Her heart was beating so dramatically she could hear nothing but its continual
thump-thump-thump
inside her ears. She needed to calm down, she realized, breathing deeply in an effort to do just that. Not being able to hear put her at an extreme disadvantage.
It could be a blown fuse,
she reasonably told herself.
Just a fuse.
The lights flicked back on. Her eyes widened. The sound of breathing coming from somewhere in the room both shocked and frightened her. She whirled around in a circle, stunned when she saw him standing there.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed, her eyes briefly shuttering as she clutched her heart. “You scared me half to death! What are you doing here?”
He said nothing, just stared at her.
Her eyes narrowed in confusion. Why
was
he here? There was something different about him tonight. His expression, his eyes . . .
Realization slowly and horrifically dawned. “Oh no.” Nikki shook her head, her voice breaking as she started backing away. She bumped into a bookshelf, ten novels and three magazines raining down on her at impact. “Oh God, not you. Please,” she gasped, “you can’t be him!”
He was quiet for a moment as he studied her through crazed eyes. “Nikki,” he finally whispered in a false voice she recognized all too well. He slowly began walking toward her. “My love . . .”
His arm raised up, a gleaming metal object momentarily visible. Nikki would have screamed, but a blow to the skull sent her plummeting to the floor instead.
Where the hell is she? Thomas thought, his heart racing
as the Cadillac sped toward Nikki’s apartment. She must know he’d be worried. She’d answer his calls if she could. First James escaped, then Ben up and disappeared, and now he couldn’t get a hold of either Nikki or the two cops assigned to her.
Shit.
A panicky, terrified feeling swamped him, much the way he’d felt when Amy had disappeared. Things couldn’t end that way again. They just couldn’t. He had failed his little girl. He’d be damned if he’d also fail the woman he loved—yes, he loved her.
“Don’t let me be too late,” Thomas pleaded under his breath to the heavens. Every muscle in his body was tensed, his jaw tight. “Please God, please, don’t let me be too late.”
Kim and Megan raced up the stairs toward Nikki’s
apartment. The jarring movements caused pain to splinter through Kim’s ankle, but she gritted her teeth and ignored it. “One more flight,” she panted to her stepmother as they rounded another incline in the stairwell.
Megan held the revolver like a pro, not too obvious but ready to be used if it came to that. By the time they reached Nikki’s apartment, Kim already knew she was too late. Bile churned in her stomach at the sight of the unlocked, slightly ajar front door. “No,” she gasped. “No! No! No! No! No!”
“Maybe she’s still inside,” Megan said shakily as they let themselves into the apartment and ran in. “Please be inside,” she whispered to the walls as she came to a halt in the living room. Her wide blue eyes watched Kim as she dashed into the bedroom, the bathroom, everywhere, looking for Nikki.
“Nikki!” Kim shouted, her voice on the verge of hysteria. “Nikki please answer me! Please!”
Megan’s teeth sank into her lower lip. Her gaze flicked down to the carpet. Her eyes, already wide, bulged. “Oh dear God,” she gasped. “Kim—oh no!”
Kim was at her side in a heartbeat. “What?” she shouted, her breasts heaving up and down with her labored breathing. “Megan—what is it?”
Thomas burst his way into the apartment, scaring the life out of Kim. She jumped, then upon realizing who it was, turned haunted blue eyes up to the detective as she watched him stare at her, his breathing even more ragged than hers.
“She’s not here,” Kim croaked out, her voice catching. “I checked everywhere.”
He looked as nauseous as she felt. Nikki was gone and the two cops assigned to protect her had seemingly disappeared into thin air. “I’ll go check the grounds and call the station,” Thomas rasped. “I’ll be right—”
“They are long gone,” Megan whispered. She took a deep breath as she pointed to the carpet, but her voice still trembled. “Look.”
Her stepmother seemed too shocked, too sick, to say anything else. Following her line of vision, Kim glanced down to the carpet. She stilled.
“Blood,” Thomas murmured, having come up behind her.
Kim felt dizzy, everything around her spinning. “Dried blood,” she said, the words ripping out of her throat in a guttural, half-insane sound. That meant Lucifer had dragged her out minutes ago—maybe many minutes ago. Perhaps too long to find him. “No!
Oh, god
-Nik, please!”
She felt Thomas’s hands rest on the back of her shoulders—felt them but somehow didn’t register they were there. She was going to faint, or be sick, or . . .
Not Nikki, Kim hysterically thought. This wasn’t happening. She should have stayed with her, should never have let her best friend out of her sight.
“Stay put!” she heard Thomas shout as he ran out of the apartment. The world was spinning. Her ears were ringing from the violent way her heart was pumping. “I’ll be right back!”
Chapter 28
Monday, July 28 3:44 A.M.
Nikki awoke slowly, groggily, the top of her head aching
so badly it wrenched a soft moan from her. Her eyelids felt heavy, like lead weights she wanted to open but couldn’t. She was cold, she thought, her teeth starting to chatter. She needed a blanket—something, anything. So cold.
“Please,” she heard a feminine voice softly plead. “I can’t take any more.”
No answer. Just the sound of a Polaroid snapping photographs and a familiar tune being hummed while . . .
Nikki stilled. She knew that tune. And, she thought, as memories came flooding back, she knew that woman’s voice.
Open your eyes,
she commanded herself.
Open them!
“Please,” the feminine voice gasped. “No more—just kill me,” she begged. “Please
just kill me
.”
Nikki’s heart began slamming in her chest. Her eyes flew open. She stared in horror at the sight that greeted her.
Priscilla Harrington-Barnsworth—naked, spread-eagled, tied down to a folding table. Four tiny but deep cuts on her upper torso kept blood steadily dripping from her body. Her unblinking hazel eyes were dim with pain and empty with resolve.
He walked toward the senator, humming in his throat.
Him.
Oh God—how could it be him? How could she have not known . . .
He was going to rape Priscilla, Nikki thought, perspiration breaking out on her forehead. He was starting to unzip his trousers and—
“No!” Nikki groaned, her head feeling like it was ready to split into two. “Leave her the hell alone, you sadistic asshole!”
He stilled. His head slowly turned toward her.
She hadn’t been dreaming, she thought, feeling sick. It
was
him.
“Don’t talk to me like that!” he bellowed, stalking toward her, Priscilla forgotten. “Don’t ever talk to me like that!” He raised his palm and slapped her across the face, brutally enough to make Nikki taste blood.
Nikki’s gaze fell to the senator—the same senator who had managed to work one of her hands loose of the knots. She resisted the urge to let her eyes widen and narrowed them at the man who meant to kill her instead. She smiled at him, confusing him.
Please God!
she thought hysterically, her raw emotions in stark contrast to her calm, even cold exterior.
Please let me pull this off.
“You’re a coward,” Nikki whispered, watching his body tense and still. “You can rape me. You can kill me. . . .” She smiled fully, showing him white teeth stained by dripping crimson blood. “But you will always fear me.”
“Shut up!” He backhanded her again.
Nikki blinked several times in rapid succession, the impact making her vision blurry.
“Shut up!” He grabbed fistfuls of his hair by the roots and closed his eyes. His chest heaved up and down as he worked to calm himself.
The police profiler she’d spoken to had been right, Nikki realized. He did fear women. He feared their power over him, couldn’t stand to be taunted by one.
“Shut up!” he bellowed.
The senator was so close to being free. Nikki could see how close in her peripheral vision.
He couldn’t. Yet.
Terrified of what his reaction would be, but knowing she had no choice left to her, Nikki went in for the kill. “Just a coward,” she murmured, taunting him.
Hurry the hell up, Priscilla!
she frantically thought. If her adrenaline went any higher, she’d pass out. “A coward.”
Rage the likes of which she’d never before been the brunt of swept over his features in a way that horrified her. His entire musculature contorted, sweat dripped off his forehead in rivulets.
A gleaming silver knife rose high above his head. Nikki didn’t want to show him fear, but couldn’t contain it. Her eyes widened when the grim reality that she had pushed him too far clawed at her gut like talons.
There would be no time for Thomas to find her, she realized in ice-cold terror. Unlike Priscilla, Nikki’s deathblow would be coming mercifully soon.
Thomas. Oh God, she loved him so much. What would this do to him? He’d wrongly believe he’d failed her. Just like he wrongly believed he’d failed Amy.
Her captor wielded the knife higher above his head, screaming like the lunatic he was, his body shaking.
It was over, Nikki realized, swallowing convulsively. Her time had just run out.
Kim stared unblinking at nothing as she paced back
and forth in Nikki’s apartment, police officers seemingly everywhere. Thomas had said to wait for him here, but he was yet to come back. One of the detectives had informed her he’d raced over to the Harrington-Barnsworth campaign headquarters to follow up on a possible lead. The officer didn’t know how long it would be until Thomas returned.
Deciding not to wait around like a useless decoration, she walked over to where Megan sat on the sofa. “Let’s go,” she said softly. At her stepmother’s nod, she turned to the closest detective to let him know they were leaving. “My cell will be on at all times. Please have Detective Cavanah phone me as soon as he hears something.”
“He wants you to wait here for him, ma’am,” the officer politely informed her. “I think you should, too.”
Kim closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I can’t,” she whispered, the pain she felt unguarded. Her eyes opened and found his. “How can you expect me to stay here where all I can do is stare at my best friend’s blood on the carpet?”
He sighed, his expression letting her know he understood. “Go on,” he said gently. “I’ll radio Thomas to let him know.”
She released a shaky breath. “Thank you.” She needed to get out of here before she lost it completely. As far away from this apartment as possible. She needed to run, scream, sob, think. Right now she felt numb, disassociated from her body. “Please let me know the second you get any news at all.”
The officer nodded. “Will do, ma’am.”
Five minutes later, Kim and Megan were in Kim’s BMW, Megan at the steering wheel. Kim turned up the air-conditioning as high and cold as it could go, closing her eyes at the sudden blast. It felt good, the icy intensity almost painful. It helped her shake off the feeling of disassociation that had engulfed her.
Think, damn it. Think. . . .
The dreams. Over time many of the little details in them had changed. The vantage point through which she could see Nikki’s murder take place, the accompanying sounds, even the method of death. But a few things had always—
always
—stayed the same.
A dark place. The scent of water. Her eyes widened.
“Don’t go home,” Kim whispered, her head turning to stare at her stepmother. “Go to the Flats.”
One of Megan’s eyebrows slowly inched up.
“She’s still alive,” Kim said, her heartbeat picking up enough to give her an adrenaline rush. She felt hope surge inside of her for the first time since finding her best friend’s apartment abandoned, blood stains on the carpet. “I know she’s still alive.”
Thomas paced back and forth. He saw Maxwell
Harrington do the same a few feet over. Both men were liable to wear holes into the linoleum floors of the small campaign headquarters the senator kept in the Flats.
The instinct Thomas had to blindly comb the streets was overpowering. It took all of his willpower to talk himself out of it. Nikki was out there somewhere, still alive. Her time was running out. So was the senator’s.
There was no efficiency in roaming the streets. Not yet. Not when a very real lead might come of the waiting. Since the phone company hadn’t offered much in the way of enlightenment, Thomas needed to hear the communication specialist’s results, see if she discovered anything from the last phone call Priscilla Harrington-Barnsworth had engaged in. He’d give her five more minutes before he started that combing.
Nikki
,
he thought.
Nikki.
He’d never loved a woman like he loved her. He couldn’t lose her, refused to lose her.
Thomas tried not to dwell on how much trouble Lucifer had gone through to acquire Nikki—he’d knocked out one officer assigned to watch her apartment and slit the throat of the second one. He tried not to let it mess with his focus, but he was all too aware that the more Lucifer craved a victim the longer and more intense the torture he doled out to her was.
He couldn’t stand to think of that. It ate at his gut the way it did every time he thought about the four brutal days his daughter had endured.
James. How could James be capable of this. . . .
“The location of the perpetrator when he phoned the senator,” Amanda Hibbs, the communications specialist, announced, “was definitely within the Flats.”