Obsession Falls (3 page)

She touched her cheek. More bruising, and the blood wasn’t much. Not too much. In here, there weren’t any wild animals to be attracted to the smell. Maybe some bats. These bats ate insects. No vampire bats lived in Idaho. She was almost sure she remembered that.

Light trickled through the narrow opening above her. Not much light. Not enough. And with Dash out there, she didn’t dare activate her phone.

In fact … she pulled it out of her waist pack and powered it down.

Yes, she was in a cave. Probably no one could use her GPS to locate her. But she didn’t dare take the chance.

If Dash had seen her, if he could somehow wedge his broad shoulders through the hole, he could look down at her and kill her like a duck in a shooting gallery.

But if he had, surely he would have done it by now.

She scooted to put her spine against the wall. She curled up, hugging her knees, listening for Dash, wondering if he saw her go in, if he knew where she hid, if he would come after her with his pistol—or if he would go away and return with dynamite and blast the entry and she would never, ever leave this place of absolute dark and sharp chill and the rustle of creatures unseen.

CHAPTER FIVE

Finally … Taylor fell asleep, rolled onto her side, stretched out … and fell forever into the dark, onto the rocks.

She woke with a gasp, sat up, terrified and trembling.

She was fine. She was fine. She hadn’t fallen at all.

It was nothing but a dream.

But she couldn’t go to sleep again. Could. Not. Did. Not. Dare. It was too dangerous.

It was dangerous to stay here, too.

Her mouth was dry. Even her teeth felt dry.

She hadn’t had a drink for hours. She was dehydrated. She needed water, and soon. Which meant … which meant she had to leave.

She could take heart in the fact Dash hadn’t followed her in. She’d seen no flashlight beam pierce the dark.

Of course, she had barely made it through the crack. That broad-shouldered, muscular murderer of a football player sure as hell couldn’t do it.

Seamore “Dash” Roberts. She leaned her head back against the rock. What did she know about him?

Not much. She followed football with mild interest, and only her local teams. But Dash was special. He was a celebrity … of sorts. He’d played two and a half seasons for the Miami Dolphins, had been one of their hottest players. Then he’d beat up his model girlfriend so brutally he put her in the ICU for over a month, and broke her face so horribly she could never look in the mirror again, much less get work as a model.
She
committed suicide, and
he
served six months of a three-year sentence—he was a sports superstar, no reason to make him pay too much for brutality and mutilation. Then he was out on parole, confined to his home for two months, which gave him time to get picked up by the Detroit Lions. He was back on the field, fast as ever, a media darling, when he got photographed betting on his own game. That was the end of his football career. After that, there were some moments of glory in arena football, but he kept a low profile.

Now she knew why. He was working for hire as a hit man, and apparently without a shred of conscience.

A little boy. He was going to kill a little boy.

And her, too. But really … what kind of monster killed a kid?

She wanted to look at her phone. She wanted to check the time. It had been hours—she thought—since she’d crawled in here. Was it dark outside?

Yes, because no more light leaked into the cave.

Should she try to leave?

Could
she leave, or was she trapped here?

Using her hands to sweep up the wall behind her, she stood, and at about five feet up, she located the outcrop that led to the entrance.

She was five-seven. This was doable. She could climb up there. Somehow. If the rock didn’t break. If she didn’t fall backward and splatter her brains out on the stone ledge, or fall all the way down into whatever oblivion waited at the bottom of the cave.

What if Dash was sitting out there, waiting?

No choice. In her waist pack she carried her phone, some drawing pencils, a sharpener, a mini-pack of tissues, a fold-up cup, and an energy bar. She had more stuff in her rental car: a couple of bottles of water, a sandwich. But she hadn’t come equipped to camp. She hadn’t come to survive. She’d come out to sketch ingrown toenail mountains.

She was a skilled furniture designer. She was a respected interior decorator. She liked her job. She liked the money she made. So why the hell had she decided she needed further fulfillment as an artist?

She was such a schmuck.

And she was stalling.

She groped across the rocky surface. She found dust and gravel, but nothing to hang on to.

She pulled on the ledge a little, wincing when a few chunks of stone crumbled and fell at her feet.

She opened and ate the energy bar, and stuffed the wrapper back in her waist pack.

She pulled out her phone. Held it in her hand and decided that since she was deep underground no one—that would be Dash or his mysterious boss—could trace her signal. She squatted down and huddled close against the wall, powered on her phone, and blinked at the sudden blaze of light.

Three thirty-eight
A.M
. She had slept longer than she realized.

She powered it down again, stashed it in her waist pack. She took a breath, and tried to hoist herself up.

Pain shot through her wrist. She landed back on her feet, squatted down, and held her wrist. And rocked.

Cracked. Yeah. Cracked for sure. And it couldn’t have been her left wrist. No. It had to be her right one, and she was most definitely right-handed.

So what? She still had to get out of here.

Standing, she took long, fortifying breaths, and tried to take heart in the fact that the shelf above her had held her weight. If she could work around that wrist and pull herself up there …

This moment was why she had been working out with Brent, the physical trainer. If she could ignore the pain that sadist made her inflict on herself, she could ignore a few bruises and a cracked wrist.

So she did it. She mostly used her elbows, whimpering and scrabbling for anything to hold on to, finding nothing, whimpering and scrabbling some more. It wasn’t graceful. She was glad no one watched her. But when at last she lay there in the narrow, tight place before the narrow, tight crack that would take her out of the narrow, tight cave, she was panting, sweating, trembling. She found herself torn between relief … and fear. Relief because she needed food and water, and fear that she didn’t have the energy to work her way out through the tiny crack in the rock. Plus, she still didn’t know if Dash was out there, and she had to crawl. He could smash her head as soon as she stuck it out.

Cheerful thought.

Wiggling around, she dug a sharpened pencil out of her waist pack.

Hey. It was a weapon. Not much of a weapon, but her karate master had promised that after only twenty lessons, she would be able to kill a man with a sharpened pencil.

Too bad she’d quit karate after lesson two, when she hit the floor and got the breath knocked out of her.

She gathered her courage to make the first move toward freedom—or death.

Beneath her knee, a chunk of rock broke off.

It struck the ledge where she’d rested below, bounced off into oblivion. Her leg dangled in the air. The rest of the ledge started to crumble—and she found herself outside the cave and upright, clutching the pencil in her fist.

And alone.

No Dash.

She wiped the perspiration off her forehead with her bare arm. Put the pencil back into her waist pack. Looked around and tried to evaluate her situation sensibly.

Sensibly
couldn’t change the facts.

It was cold and dark. Really cold. She could see her breath. And really dark. Moonless, and the starlight could not pierce the canopy of the ancient trees.

There were creatures out here. Not just harmless animals like bunnies and mice. Wolf packs lived in Idaho, and black bears, and she was under no illusions about those predators—as she weakened, they would rip her flesh and clean her bones.

She needed to get to her car and get out of here as fast as she could. She needed to do it before dawn.

Because in the cave, she had refused to face one truth.

Every one of those drawings she had deliberately tossed to the wind—every one of those crappy, lousy, humiliating drawings—she had signed every one of them.

Dash and his murderous cohort knew her name.

She needed to find her car before they did.

CHAPTER SIX

Dawn was breaking when Taylor knelt beside a stream, opened her fold-up cup, dipped it in the freezing water, and took a long, grateful drink.

She was already so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers, the icy water made her shiver uncontrollably, and she would probably get giardia from unclean water. But better that than dying of dehydration.

Gritting her teeth, she slid her wrist under the surface and let the water numb the pain and, she hoped, bring down the swelling. She’d slipped more than once in the darkness, and caught herself, and every time agony almost brought her to her knees.

But she kept going. She didn’t know she had it in her, but desperation did wonderful things for a woman’s stamina and courage.

When she had calmed the throbbing, she leaned her back against a tall pine, pulled her knees into her chest in a vain attempt to get warm, cradled her arm, and faced hard reality.

She hadn’t made it back to her car in time. Worse than that, she had done another thing her father had warned her not to do. She had gotten lost in the mountains. The Sawtooth Mountains. Not the kind of mountains they had in the East. Not sissy mountains. The Sawtooths were steep, with elevations towering upward to almost eleven thousand feet. Every night—
every
night—the temperatures dropped below freezing. People got lost here and never came out. Sometimes an unwary hiker found the body. Sometimes no one found any trace.

For people who wanted to disappear, the Sawtooth Mountains were the place to do it, as long as they were prepared for cold and loneliness, hunger, wild animals, and winters that started early and ended late.

Taylor wasn’t totally unprepared. She had a compass—on her phone, which she didn’t dare power up for fear the bad guys would track her.

She knew how to use the constellations, find the North Star. Her father had taught her. But in these mountains, studded with sudden precipices, steep inclines, and unending trees, seeing enough of the sky to consistently find the Big Dipper was impossible. She could climb higher, out of the tree line, but that was going the wrong way, and she needed to eat. Which wasn’t going to happen soon. And she needed to sleep. That, she could manage. Because her father had taught her how to build a shelter.

As she uncurled from the tight ball and stood, she said aloud, “Thank you, Daddy.”

She wasn’t going to like this bed. She wasn’t going to be comfortable. The needles were going to poke her and the sap was going to stick to her skin. Inevitably, there would be bugs. But the branches would hold her up off the cold ground and provide cover to help her retain her body heat. And as the morning progressed, the air would warm and she wouldn’t be so terribly, horribly cold.

Her father had taught her that anytime she went into the forest, to take a hatchet and a knife, preferably the Randall knife—which she still owned. At home. If she had that knife … but she didn’t, so she broke branches off the trees, piled them in a sunny spot, and arranged a nest for herself. She slid down, curled up, pulled more branches over herself, and despite the needles, the sap, and the bugs, she went immediately to sleep.

She woke in the early afternoon. The sun was shining on her face. She itched. Everywhere. And something with creepy legs was crawling down her back.

She flung the branches aside, did the bug-dance, and shook a beetle out of her shirt.

She touched her nose. Sunburn. She had a rash on her arms from the pine needles. Still she felt better than she had when she went to sleep. She could think cognitively. She could make plans and know they made sense.

Okay. She had to get to her car. The Cherokee was parked off the road, hidden by trees, a good mile from where she’d seen the attempted murder. Over this rough terrain, and at night, she couldn’t have walked far from that place where the child … well. She couldn’t think of him right now. Either he was okay or he wasn’t. Now she needed to make sure she was okay.

So to find her car, all she had to do was to go down.

Yes, there was a chance Dash had found the car. Or maybe he was waiting for her along the road.

But she was miles into the mountains. She couldn’t walk back to civilization. She needed a vehicle if she was going to go to the cops and report this murder—or, hopefully, attempted murder.

She scattered her nest, dumping most of the branches in the creek. No use leaving evidence she’d been here.

She would follow the creek down to the basin, stick to the trees, use whatever concealment she could find. When she found the car, she would scout around before she approached it, look for signs that another person had been there. Or was there. And if she was satisfied she was alone, she would get in and drive like hell back to Ketchum and the police station.

No, wait. First she would eat the sandwich and anything else she could find.
Then
drive like hell.

“Good plan,” she said aloud, and started down the creek bed. Then she answered herself, “Of course it’s a good plan. You have no choice.”

Great. Twenty-four hours in the mountains and she was already turning into one of those hermits who held conversations with herself. “It’s okay,” she said. “A couple more hours and you’ll be talking to the police.”