The River Runs Dry (25 page)

“Who are you?” she said again, seeing the shape of the woman's head turn towards her.

She was still mumbling quietly, always saying the same thing: “don't make him come. He'll come down...he'll come down.”

“How....long have you been here?” Jessie asked in fear. Fear at who this woman was, fear at what he'd done to her to make her this way..

The woman kept mumbling, no straight answer coming from her lips.

Jessie shook on the floor, despite the heat in the room. She was his captive now, locked in his cell. But one thought kept her from shouting out and screaming in the blackness, one thought prevented her from losing it. Jack. She knew he wouldn't stop until he found her, until he found
him
.

A sudden noise sounded above and a sprinkling of dust floated down from the ceiling. Jessie looked up to see a shadow passing over the thin slits of light between the floorboards, the wood creaking and groaning as his weight passed over them.

Then she heard a loud noise to her right and turned her head to see a burst of light spill from above. It illuminated the room, bringing into focus a staircase right to her side that extended behind the wall at her back. Then she heard footsteps again, ominously pacing down the wooden stairs as they creaked under his weight.

Her pulse rate soared as she turned back to face forward into the room, for the first time seeing the woman chained to the floor ahead of her in full view. She sat, hunched up against the wall, shivering and cowering from the sound and sight of the man walking down the steps.

She wore nothing but rags, dirty and covered in stains. Her arms and legs extended from her soiled clothing, littered with little cuts and bruises and burns. Some of them looked old, some fresh, still red and dribbling with blood. Her hair was dark and matted with grime, unwashed for months. She kept her head low, her chin tucked down into her chest in submission, like an abused dog just waiting for its owner's whip. Jessie could just about make out scarring on her cheeks, the top of her nose.

The sight made her gag slightly as the footsteps grew closer. The thought rushed through her mind that she was in for the same treatment, the same torture. She began breathing heavily, unable to control it, unable to stop herself from shaking and sliding as far as she could from the steps.

But there was nowhere she could go. Nothing she could do.

Before she knew it the feet came into view to her right, then the legs, then the torso. Finally, Jessie's eyes caught the entire man. He was quite tall, but wiry, his shoulders wide but waist slim. He moved casually to the bottom, stepping lightly onto the concrete floor and smiling as he looked over Tracy, cowering and shivering in fear against the far wall.

Then he turned, slowly, and his eyes met Jessie's. They were strange, dark, his hair dark as well. Jessie knew, as when she was taken, who he was. In that split second she'd known, and now she got a good look at him. He'd been to her home once, spoken to her briefly before showing a couple around the place. He wasn't the man who'd first seen her when she spoke about selling the house.

No, this guy was filling in for him that day, not too long ago. He looked different then. His eyes were blue, his hair blond. He wore a wide smile on his face, plastered on and refusing to leave. Jessie hadn't thought anything of him then, nothing at all. He was just a young man doing a job, trying to make his way in the world.

But now she looked at him, his eyes seething, burning with hatred and pain and old memory. He looked at Jessie like he'd known her for years, like she'd wronged him in a previous life.

He walked forward now, drawing closer to Jessie as she crept as far back against the wall as she could. Then he leaned down, bending closer to her, his eyes still stuck to her face, cold and filled with hate.

“It's amazing,” he whispered. “It really is amazing just how much you look like her.” His voice was weird now, soft. He extended his hand and gripped Jessie's chin, pulling her face towards his.

He stared at her for a while, looking all over her face, deep into her eyes, over her hair. Then he looked over his shoulder at the woman at the opposite wall, still cowering, still praying for him to leave.

Jessie shivered at his touch, at the weird gaze of his eyes, the coldness of his voice.

“I'm going to make you suffer,” he whispered. “Just as I suffered. I've finally got you together, back together again, the two of you. Now it's your turn....”

Then he reached to his back and brought out a small knife, shining in the light. Jessie's eyes grew in fear at the sight of it and she struggled backwards, her chained ankles preventing her from moving.

“It's OK,” he whispered again, his voice calm. “It's OK, we'll start small. Don't struggle. Give me your arm.”

Jessie continued to scramble away from him, holding up her arms to shield herself from the knife. But he just kept speaking, his voice still cold and calm and unemotional.

“Give me your arm.....or I'll take your tongue.”

The words brought instant tears to Jessie's eyes, so fraught with genuine menace. Shivering, she slowly extended her arm and he took her wrist, pulling it straight out in front of her.

He breathed in deep, with pleasure, as he slid the knife over the top of her forearm, slicing through her skin and into her flesh. It wasn't deep, but the sting ran straight through Jessie's body, forcing her to scream out, loud and piercing, with pain.

Blood began flowing from the wound, trickling down her arm as he sliced again, and again. He cut her four times, each one bringing groans of pleasure out of him as he stared into her pained eyes.

Then he stopped, Jessie's eyes streaming with warm tears, and held the bloodied knife to his side. “Now you understand....how it feels...” he said, his voice croaking.

He stood, holding the bloodied knife to his side, and turned casually, walking back up the stairs as he'd come down: slowly, menacingly. When he reached the top the door screeched loudly again, and once more the room was plunged into total blackness.

Chapter 26

Jack stood over his desk, his strong hands pressing hard at the wood. He looked down upon it, covered in pictures from the various crime scenes he'd witnessed over the last few weeks and months. There were three that caught his eye, three images of tire marks in three separate locations.

One was Leanne Graves' house or, at least, down the road from it. Jack had found the tire marks in the alley further down the street, shaping off to the right as they stretched out from the accumulated dirt of the alley and out onto the road. He turned his eyes to the map of town that sat in the center of his desk, and marked down the position and the direction the car was going.

The second location was of the shack out in on the plains southeast of town, several miles beyond the reaches of the city. Jack had found tire marks there too that matched those from Leanne Graves's place. From the depth of the marks and their direction, it looked like the car had come from the town, but moved off away to the east, further out into the desert plains. Once more Jack marked the position down on the map.

The final location was from outside the back of Jack's own building, tire marks he'd discovered only that same morning. The tracks looked to be moving south eastwards from Jack's location in the north of town.

East. Everything pointed east.

Jack's eyes narrowed on the map. The three locations he'd marked weren't necessarily important. No, Burgess was not a big place and the killer had shown he was willing to take women and kill women from further afield, such as the hospital in Kanton, and even Taylor Lane in LA.

No, it wasn't the locations that interested Jack, it was the direction of the tire tracks. On each occasion the car had been traveling eastwards out into the dusty plains beyond the boundary of the town. There was something out there, Jack could feel it.

He moved quickly from his door and out onto the bustling office floor down the corridor. Everyone there was busily hunting down what they could on Webster Hart, searching through his past, fine combing his falsified life.

Jack came upon Carla's desk and put his hand to her shoulder as she finished up on a phone call. She looked round quickly at his touch as Jack spoke.

“Have you checked about any property registered under Hart's name?”

Carla nodded. “Nothing. The guy's a ghost, only been using the name for a little while. He was probably using another before, once he dropped Trey Hunter. He must have some contacts who helped him get a social security number and driver's license...it's possible he's been living under a number of aliases. We're still digging everything we can up.”

“Right, keep on it, but do something for me first. I need you to check all property east of town, any farms or shacks or ranches or anything out on the plains. There are no large settlements out that way are there?”

Carla shook her head. “Not that I know of, not for a long way towards Nevada and Vegas. I doubt there are too many ranches or farms or anything else there either.”

“Good, that's what I'm hoping for.”

“Are you smelling something Jack?”

“Like I told you earlier, just a hunch.”

…

The afternoon was drawing on now, a breeze rushing across from the south. It swept up dust as Jack drove out of town, finding himself along dirt tracks that seemingly led nowhere, out to the edge of the earth.

He checked his phone, looking over an image of marked properties that Carla had just sent through. There were a smattering of them across the plains, old houses registered under a number of names. But there were several others, abandoned places that Carla couldn't put a name to. They were all spread over the eastern plains, like stars dotted on the night sky, some of them close to the town, others much further out.

A couple of hours went by as Jack drove through the dusty plains, tracking from house to house. Some were old ranches, some disused shacks or run down barns out in the middle of nowhere. Others were lived in by hermits, those looking to live the quiet life away from the modern world. Out here, on these silent, eery plains, you could be as secluded and isolated as you wanted. And that's exactly why Jack was here.

He kept driving as the sun moved inexorably towards the horizon, every hour slipping by making it less likely that he'd ever find Jessie alive. He tried to keep his mind from her, but couldn't. She crept in now, more and more as the hours went by, causing a desperation to build, to bubble up inside him like a volcano waiting to explode.

He kept to the tracks, kept to the known locations that Carla had sent him, his hope waning with every abandoned ranch, every house occupied by an old man with a shotgun in his hands, ready to defend himself from whoever might come calling.

Soon the light began to change up above, turning from the bright yellow of day to the more mellow orange and red that signaled the end to the afternoon, and the beginning of yet another night of fear for the town behind him. He continued to cruise down the latest track, the landscape clear and open around him, littered with rocky outcrops and craggy ridges sticking out of the parched earth.

But then something caught his eye, marks jutting off from the track up ahead. He slowed to a cruising pace and rolled up as the orange sunset shone brilliantly in the distance. He stepped from the car and walked towards the marks, his eyes growing keener with a growing interest, a growing hope.

There, written into the dirt, were tire marks, clear as day, deviating from the track and off onto the desert plains beyond. They were marked clearly in the hard, dry, earth, moving off east away from the track as it veered south. Jack looked upon the tracks closely, recognizing their markings. It was unmistakable: they were the same tires he'd seen so many times before.

He turned, quickly, and ran back towards the car, stepping in and picking up his phone. He stared at the map and the area beyond the direction of the tires. He couldn't see any other property listed on the map, no sign of any man made structure eastwards beyond that point.

His heart quickened as he threw the phone to the seat beside him and put the car back into gear, turning the wheels around the markings and eastwards off the track. He drove carefully forward, keeping his eyes to the ground and searching for the path of the vehicle.

It was hard to make much out, the parched earth hard and flat and difficult to imprint. Within only a few feet the deeper cuts of the tires gave way to lighter markings on the surface of the earth.

Jack drove on until the markings grew indistinct from the cracked soil, once more stepping from the car to get a better look. He leaned down and stared with his keen eyes, turning back to see the path of the tires turning off the track behind him and straightening out towards a series of rock outcrops in the distance.

The sun was fading fast now, its descent below the horizon speeding as it poured its warm light in a final flourish over the landscape. Jack crept forward along the earth, searching for any further signs that might help him, but could see nothing else, the breeze from the south having disturbed any of the lighter markings in the sand and brittle earth.

He turned once more and climbed back into his car, picking up his phone as he had before. He needed help out here, more cars, more people, to cover the expanse ahead of him. He dialed Carla's number but it just beeped and went dead.

“Damn,” he muttered to himself, seeing a crossed off circle on the front of his cell to indicate no signal.

He lifted his head and looked out once again on the open view ahead of him, his eyes set ahead on the craggy rock formation in the distance. It was slowly becoming a silhouette against the darkening sky, a beacon on the horizon for him to get to.

He shifted the car into gear again and lightly pressed down on the accelerator, feeling the car lurch forward slowly towards the desolation ahead. He wasn't going to go back for help, not right now, not miles along those winding tracks.

No, this was his task, his responsibility. And he'd do it alone.