Run From Fear (45 page)

He’d told her he loved her again. And she told him she needed space.

By the third day, at least she thought it was the third day, Talia was nearly mad from hunger and thirst. She and Rosie barely moved from their same spot in the corner, huddling together to provide some semblance of warmth. Every cell in her body ached with the cold, and she felt like the hard concrete floor was grinding her joints down.

Eugene came a few times a day to provide small sips of water, but she and Rosie were given no food. He gave them a bucket in which to relieve themselves and checked on Talia’s knife wound. Shortly after he’d left that first night, he’d returned with first-aid supplies. He’d carefully cleaned it with hydrogen peroxide, and when she’d gasped and jerked in pain, he’d scrubbed roughly at the wound with a piece of gauze and told her the pain wasn’t even close to what she deserved.

He pulled the sides together with butterfly bandages and covered it with gauze. “Now we just have to wait for it to heal.”

It was the only reason they were still alive, she knew. Or at least, it was why she was alive. Eugene wanted her
“perfect,” unmarred except for the existing scars when he finished her.

But every time he came, she was terrified this would be the time he killed Rosie, just to make Talia’s suffering more profound. Yet he hadn’t made a move, and Talia decided he was planning to wait to kill them together. She knew he would kill Rosie first.

That’s why she’d immediately ripped off the bandages and reopened the wound. She would keep it open, festering into eternity if that’s what it took. To give them a chance to be found.

But the plan had quickly backfired. When Gene saw what she had done, he very deliberately took off his leather belt and walked toward her, slapping it against his opposite hand. As he brought it up, Talia swallowed hard and braced herself for impact. But at the last second, he turned and brought the belt down hard across Rosie’s bare arm. Her shriek filled the chamber and Talia threw herself across her sister, trying to deflect the blows.

Eugene picked her up and slammed her against the wall, and while she lay there, stunned, he bound her ankles and then looped another tie to join them to her wrists, hobbling her and making it impossible to move.

As Talia screamed herself hoarse, he pushed Rosie to her stomach and brought the belt down over and over until her bare skin was covered in ugly welts, some of them beading with blood.

Eugene stood over them, panting, as he slipped the belt back through the loops. “You pull anything else and she’s the one who will suffer, got it?”

Talia nodded and sat perfectly still as he rebandaged the wound, and she didn’t move until well after he’d gone.

She’d left it undisturbed and now, what she was pretty sure was sometime on Tuesday, it was still raw and prone to reopening if she wasn’t careful. It would take a while to heal. Although, she thought morbidly as Eugene came in to give them each their paltry ration of water, by that time they might be dead of dehydration and starvation. It would serve him right if they died before he got around to killing them.

It wasn’t her first choice for an ending, but she’d take it over the violence Eugene had planned. Though she tried to keep her hopes up, the ending where someone—Jack—found them and came to their rescue seemed to be slipping further and further away.

B
y Tuesday morning, Jack decided Talia had had all the space she needed. He called her and, predictably, it went straight into voice mail. He grabbed a coffee to go and headed to her house. If she got pissed at him showing up unannounced, too bad. He didn’t want to risk warning her and having her take off before he got there.

The idea that she would flee stuck in his craw, and some rational part of his psyche thought maybe this was a sign. When the woman you loved was avoiding your calls and you had to practically stalk her just to get her to talk to you face-to-face, maybe that was a sign this wasn’t the relationship he should be pursuing.

Nevertheless, ten minutes later he pulled up in front of her house and was knocking on her door. No answer. He went to the garage and, after a moment’s hesitation, keyed in the alarm code and opened the garage door. There was a small sense of relief when he saw her car wasn’t there.

Nice to know she wasn’t hiding in the house, refusing to open the door while he stood there like a loser. He checked his watch. This was around the time she went to Gus’s for a workout. He climbed back into his car and
drove over. He didn’t see her car in the main lot, but she sometimes parked on the street and went in the back entrance.

Jack jogged up to the entrance, dialing her number as he went on the off chance she’d pick up. She didn’t, and he didn’t see her anywhere in the gym; the only place left to check was the locker room.

The uneasy feeling was building. Even as he told himself he was overreacting, he started to pull up the tracking application that linked his phone with Talia’s. He’d resisted using it before, knowing she’d been upset when he’d tracked her with it the other day. But something was off here.

As he started to log in, he heard a woman call his name. His heart skipped even as he turned and saw that it was Susie, not Talia, waving to him from across the gym. He waited as she stripped off her gloves and jogged over.

“Hey,” she said when she reached him. Her skin was shiny with sweat and she was breathing a little hard. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Is everything okay? Philip told me they arrested you.”

He nodded. “I made bail, so for now I’m a free man.”

“You’re not working out,” she said when she noticed his jeans, boots, and T-shirt.

He shook his head. “I’m trying to track down Talia. I figured this time of day she’d be here. Have you seen her?”

Susie’s eyebrows pulled together in concern. “I haven’t seen her since Saturday. I ran into her here. But she was supposed to meet me at the restaurant yesterday morning and she never showed up.”

The dread was amping up, coming to a head. “Did she call you and tell you why?”

Susie shook her head. “I called her but she never got back to me. Which is not like her at all, but I thought maybe with everything happening she needed a break from everyone or something.”

“Talia is all about accountability. The way she keeps tabs on Rosie there’s no way she’d let someone worry.”

“Do you think something happened?”

Jack took out his phone and reread the text he’d gotten from her last night. It sounded enough like her, but anyone could take a phone and send messages with it. “I don’t know. I’m going to check in with Rosie and see what’s going on.”

Rosie didn’t answer either. While that wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, it did nothing to settle the churning in his gut.

“I’m going to call Philip,” Susie said. “Maybe he can help.”

He left with a promise to call her as soon as he knew anything and headed to his car. Before he left, he finished logging into the locator for Talia’s phone and clenched his jaw when he got the
Unable to locate
message indicating the phone had been turned off.

He felt slightly better when he clicked on the last known location and it showed that she’d been at Rosie’s dorm, but that relief quickly fled when he saw the time stamp. It was from 10:13 Monday night, right after she’d sent the last text to him.

He covered the distance between Gus’s and Rosie’s dorm in record time. He waited until one of her dorm-
mates was leaving and caught the door before it closed. Ignoring a voice asking who he was, he took the stairs two at a time and pounded on Rosie’s door.

“Are you looking for Rosario?” a female voice called from down the hall. It was Dana, Rosie’s roommate, and it was all déjà vu of the night last week when they’d come looking for her. “Because she’s not here.”

“Where is she?”

Dana shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said, sounding a little miffed. “First she totally lied about ditching the Yosemite trip to stay with her sister, and now she says she is staying with her sister but she won’t call me back and tell me why. I mean, if she’s mad at me about something, she should just tell me right—”

Jack cut her off. “What do you mean she lied about the Yosemite trip?”

“Friday, right before we were supposed to leave, she sent me this text saying she couldn’t go on the trip after all, and she was spending the weekend with Talia.”

“She didn’t spend the weekend with Talia.” Dread rippled through him.

“I know,” Dana said with an exasperated eye roll. “When Talia came to pick Rosario up—”

“When was that?”

“Sunday night. She was all, ‘Rosie wasn’t with me. She told me she was going to Yosemite.’ Then Rosie texted her to meet her outside and she left.”

“You haven’t seen Rosie at all?”

Dana shook her head. “No, not since Friday.”

Jack forced down the cold knot of fear that threatened to choke him. He had to stay cool. But holy Christ, it was
Tuesday afternoon and Rosie hadn’t been seen since Friday and Talia had been gone since Sunday.

They could be anywhere. Anything could have happened to them.

He forced aside the horrible images pushing at the edges of his consciousness and focused on the here and now and gathering all the information he could to help find them.

“Let’s start with Friday. When exactly was the last time you saw Rosie?”

“Breakfast. We were walking back from the dining room, and for some reason her physics TA was here and wanted to talk to her.”

“Eugene,” Jack said, picturing the younger man in his head. His bland, unremarkable features. His wiry body.

Always there, hanging around on the sidelines, observing everything, listening to every word. So easy to overlook.

He’d insinuated himself into Rosie’s life and Jack hadn’t even given him a second look. Jack had no idea what his angle was with Talia or his connection with Sutherland, but somewhere, deep in his gut, he knew Eugene had them.

And Christ, if Sutherland hadn’t been lying about sending the DVD to Talia… that meant…

He had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting right there in the hall.

He could only imagine how terrified Talia must be, for herself and Rosario. Memories of the last time he’d pulled her out of a basement… the blood, her screams. What if he was already too late?

The thought left a gaping crater in his chest, and he
knew, if Talia and Rosie were dead, there would be no getting over it.

He took a deep breath and forced the blackness aside. Later, he could beat himself up for not realizing it a week ago, but now he had to focus on finding Talia and Rosie before it was too late.

He left Dana without saying good-bye, whipping out his phone as he sprinted to his car. His first call was to Toni, asking for a complete location history for Rosie’s phone since Friday and a home address for Eugene Kuusik. Then he called Detective Nolan and left a message to let him know the scoop.

By the time he got back to the car, Toni had sent all of the information to the iPad he’d stashed in his glove compartment. He did a quick scan of the GPS locations—most were on campus, and it also showed the phone being taken to an address in Palo Alto that matched what Toni found for a home address.

Rosie’s phone hadn’t traveled far and he hoped that meant Talia and Rosie hadn’t either. He started his car, intending to go to Eugene’s house, but thought better of it when he glanced at the clock. This time of day, Eugene was likely to be on campus, teaching class or working in the lab.

He made another call to Moreno. “I need you to get Novascelic and do me a favor.”

“Yeah, and I’d love a blow job from Katy Perry—”

“Talia’s missing,” Jack said curtly, “and Rosie too.” He gave him a brief rundown of all the particulars and who he was pretty sure they were dealing with.

At that, Moreno went all business.

“I need you to go to this address, find anything and
everything that might show us where he takes them. I’m going to try to run him down at his office.”

He sped across campus, mentally cataloging everything Nolan had told him about what he’d done to the girls, where he’d kept them. None of them had seen the surroundings but they all described a place that was cold, damp, with concrete walls and floors.

It had to be isolated and well insulated, where no one would hear the screams. Like a basement or an underground bunker. He called Toni again and asked her to pull up the blueprints for all the campus buildings and see which ones might have underground facilities. It was a long shot and would take hours, but it was the only thing he could think of.

He sped across campus to the new Clark Building, where Eugene did his PhD research. As he walked through the entrance, he could feel the rage building at the prospect of seeing the man he was now certain had kidnapped the woman he loved.

He forced it back, reminding himself he needed to treat this like any other mission. Keep a cool head. Don’t miss any details. Do not let emotions take over and make you fuck up.

The facility was immense, and it took him a few minutes to find the lab. He walked in, and a small Asian woman looked up, startled, from her microscope.