I grab the bag. The officer is about to say something, but Dean holds up a hand.
I flip the bag over, studying the phone’s screen. As I press it, the screen lights up, revealing missed calls from Carl. A text message from Kate. And a news alert, for a missing woman and man. The irony that the news notification of her disappearance is on her phone fails to amuse me. I hand Dean the phone, not wanting to look at it a moment longer because it is evidence that something has happened to the woman I love.
Chapter Thirty
Emma
I wake to the sound of an engine. My mouth feels dry, and my head is killing me. I open my eyes, but I don’t see anything. I’m completely disoriented. I attempt to feel for my surroundings when I realize that my hands are tied together. I go to move my feet. They are tied together, too. Shit. I start to panic. I go to call out and find that my mouth is taped shut.
My panic increases with each breath. I try to remember the teacher in my self-defense class in college. What did he say? Breathe. I take a few deep breaths through my nose. Then I am tossed up and immediately hit something.
I am in a car, the trunk of a car. But whose car? And where are we going? Oh, God! The stalker!
Does he have Jason? How long have I been unconscious? I start kicking with both legs, hoping I can jostle something loose. Don’t cars have some sort of safety latch back here? Or maybe I can kick the lights out? I read something about that once.
I start kicking and rolling around as I kick, hoping to hit something, anything.
I feel like I’m doing this for a long time when the car comes to a stop. I don’t hear anything around me and that scares me. There is no buzz of cars passing us on a big freeway. There is no sound of nearby engines. There are no sounds at all.
I hear the crunch of feet on gravel. My body begins to tremble as the footsteps get closer to me. I search around me for anything to use as a weapon, but I come up empty-handed.
The trunk pops open, and I’m surprised by the darkness. How long was I out? What time is it?
“You can stop kicking things, it won’t help,” a familiar voice says. Chills like I’ve never experienced in my life course through my body.
Jason Winters.
I squint and slowly his body comes into focus.
“I’ll take this tape off if you promise not to scream,” he says, his voice is detached, cold, and makes me shiver even harder.
I nod, and he rips the tape off, taking some skin with it. My eyes water as I bite my dry lip trying not to cry out from the pain. I attempt to look around, but it’s hard to see in the vast darkness surrounding us. Only the moonlight through the clouds illuminates the trees around us.
“What’s going on?” I manage as I try to swallow, my throat constricting as I do. I briefly close my eyes because focusing is making my head hurt more than it was in the darkness of the trunk.
“You all really are stupid, aren’t you?” he says with a hollow laugh that sends shivers down my spine.
I open my eyes and blink them, unsure of my next move. Do I play stupid? My mind is so blank right now, I can’t even think about anything but how to answer his rhetorical question.
“I must have gotten every ounce of intelligence our father had,” he scoffs.
I look up at him in total confusion. “Why are you doing this?” I ask the obvious question. I feel like the victim in some bad horror movie.
He rests his hands on the lid of the trunk, leaning over me. “Because he had it all. Our dad never gave a fuck about me. He fucking paid my mom off to go away. I didn’t know who he was until Mom died and I found things in a journal. Gran always said my dad was a bad man, but I knew he was when I read her diary. He never loved her or me. They had to be punished for what they did to us. If he had stayed with us, Mom could have gotten better treatment and she would still be alive.”
His words take a tone of pure evil, and I’m suddenly very aware that I may not make it out of this situation alive. Keep him talking, the words resonate in my mind. If he’s talking, he can’t be killing me.
“But why now?” I ask, trying to sound like I’m clueless.
He growls as he leans in and a sliver of moonlight gleams across his eyes, making them appear darker than normal.
He laughs then, a laugh of a villain, a laugh of a person who's lost all sanity. “Now? That’s rich. You think I’m just doing something now?” He changes his voice to sound like a kid. “Oh, poor me. What? I have a brother? Yay! I’m so lucky.” He pounds his fist on the car. “You think I just found out I had a brother! You are as dumb as your pathetic boyfriend.”
“Why didn’t you tell him you knew?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
He leans in again toward me. “’Cause I’m not a fucking idiot, Emma. You don’t show the opponent your cards, do you? I’m just fucking lucky that my stupid, arrogant brother had a stalker. It was easy to replicate the little sticky notes, even the handwriting. And then sending false death threats over the past few months, making it look like another stalker. I’ve had his security team and the cops on a wild goose chase for weeks now. When I knew he found me, I decided to take my plan to the next level. I had been biding my time, waiting for that moment, and then he came looking for me. It was better than I could have planned. I knew it was my time to take action, to finish what I started all those years ago. But I had to outsource that last ploy to keep him away while I got you. You didn’t even guess the note and text was from me. I thought maybe you’d say something to him; throw him off the track some more. But it doesn’t matter, they may figure it all out sooner rather than later, but it’ll be too late by then. Because I will take him down just like his father.”
My mind tries to process everything he has just told me. “What do you mean like his father?”
“You think it was an accident that killed Ken Daniels? Yeah, you’d believe that, wouldn’t you? Because I’m that fucking good. Three years of military service taught me a lot about how to dismantle cars. I could put an engine together out in the desert and then take it back apart. One little screw is loose and the whole car stops working. That’s all it takes, just a little tweak. Of course, I had to bury all my records, so the cops wouldn’t consider me a suspect with that little issue at Blythe’s place. But the military also taught me about computers and how to hide files. That security firm would figure it out eventually, so I had to make my move sooner rather than later.”
I swallow, but my mouth is so dry that I can’t even manage to do that. “What do you get out of this?” I ask, trying to keep him talking as long as possible.
He sits down on the bumper. “I’ll tell you what I get. I get revenge,” he starts before he launches into mindless babble about his rough childhood. I silently pray to the universe that someone will find us, even though I have no clue as to where we are.
Chapter Thirty-One
Grady
I’m sitting in the LA offices of our security firm. There is a wall of screens in front of me. It’s been two hours since Carl last saw Jason and Emma. The security firm and the LAPD are going through every possible video feed they can, trying to find them. So far, we’ve found that a black sedan with tinted windows left the parking lot shortly after Emma went to the bathroom. The camera in the back of the restaurant didn’t show the whole parking lot and if someone knew it was there, they could easily avoid being seen on it.