The One That Got Away (16 page)

She rode her luck for as long as she could, but the crazy train came to an end when she threw a seven before her point. Boos and moans followed, and the stickman clawed back all the money everyone had been making during her sweet run. Not all was lost, because she’d pocketed three hundred and fifty dollars before she’d sevened out. That was enough to cover the costs of this expedition.

Just as she walked away from the craps table, two guys in their forties sidled up to her. Both sported the same Men’s Wearhouse look, simple dress shirts and slacks. Neither were Brad Pitt in the looks department, but they weren’t entirely hard on the eyes either.

“Hey, you’re not going, are you?” one of them asked. “The night is young.”

She glanced at her watch, which told her it was close to 2:00 a.m. “Yeah, a girl has to get her beauty sleep.”

“Have a drink with us first,” the other said.

“Why would I get a drink with a couple of strangers?” She smiled to let them know she wasn’t being mean.

They smiled back.

“A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet,” the other said.

A stranger is also someone who’ll abduct you, hang you from a hook, and lash you with a whip
, she thought.

“I’m Jack,” the first of them said, “and this is Rob.”

“And you are?” Rob asked.

“Zoë.”

“The stranger spell has been broken,” Jack said. “As new friends, let’s toast the occasion with a drink.”

She felt the weight of their stares passing over her body. “Why would you want to have a drink with me?”

Rob held a fist of chips. “You won us a lot of money. It’s only right to thank you. Blame my Texas upbringing.”

“So, what do you say?” Jack asked.

She was going to say no, but then considered how stressful tomorrow was likely to be—finding the places that had wrecked her life and cost Holli hers. Regardless of what she discovered, it was going to be brutal on the soul. A cocktail with strangers would be a nice distraction.

“Why not?”

The three cut across the casino floor to Mark Anthony’s. They were trying to impress her. Mark Anthony’s was the kind of bar where complex lighting accentuated the extravagant decor, to justify the high prices, and a pair of bouncers protected the entrance. They grabbed a high-top table in the middle of the place.

Their waitress came over the moment they sat. She introduced herself as Jade, a name Zoë suspected was fake. Zoë guessed they were similar in age, although the waitress’s makeup made it hard to tell. The black cocktail dress Jade wore was low in the front, backless, and high on the thigh. It was all designed to get men to act like fools and spend recklessly in order to impress. Zoë couldn’t really judge. Didn’t she wear the same type of outfit, for a similar effect?

“So guys, can I interest you in a cocktail? Our crew can rustle you up anything you care to name. Or, better yet, can I interest you in a bottle service?”

“Champagne,” Jack announced. “We’re celebrating.”

“I can go for that,” Rob added. “What do you say, Zoë?”

Neither of them seemed like champagne guys to her, and she certainly wasn’t into it. She shrugged. “You said you guys were buying, so I leave it to you.”

“Champagne, it is,” Jack said.

“I’ll bring that right over, guys,” Jade said.

“With a glass of water,” Zoë said.

She’d snacked during the drive, without a real meal, and she was already feeling the effects of the two cosmos she’d knocked back earlier.

“We’re here for the medical-devices trade show,” Jack said. “You here for it too? I’m thinking you’re a rep. Am I right?”

She was half tempted to tell them she was. It wasn’t the first time she’d lied about her profession during a pickup. No one wanted to hear she was a mall cop. Instead, she told them she was just on a minivacation.

Their faces lit up at this reveal. Zoë knew what they were thinking—no blowback. If something sexual happened, it wouldn’t hurt their working relationships. She should have told them she was part of the trade show. It would have helped keep them at bay.

The champagne came, and Jade made a big fuss of filling their glasses. They toasted their good fortune. The guys drained their glasses, while Zoë sipped hers. Rob poured refills all around.

Zoë drank more from her water glass than her champagne glass over the next ten minutes. She didn’t know what was wrong with her tonight. Normally, she would have been matching the guys drink for drink, but she just didn’t have the thirst for it, in more ways than one. She didn’t know if it was Jack’s and Rob’s dull attempts to impress her with their jobs and big-boy toys back home, or the trip she was on that was bringing her down. She had thought a carefree evening at the casino would give her the respite she needed before her journey, but she was wrong. The idea seemed so tawdry and meaningless. She was here to find a killer’s lair. Getting picked up by a couple of random guys just didn’t play into it. The weight of her stupidity rested heavily on her shoulders.

Smarten up
, she thought.
This is the kind of shit that got you snatched in the first place
.

“You know what, guys?” she said, cutting Jack off in the middle of some story about his boat. “I have to call it a night.”

Both Jack and Rob hit her with a chorus of nos and expressed their general disappointment.

She hopped off her stool. “Duty calls, guys.”

Rob caught her wrist. “Look, stick around. We’ll get another bottle, have some fun, and see where the night leads us.”

Rob said more but she didn’t hear him over the roar of blood rushing through her ears. She went from zero to pissed in an instant. All she saw was his grip on her wrist. His attempt to restrain her. His misguided belief that he had control of her. All she had to do was chop him across the throat with her free hand, and he’d learn how misguided he was.

The simple defense move was in her head, ready and primed to go, but she didn’t unleash it. These guys weren’t worth it, and she didn’t need any trouble. What she needed was to get back to her original plan of retracing her steps. The rage left her in a long exhale.

“Rob, don’t make this unpleasant. We all won some money and we had a drink. Now I want to leave.”

He snorted. “What if I don’t want you to leave?”

She felt the rage bubbling back up. She pushed it down. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll scream, and that will bring the bouncers, then the cops, and finally, a night in jail.”

Rob froze.

“I feel a scream building.”

“Christ, Rob, do as she says,” Jack said.

Rob released his grasp, and she strode from the bar, never once bothering to turn around.

On the way back to her to room, she reexamined what had just happened. She’d put herself in a vulnerable position and walked away without hurting anyone. She knew what Jarocki would have called it—growth.

Marshall Beck slipped into Zoë’s apartment complex unnoticed, helped by the cover of night. He’d been watching the place for the past couple of hours, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t in. No lights were on in her residence, and no one had come and gone.

He climbed the stairs to the second floor and strode up to Zoë’s door as if he had good reason to be visiting. That was where so many people went wrong. They looked as though they were there for nefarious reasons. It was an easy disguise for him to assume. He wasn’t acting nefariously. He was acting with good intent.

He brought out a shave key and slipped it into Zoë’s lock. He’d made it himself and practiced on the doors of his home. He had a pick gun too, but he didn’t need it. The shave key worked its magic, and he let himself in.

He flicked on the lights. The apartment’s floor plan was simple—one bed, one bath, with a living room connected to an open kitchen and dining area. The furnishings, or lack of them, gave the place an uninviting feel. Zoë’s place possessed the bare minimum for making a home. In the living room, there was a loveseat and an armchair separated by a coffee table. A TV, not even a flat screen, sat on a stand. The bedroom consisted of just a bed with no headboard pushed against a corner of the room with a nightstand on the exposed side.

This is no single-girl’s love nest
, he thought.

The place didn’t feel feminine. There was nothing ladylike about the furnishings; they were purely functional. And something else was missing. It took him a second to realize what it was—pictures. No paintings or prints gave the rooms personality. No photos gave insight as to whom Zoë held dear. It was such a minor thing, but it made such a difference.

He couldn’t decide if the austerity was a sign of Zoë’s reformed ways or not. When he’d encountered her last year, she’d been a loud and bawdy party girl. Now she lived like a nun but was a gung-ho rent-a-cop, willing to put her life on the line for a stolen cell phone. But that wasn’t strictly true. Rick Sobona’s run-in with her clashed with the nun image, as did that skimpy dress he’d seen her wearing the night of Laurie Hernandez’s death.

He went into the bedroom and slid back the closet door. Among the mall-security uniforms, he found jeans and T-shirts, workout clothes, and four skintight dresses fit for a slut. He touched one and fingered the material.

“You’re a conundrum, Zoë Sutton,” he said, closing the door.

He sat down on the corner of the bed and took in this window on Zoë’s life. He’d come here purely for scouting purposes, but he’d come prepared to take matters to a final conclusion, if needed. His Taser was in one pocket, as was a chloroform-soaked rag. It would be nothing to take her the second she walked through the door.

But should I?

That had been the big question plaguing his thoughts since seeing her on the news. His investigation had revealed a changed woman. Part of him said let her go. He’d made a difference in her. Besides, there were worse examples of human life out there that needed reeducating.

But . . . there was always a
but
. Those whore dresses in her closet. He couldn’t get past those damn dresses. They shrieked of Zoë’s failure to reform. If she hadn’t changed, after getting a second shot at life by the skin of her teeth, well, she deserved his originally intended outcome.

Pursuing her now came with great risk. The cops were watching her. He couldn’t come at her with the same freedom he had with the others, and she wouldn’t be a clean kill. The best thing was to leave her alone. He’d left his mark on her, and it was more than just a scar. Forgetting her was the smart move, but he felt his personal pride picking at him. He’d screwed up and she’d gotten away. He needed to finish what he’d started. That was his failing and his strength.

He moved to the living room and waited for Zoë. And he waited. The clock on the cable box went from midnight to 1:00 a.m., then to 2:00 a.m. At 3:00, it was clear she wasn’t coming home tonight. He could just imagine what she was up to in one of those
dresses
, with someone like Rick Sobona. That red getup he’d seen on her was missing.

“Where are you, Zoë?” he said with contempt. He had the feeling she’d gone somewhere. He’d dropped by the mall earlier in the day, and she hadn’t been there. Had she skipped town? That absent red dress said no. No one skipped town leaving all her clothes but taking her party dress.

Any thought of sparing her left him. He let himself out, knowing he would return.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zoë waited until a couple of hours prior to dusk the following day before leaving Las Vegas. That was when she and Holli had left for home, so it was when she left this time. That meant she’d been forced to spend the day kicking around the Strip, but that had been fine. Vegas had plenty to keep her occupied before she’d begun her long journey of discovery.

She remembered the route they’d started with for their trip back home. It was one of the few things she did recall. They took US 95, which headed to Indian Springs, then threaded between Creech Air Force Base and Death Valley. Eventually, they had planned to cross back into California and return to San Francisco by cutting through Yosemite, a drive that showed the changing landscape of California and Nevada. It should have been fun, not the nightmare it had become.

She had to retrace only the first 250 miles of the 600-mile drive because the police had found her in her wrecked Beetle on US 395, halfway between Mammoth Lakes and Bishop. Confusingly, she’d been heading in the wrong direction, away from San Francisco.

What does that mean?

It meant she’d been doped up enough not to know left from right, north from south. God knows where she’d thought she was going. She replayed the smudged memories of that night. All she remembered was just trying to get away. The shameful thought brought tears to her eyes.

She had used the spot where she’d wrecked as the center of her search. What happened to her and Holli would stem from the point where the cops had found her. How big a radius she was looking at was hard to determine. There were a number of factors to consider. In her dazed condition, how far had she driven from those old sheds? How far had her abductor driven them from the bar they’d been in? Where was the bar? She guessed she was looking at a fifty-to-eighty-mile radius, and she’d drawn the ring on a map that she’d picked up with her rental car. She’d focus her search in that circle. It was a lot of road, but she was helped by the fact that it wasn’t a densely populated part of the country. Towns were few and far between in the large expanse of land. However, it made the task no less daunting.