Authors: Joann Ross
Tags: #Contemporary, #Military, #Romance Suspense, #Mystery Romantic Suspense
"I don't understand."
Even as she tried to process what had happened to her once she'd arrived at Whispering Pines, Sabrina kept her tone soft, her expression guileless, struggling to keep Harlan from seeing her revulsion.
The last thing she remembered was him leading her into the sunroom. Then, somehow, she'd ended up in a cage the old slave quarters, where, to her shock, she'd found he was also holding Misty Mannington and Titania prisoner in separate cages.
The good news was they were all still alive. And if Sabrina had anything to do with it, they'd stay that way.
"This has to be a mistake." Her heart was in her throat, making it difficult to get the words out. A blinding headache pulsed lightning bolts behind her eyes.
"My only mistake was not taking your damn grandfather out, tying concrete around his ankles, and dumping him into the sea," he said. "But I didn't have much time before daylight, and the gardener had finished turning over the soil for spring, so it seemed a sensible solution at the time."
Sensible
didn't exist in the same universe as this man. How had he managed to live among them every day without anyone knowing how evil he was?
"Why did you kill him?"
"Because he suddenly found his conscience. Oh, it was all right when he was playing plantation master and whipping the girls I'd collect for us. Or raping and branding them."
Branding?
"Of course," Sabrina said weakly as a naked Misty whimpered at his description. Horrified, she realized that explained the oozing scab on the other woman's bottom.
"He also enjoyed when I brought home a Russian container ship pilot I met at a bar on the Somersett waterfront. It was the first time I'd allowed an outsider to join our little game. We made him the overseer.
"Unfortunately, he wasn't quite as rough as he could have been, certainly not as much as of a disciplinarian as I am, which was a surprise, given that Russians have a reputation for being fairly brutal—
"But Robert enjoyed himself, just the same. Until he got squeamish at the end."
"The end?"
Sabrina exchanged a look with Titania, who, thankfully, except for a black eye and a nasty bruise along her cheekbone, seemed to be surviving far better than Misty, Of course, unless Sabrina had been unconscious longer than the time it had taken Harlan to move her from the sunroom, her best friend had been a prisoner for only a day.
"Well, now, we couldn't let the man leave, could we?" he asked reasonably. "Because he'd be bound to tell someone. And they'd tell someone, and so on, and so on, and our lovely game would end."
"So you killed him." Just as he'd done with that man who'd recently been found in the marsh.
"Slit his throat with a scalpel. It was quick and smooth and painless. But I could tell the murder disturbed Robert. And then two nights later, I also dispatched the girl, who'd gotten tedious anyway, since she seemed to have lost the ability to speak. All she would do was tremble and make these pitiful whimpering sounds."
A lot, Sabrina realized, like the ones Misty had begun making. Which didn't give Sabrina a great deal of confidence about how much help the other woman would be in whatever escape plan she and Titania could come up with.
"Is that what you're going to do to me?" she asked. "Whip me? Rape me?"
It sounded like the title of a snuff film.
"Of course not!" Appearing shocked, he ran the back of his hand down her cheek. "You're family."
"So was my grandfather."
"Only by marriage.
Lucie
was my cousin. Which was why, I have to admit, it was difficult to dispatch her."
The Florence suicide bomber began to seem rational by comparison. The more Harlan explained and rationalized his horrific crimes, the more Sabrina's blood chilled. But if she could only keep him talking, she might be able to figure out a way to get out of here. A way to get them all out of here.
"My grandmother's death wasn't natural." It wasn't a question, but he answered it anyway.
"No. I had to kill her after she came to me with photographs she'd found while packing things away in the attic to get ready for the construction. Robert, it appeared, wasn't very discreet. Unfortunately she died of the sodium pentothal I gave her, before she could tell me where she'd hidden them.
"Her mistake was that she gave me twenty-four hours to turn myself in before she went to Nate Spencer herself. Naturally, I couldn't let her do that."
"Naturally," Sabrina murmured, even as she was heartsick at this revelation.
"It's interesting," he observed, in that same spookily conversational tone, "that you'd ask the very same question about Lucie that Lillian asked me only this morning."
"And what did you tell her?"
Stall.
"Why, the truth, of course," he said with some surprise. "You don't stay married to a woman for more than forty years by lying to her."
"So Lillian knew? About my grandfather? And the women?"
"Apparently so. Which surprised me. Then again," he said, "they always say that the best marriages are where the partners keep a few secrets from their spouses."
"So I've heard."
Forget about what she'd told Zach about having fallen down the rabbit hole after the bombing. She'd now made it all the way to the lowest circle of hell.
"Does she know that you've taken me hostage?"
"No. I'm afraid she's beyond knowing anything."
"You murdered your own wife?"
"It was a mercy killing," he said, a bit defensively, Sabrina thought. "One she asked for. But 'hostage' is such a harsh word." He rubbed his chin. "I don't suppose you'd accept the idea of being my guest?"
"Gee, Harlan, you know, that sounds real peachy. But, while I admittedly haven't read all of the Miss Manners columns, I sure don't remember one that mentioned caging your guest and putting them in shackles."
"You have a point," he allowed. "But what else would you have me do with you? I couldn't risk you finding those photographs."
"Take me—take
us
," she corrected, "upstairs. If you truly intend to kill us—"
"Oh, I do," he assured her.
"Then let Titania write a note to Nate. And I need to write to Zach. I haven't told him yet that I love him, and I hate the idea of him never knowing how I felt."
"That's remarkably maudlin. But you do bring up an intriguing idea."
"What's that?" So far she hadn't been the least bit wild about any of his ideas.
"Can you type?"
"Of course. Doesn't everyone these days?"
"I don't. I've always had secretaries and nurses to transcribe my medical records. And Lillian always took care of personal correspondence. Not that she believed a typewritten note was appropriate for most personal occasions, but she did learn in school, when women were taught proper secretarial skills.
"So, here's what we'll do. I'll let you come upstairs and write your precious sweetheart note to your lover. And then I'll dictate my story to you. Because, although I have documentation, with photos and videotapes, it will be better for historians if I tell about my work in my own words."
He nodded, obviously pleased with that idea.
"You want to get into the history books."
"Of course. With Bundy, and the Boston Strangler, the Son of Sam, and all those other notorious serial killers—not that they ever reached my impressive body count."
He was, Sabrina could tell by his tone, vastly proud of that.
She also realized she'd gained a bargaining chip.
"I'll do it," she said, "if Titania and Misty can come with me."
"You don't have a choice," he pointed out. "You'll do what I say or die."
She shrugged. "I'm going to die anyway. The location doesn't make that much of a difference."
"What about that note you were so eager to write?"
"If Zach doesn't know how I feel about him, he's probably not the right man for me anyway."
But she knew he was. Had known it at sixteen, and knew it even more surely now.
He laughed at that. "You're a very pragmatic young woman. In that way you remind me a great deal of your grandmother. But Lucie proved more of a fighter at the end."
He shook his head. "She did not go as easily as Lillian into that good night."
With the drugs still in her system, and her head pounding, the idea of her grandmother's last moments on earth nearly had Sabrina passing out.
Or throwing up.
Or both.
"How did you get away with it?" she asked. A split second later, she'd answered her own question. "Because you're the medical examiner. You can put whatever you want on the death certificate."
"I always knew you were a clever girl."
He took a key from the pocket of his slacks and unfastened her shackles, then did the same for Titania, who, unsurprisingly, stubbornly didn't so much as rub her wrists. Unlike Misty, who crumpled to the steel floor of the cage like a rag doll.
"Get her up," Harlan snapped. "And let's get going. We have a manifesto to write."
"Is she a genius or what?" Zach asked the four men in the car with him as they raced toward Whispering Pines. He would've preferred the Viper, but they wouldn't all fit in it, and this was a team effort.
"A genius," John agreed. "Which bodes well for the intelligence of my future grandchildren."
"Don't rush the guy," Quinn said. "He hasn't even gotten the lady to say yes, yet."
"Piece of cake," Zach said.
So long as he could keep her alive long enough to propose.
No! He wasn't going to let himself think those old dark negative thoughts.
Thanks to Sabrina's having called him on her Black-Berry and leaving it on after she slipped it into the pocket of that full gypsy skirt she'd been wearing the last time he'd seen her, they'd been able to track her to her location.
It was also how they were able to hear Harlan's description of at least some of his alleged dozens of murders. And how they knew that so far, Sabrina, Titania, and that ditzy Misty Mannington were still alive.
In a bit of good luck, thanks to having planed Lillian Honeycutt's humidity-swollen doors, Zach knew exactly where Harlan's second-floor office was located.
Of course, he could be planning to write his murder book for the masses in the library. But remembering back on their evening there, Zach couldn't recall a computer in the room, Which he hoped meant that Honeycutt would be holding the women in the office.
To avoid any surprises, given that the house had been added on to several times over the years, Zach's father had found the blueprints for Whispering Pines in the island's building-permits files. Not wanting to waste valuable time going down to the office and having Nate flash his badge at some bureaucrat, Zach had simply hacked into the database.
Then he told Quinn that Phoenix Team really ought to solicit the island government account, because the average third grader could hack his way into that site.
"Okay. Let's synchronize our watches."
The line might sound corny to civilians watching it in the movies, but it wasn't at all humorous to the former military men, who knew the importance of split-second timing while carrying out a mission.
Watches were set. Positions assigned.
Nate, John, and Zach would storm the room, Nate and John from the interior hallway and Zach coming down from the roof, then kicking open the French doors that opened out onto a small balcony, which, though not nearly as large as the veranda, would still prevent him from having to crash through the glass of a window.
Although he would've preferred taking Harlan out himself for what he'd done to Sabrina, her grandmother, and Titania, Zach had planned enough missions to know it was best to go with the experts. And when it came to snipers, there were none better than SEAL specialist Quinn McKade.
Today Zach wasn't about to settle for anything less than the best.
Whatever he'd drugged her with was still fogging her mind enough that Sabrina was having difficulty keeping up with Harlan's rambling narrative of murders going back nearly forty years.
Like so many children who'd grown up in the South of the nineteen forties and fifties, he'd been taught that the War Between the States had been a states' rights issue. Very little attention had been given to the actual dirty commerce of slavery.
Which was why it wasn't until Harlan's sophomore year of high school—when a history teacher who'd moved to Swann Island from Vermont to escape the seemingly endless winters had assigned her students a paper on the slave auctions that had taken place in Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Somersett, and other cities all over the South—that he viewed, for the very first time, a woodcarving of a naked, bound African woman being led by a rope to the auction block.
The fifteen-year-old boy became instantly, painfully, aroused.
In the beginning, he would find the occasional girl who would be willing to get naked, stand on a barrel, and allow him to point out her feminine attributes to imaginary buyers.
But when even the most adventurous balked at rougher play, he had turned to prostitutes, during his college years, which was when Robert Swann had joined the game.
Until the whippings and brandings, rapes, and other degrading acts of humiliation were no longer enough. When the first murder occurred, Robert had dropped out. And had died for his defection.
Unfortunately, though, he hadn't gotten rid of the photographs taken over those years. Photographs that had gotten Lucie killed.
"I don't understand why no one ever knew," Sabrina dared to ask as she sensed he was getting to the end of his rambling tale of madness and murder.
"Because I chose my slaves carefully," he explained. "Usually hookers or women who the authorities wouldn't look for very hard. Women with histories of promiscuity, adultery. Addictions. That sort of thing."
"But from what I've heard, that nurse, Cleo Gibson, didn't fit your profile."
"No. She was an impulsive kill. She'd been so excited the day before at the hospital, talking about her pretty little bedroom in her pretty little house, that I decided to fit in a play date."
Sabrina wondered what kind of monster could smile at the memory of terrorizing a woman, raping her, and finally stabbing her multiple times, then leaving her naked corpse on the road.
"As for dispensing with their bodies, that was simple." He waved a hand toward the window, back toward the old slave quarters, which he'd turned into torture chambers. "I simply buried them with all the other slaves, from when Whispering Pines was a working indigo plantation.
"It was only when Sumner starting building his fucking golf course right next to my fence line that I had to find a new place to dump them."
Which was, according to reports, precisely what he'd done. Dump them, like yesterday's garbage.
"You won't get away with this," she said mildly.
Strangely, a calm had come over her, allowing her to remain outwardly composed, carry on a conversation, and type up the story of this man's insanity, while her brain was scrambling trying to come up with escape routes.
"I don't intend to," he said, his tone as mild as hers. "Just as I had no intention of leaving my dear wife alive to face all the media circus and scandal that would have surely killed her slowly and painfully, given her weakened condition. I have no desire to end up with a needle in my arm in the state execution chamber."
He reached past her into a desk drawer and pulled out a revolver.
"Once I kill you, your friend, and that sniveling slave over there"—he waved the revolver toward Misty—"I'll take my own life.
"It's been a good run. I've had an extraordinary life. One most men could only dream of."
As he looked over her shoulder at the computer monitor, Sabrina caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye.
No. Not
something. Someone
.
Even as her heart hitched, she fought to keep her voice calm.
"So, no regrets?"
"Not a one," he replied.
Zach was outside the French doors, hand up, fingers counting down.
A sideways glance toward Titania revealed that she'd seen him, too.
One.
Two.
On the count of three, both doors to the office burst open.
John dove for Misty, covering her trembling body with his, while at the same time Nate and Zach dragged Titania and Sabrina to the floor, covering their bodies with their much larger, stronger ones.
There was a roaring in Sabrina's ears, like the surf during a hurricane. But it didn't stop her from hearing the sharp crack that splintered the air.
An instant later, Harlan Honeycutt crumpled to the floor, a spreading red stain blossoming in the center of his forehead.
One shot. One kill.