A knot formed in her throat but she pushed past it. He was enjoying himself. He’d manipulated his entire universe for all these years. Being blind had been a game. The people in his life were pawns.
“How many?” she asked, but she was almost afraid to know.
He walked to the mantel. Stopped a few feet from it and looked at whatever he’d set there. A statue of some sort, just a few inches tall. “Ten,” he said. “Ten fucking angels from my mother. They watched, they saw. And when they did, I crushed them. Every one of them.” He turned back to her. “Do you want to know what I turned them into? You’ll be impressed, I think.” She might have answered—to keep him talking—but didn’t need to. He went on without any encouragement. “I turned them into blind mutes. I put the clay on their faces and then handed them to Maggie, and she made them beautiful and hung them on the wall. It was all my mother wanted, anyway, to be beautiful.” He was laughing now, a gleeful sound. “No one else could see what they were. Only the blind man. Isn’t that wonderful?”
God, he was crazy. Stay with it. Pay attention. His mother had committed suicide. Erin remembered that. “So your mother left you. But her angel kept watching.”
Rodney sneered. “Angel? Singular? Not one, you stupid bitch. Ten. Ten. It’s taken me years to find them all. Every time I killed one, another was there.” He fingered the angel on the mantel and his posture got a shot of steel. “But this is the last. I don’t care who it is. Maggie. You.
Mann. It doesn’t fucking matter anymore, as long as it’s gone.”
He knocked the angel statue off the mantel, a sweeping motion that was filled with rage. It flew across the room and hit the mattress on the floor, bounced twice, and lay there.
Looking up at him.
He stared. His frame was vibrating. Erin thought he couldn’t breathe.
Then he turned and marched straight to her. Rage in his eyes. She tried to scoot from reach, but his boot caught her in the chest. She rolled, and another kick hit her chin. He went at her, again and again, and Erin rolled into a ball and prayed she could fool him.
R
ODNEY STOOD BACK
to catch his breath. She was gone. He bent down and hauled her to the table. Deadweight. Damn her.
So your mother left you.
Fuck you. It doesn’t matter now.
He straightened, feeling the gaze of the figurine on the mattress. Unbroken, but not for long. He just had to kill Erin first.
He studied her, bound on a wooden table with duct tape around her wrists and ankles, her eyes staring into the rafters in a daze.
What do you see now, bitch?
Nothing, he thought, and got the stun gun and glue ready. He stretched her out straight. Several minutes had passed since he’d used the stun gun; she ought to be coming around again. But she wasn’t.
Shit. He shouldn’t have cut loose on her quite so hard. She’d just made him so fucking mad. And now she was nearly gone.
Didn’t matter. He would have enjoyed taunting her more, enjoyed explaining everything to her psychologist’s mind, but time was ticking. Nick would be here soon. Gotta move.
He pried a hunk of earth from the pile he’d brought in, kneaded it like artist’s clay, then reached down and smeared it onto her face. Got another dollop and pushed it over the edge of the first, over the slender nose, over the high cheekbones, over the seam of ugly stitches at her temple. He smiled at that. On the inside of this mask would be something special: the imprint of stitches and the swell of a nasty welt on the side of her face. When the authorities found this one, there would be no doubt whose face had provided the mold.
The mighty Erin Sims. Just in time to join her brother in hell. A two-fer.
The dregs of his anger drained at that, and he worked faster, pushing more mud onto her face. He hadn’t been a hundred percent certain it would work, the earth unrefined and a little too dry, but it did. This one wasn’t going to be art, after all. This one would just be a death mask.
He smeared it on until he ran out, one side of her face half-caked, the other still pale and clear. He held a hand over her nose. Her breaths were barely there.
He picked up the lantern from the hearth, turned up the flame and headed for the basement. It was almost as empty as the rest of the house, but he found a shovel.
Good enough.
He peeked in on Erin Sims’s unmoving body and carried the shovel outside. He got in the car and angled it to face into the woods, then left the headlights on and followed the twin beams, looking for a spot clear of trees. Didn’t want to run into big roots six inches down.
He found a spot that looked hopeful, and began digging.
Tick-tock,
Dr. Sims.
Erin held her breath, listening. Her cheek and nose were nearly covered, the sharp tang of earth in her nose.
Pain rolled over her in waves, but she didn’t care. She was alive. He’d stopped kicking and hitting when she went limp and sank into a ball—no sport in beating a dead woman. She’d struggled not to move, to let her body be deadweight.
Not as far gone as he thought.
But maybe not as strong as she’d need to be? She wasn’t sure. Her feet felt swollen; the bastard had bound her tight. She gave her hands a try. They were taped, even tighter than before.
And she was on a table, afraid to move. She listened, straining to hear footsteps. He was gone.
Easy, now. Keep your head.
She took a deep breath, braced for the pain, and swung her legs around. Bound, the movement nearly threw her off kilter, but she hung on and swiveled to her side on the table. One more try and she got her legs over the edge to sit up.
And nearly passed out. The room whirled. Erin swallowed back a chunk of fear in her throat and the sensation of the mud tightening on her face brought a wave of panic. For a few seconds, she could do nothing but lift both hands and scrape at her face like a madwoman. “Get it off, get it off,” she whispered, frantic, as the mud hit the floor in pieces.
Stop it; don’t be crazy. There’s no time for that.
She slid to the floor, her heart beating like that of a cornered hare. She found her balance and straightened, carefully, unable to separate her feet. She turned around and braced her hands on the table, scuffling a few inches at a time toward the door. A kitchen back there; she could see it. It was dark and unused, but if there was a sharp object anywhere in the house, it would be there.
The length of table ran out—she had to go without. She hopped once, swayed and almost fell, then bunny-hopped to the wall.
Her heart raced, but the wall held her up. She caught her breath and started moving, getting the hang of the locomotion: a two-footed scoot and then a hop to catch her balance, staying close against the wall. Scootch, hop. Scootch, hop.
She made it to the kitchen door and nearly wilted with relief, then rounded the doorway and lost the wall at her back. Erin fell, face first.
Thwack,
she hit the bare cement. Pain rolled through her head on a cloud of dizziness, and a slippery heat pooled between the cold surface of the concrete and her skin. Forehead, she realized, as the pain began to throb, and then decided her eyebrow must be split. Blood in her eye.
She rolled, trying to get it to drip the other way, and waggled upright again, using the lower kitchen cupboards as her wall. Vertical, she pulled drawers open, one after another, bending close in the dark to see. A knife, a corkscrew, ice pick.
Anything
sharp. Duct tape would tear, if she could just get an edge started. Of course, Rodney had been thorough: The lengths of tape were looped around four, maybe five times. Still…
Nothing.
Damn you, Nick
.
She fingered the edge of the countertop… Sharp enough? No. Granite, of course. Expensive, smooth, granite with rounded edges. Nick’s kitchen. Nothing but the best.
Damn you, Nick.
She inched farther along the counters, trying to listen for Rodney past the thunder beating in her chest and the pain pounding in her head. Scootch, hop. Scootch, hop…
Then she saw the sink, another six feet away. Something in it? Something sharp? Too dark to see, and it was a deep sink—the kind a chef would want.
Damn you, Nick…
She scootched and hopped her way there and almost cried for joy. There, in the depths of stainless steel, was how Nick Mann spent his annual hell weekend. There, in the darkness, lay two empty tequila bottles.
Bless you, Nick.
Nick rolled past Weaver’s. Lights flared all over the plant, cops conducting a search and questioning employees. He swerved to a stop beside a Carroll County cruiser.
“Any sign of him?” he asked a deputy posted at the main entrance.
“No, sir. We’ve got a search going.”
He looked at Quent. “This site’s covered. Let’s go.”
Erin broke the first bottle against the granite counter top without much trouble—and without bringing Rodney running—but it snapped high on the neck, cutting her fingers and leaving her with too little to use as a saw. Her second try was better—she held the bottle by the bottom rather than the top and broke it lower—then bent down in the dark to saw the edge into the tape around her ankles. Her feet were free in no time, but her hands were slick with blood. She couldn’t get an angle to reach the tape on her wrists.
She kept trying, her heart in her throat. Dear God, Rodney would hear and come back, and she couldn’t get the sharp edge to—
It cut. Just like that, the glass slid through and the tape gave way. She was free.
Her heart raced. She used her forearm to wipe blood
from her eye, then stood there panting, trying to decide what to do. Where was Rodney? The garage? The basement? She’d have heard him if he’d gone upstairs; he’d have heard her if he were in the house.
Outside, then, still digging up clay. Unless he
had
heard her, and was waiting, just around the corner, gun in hand…
She closed her eyes. She couldn’t think like that; it would paralyze her.
She glanced around, wishing she knew more about this house. She had to decide: Stay inside and be cornered by the gun or run outside and try to elude him in the dark. Inside there was warmth, limited space, and no weapons besides these bottles. Outside was darkness and cold, the same weapons but room to run, places to hide. A clay mine with people not far away. A bullet could reach out and grab her from dozens of yards away, but not reliably. Even a sharpshooter missed nine out of ten times when the target was moving. And in the dark…
In the end, Erin decided there really wasn’t a choice. She went out a side door from the kitchen, the broken bottle in her right hand. Scooped down to pick up a beer bottle for her left.
She looked around. A gray-white column of light—headlights—pointed off to her left, and darkness stretched to her right and in front of her.
She went for the darkness. Kept rubbing blood from her eye with her sleeve and noticed, with a twist of her stomach, that her sleeve was drenched and sticky. She kept walking, lightheaded through the dark. The ground had a strange way of shifting underfoot. The biggest trees made dark shadows but vines and shrubs were like invisible wires that tangled her feet—
BOOM.
E
RIN DROPPED, SCRAMBLED TO A TREE.
BOOM-thwack.
A second bullet followed, a different sound. This one had hit a tree ten feet in front of her.
God, he saw her.
She whirled to go the other way. Tripped and dragged herself over the ground in an army crawl for a few feet, then lumbered upright and dodged in a different direction. She lost one bottle but hung on to the broken one.
“Bitch,” Rodney called. “Stupid, stupid bitch.”
BOOM.
Erin stumbled, then found her feet and zigzagged between the trees, blood blinding her left eye. The beam of the headlights stretched out in front of her.
BOOM.
She hit the ground. Dear God, her silhouette must be visible in front of that beam. Rodney had seen exactly where she was.
She crawled, blinking at blood and cold sweat, wishing she could take off her jacket and tie the sleeves around her forehead. She couldn’t. The shirt underneath was light
yellow—it would look white out here. She kept moving, knees and elbows dragging across the ground, needing to get out from in front of those damn headlights.
Thirty yards out, forty. Need the dark, need the dark.
Need to rest.
A shred of paper marked a tree and Erin put her hand out, bracing herself to catch her breath. She leaned back against the tree and winced. Something caught her in the back. She pulled away and reached behind her, feeling for it.
A knife. It was stabbed through the target and holding it in place.
Thank you, Nick.
Rodney seethed, stopping to reload the pistol.
Bitch.
He’d just about screamed with rage when he saw her come out of the house, then thought better of it. He doused the lantern and stalked her in the dark. Evil, damnable bitch. She’d tricked him. When he left her, he’d thought she was almost dead.
But he had the advantage. Aside from having a gun, the headlights had stretched out behind Erin like a backdrop. He fired, and Erin dropped below the light. For a moment of sheer thrill, Rodney thought he’d hit her, then her silhouette reappeared, and he squeezed the trigger again. Missed. Kept the bitch on the run, though.
Rodney wasn’t running. Once Erin managed to get out from in front of the headlights, it was harder to keep track of her, but she was hurt, and she’d already been weak and running before he took that first shot. And Rodney didn’t need to be careful where he went. His hair would catch the moonlight, but it didn’t matter if Erin knew where he was. She didn’t have a gun. He did.
He followed the direction he’d seen her go, taking measured steps, peering into the darkness. Erin Sims was no match for him. She hadn’t been for twelve years and she wouldn’t be now.
Relax. Keep looking. You’ll find her as soon as—