The pieces just didn’t fit.
He said Ellie had to pay for humiliating him. That she was the cause of everything.
Other than her current boss, the only person who might know about Ellie’s past was her father.
Randall Reeves was the last man on earth Derrick wanted to see. But talking to him might be the only way to save Ellie.
One Hundred Thirty-Five
Somewhere on the AT
Ellie had lost all sense of time. She’d drifted in and out of consciousness, only to be beaten again, suffocated by blackness all over again. In between, she’d thought she’d heard a dog barking somewhere.
That was how he treated her, how he’d treated the other victims.
But she still refused to beg.
He glared down at her now, pulling at the chain to force her to crawl toward him.
“I told you that you’d pay for humiliating me,” he snarled.
He had. Suddenly it all made sense. She knew who he was, what he had said all those years ago. He’d been at the police academy at the same time she had and had tried to bully her into quitting with sexist remarks. He’d tripped her up during their runs, teamed up with two other trainees to mess with her gun so it jammed when she was in a simulation exercise, and groped her by the locker room when he caught her by herself.
All these years later, his words still echoed in her ears. “You’re a weakling. But I can put a good word in for you if you cooperate.”
“I don’t need a good word from you,” she’d told him. “I’ll make it on my own.”
Then he’d shoved his hand up her shirt. “No, you won’t. I’ll make sure of that.”
She’d kneed him in the balls, then punched him and broken his nose. When she’d looked up, two other men had been watching. They hadn’t bothered to help her but she’d heard them laughing at Burton when she’d walked away.
“It was your fault you got dismissed from the academy,” she spat, dragging herself away from the memory. “You got what you deserved.”
His name was Hugh Burton. She’d filed charges against him for sexual harassment and once her complaint was filed, other female officers had come forward. An investigation revealed his violent tendencies towards women, that he was a racist and a hothead who used unusual and unnecessary brute force on the job. He was also found to beat the K-9 unit dogs during training.
“Women have to be put in their place,” he said sharply. “Especially women like you.”
“That’s the reason you killed those women?” she asked. “Why not just come after me in the beginning?”
“I wanted you to suffer. I saw you on the news. I knew you felt guilty about those little girls dying.” A smile curved his mouth. Finally, he’d removed his mask, and she could see his face. He’d aged more than she would have thought. While once he’d been handsome, his thick wavy hair was now thinning. A deep scar on his upper arm looked recent, and his black eyes were menacing.
“It’s your fault my wife left me.” He gripped her arms and shook her so hard nausea caught her in its clutches. “After you got me dismissed from the academy, I couldn’t get another job. When Cathy heard about it, she went crazy.” He shoved his face in hers, spitting on her as he spoke. “I tried to explain, but then she said she thought I had a wandering eye and now she knew it for sure.”
“Then what did you do?” Ellie probed, fearing what the answer would be.
“I did what I had to do, I taught her a lesson. Then she had the nerve to try and leave me. I couldn’t let that happen. But she was insane, she had the nerve to push me, and I grabbed her to keep her from leaving. She said you spoke up against me, and she wanted to be like you. Like you,” he spat. “That she didn’t want to be my wife anymore.”
Ellie saw the scene playing out in her mind in sickening clarity. “So you tried to stop her.”
“I did,” he bellowed. “But she put our little girl in the car and took off, speeding. She was going so fast, I chased after her in my truck, but…” His voice broke. “But she flew around the mountain so quickly she lost control. She crashed and my baby girl… they were trapped.” Wild rage contorted his face. “I tried to get my baby out but… she died right there, trapped in that twisted hunk of metal.”
“I’m sorry about your little girl,” Ellie said, striving to calm him, dreading what was next.
But he wasn’t listening. His fingers dug into her arms. “It’s all your fault. You killed her. You killed Cathy and my little girl.”
Swallowing, Ellie tried to control her emotions. Now he was going to kill her. She had no doubt about that.
“Why wait all these years to get your revenge?” she asked.
“I tried to move on,” he said. “Tried to put it all behind me. But then I saw you in the news. Ellie Reeves a hero, for saving two children.” His voice rose another octave. “That story aired on the anniversary of the day I buried my girl. You didn’t save my daughter, did you? You killed her. You’re not a hero.”
Despite the monster he had turned into, Ellie couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the man in front of her.
“But Deputy Eastwood has nothing to do with any of this, and neither did those other women,” Ellie said. “You have me now. Where is she?”
“Oh, she’s another one just like you. Thinks she’s better than everyone else. She needed to be put in her place. I made her suffer, too.”
“Where did you leave her body?”
He scoffed. “You should be worried about yourself.”
“Where is she, Hugh?”
“You’ll be together soon. I have the perfect place to dispose of your bodies.”
“All you’ve done is prove that you didn’t deserve to wear a badge,” she spat, thinking of her helpless friend.
Backhanding her, he sent a sharp pain pulsing through her jaw.
“I proved that I’m smarter and stronger than you. All this time you’ve been chasing different leads. Making arrests. Running all over town like a headless chicken. You didn’t have a fucking clue it was me.”
It had been years since she’d last seen him. Since she’d spoken to him. How could she have known?
“You found out everyone I was close to and tried to turn me against them,” she said. “You framed Cord.”
“See how clever I was.”
“And you knew about Hiram.”
“Oh, yes, Hiram and his friend Vinny. All I had to do was pose as a cleaner and I got to talk to your brother. He told me all about Vinny. And that fell into place. Vinny would do anything for your brother, so I helped him get out of that hospital and pointed the finger at the two of them.”
“It was you on the security camera going into Vinny’s room,” Ellie said.
He chuckled. “All it took was some scrubs and knowing one of the guards liked to slip out for a smoke every two hours.”
“You hacked into the therapist’s files,” she said, piecing together the past few weeks. She’d told the counselor—or the woman she’d thought was the counselor—all her secrets, poured out her feelings of guilt, about Hiram and the adoption, her irritation with Bryce, that one night with Derrick, her history with Cord, and the tension between them. “How did you know I was talking to a counselor?”