The Fourth Victim (22 page)

“Mmm.” JoAnne ran her tongue over her lips, and Clay marveled at her acting ability. The woman had missed her calling.

No, that wasn't true. She was the best damned agent he'd ever known.

“I'll be that good, Daddy, I promise,” she drawled. “But first you gotta do me one little itty-bitty favor.”

“What's that, princess?” Ezekial ran a finger over JoAnne's breast.

Get your hands off me, you creep.
Clay read his agent's
mind at the same time that he heard, “I got a little problem and need a man to take care of it.”

“I'm your man, baby, what's your problem?”

“I got a boyfriend who's rough, you know? I try to get away from him and he hunts me down. Shares me with his buddies, too, and keeps all the cash himself.” She rubbed a knee against the man's fly.

“You know where this dude is?”

“Mmm-hmm. He's sleeping it off over at his place by the fairground.”

“How's about an itty-bitty little explosion to fix your itty-bitty problem?”

“Explosion?” JoAnne pulled back, sounding shocked. “Wait a minute. I don't want no trouble. I'm not goin' to jail! I just thought maybe you could, you know, beat him up.”

“Don't worry, baby, this explosion ain't gonna hurt you,” Ezekial said. The disgusting excuse for a human being practically slavered as he looked Joanne up and down. “Today's payday. And Daddy got paid double. Your dude got a gas grill?”

“Yeah. Beside the house.”

“Well, I got a itty-bitty propane tank that just might accidentally-on-purpose explode.”

And it was done.

For once, something went like clockwork.

JoAnne made the arrest. And if she happened to apply the handcuffs tightly enough to dig into the pimp's skin, Clay didn't care to notice.

With the tape they'd just made, combined with the rest of the evidence they'd collected, they had enough on Greene to put him away forever.

Now it was time for Clay to go to work.

One way or another, he was going to get the man to tell him the rest of his sordid tale. Ezekial Greene might have
fathered Kelly Chapman, biologically speaking, but he was no father.

He had no right to anything in her life.

Clay was going to make sure the man knew that before the day was over.

Edgewood, Ohio
Monday, December 6, 2010

I
was going crazy sitting there. Hours had passed since Clay had walked out, still talking on the phone. Many hours. It was after five. Getting dark. I couldn't turn on any lights until he came home.

I didn't dare turn on the television either.

Not only would I be in danger if the kidnapper knew where I was, but Clay had put his job on the line for me. I owed him my cooperation.

I had no idea what was going on and not knowing upset my emotional equilibrium. It was making me paranoid. Afraid to move. Clay had left hours ago. Looking for an adoption agency that could be a figment of my imagination for all I knew.

Looking for the man who'd sired me and then tried to sell me. Twice.

The time for the ransom drop had long since passed.

And…nothing.

I'd tried to sleep. I'd taken another bath. I'd jotted notes to myself about things I wanted to do when I got home. Made lists. I'd thought about Maggie and Camy, and taking
us all on vacation. I'd walked through Clay's house, noticing how little there was of any beauty or peace. Based on that and on what I'd observed, I analyzed him. I recognized that there were a lot of gaps in what I knew about him.

When all else failed, I had a beer.

Something must have gone wrong. That much was obvious. If I was a free woman, Clay would've called to tell me. His home phone hadn't rung. Not that I would've answered if it had.

What if Clay had been hurt? No one knew I was there. No one would know to contact me. I could be there waiting for days before someone came here to deal with Clay's estate.

What was I thinking? Of course he was okay! He was working. And couldn't contact me.

Still, something must've gone wrong or I'd be free by now.

Maybe my father hadn't been the kidnapper, after all.

At 5:30 I took the notepad Clay had given me to the table and, pen in hand, concentrated on my current and recent clients. I went through them one at a time. Made notes on everything I could remember about each of them.

The woman from Denver who had Munchausen's; I'd testified against her to save her husband from wrongful conviction. Melanie Bonaby—who'd come to me when she discovered her husband was unfaithful to her. I'd helped her through the divorce, but she'd let the bitterness consume her. She'd become obsessed and begun stalking and threatening his new wife. She'd eventually lost her children as a result and had expected Kelly to help her again…. Jane Hamilton and Marla Todd. They were two of the three victims of a bigamous, abusive man. I'd been able to be of some benefit to Jane and had attended her wedding the previous summer. Erin and Rick, of course. There were others. Plenty of them. I kept writing.

I would figure this out—and have a list for Clay when he got home. Someone wanted me gone. We'd find out who. And deal with him.

One step at a time. That was all it took. One step at a time.

And what about Maggie? Sam hadn't let her go to school, had she? Abrams could get to her there. Maggie could slip away.

We weren't just fighting Abrams. We were fighting Maggie, too. Fighting her desperate need to be loved. Her delusions about romance.

When it got too dark to write, I moved from the kitchen into the windowless bathroom attached to my bedroom. There were shutters on the kitchen window, but slits of light would show through. Piling towels on the bathroom floor to cushion myself, I settled down and continued to write. When I filled one page, I'd start another. And another. Writing on the back as well as the front.

My hand ached as it sped across the tiny pages. I was racing against my thoughts—trying to keep up with them. I jotted down client information, but other things that came to mind, as well. I wrote about Maggie. My mom. About myself. And about Clay Thatcher.

I wrote until I heard the garage door into the kitchen slam shut.

Was Clay home? Straining to hear through two closed doors, I couldn't make out a single distinguishing sound. No footsteps. No keys.

No calling of my name.

Wouldn't Clay have called out to me?

I sat there, trapped in a windowless room, with no idea who was there.

What if it
wasn't
Clay?

What if he'd told someone about me?

Did the kidnapper get Clay's keys? And his address
from his driver's license? Had Clay given me up for some reason?

Had someone picked the lock on the kitchen door?

Shaking, clutching the gun Clay had left for me, I curled into a corner of the room, into the smallest shape I could make, facing the door. And waited for him to come to me.

 

“Once more, Mr. Greene.” Alone in the interrogation room, Clay stared down the man slouched across from him. “Tell me what you did with your daughter.”

They'd been at this a long time. Too long. Hours. But he'd go as long as it took to get a confession.

“I gave the bitch my genes, that's what I did.” Hairy knuckles rested lightly against the partially exposed belly pressed up against the table, which separated Clay from his suspect. “She is what she is because of me.”

Clay had heard the asshole's version of truth ad nauseam.

“You think she got her smarts from the dumb bitch who raised her?”

“Her mother, you mean,” Clay said. “The woman you got pregnant.”

Greene had accountability issues. Everything in the world was someone else's fault.

And the man thought
he'd
given Kelly her intelligence?

He'd given his daughter her eyes, though. Clay wanted to puke every time he looked over and saw the vivid blue eyes—unlike Kelly's these were filled with…emptiness.

“Listen, Greene, your opinions don't mean a damn thing to me.” The hell with JoAnne and anyone else who was watching this from the other side of the glass. He was done with this guy. “I don't care who you are or what rights you think you have. You're in my world now, and in my world,
you're a murderer. You got that?” Clay leaned in, his voice hard. “A man died in that explosion at the adoption agency today. A cop. From where I'm sitting your life isn't worth shit. The only thing you've got going for you at this point is the possibility that you can point us to Kelly Chapman. You tell us where she is and that'll count for something.”

In his next life, maybe.

Clay needed the confession. He needed to know Kelly was safe. And then he was turning this bastard over to a D.A. who'd already said he was going for the death penalty.

“You don't get it, do ya?” Greene's rotten-toothed grin was sickening. “Prison ain't so bad. I been there. I know. The beds are better 'n sleeping on the floor, and the food ain't so bad, either. Best part is the price is right.”

“And what about the death chamber?” Clay wanted to squeeze the air out of the man's throat. But he sat back. He wasn't going to let the slime get to him. He was going to get to the slime. One way or another. “You got some good memories of that, too?” he asked.

“Appeal, man. I've got my right to appeal. By the time my number comes up, I'll be old and gray and ready to go. And in the meantime?” Ezekial Greene scooted back from the table, grabbed his crotch. “You know what they do to cop killers in prison, man? They revere them. I'm going to be king of the castle. I'll get what I want from whoever I want when I want. You be sure and tell that to my little girl when you find her. You tell her that her daddy's king of the world. You tell her that others will get some, but she got the best of him.” He squeezed his fly one more time. “She
is
me,” he said.

Clay was over the table before he had a single thought, his hands going for the throat.

It was Greene's laughter that did it. Clay had to shut the
man up. He had to rid the world of that sound. Remove any possibility of its ever reaching Kelly Chapman's ears.

But although he'd leaned across the table, he didn't touch Greene. Didn't make contact at all. He wasn't giving the fuckwad any chance for a way out.

JoAnne was in the room before Clay had a chance to warn the bastard what was coming to him if he didn't tell Clay what he wanted to know. Barry was right behind her.

“Clay? There's a phone call for you,” she said as Barry slid into the seat Clay had just vacated.

“I'll be back,” he warned with a long look at the smug fiend breathing air that was wasted on him.

“What was that about?” JoAnne didn't wait until they were in Clay's office before she started in.

“Who's on the phone?” he asked, but he knew.

“No one.”

“I wasn't going to touch him.”

“Then what was it about?” Standing outside the door, with the viewing window in plain sight, JoAnne glanced at the prisoner and then at Clay. “I've never seen you lose control before. What's going on?”

“He killed a cop.”

“I've seen you interrogate a sex offender who raped and murdered an eight-year-old girl. You never left your seat.”

“That guy confessed.”

“Maybe Greene
didn't
kidnap Kelly Chapman.”

He did it. He
had
to have done it. He'd murdered a cop and been prepared to murder young children. All without conscience. He'd killed a man and then been ready to fuck JoAnne.

“Maybe it happened just like he said.” JoAnne's quiet voice infiltrated the self-talk Clay couldn't escape. “He heard about Kelly's disappearance on the news and, as he
put it, thought his ship had come in. He'd just been waiting for his moment and that was it.”

One of the problems with this theory was that it meant Kelly Chapman's kidnapper was still at large. Out there. Somewhere.

“Greg got a confirmation from local police in Tennessee. The landlord was out of town and just got back. He checked out, and so does Greene's alibi for Friday morning.”

Goddammit to hell.

He'd lost an entire fucking day.

And Kelly was home alone. Virtually unprotected.

Edgewood, Ohio
Monday, December 6, 2010

Someone was in the house.

And it wasn't Clay.

Clay would've come to find me immediately.

Shivering, from too much time spent on the cold floor, or so I told myself, I huddled. And listened. And wished I'd decided to spend the day under the bed.

My skates were inside the bedroom door. They wouldn't be visible if the intruder just looked in. They'd be completely visible—and a dead giveaway—if he came into the bedroom.

There was nothing else of mine there. I'd considered every move I'd made over and over during the half hour I'd been sitting there, waiting for something to happen.

I held the gun up, pointed at the door, but my arms were getting shaky, my trigger finger stiff.

The bed was made. My clothes had been disposed of. The extra clothes Clay had purchased were in his car, ready for his next trip to the shelter in town. I'd washed the dishes I'd used that morning. I'd left no sign of Clay having had a visitor.

So did that mean whoever was there was waiting for him? Prepared to kill him the minute he walked in the door?

I had to warn him.

But how? Without exposing myself? And bringing more danger on Clay. And me. And maybe even Maggie.

Clay might have confided in someone today. Abrams was well connected; he could've sent someone to Clay's house. To take us both out.

I tried to take a deep breath. And couldn't. My chest was too tight.

What should I do?

I had to hide.

Had to trust Clay.

Had to stay quiet. Not make a sound.

Something fell on the floor somewhere in the house. On the tile, not the carpet. Whoever was out there was either in the kitchen or the eating area.

Slowly, silently, I lay down flat on my back, sliding over until my head was at the door. With the pistol at my chin, pointing under the crack, I peered under the bathroom door toward the bedroom. I was pretty sure the bedroom door was still closed. And it looked like there were no lights on anywhere.

Either he'd already checked out the house, or he'd known Clay wouldn't be here.

Was I right? Was someone out there, sitting in the dark, waiting for Clay?

Someone sent by David Abrams?

What should I do? What
could
I do? I was a psychologist. I should be able to outthink this guy.

But we weren't dealing with amateurs here. And there's such a thing as a psychopath. It referred to people who had no conscience, who lacked empathy and compassion. It
meant that any interaction I had with this guy, any attempt to influence or persuade him, might not have any effect.

Something else moved—a chair, maybe. And then nothing. I had no idea what was going on. What I wasn't hearing.

I didn't want to accept the inevitability of attack. Of cruelty. Of death.

Just then Marc Snyder appeared in my mind. The young soldier had recently returned from Iraq. I'd chased him down the street more than once when he'd come for an appointment and had left because I hadn't been at the door to greet him.

Marc required much of me.

Because he'd been through so much. He'd seen a young boy lying on the street with his stomach ripped to shreds, bleeding profusely and screaming for his mother. He'd watched while an insurgent raped a woman. Heard her screams, too.

He'd been unable to let go of what had happened and move on to what could—should—come next in his life. The memories were tearing him apart. Eating him alive.

Why had Marc Snyder just occurred to me?

Because he was tortured by his own mind, and I was beginning to feel that way, too?

Because he felt helpless? Unable to make his life right?

Or because he was my kidnapper?

Did he need me gone because I was the only one pushing him to face his demons? The only one who really believed he could get beyond PTSD and have a full and meaningful life?