Midnight Exposure (10 page)

“Really?” Indignation laced Nathan’s voice. “No one told me about that.”

Hugh looked down at his notebook. “The tow truck picked up the car around three.”

“Oh, I had some errands to run. Did you check inside the vehicle?”

Hugh’s nod was far too casual. “Nothing unusual in it.”

“This is a small town. Where could she have gone?” Nathan followed Hugh’s gaze as it shifted to the window. Outside, snow-flakes danced in the glow of the rear parking lot light. A spare inch coated the asphalt.

“It’s damned cold out,” Hugh said. “She had hot chocolate with Reed Kimball at the bookstore. She bought a book and left the store at four forty-five. Hasn’t been seen since. We found a Styrofoam cup and her purchase in the hedge outside the inn.”

“Not good.”

“No. Definitely not. Doug and I did a drive around. No sign of her. With this storm gearing up for tomorrow, I want to dispense with the usual wait and start looking for this girl in a major way. I need volunteers. Appreciate it if you could handle organizing them. Doug’s already started making calls.”

“Sure thing.” Nathan rose. “I’ll see how many people I can scrape up. Maybe she fell or something. Hit her head. I can’t think of any other possibilities.”

“If she fell outside the inn, she’d still be outside the inn.” Hugh tugged on his cap and rose. “I don’t like this one bit, not after that body turned up last week.”

Nathan rose to his feet and splayed his palms on the desk. “Hugh, we talked about that. Do not go starting any rumors unless the medical examiner officially rules that death a homicide. Chances are that kid died of exposure.”

“Don’t you think it’s odd, having two strange events in such a short period of time?” Hugh cocked his head.

“No. Pure coincidence. There’s nothing unusual about someone getting lost and freezing to death. Happens every year.”

“But now we have a missing kid and a missing tourist.”

“Christ, Hugh. That kid disappeared over six weeks ago. You can’t possibly connect the two events. This town can’t afford bad publicity. This was the slowest hunting season on record. One more like that and this town’ll shrivel up and die.”

A rap on the door frame cut Nathan off before he could threaten Hugh with town council intervention. A uniformed Lieutenant Doug Lang stood in the hall, a black knit hat clenched in both hands.

“The Rotary Club is going to help.” Doug’s gaze passed over Hugh and settled on Nathan. “Do you want to use the diner as a base?”

“Good idea, Doug,” Nathan answered.

Doug flushed.

“I’ll get on the phone to the state and county boys, but I doubt we’ll get any help yet.” Hugh grunted and stepped into the hall. “We need to find her. Before we have another body on our hands.”

Doug’s eyes followed Hugh’s exit.

“So how many volunteers do we have in the Rotary?” Nathan pulled paper and a pencil from his desk drawer.

Doug pulled a small notebook from his pocket. “A dozen. We’re calling the volunteer firemen, too.”

“Good.”

Doug scratched his head with the tip of his finger. He glanced at the door and lowered his voice. “Just so you know, Hugh’s been talking to Reed Kimball about that dead kid.”

Nathan snapped the pencil in two. “Has he?”

“Yeah. Hugh isn’t telling you everything about this Jayne Sullivan. I think it’s a huge coincidence that one of the last people to see her alive was Reed Kimball, considering.”

“Considering what?” Other than that Hugh wanted Reed to take over as chief. Really, Hugh wanted anyone but Doug to take over as chief. Nathan couldn’t blame Hugh. Doug was an idiot, but his daddy owned the local bank. Nathan found the lieutenant easily manipulated and therefore useful on occasion.

Doug expression went smug and mean. “You didn’t know?”

Jayne raised her eyelids and immediately squeezed them shut again. Her head felt like a bowling ball mounted on a Popsicle stick, with her neck not nearly strong enough to support its bloated burden. Pain and nausea competed for top billing as she clawed her way out of a drugged stupor. A weak shiver coursed through her limbs.

Had she been at a party? Had someone slipped her something
? Her memory was a deep dark hole. The fact that she couldn’t remember the previous night washed over her consciousness like an ice-cold shower.

She tried to raise a hand to her head. A tug on her other wrist and a metallic jingle made her eyelids snap open. Pain shot through her left hand. Her vision blurred in the dim light. She blinked hard and focused as the images in front of her sharpened.

Handcuffs linked her wrists. A thick chain fastened her bound hands to the stone wall four feet away. She stared at them as if they were figments of her imagination. She turned over her left hand. A fresh cut was just beginning to scab over. Adrenaline pushed the first twinge of terror through the drug-induced haze.

This can’t be happening.

Ignoring the pressure behind her eyeballs, she scanned her surroundings. Four walls of irregular stone. Dirt floor. Low ceiling. A bare lightbulb was attached directly to a rough-hewn
beam. A steep wooden staircase rose in the center of the space. High on the opposite wall, faint gray light filtered in through two narrow, rectangular windows. An ancient furnace hunkered in the far corner.

OK. She was in a basement. But where? And how long had she been down here? She glanced toward the closest small window. With the heavy cloud cover, it could be dawn, dusk, or anywhere in between.

She forced herself to a sitting position. The room spun briefly, and she closed her eyes for three slow breaths. A gentle probe with her fingertips found the egg-size lump behind her ear. When she pressed on it, pain bounced through her head like a pinball.

Jayne blinked hard to sharpen her focus. The walls were covered with hundreds of those strange symbols. As her head cleared, Jayne connected the dots. She sucked a shaky breath into her lungs, controlled the exhalation.

She’d been knocked unconscious, drugged, and kidnapped by whoever was following her around town. This sort of thing happened to other people. She heard it on the news, read about it in the newspaper. She watched
CSI
with the same morbid fascination as everyone else.

But this sort of violence didn’t actually strike the average person. Twice. And how had he grabbed her without making a sound? She was always vigilant.

Fear swept the remaining fuzz from her brain. Her situation crystallized. If she couldn’t find a way to escape, she would die here. She refused to contemplate that option. There was always a way out, a counter to every attack. She just had to find it.

She would escape.

But how?

Both windows were barred. No bulkhead doors. The only way out was at the top of the staircase. It was also the only way in, and the way that her captor would enter when he came back.

Because whoever he was, he
would
come back. The faces of the men she’d met in Huntsville flashed through her mind: Nathan, Jed, Chief Bailey, Bill. She forced herself to add Reed to the list. Her attraction to him didn’t alter the fact that he was essentially a stranger.

What if Reed wasn’t R. S. Morgan? Could one of the other men be the sculptor? Could the sculptor be mentally ill? How desperate was he to keep his identity a secret? She hadn’t heard from Chief Bailey, so she didn’t know for sure that Ty Jennings was still in Philadelphia.

Jayne drew in more stale air and refocused with a quick, painful shake of her head. Next to her, directly under the place where the chain was fastened to the stone, three bottles of water tempted her. It looked like her captor wouldn’t be back right away, and that he wanted her alive—for now.

Jayne licked her chapped lips as she picked up a bottle and examined it. The seals were broken; the water was probably laced with a sedative. She set it back on the floor. Like she’d drink anything supplied to her by a kidnapper who’d already drugged her once.

A faint moan sounded from above.

Jayne held her breath and strained her ears for sounds. Only silence greeted her ears. No footsteps echoed from overhead. No squeaking of floorboards. No hum of appliances. Nothing.

Must have been the old house above her settling or the wind through the trees outside.

Scooting back to lean against the rough wall, she squinted at the tiny window across the room. Through it, she could see
the edge of the forest. Fat snowflakes fell against a colorless sky. From the lack of other visible roofs and the silence, she doubted she was still in town. The vastness of the wilderness surrounding Huntsville flashed through her mind. Didn’t matter. She’d take her chances out there over what was in store for her in this basement.

She didn’t want to die, but she
really
didn’t want to be tortured, then die.

Jayne pounded a fist on her knee. Death wasn’t an option. Not only did she have plenty of living to do, she couldn’t do that to her brothers. They’d never be able to cope with losing her, especially Danny. He’d already sacrificed enough. His mental state was far too fragile to cope with another loss.

Time to get off her butt and out of this prison.

The room was cold but not as freezing as outside. Jayne felt the dampness seep into her bones. She was dressed exactly as she’d been when she left the bookstore: wool sweater, jeans, and boots. Her jacket, hat, and gloves were missing. No doubt to discourage an escape attempt.

Jayne examined the handcuffs. Too tight to slip out. There was a tiny keyhole in each, and Jayne wasted a few minutes searching her pockets and the surrounding dirt for anything that would fit into the hole. She was no angel. She’d picked a few locks in her day.

Finding nothing useful, she tucked her feet under her body and rose to a kneeling position. Whatever drug she’d been administered was wearing off rapidly, because she only wavered for a brief moment before getting to her feet. Her legs felt steadier than she’d expected.

She tested the length of chain with a yank. It didn’t give, but a few minuscule granules of gray dust trickled down to the floor to accumulate in a hopeful pile. Jayne pulled harder. The metal
cuffs bit into her flesh. Blood seeped from the thin skin over her wrist bones.

She ignored the pain and stepped to the wall to inspect the fastening, a giant eyehook set directly into the mortar. Jayne grasped the eye with her fingers. In the next few minutes, she managed a painstaking eighth of a turn, watching optimistically as more dried mortar dust emerged from the hole and trickled slowly down to the dirt floor.

Freeing the hook was going to be a slow process.

But how much time did she have before her captor returned?

Jayne said a silent prayer and wiggled the hook again.

“I’ll be in the truck, Scott!” Reed shrugged back into his coat and snagged his keys from the hook by the door.

“Coming,” his son called from his bedroom at the other end of the one-story house.

Juggling two travel mugs of coffee, Reed opened the door and stepped out into the predawn gray. He was raw and numb from the night’s lack of success in finding Jayne. How could she be gone?

Snow fell, the density of the dancing white curtain thickening by the hour. Three inches had accumulated since midnight. Sheba brushed past his legs to chase a squirrel up a nearby tree. Reed leaned in and started the red Yukon. A blistering gust burned his unshaven jaw, sending a fresh ache of cold through his bones. The tall pines overhead bowed to the wind. Jayne’s Caribbean-blue eyes filled his mind while emptiness crushed his chest.

Where was she? Was she warm? Was she injured? He refused to think about the possibility of her being dead, even though his
inner cop told him the chances increased with each hour that passed.

Never mind the fact that 90 percent of women taken to a secondary location didn’t survive.

Pushing the sick feeling back, he opened the back door of the truck. “Come here, girl.”

Sheba leaped into the vehicle. Reed closed the rear door and climbed behind the wheel, grateful for the dog’s silent company. Scott burst from the house and loped down the short walk. Slinging a backpack to the floor, he hopped into the truck. He removed the Pop-Tart that protruded from his front teeth, rooted through the bag, and pulled out a blue box. He handed Reed a cold toaster pastry. “Here.”

“Thanks.” Reed took it. His stomach protested the first bite, but he forced it down. The sugar would have to serve as a stand-in for sleep. It took a few seconds for the artificial flavor to come to life on his tongue.

Strawberry.

He closed his eyes, the scent conjuring images of Jayne in his mind. Her wide smile, the vivid turquoise of her eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw.

The small shake of her head as she refused his escort to the inn.

The pastry went back into the package. Food would not fill the void inside him. Just like wallowing in guilt and loss wouldn’t find Jayne.

He shifted into gear and the truck rolled down the drive.

“You OK?” Scott asked.

Reed glanced at his son. Scott’s eyes were underscored. The night’s search had been long and cold, but the teen had held up. Like a man. Even if Reed had fucked up every other aspect of his life, Scott had turned out OK.