David said.

  “I have a feeling it can’t be anything good. A playground means kids, right?”

  David gave me a look of concern. “Usually, yes. Look, something is happening.”

  We watched while holding our breath as a flock of kids came out from a building and rushed onto the playground. People who were watching were commenting like crazy, saying nasty things about what they would do to the children. It made me sick to my stomach. Who were these people?

  One child approached the camera and stood still for a few seconds while staring at it. He reached over and picked something up, and that was when my heart dropped.

  I watched the kid open a Pixie Stick, then place the candy powder-filled straw in his mouth and pour in the contents.

  Oh, dear God.

  My eyes locked with David’s for a brief second of panic. We needed to get to these children before it was too late.

  “I think I know where it is,” he said. He pointed at the building in the back on the screen. “That’s Southside Elementary school. Adam used to go there. It’s close to downtown Fernandina Beach on Jasmine Street.”

  Sydney came to the door. “Are we leaving or what? Dad?”

  My eyes locked with David’s. I saw the indecision in his.

  “You go,” I said. “I’ll take care of this. You go see Adam.”

  “Are you sure?” David asked.

  “Yes! Just GO!” I yelled louder than I wanted to. The pressure of the situation as I watched more kids come up to the boy and start to devour the candy made me stressed out. I fumbled with my phone and managed to finally dial nine-one-one while I rushed to my minivan and took off, trying to explain to dispatch that this was no joke, that I wasn’t insane, that a bunch of kids were about to be poisoned at the elementary school and she should send police and first responders.

  “We need ambulances,” I ended up yelling as I sped down Jasmine Street toward the school, flooring the accelerator, blowing my horn at everyone who wouldn’t get out of my way.

  “We need plenty of them!”

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  E.T. felt good. He was watching the live-feed on his screen and monitoring the comments along with the number of viewers. It was going up at a good and steady rate. Soon, it reached almost five hundred, much to his pleasure. Next thing, he was heading for a thousand. He knew it would be one of his best so far, and he had been right. There was just something about hurting children that sparked the views.

  The first child had taken a Pixie Stick, and E.T. watched as he poured it into his mouth, completely unaware of what it really contained, what E.T. had mixed into the sugar.

  Stupid, gullible children

  Now, E.T. was anxiously waiting for more children to join this one, and he wasn’t disappointed. Seconds later, another kid came up to the camera and grabbed an entire handful that he swallowed quickly while calling for the others. Soon, the camera was surrounded by little innocent faces, reaching into the bag, gulping the candy down happily like there was no tomorrow.

  Which, in their case, there wasn’t.

  E.T. had gotten the idea from reading about how poisoned candy on Halloween was a myth and that it had actually never happened. For some inexplicable reason, people had just decided to fear Halloween candy and that strangers might put poison, or razor blades in it, or broken glass, or anything else that would hurt random children. But the fact was that it had never happened. The police had never documented actual cases of people randomly distributing poisoned goodies to children on Halloween. It was all just a collective fear, hysteria created by media and anxious parents. The only real story was of a child being killed by his own father in nineteen-seventy-four in Texas. The dad wanted to collect his life insurance and let him eat Pixie Sticks that were poisoned with cyanide. The rest was nothing but an urban legend. It was hysteria.

  Up until now.

  As of today, E.T. had made the nightmare come true. From now on, parents would never let children eat candy from strangers, especially not from the hands of a clown. It would go over in the history of terrifying stories to tell.

  And it was all his doing.

  E.T. chuckled as he watched the first kid collapse to the ground. Another followed, and seconds later, they were dropping like flies. Some were holding their stomachs and having seizures, their bodies trembling on the ground, while others simply fell down without any warning signs. It was eerie, like a horror movie, but even better.

  Because it was real.

  And the numbers were up. Now, E.T. had reached two thousand viewers, and it was rapidly climbing.

  Five thousand, six, seven, eight … could it be … could he really reach that magical number and out-win all the others?

  Nine … ten … eleven!

  Eleven thousand people all over the globe had now tuned into his small live-feed and were commenting and cheering him on. That was it. This was what he had been waiting for. He had achieved his ultimate goal.

  He was finally famous.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  “STOP! Get them away from the candy!”

  I stormed toward the playground and jumped the fence. Two teachers were already attending to the children who had dropped to the ground. One of the teachers was crying hysterically. I ran to them. In the distance, I could hear sirens
, which meant the lady at dispatch hadn’t dared not to take me seriously, or maybe one of the teachers had managed to call it in as well, and they’d finally decided to send help.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that help was on its way. And we needed it. We needed it more than ever.

  Twelve children had collapsed on the ground. A few others were throwing up or holding their stomachs, crying in pain. A girl had a Pixie Stick in her hand and was about to put it in her mouth when I stopped her and knocked it out of her hand. She started to cry helplessly, while I hurried to the source of this.

  A clown was sitting on the bench, a basket in his lap. His head was slumped, and he wasn’t moving.

  “Help is on the way,” I said to the teachers, who were both whimpering and crying while watching the lifeless children. “Ambulances are coming. Police are on their way too. Should be here any second now.”

  “This one isn’t breathing,” one of them said. “He just stopped breathing. What do I do? I don’t know what to do?”

  “This one isn’t breathing either,” the other said, while frantically trying to perform CPR on the small body. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Keep at it until help gets here, both of you,” I said and threw myself over a lifeless kid. I turned him around and felt for a pulse. When there was none, I began pumping his chest and blowing air into his mouth. Nothing happened. The sirens were approaching while we fought for these children’s lives until the paramedics came rushing in, carrying stretchers and wearing uniforms. Once they took over, I backed up. My hands were shaking, and I was crying heavily. The sight of all these lifeless children had overpowered me.

  Who could be this evil? Was it really possible that anyone could do such a thing and still call himself human?

  In a fit of rage, I turned to face the clown, remembering that I had watched it all go down on the video in David’s office, like thousands of others who subscribed to this guy’s videos. I approached him and put a set of fingers on his throat but found no pulse. I looked closer at his costume. There, in the middle of that curly red wig, I spotted a Go-Pro camera. I took in a deep breath, then stared directly into it.