They held each other a long moment before Taylor tried to pull back in a panic. “We have to get out of here. He’s going to find us!”
“He’s dead,” Eagle said, not letting go.
“What?”
“Dead. I killed him,” Eagle rasped, using his head to motion behind him.
Looking over his shoulder, Taylor could see a man’s body lying in the dirt, near the tree trunk where she’d first considered hiding.
The sound of a helicopter registered, and she looked up, not able to see it through the thick leaves on the trees. Yet she panicked once more, trying to pull out of Eagle’s arms.
“We need to go! We’ll tell them the guy ran off and we don’t know what happened to him. Then maybe we can come back later and bury him or something!”
“Taylor, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not! You can’t go to jail. I’d never survive that!” She was hysterical, but she couldn’t help it.
“I’m not going to jail,” he said calmly.
“Yes, you are! You killed him, and I can’t identify him as the man who’s been stalking me. I mean, I knew he was because of the way he smelled, but no one will believe me. Lawyers will tear any self-defense argument apart!”
“His scent was still that strong?” Eagle asked.
“How can you be so calm?!” Taylor practically screamed. “Yes! He said he was a paramedic and wanted me to sit in his car while he went to check on you, but I recognized his piece-of-shit car from when he hit me before. That, and the way he smelled. He was trying to put me in his trunk, but I hit his arm and made him drop his keys. Then he hit me, and I ran.”
“He hit you?” Eagle growled, bringing a hand up to gently push the hair away from her face so he could examine her.
“Eagle, please!” Taylor begged, struggling in his arms.
“As much as I love that you want to protect me, it’s not necessary,” Eagle told her, his voice calm once more, even as he tightened his hold and took in her swollen cheekbone. “My team will be here in minutes, and everything will be fine.”
“Your team?” Taylor asked in confusion. “We’re almost an hour from Silverstone Towing.”
“They were in the helicopter. After the FLIR found our heat sources, they rappelled out and are hotfooting it to our location.”
Taylor’s head spun. “What?”
“No one’s going to jail,” he reassured her.
Wanting to believe him, Taylor shook her head, still dazed. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
“I know,” he replied. “I also have a concussion. What about you? Did he hurt you any other way than hitting you?”
“No. But my ribs are killing me, I lost a shoe and my foot hurts, and I got scraped up pretty good by all the thorns in this forest.”
Eagle just closed his eyes and pulled her even closer.
Taylor understood. She didn’t want to let him go either. Everything had happened so fast, and they’d both come close to dying.
Two minutes later, that was how Bull, Smoke, and Gramps found them. Sitting on the ground, Taylor in Eagle’s lap, holding on to each other as if they’d never let go.
Chapter Eighteen
Taylor sat in an interrogation room at the police station near Silverstone Towing. It was two days after her stalker had purposely run into Eagle’s Wrangler and had tried to kidnap her. They’d missed the awards ceremony in Bloomington, but considering all that had happened, it didn’t seem all that important anymore. She and Eagle were still feeling a bit rough, but she wasn’t going to put off this meeting even one day longer. She needed answers, and she knew Eagle felt the same way.
Bull, Smoke, and Gramps had also asked to sit in on the meeting. Familiar with the men, the police allowed it, and Taylor had no problem with that either. She owed the men everything. They’d gotten to her and Eagle quicker than she could’ve imagined. They’d been like the brothers she’d never had. She wouldn’t deny them information about what she’d gotten them in the middle of.
Taylor looked over at Eagle. He’d refused to wear a bandage over the large cut on his forehead today, saying it itched and he’d rather let the stitches get some air. She couldn’t decide if he looked better with the bandage on or off. At the moment, the wound was red and slightly infected, and the black stitches looked like antennas from bugs trying to crawl out of his forehead, so she was leaning toward him looking better with it on.
Eagle caught her watching him, and he reached for her hand. He scooted his chair closer, then rested their clasped hands on his thigh. “What’d you find out?” he asked the detectives.
Instead of answering Eagle, both the man and woman who’d been tasked with updating them on the investigation looked at Taylor. They had similar looks of sympathy on their faces.
Taylor tensed.
“First of all, in case you were worried, there will be no charges against Mr. Trowbridge,” Detective Allen said. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a black polo shirt featuring the police department logo.
It took a second for Taylor to remember Mr. Trowbridge was Eagle. She nodded.
“The man who caused your car wreck was Brett Williams. He was forty-three, and we have evidence to suggest he was a prolific serial killer.”
Taylor gaped at the detective in shock. “What?”
“We’re positive he’s responsible for almost a dozen young women’s deaths over the last three years,” the other detective said. He’d already introduced himself as James Wolfe.
“How do you know?” Eagle asked.
It was just as well, because Taylor was literally speechless. She couldn’t think of even one thing to ask; she was too horrified.
“He had pictures of his victims,” Detective Wolfe said. “Polaroids. They look like they were taken after he’d killed them. All of the women had been reported missing, but there were never any clues as to where they might have gone.”
“He lived with his mother, who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. When we got to her house, she was locked inside a bedroom. She’d soiled herself and was suffering from dehydration. She was completely confused and kept asking where her husband, Donald, was, as well as her little boy, Brett,” Detective Allen explained.
Taylor felt horrible for the woman. The way Brett smelled made more sense now.
“How did Brett become fixated on Taylor?” Eagle asked. “Where did they meet?”
Detective Wolfe opened a folder in front of him, studying a report. “In a search of the basement, where it looks like he spent most of his time, a diary of sorts was found. It clearly implicates him in the deaths of the women we saw in the photographs. He wrote extensively about how he felt as he tortured them. He also went into detail about how he’d strangled them until they were unconscious or dead. Then did rescue breathing, if necessary, to bring them back to life. Apparently, that’s what got him off. As far as we can tell from his diary, he kept each woman for anywhere from a few days up to two weeks.”
Taylor swallowed hard, and she jerked in surprise when she felt Eagle’s fingers on her cheek. She’d been crying and hadn’t realized it.
“I know you do this all the time,” Eagle told the detectives in a harsh tone, “but can you please lighten up on the details? My girlfriend narrowly escaped being one of his victims.”