(Blood and Bone, #2) Sin and Swoon (19 page)

But now, knowing it’s in Manhattan, I don’t know if I can do it. Maybe when I was younger.

Who am I kidding?
I have never been fun-loving, and I have never liked Manhattan.

I’ve done UN security detail, and the UN headquarters creep me out. The whole
international soil
bothers me. What happens there stays there. I’ve seen it a lot. American rules do not apply, and I happen to like our rules regarding rape and women’s rights. A whole year there is unappealing. Especially when I have a job I like.

Granted, I won’t be able to do any more mind runs, I have clearly done too many already, but maybe I can help the new people who are set to take it on. I could even go back into active duty as far as tracking goes. Profiling terrorists for the military and living in Manhattan sounds about as much fun as having my teeth pulled out.

When I get to the building downtown, Angie gives me a warm hug. “How are ya?”

“Tired and annoyed.”

She lifts my finger. “And still engaged, I see. Dr. Dash did his magic, did he?”

I sneer. “You know how adorable he is when he begs.”

“The most adorable. It’s unbearable.” She laughs. “What’s the plan with the new job?”

“Not sure. The details have started rolling in since this job is nearing its end. They want me to move to Manhattan, and Dash is here in DC, and my life is going to be poo.”

She wrinkles her nose. “The UN is a rather interesting spot.”

“Worst job ever, and Manhattan. I’m not a New York kind of girl. I don’t do high heels and brunch and gluten-free and the next new thing that’s hot for seven seconds.”

“Stop, ya love brunch, and we both know it.” She laughs again and points at the sheet of paper in her hands. “Anyway, we have the backstory on the girl, Ashley Potter. I need to cross-reference what ya know with what we know. We apparently have some blanks that need to be filled in. I haven’t ever done this before, so bear with me, eh?”

“It’s easy. We can be casual; the details can be fixed up to sound smart later when they transcribe the whole thing. Start the recorder.” I cross the room to the huge desk and sit, getting comfy so I can start sifting through my brain. “This is Special Agent Jane Spears and Dr. Angela O’Conner doing the detailed report on the mind run for one Ashley Potter. As far as the details of the mind run are concerned she has given many of the details of her kidnapping, capture, confinement, escape, recapture, and attempted murder. Ashley Potter arrived at nursing school in Seattle from her hometown, Tanner, Washington, in the late summer, starting freshman year in 2014. Her mother smuggled in a cat, a ginger tabby named Angel. Her first roommate, a girl I did not ascertain the name of, but I am certain the report has her named, was a complete ass about the cat. They fought for a week or so, resulting in a girl named Stephanie Banks, or Steph, as Ashley knew her, proposing the great roommate switch. Steph was actually an assy bigot—that’s not a technical name but it is what Ashley called her—who our girl Ashley rarely hung out with. It was believed the old roommates were lesbians. I don’t recall their names, but Steph hated them. Flipped out when she discovered her roommate was a lesbian. Again, they are named in the file done by the patrol officers.”

“In the report ya e-mailed me ya used names from previous files.”

“Yeah, Michelle and Leona.” I nod, not opening my eyes. “The scenery in Ashley’s mind was moving fast, and I needed some anchors. I used Michelle and Leona because they reminded me of who I was and that I wasn’t Ashley. Anyway, the other roommates moved into the room together, and Ashley ended up in a room with Stephanie and the cat. Finally Stephanie wears her down and gets Ashley out on the town with her. Both get completely trashed off their ass. Our guy, Mr. X, met Ashley that night. He brought her back to his place, under the guise of being friends with her roomie, but the roomie wasn’t there. She apparently left the bar with a professor friend of our guy’s from another college and ended up leaving school permanently.”

“Ya think it’s possible Stephanie was murdered to create a backstory for Mr. X? If Steph were gone Ashley wouldn’t have known that Mr. X wasn’t a friend of hers. He could claim a friendship with Stephanie, and she wasn’t around to verify the truth or lies.”

I nod. “I would assume as much. We should be dragging the harbor for the girl. We know he likes drowning them. He put Ashley into a river, after all.” I sigh, trying to find my place in my thoughts again. “Anyway, Ashley ends up dating this guy, Mr. X, and no one knows him. He uses the whole
I’m a teacher, we can’t be seen together.
After many dates and what I would consider a serious amount of self-control on Mr. X’s part, he takes her to the cabin on the mountain. This is where things shift for me. I felt like this was abnormal behavior for him, from a profiler’s standpoint. I think our guy liked her and didn’t want to hurt her. I think he wanted it to go somewhere, and I think he liked having her there and her not knowing about the girls under the garage.”

“Jesus!”

“Right! It’s a power thing, though, huh. He has her there, swooning over him, but really he has a harem under the stairs.” I shake my head, reliving that little bit of weirdness. “But our guy isn’t a normal guy, he’s
American Psycho
mixed with Norman Bates. He’s crazy, so he can’t even have normal sex with her. The date goes from sort of awesome to quite revealing about his personality. He has some kinky, weird masturbating-dominator action.”

“Is that the clinical name for it? I have noticed ya use a lot of technical terms in this.”

“We aren’t here for my winning conversation, Angie. The transcribers fix it for me, adding the technical words on the report.” I lift a middle finger, but maintain my focus. “Anyway, I believe Mr. X makes the decision to kill Ashley over Christmas, but she still has a spot in his heart. I think at first he honestly tried to figure out a way to fix things with her, stalking her and watching her, wishing he hadn’t revealed his kinky weirdo within. She sees him stalking her once, and they have real sex in the Jeep, and he panics like a weirdo. Of course then he realizes his insanity is obvious and he can’t do normal, so he breaks things off, driving away like a nut. I think he looked back at his reaction, knew it wasn’t sane, knew she had to be thinking ‘what the fuck’ about it. And while I believe he started the whole thing wanting to keep her safe, I would say the voices got to be too much. The paranoia of what she must think of him got to be too much. He connected his craziness to the missing girls, so he assumed she might also. That’s when he ended up taking her the night she got drunk with the old roommates, the lesbians, from school.”

I can hear her writing. “Is there anything else ya can see in the beginning before the abduction that might help us nail down who he is?”

I shake my head. “Dash and Rory fucking around with the recording—so Dash wouldn’t have hurt feelings—messed with Mr. X. It rotated between Dash as the bad guy at the beginning, and Rory being my brother, to Rory being the bad guy. Even little things found their way in there—his accent and love of Ireland. Idiots. Leave that in there too; let them get in shit for it.”

She sighs. She’s clearly as pleased as I am.

“Mr. X’s ability to cook and his gentlemanly behavior was all Derek; I don’t think that happened. I think he tried, but he was mediocre at best.”

She flips and shuffles papers. “Okay, and post-abduction?”

I roll my head a little, taking a deep breath. Something dawns on me, and I crack an eyelid. “Why are you doing this?”

She shakes her head, rolling her eyes. “The little stunt with messing with ya meant Rory isn’t allowed to be part of this debriefing, and the people who turn this whole fecked-up mess into a file are still managing the site. I suspect they will be at that site for at least six months. They found another set of caves being dug out. Mr. X was midconstruction on more cells. He was a greedy fucker, if ya ask me.”

“Let’s get back to it; I want this over.” I gulp, closing my eyes again. “So Ashley wakes in the cell, she’s scared, and from what I could tell there was a drug in her system. I suspect drugs were part of the food or water all along. The water bottles never cracked like they were brand new; the lids were always opened prior to being put in the minibar. The food would have been enriched, to help with vitamins and nutrients. Loads of vitamin D and all the Bs to stop them from dying down there.”

“To prevent them getting sick down there with no sunlight.”

“Right. But it’s a guess.” I shrug. “She wakes, panics, and then settles. It’s too easy a transition in the beginning. She has no fight in her, and it didn’t feel natural. Her friendship with the girl next to her, Bethany, was what saved her in the long run.”

“Bethany Jones, the girl who died saving Ashley. She was twenty-four, an orphan, and a college student at University of Portland. She was an only child, and the only person who ever looked for her was her caseworker from her days in the system. She was a lot like ya, actually.”

I open my eyes. “What?”

She nods. “Looked similar; parents died when she was young, in a house fire. Dad tied Mom up and lit the place up. No siblings. Bethany was at Grandma’s when it happened. Grandma died two years later, putting Bethany in the foster system at the tender age of seven.”

“No one would have missed her?”

She shakes her head, biting her lip. “The girls in the cellar were all fairly similar. Girls who had just spoken about traveling Europe or cut themselves off from their family.”

“That’s what was so different from them and Ashley, then? She did feel different in that hole. She seemed to be a bit of a rule breaker compared to the other girls.”

She nods again. “Ashley Potter was close to her brother, who is older and at school in Portland. His name is Jason, but ya named him Simon and made him a twin?”

I smile weakly. “He was an unknown to me in her mind, so I made him known. I have to make certain I remain in control in her mind so I don’t get lost.”

She wriggles her lips. “From how it looks in the reports and facts we have found, Ashley really was the odd man out in the cells. The other girls were hardly missed. Considered runaways and part of the stats until Miss Ashley went missing. Then dust started getting kicked up. The uniforms and FBI started to notice there’s a pattern in all the other missing girls. That’s how we got involved.”

“Okay, back to it.” I settle back in and close my eyes. “Bethany and Ashley became friends, often holding each other through the tiny gap in the corner of their walls. They sat and picked at the wall, flushing the pieces in toilet paper. The girls were each other’s rocks. At one point I would have to assume Bethany knew what she had to do. I couldn’t enter Bethany’s mind, so I don’t know if it was a plan, but it seemed like one. As one of the original girls down there, Bethany didn’t get a lot of time with Mr. X. So she waited for him to come to her, and when he finally did, she attacked, and tossed the key to Ashley. Ashley escaped, freeing one of the girls along the way, Lacey perhaps.”

“Lacey Kavinsky. Aged twenty-six, been missing the longest,” Angie adds. “Why did you pretend to be Bethany if you were in Ashley’s mind?” She asks with her eyes on her notes.

“Because I needed to get Ashley’s trust. She trusted no one in her life the way she did Bethany. She loved her like a sister. So I made her think I was Bethany. I needed her to try to show me more. And Dash and Rory screwing around with things meant I had to think fast.” I shake my head. “So Ashley frees Lacey and runs above, blazing a trail for the other girls. But somehow Mr. X manages to convince Lacey to unlock his door. He then goes after Ashley. She hides out in the woods, in shock I think that Bethany has died, and the girls down below never even tried to escape. But they aren’t as strong as Ashley is. They are all broken down, maybe even before Mr. X came along. Ashley runs to a cabin, sitting behind it, sort of defeated, I think. She’s so tired and lost. She needs to figure out a plan, but the drugs in her system have her blurry a bit. Hazy in the brain so to speak. She hears a car, thinks it’s him, returning to the cabin. So she gets up and runs through the woods, heading for the cabins on the lower part of the road. She finds an unlocked truck with keys in the visor, and drives it down the hill. But Mr. X is waiting down there for her. It clearly wasn’t him who came up the hill. He rams the truck, causes an accident. Hits her over the head and takes her back.” This is the part I can’t take. I cringe.

“I think we know what happens next. I don’t think we need to rehash the room. Is she awake when she goes into the water?” Angie sounds disturbed.

I nod, swallowing my bile. “Yes, she had been knocked out in the room of torture, but woke—” I heave, and everything inside of me threatens to come back up. “She woke from the cold water as it rushed over her. Her eyes opened, and she saw him, Mr. X. He was there, rinsing the blood from his hands. She managed to get her face above water and gasp some air in. It went black, her vision went black, as she washed down the shore. I don’t think he even came close to expecting her to make it.”

Angie’s voice sounds shaken. “That river is known for being particularly violent. A few years ago a girl went missing from up there, and her car was parked near the river. So the police attached a tracker to a dead bear along the shore, tossed the bear’s carcass in the river, and tracked its movements. They lost the bloody bear in the rapids. They had hoped the bear would lead them to the girl, but they lost the bear too. So technically Ashley shouldn’t have made it.”

I shrug. “Mild winter. All it did was rain this year, not a lot of snow. Rapids might have been less, giving poor Ashley a chance. Something he clearly never expected.”

“This really was the worst of the worst, eh?” She taps a finger against her lips. “I wonder if that river is where the others are? Girls like Steph who would have gotten in the way of his story or planning? Or girls who didn’t fit into the cellar lifestyle. People like him have been proven to habitually dump bodies the same way.”

I nod. “Look at Samantha Barnes and her father.”