Chapter 33
Thursday, March 13
M utt sensed John’s return before Beth did. She joined the dog at the door and had it already opened as John came up the steps. “Is there news?” Even as she asked, his expression told her there hadn’t been.
“Her phone goes straight to voice mail,” he said. “Obviously she’s turned it off, and she’s smart enough to take the battery out so we can’t trace it. She did that the last time.”
He replaced the shotgun in the rack, then removed his jacket and hung it on the peg. His features were taut. The cleft between his eyebrows was as deep as she had ever seen it. She wasn’t sure he had even noticed that she had brought him a cup of coffee until he took it from her. Absently he thanked her.
“First I called the restaurant,” he said. “It had closed for the night, but the manager was still there. I played the cop card, told him the young woman I was after was last seen leaving the restaurant and asked if the parking valets were still around. They’d all left, but he said he would call the captain, ask if any remembered her leaving, and would let me know. Still waiting on that.
“I’ve got one of my buddies in the department checking with Uber to see if a car picked her up at the restaurant. I gave patrol officers who aren’t Barker loyalists a description of her—Roslyn told me what she was wearing—and asked them to be on the lookout. Sheriff’s deputies, too.
“I’ve called every medical facility I know of, the one where Carla Mellin works included. Molly hasn’t shown up in any ER, thank God. I left my contact info with them in case she does.”
“How is Roslyn dealing with it?”
“In her usual way. She’s in orbit. She’s accusing Molly of pulling this stunt to spite her for getting engaged, and she’s probably right about that. Of course, Roslyn is also blaming me for encouraging this kind of irresponsible behavior. Her ranting is counterproductive, but, must say, I understand her anger, because I’m angry, too. In fact, I’m mad as hell.
“Molly has put me through this twice before and swore she never would again. I won’t let her off without paying some consequences, but priority one is to find her and bring her home. And by home I mean wherever I am. I should have picked her up today when she begged me to. If I’d done that, she wouldn’t have done this.”
In a soft voice, Beth told him that he shouldn’t blame himself, but she knew that the banal words fell on deaf ears.
“The not knowing is pure hell. The only positive thing about this situation is that Barker and the ogre don’t have her.”
“I want to hear about that encounter,” Beth said, “but the important thing is that you seem unhurt. Mitch, too, I assume.”
“We got away without a scratch.”
“Barker and the ogre?”
“Temporarily out of commission.”
“That’s good enough for now. You can tell me the rest later. In fact, everything can wait until you hear from Molly.” She didn’t realize that she’d been twisting her hands together until he looked down at them.
“Her timing couldn’t be worse, could it?” he said. “What about the professor?”
“You don’t need the distraction, God knows. But if I sat on this, I think you’d hate me for it.” Without further delay, she motioned him toward their computer table. The video was paused on the professor at his desk and the overloaded bookshelves behind him. “Here,” she said, pointing. “You have to get close to see.”
He sat down and leaned toward the monitor. “Son of a bitch.”
“Could he possibly be our man?”
“A home tattoo kit for a guy who wears argyle sweaters?” John said.
Beth saw that he was referring to a framed picture on one of the bookshelves. She’d noticed it before. It was of the professor, posing with a woman and a boy, presumably his son.
She said, “Doesn’t quite fit, does it?”
“No. Yet the kit is in plain sight. Like he was toying with us.”
“There’s something else.” She picked up the copy of the professor’s book and opened it to the page she’d marked with a Post-it. “He wrote eight pages about numerology and has a collection of books on it. Why did he downplay his knowledge of it?”
In thought, John scratched his chin with his thumbnail. “It’s not a smoking gun, but it’s starting to make sense. He circulates in that community.”
“Do you still think there’s an underground society of some sort, or did he commit all four abductions?”
“I don’t know, but his location is central enough for him to have. He travels around for his lectures. He would see young women on campuses.” He contemplated it, then said, “He’s looking good to me, Beth. If we had some pretext to have him watched tomorrow, we—”
“It is tomorrow, John. That’s why I didn’t want to postpone telling you about this. It’s past midnight. It’s March thirteenth.”
“Christ. Remember what I said about the moon always being there even—”
“If it’s not visible.”
“You were talking to him when Roslyn called to tell me Molly wasn’t at home. Where did you leave it with him?”
“He was flattered that we’d asked for his help again and said he would get right on it.”
“Some of those handles we sent could belong to him. He’d get a grin out of that.” He motioned for her to rewind the video. “Let’s listen to our chat with new ears.”
Beth, accustomed to watching videos and looking for contradictions, glitches, or nuances, paused it several times to comment on a hand gesture or a shift in the professor’s facial expression, but saw nothing that indicated he was a serial criminal.
“He seems perfectly benign,” she said. “He looks, acts, and sounds exactly like what he is.”
“Serial criminals usually do. That’s why they can commit numerous crimes before they get caught. They’re the last person anyone would suspect.”
They were almost at the end of the video when a phone jingled.
John reacted like he’d been snake bit and jerked it from his pocket. “This is Bowie.” He listened.
Beth could hear a male voice but couldn’t understand what he was saying. She could tell, though, that whatever it was, it wasn’t what John had hoped to hear.
“I appreciate the follow-up. Thank you,” he said, and disconnected. “The restaurant manager. One of the valets remembered Molly because she seemed upset when she came out of the restaurant and was rude to him when he asked if she was waiting on a car. She struck off down the sidewalk alone.”
He stood up and started pecking in a number on the phone. “I’ve got to let everybody know that was where she was last seen.” He made a call, talked in the shorthand of police officers, and ended it by saying, “Can you alert everybody to that, please? Be sure to include Mitch. Thanks.”
He went to the door, lifted his jacket off the peg, and put it on. “At least I have a starting place.”
“We,” she said. “ We have a starting place. I’m going with you this time. No argument. Leave Molly a note, telling her we’re out looking for her. Tell her to call you and then to stay put till we can get back.”
He must’ve thought that was a reasonable course of action. He sat down again and began to scrawl on a legal tablet. “Let Mutt out, please. And fill his bowls. We don’t know how long we’ll be gone.”
She did that, then went into the bedroom and got her jacket. When she returned to the main room, John was in the kitchen pouring coffee from the carafe into a thermos.
She let Mutt back in, and he sensed their urgency. He kept in stride with her as she went over to the table to turn off her laptop. She noticed that there were less than two minutes left to run. She reached out to stop its play when her hand froze in midair.
She nudged Mutt aside and sat down on the edge of the chair seat. She backed up ten seconds of the video and replayed it, then quickly paused it and reversed it again. Her heart in her throat, she croaked, “John?”
He was moving quickly around the room, turning off lights. “Yeah?” He came over.
“Listen. Listen closely.”
She restarted the video where she’d stopped it. The professor was talking. Distantly, a phone rang. A chair was heard scraping back across the floor, then John’s whisper, coming through the professor’s monitor, was barely there but loud enough to be heard. “Molly.”
The professor’s eyebrows lifted.
Beth paused the video there. “Molly called you, remember? You got up to answer and told me who it was so I would know why you were leaving the virtual meeting.” She pointed to the monitor. “Look at his reaction when you said her name.”
“And a few hours later, he talked to me about names with double letters.”
The two of them looked at each other with dawning horror.
Molly woke up with the worst headache ever. For a time that’s all she could concentrate on; then gradually she became aware that the surface beneath her was hard and cold and that she was uncomfortable all over.
Fearing that any movement at all would sharpen the splinters of pain piercing her brain, she lay perfectly still, wondering why she felt so bad. The flu was going around at school. Had she caught it?
But then memory came drifting through the dense fog of her mind, and she remembered.
She had left the restaurant, furious at her mother, nauseated by the whole “new happy family” scene. She hadn’t had a plan other than to get away from that stupid cake with the sparklers flaring from it, and the people at other tables clapping and calling out well wishes. She’d had to escape the whole farce.
As she’d exited, she batted away the valet who’d approached her about retrieving her car. She’d seen that the nearest corner was half a block away. Fuming and upset, she’d walked toward it, wanting to get out of sight of the restaurant quickly, thinking that possibly either her mother or the loser would chase after her, demanding that she return to the celebration.
She’d rounded the corner and hadn’t gone far when a car pulled up to the curb and idled. The driver’s window slid down. “Excuse me, miss. I think you forgot this when you left the restaurant.” He opened the car door and stepped out, extending a purse toward her.
“Nope. I have mine,” she said, patting the small bag hanging from her shoulder.
“Oh, well, someone else’s then. My mistake.” And then he’d swung the purse at the side of her head. Her last thought had been, What just happened?
Something terrible had happened, she realized now. A woman’s worst nightmare had happened. Like Crissy Mellin and others who’d disappeared without a trace.
That couldn’t happen to her, though. No! Not to her!
But, oh God, if it had, it would positively kill her dad.
Spurred by that thought, she opened her eyes. She was dizzy, making it difficult to bring the wavering shape bending over her into focus and keep it still. But finally she did. She recognized the man who had smiled at her through the open car window. He was smiling now.
“Ah, good. You’re awake. I was afraid you wouldn’t come to before I have to leave, and I had hoped for a chance to get to know you, Molly.”
He knew her name? As muzzy as she was, she knew she’d never met him. She tried to sit up and only then realized that her hands and feet were bound.
“Don’t strain,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “You can’t get loose, and you could hurt yourself trying.”
She wanted to yell at him that she was already hurt. The purse he’d struck her with must’ve been packed with iron, and she wondered if the blow had in fact cracked her skull.
He was leaning down close to her, blocking most of her field of vision, but what she could see beyond his head and shoulders was a high ceiling supporting metal walls. It was an ugly enclosure. A garage? A boathouse?
She shuddered beneath his caressing touch on her shoulder. She detested his smarmy smile. He was looking at her like they were friends. Or lovers. That thought made her want to throw up. Shrinking from him, she asked, “Who are you?”
“Your liberator.”
She didn’t know what that was supposed to mean exactly, only that it sounded scary. “Get your hand off me.” Her voice warbled. She wished for more strength behind it. “My father will kill you.”
“I’m sure he’d want to. The volatility of his personality is obvious.”
She didn’t know the definition of that v word, but, if he knew her dad at all, he never would have done this to her. “If you value your life,” she whispered, “you’ll take me home.”
“You’ll be going home, Molly. To Luna.”
That sounded freaking crazy. She became even more frightened and decided to say nothing more. She got the impression that he wanted to engage with her. She would deny him that. She was expert at shutting people out. She did it to her mother all the time. She closed her eyes.
She sensed him standing up. His footsteps squeaked on the floor, which made no sense to her, so she reopened her eyes to slits. Plastic. The floor was lined with thick black plastic like heavy-duty trash bags were made of.
He was going to kill her, wasn’t he?
Turning her head slightly, she saw him standing at a crude workbench, his back to her. He’d pulled on latex gloves. It took her a while to figure out that he was using tongs to pick up stainless steel instruments and dipping them one by one into a shallow basin and swishing them around in some sort of solution.
Sterilizing. That’s what he was doing; he was sterilizing those utensils, which looked like they belonged in an operating room. After their dunking, each was lined up with its fellows on a white towel.
Unable to hold it back, she screamed in terror.
Startled, he turned around and said sharply, “Stop that, Molly. It won’t do you any good. Nobody can hear you.”
“Go to hell,” she sobbed, sagging weakly.
Her outburst had launched rockets of pain inside her head. Her stomach heaved. Bile surged into her throat, but, by an act of will, she kept from spewing it. She knew she must have a serious concussion, and struggling could jostle her brain and make it worse. So she lay still, in misery and fear.
He finished with the instruments, making small adjustments to their alignment on the towel, then peeled off the gloves and dropped them into an oil drum, also lined with plastic. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and buttoned both buttons on each cuff.
“Now. The final step.” He walked over to a hook, which had been screwed into the wall, and reached into a plastic shopping bag hanging there along with a sport coat.
He took a box from the bag, walked it over to the workbench, and opened it. He studied the contents as though taking inventory, then turned to her and smiled. “Want to see?”
He carried the open box over to her. She gasped when she saw what was inside: stoppered bottles of red ink, a bottle labeled as an antiseptic, a tube of salve, and needles of various sizes in sterilized sleeves.
She found it difficult to breathe, and it hurt her chest to try. This freak was going to tattoo her!
“I ordered several stencils,” he said in a conversational tone that mocked her horror. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and held it out to her. It was the outline of a crescent moon. “I hope you like it.”
His smile made her want to gag.
He returned to the workbench, removed the sealed lid from a rectangular storage container, and took out several cotton balls. He pulled on another pair of latex gloves before soaking several of the cotton balls with the antiseptic solution from the tattoo kit. He returned to her with them.
“Now, let’s see.” With his free hand, he took hold of her arm. She tried to pull it from his grasp but was helpless to do so. “Molly, Molly, this part won’t hurt. I’m only going to begin the cleansing process.”
He stroked the inside of her arm. “This looks like a good spot, don’t you think?” With his index finger, he drew a circle midway up her forearm.
“Go to hell, you creep,” she shouted, and again struggled to free herself.
He looked up and winked at her. “I don’t mind a little feistiness.”
“You’re psycho. Sick. Sick! And you’re going to die, you know. My dad is going to kill you.” She managed to raise her knees and bump them against his arm. One of the cotton balls fell from his hand onto the floor.
As he stared down at it with something akin to disgust, his demeanor changed. Speaking softly and with an undertone of menace, he said, “Now you’re really testing my patience, Molly. I’m your liberator. You should mind your manners with me.”
He made the warning emphatic by gripping her arm tighter. He then swabbed her forearm from her wrist to the crook of her elbow with one of the wet cotton balls.
She despised his touch but couldn’t physically overcome him, and she was fearful that if she persisted in insulting him he would suspend his cleansing process and go to work on her with the surgical instruments. Until she could think more clearly and devise a means of escape, she determined that her best defense would be to keep her expression impassive and her reactions to a minimum.
He muttered to himself what sounded like a chant about cleansing, purity, perfection, Luna, Luna, Luna. She didn’t know how long that would have continued if his wristwatch hadn’t dinged an alarm.
It startled both of them. He froze for several seconds, then seemed to come to himself. He looked at his watch and said, “Oh. I was hoping to get the outline done tonight, but time has gotten away.” He looked into her eyes. “I hate to leave you, but practical matters dictate. I have to be back home in time to drive my son to school. Today he has an algebra test he’s been fretting about. He’s studied hard for it, but he’ll appreciate a last-minute pep talk.”
He disposed of the used cotton balls, replaced the lid on the storage box, and closed the tattoo kit. He placed it on the shelf above the one with the surgical instruments, scooting it this way and that, until it was perfectly centered, and the front of it was flush with the edge of the shelf.
“There.” He stepped back and admired it for several seconds before coming back around to her. “When I return, we’ll start on your tattoo. I’ll make several passes throughout the day. It may hurt a little, but I’ll be as gentle as possible.” He was so caught up in his own dreamy thoughts, he didn’t seem to notice that she was no longer reacting.
“By tonight,” he said, “your tattoo should be perfect. Everything will be perfect. Everything must be perfect.” He gave her another of those sickeningly sweet smiles. “Perfect for your blood moon.”
The empty shopping bag now hung limp on the hook. He retrieved it, took down his jacket and pulled it on. He unbolted the door. As he went out, he looked back at her.
“Remember, Molly, the goal is perfection. Please don’t spoil it. Don’t be the disappointment Crissy was.”