Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
ELI
Sylvie let out a long breath, pulling her leg up to brace her heel on the seat and picking at a smear of dust on the knee of her jeans. She looked out the window, watching the dark trees whip by, before she said, “You’re smarter than you look.”
“Should I get some glasses?” I joked, and she rolled her eyes, a faint grin stretching her mouth.
“Oh, God. You pulling off the hot professor look? No, thank you. You’re hot enough as it is.”
I fought the urge to preen under her praise.
I didn’t generally put a lot of thought into what I looked like—not from that angle.
How I fit the job, whether it was undercover, or I needed to give a certain impression—I thought about that stuff all the time.
Suit versus construction vest versus T-shirt and jeans, and how would that play on a job?
I’d never had trouble attracting women, so I figured I had to be good-looking enough, or at least not repellent.
I knew how to listen and take my time in bed, which usually paid off with the opposite sex.
Hearing Sylvie say I was hot—that was an entirely new kind of thrill.
I put it aside to think about later. I still wanted answers about her. “Spill.”
She let out another breath and stopped picking at her knee, turning her head so her cheek rested there.
I glanced over and met her eyes. “Is it bad?”
A half shrug. “Pretty bad, yeah. Not as much for me, but when I was twenty-two, the summer after I graduated from college, I was driving home from a night out with some friends. It was me and my roommate. Rachael. I was driving. She’d had a few too many margaritas.
We were celebrating her new job, so I offered to be the designated driver.
I stopped at a light—she didn’t remember to lock her door.
My car was older, not the kind that auto-locks the door when it’s moving. ”
I let out a grunt, knowing where this was going and hoping I was wrong.
“He was there before I realized the door was opening. He leaned in, unsnapped her seat belt, and dragged her out by her hair. He?—”
She cut off, sucking in a ragged breath, her eyes squeezed shut.
“He shot her. Just pulled a gun and shot her. She was on the ground in the intersection, screaming, and then nothing… Silence. Then he was in her seat, jamming the gun against my neck. He tossed my phone out the passenger door and told me to drive.” She sat up, raised a hand to rub the side of her neck.
“It was hot, and it hurt. And he was yelling, ‘Drive, drive.’ But the light was still red. It was like my brain went on the fritz. Obviously, I had to drive because there was a gun. He’d shot Rachael.
He was probably going to shoot me. But the light was red. ”
“What did you do?” I asked, trying to imagine a twenty-two-year-old Sylvie, buoyant from a night out with friends, then suddenly— “That must have been terrifying.”
“It was. Later. At first, it was just panic and this sense of unreality. I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do.
Jump out of the car? I wish I had. I didn’t want to leave Rachael.
I didn’t know if she was dead or hurt or okay and staying quiet.
But he was screaming, and the gun was hot and smelled like smoke and… ”
She rubbed the heels of her palms over her eyes.
“Instead, I hit the gas and tore through the intersection, praying we didn’t get into an accident and terrified a cop would see and pull us over, because then…
Would I get away, or would he shoot me? I didn’t know.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know anything except this man, not that much older than me, was screaming at me.
His eyes were wild. His pupils were huge. ”
“High?” I asked.
“I guess. I don’t really know a lot about drugs other than what I saw in high school and college, but that was, you know, normal stuff.
Not whatever this guy was on. He wouldn’t stop screaming.
He kept saying, ‘They’re following us, they’re following us,’ but there wasn’t anybody there. Then he just made me drive.”
“How long?” I asked, suddenly not sure I wanted to know where this was going—not when we were talking about a young Sylvie barely out of college. The things that could have happened spun through my head. I had to let her tell the story, not jump ahead to the worst possible outcome.
“I drove for hours,” she said.
“What about gas?”
“I had a full tank,” she said. “My dad made me promise. Especially when I was out late. He was worried I’d run out of gas or have to go to the gas station late at night.”
“But he forgot to warn you to lock your doors.” I was suddenly curious about Sylvie’s parents.
“No,” she said, sighing. “He did. Keep your keys between your fingers when you’re at the pump or in the parking lot.
Park under streetlights, always lock your door, check the car to make sure nobody’s hiding in the back seat.
He’s a dad, you know, telling me all the ways to stay safe, but I was twenty-two.
I thought I knew everything. Stuff like that didn’t happen where I lived.
I mean, maybe it did, but I didn’t know about it. Until it was me.”
“The guy just made you drive?”
“Yeah. Kind of. It was—he took me to a section of town I’d never been to before, made me park behind a warehouse, took the keys, got out, ranted, paced back and forth, made a phone call. I was afraid more people were going to show up. I tried to get out of the car, and then he shot.”
“He shot you?”
“He didn’t hit me. He shot near me, I think, just to scare me, which it did.
I got back in the car. God, there’s so many things I remember from that day.
The cold sweat under my arms—I stank of it.
And it just got worse. My palms were slippery on the steering wheel.
I was so scared. Every time he yelled, it was like fingers on a chalkboard.
I just wanted him to stop, to be quiet, to let me go. ”
“Did he, eventually?”
“Kind of,” she said. “He got back in the car. We drove in circles around the city. I thought about ways to signal other drivers, to ask for help, but I was afraid to set him off if I was too obvious. I flashed my lights and tried to make eye contact, but nobody figured it out. We drove, and then he made me stop. We pulled up in front of a house, and he dragged me across the seat, tried to make me go in with him, and I knew?—”
She paused and sucked in a sharp breath.
“I knew if I went in that house, things were going to get really bad. I refused. And he hit me with the gun. I still wouldn’t get out of the car, so he grabbed my hair and started to drag me.
And then the door of the house next door opened, and a lady came out with a broom, and she said, ‘What are you doing with that girl?’ He let go and I ran.
I was afraid to go back to the car. I thought the time it would take me to get in and get it started—I’d be too slow.
So, I ran. He followed but he couldn’t keep up.
I just kept running until I found a corner store, and I called the police. ”
“Did they catch him?”
Sylvie shook her head. “No. They’d already found Rachael by the time I got away. She was dead. He’d shot her in the head. They told me it was quick. She probably never knew what happened. She went from celebrating her new job to dead just like that.”
Sylvie’s voice was thick as she wiped beneath her eyes. She pulled her heel back up on the seat so she could rest her cheek on her knee, her face turned to me.
“My car was gone by the time we got back to the house,” she went on. “They found it a couple of days later. It was stripped. The insurance company totaled it and wrote me a check. The police told me they’d keep me posted. I went to therapy. And that was it.”
“He got away with it.”
“Yep.”
And that was the piece I’d been missing from the puzzle of Sylvie Calloway.
My irritation melted a bit, down to a simmer.
I understood her more now. She wanted justice.
She hadn’t been able to get it for Rachael or for herself.
She wanted it for these other women, these victims of crime, because she knew what it was like to be hurt and scared.
She knew how close she’d come to being one of those victims. If she’d gone into that house…
Acid rolled through my stomach. I could picture it so clearly. “You were smart,” I said.
“Not smart enough to lock my doors.”
“True,” I agreed. “You were also young, so you get a little leeway for that. But you were smart.”
She grunted, clearly disagreeing, but I wasn’t going to let it go.
“Sylvie. Whatever that guy was on, he was unpredictable, didn’t give a shit about the law, was in possession of a gun, and you knew he was willing to use it.
You’re very lucky that you’re not dead. And a lot of that is because you made good decisions when shit went down.
Keeping him calm—that was smart. Because if you’d irritated him enough, it’s a good chance he would have just shot you and taken the car.
And then, not going in the house, knowing the right moment to dig your heels in and say no—that was also smart. ”
She stayed quiet long enough that I looked over. She had that thinking expression on her face again.
“He could have shot me when I refused to go into the house,” she said.
“And you knew that, didn’t you?”
She nodded, eyes staring out the windshield, seeing thousands of miles in the distance. “Yeah. And somewhere in my gut, I knew taking a bullet on the sidewalk would have been preferable to whatever was waiting inside.”
“Exactly. You had a pile of shit decisions, and you made the best one. You kept yourself alive because you’re smart, and you don’t fold under pressure.
” I tapped the phone in my pocket. “I’m still having multiple heart attacks thinking about you clinging to the edge of that shelf while the timer on the bomb ticked down. ”
“I’m not sure that goes in the column of all my good decisions,” she said.
“It might, it might not. If I had to choose, I’d pick you staying alive over whatever’s on this phone.”
“Good to know,” she said under her breath, and I smiled.
I decided it was time to drop it. “So, you have a justice boner,” I said, “and then you came across Carol Stevens, and it launched a podcast.”
“Basically,” she said.
“Have you ever talked about the carjacking on the podcast?”
“No,” Sylvie said, sitting up and tilting her head to the side as if considering the idea for the first time. “The podcast isn’t about me. I’m here. I’m safe. I’m well. I don’t need my story told.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts. I’m a history-and-biography-on-audio kind of guy. But I would think people would want to know why you do this.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Who’s on deck after Emily Shaw?” I asked, just wanting the sound of her voice filling the dark.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have a few options…”
She ran through the three unsolved murders at the top of her list, and I had the momentary thought that it sucked that we lived in a world where we had so many murdered women that she didn’t know which one to choose.
She knew so much about the cases she was considering, cases she hadn’t even investigated yet, that I kept her talking most of the ride.
I didn’t want her to fall asleep until we were at the safe house, where she could tuck in and get a solid six to eight hours, maybe more.
If my gut was right, we’d be heading out of town again in another day.
She needed to catch up on her sleep first.
Sylvie didn’t give me a hard time when we got back to the building, letting me herd her into the elevator and then down the hall. As I unlocked the door, I asked, “You hungry?”
She shook her head. “I’m so tired I don’t think I can eat.”
“Good. Go to sleep.”
“What about you?” she asked, pressing her hand over her mouth to hide a jaw-cracking yawn.
“I’m going to drop the phone in the office, and then I’m going to get some sleep myself.”
She nodded. “All right. See you later. Thanks for not letting me get blown up, Eli.”
I nodded, my throat suddenly tight again. No more bombs.
Funny thing, coming from an explosives expert, but that was all I could think: no more bombs, no more Sylvie almost getting blown up.
It was early, but Maddox was in the office. I gave him the phone, told him I’d be back in a few hours with more details, and headed up to bed.