Chapter 30
I awakened to total darkness.
A foul odor.
A wet, gritty hardness beneath me.
My frontal lobe throbbed.
My rib cage screamed.
Had I suffered a concussion? A skull or rib fracture?
Was I badly hurt?
I tried lifting my head.
Lightning forked across both retinas.
Queasiness roiled in my chest and bile flooded my mouth.
I swallowed.
The nausea refused to back down.
I swallowed again, mentally ordering my gut to settle. After a few moments I felt a wave of relief that seemed less than fully committed.
Inching trembling fingers up to my face, I felt the edge of a blindfold. Warm dampness on my right temple and cheek.
Blood?
I reoriented the same hand to explore my surroundings and encountered shallow water atop concrete.
The movement triggered pressure on my ankles.
I tried lifting a foot.
Felt a pull at my wrists.
Dear God!
I was trussed like a pig, my limbs bound and tied to each other!
Twisting and hyper-flexing one wrist downward, I tested again with my fingertips.
Ropes! Triple-wrapped and knotted!
Panicky, I tugged with both arms and both legs as much as the bindings allowed.
Water sloshed.
The putrid stink intensified.
Nausea threatened anew.
I settled back, panting and struggling for recall.
My brain was incapable of forming a meaningful synapse.
Lying motionless to thwart the vomit, I shifted my focus to sensory input.
My nose took in funk, mud, and damp cement.
My ears registered an echoey hollowness suggesting an enclosed space.
Was I in a basement? A cave? A vault?
A crypt?
My heartbeat ratcheted up at the thought.
My thoughts skittered like free radicals in my battered skull.
Tears threatened. I fought them down.
Think!
Slowly, memory bytes began to assemble.
The missing cat. The oppressive heat. The hedge. Danielle Hall.
How much time had passed since that conversation?
Was I still at the Annex?
If I was elsewhere, how had I gotten here?
Where was here?
Had I fallen again? Been pushed?
Flashback image.
The earlier tumble from the rocks by the lake.
Hall had been nearby then.
A stroke of good luck, I’d said.
But had her presence been other than serendipitous?
Had that spill been the result of a deliberate attack? Had this one?
What of the sting on my arm? A bee? A wasp?
A needle?
Had I been injected with a knock-out drug?
Had Hall been the attacker?
If so, why?
Had she tied me up and transported me?
Imprisoned me?
Why?
And again. Where was I?
The mental probing produced zilch.
I called out for help.
My cries echoed and bounced back on themselves.
I screamed until my throat was raw.
Maybe it was the fall, or a blow to my head, or a pharmaceutical cocktail polluting my blood, but consciousness came and went. Each time upon waking, I had no way of knowing how long I’d been out. Hours. Days? Surely not days.
I was wearing only the shorts and tank I’d donned to go jogging. They were soaked. My skin was goose bumped, my body shivering uncontrollably.
My gut rumbled with hunger.
The tomb-like darkness and silence played games with my mind.
One definition of crazy is the repetition of an action regardless of consistently negative results. I went through the same loops again and again. The futile wrenching and yanking. The useless questioning.
Was I going crazy?
Following each bout of frenzied thrashing, I’d lower my lids, hoping to heighten my awareness of other sensory stimuli. Unnecessary, since my optic nerves were inputting zilch.
It was to no avail.
There was nothing I could do but lie there in the muck and impenetrable darkness. Willing my eyes to see something when they were open. Anything. A thin trickle of light above or below the edge of the blindfold.
Despite the chill and damp, I must have fallen deeply asleep, for I woke with a start, my heart banging like a kettle drum in my chest.
Had my ears detected movement?
Every muscle tensed as I strained to listen.
Eventually, far off, a muffled sound tickled the stillness.
My breath froze.
The sound grew louder, fractured into rhythmic gritty sloshing.
Footsteps?
Whose?
Pay attention! one functioning portion of my forebrain screamed.
I twisted my head to face in the direction of the footfalls.
Moments, heartbeats, then the darkness along the lower edge of the blindfold eased almost imperceptibly.
Tipping my head backward at an excruciating angle, I could see shadowy contours in the gloom around me. I was in a long, narrow space. A dark cutout suggested an entrance point.
The footsteps grew closer.
The cutout brightened.
A figure appeared in the opening, flashlight in one hand, pointed at the ground. All I could tell was that the person was wearing a jacket with the hood raised. Otherwise, he—or she—was a featureless silhouette.
The figure cocked an elbow and a bright light hit me.
A hand flew up to cover my eyes. A reflexive but futile response. My arm could move only inches. And my orbits were tightly swathed in fabric.
The figure approached.
Since I could see little, I counted steps.
Two. Five. Seven.
The footsteps stopped beside me.
In my fingernail sliver of vision, I saw two shapes that had to be feet. Noted that the feet were wearing leather boots with yellow laces.
New odors rode the dank air. Sweat. Cigarette smoke. And something else. Not unpleasant. A blend of cedar and oil.
The owner of the boots didn’t speak for what seemed an eternity. Then,
“Thanks for coming.”
The voice was male. Young.
I answered without thinking, my attention focused on taking in data.
“Hardly my choice,” I said.
“Good point.”
“What do you want?”
“I’ll do the questioning.” Midwestern accent. But with an odd robotic lilt.
“Fire away,” I said, sounding far more confident than I felt.
“Are you enjoying the accommodations?”
I felt my skin crawl. The voice was now high and warbly, like that of an elderly female. Had two people entered?
“I’ve had worse,” I managed, steady, though adrenaline was pumping full blast.
The response was a macabre high giggle.
“You find this funny?” I asked, largely to keep him talking. Her? Them?
“I do.”
“People will be looking for me.”
“Sadly, they won’t find you.”
“You’re fooling yourself.”
“Am I, Dr. Brennan?”
My name! I wasn’t a random victim!
“So.” The boots widened their stance. “Do you think this little experiment is evil enough?” Giving a savage twist to the word.
“What little experiment?” I shot back.
“I suppose we could call it phobia games.”
My mind scrabbled to connect dots. Experiment. Evil. Phobia. Where had that discussion taken place? With whom?
“Oh. Wait. I have that wrong.” Now delivered in a baby voice that sent a slam of electricity straight to my breastbone. “Enclosed spaces is Ruthie’s worst fear. You’re frightened of losing people you love.”
I said nothing.
“Or. We could call this an experiment in terror.”
“Is that why you kill and decorate animals? To get off on their terror?” Anything to keep him or her talking. To buy time.
“I couldn’t care less about animals. My interest is in the humans who happen upon my work.”
“You skulk like a sewer rat waiting for some poor chump to find your displays?”
“You disappoint me, doc.” Tone undisturbed by any whisper of warmth or disappointment. “Ever hear of GoPro cameras? The little beauties are so small even your CSU brain trust misses them.”
“You’re sick.”
“Perhaps.”
“What you do is risky.”
“I don’t mind risk.”
“Your demented little game will end with you in jail.” Unable to keep the revulsion from my voice.
“I doubt it.”
“Why target me?” I asked after an unnerving stretch of silence.
“Why not.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Because I can.” Snapped with an alarming ferocity.
I said nothing, refusing to play further into the bastard’s vile narrative.
“But. Onward and upward. Or perhaps I should say downward. I’ll soon have the others. I won’t bring them here, of course. That would be foolish.”
Before I could unravel that cryptic statement, nylon whispered. Then an object dinged concrete, skip-splashed through water, and came to rest by my head.
The boots pivoted.
As the sloshing faded to silence, I began desperately groping the perimeter around me. Found nothing in the small space I was able to reach.
Flexing and extending my elbows and knees as much as my bindings grudgingly allowed, I inched to my right and searched that area. Still came up empty.
I scooched again and again until the ropes, now deeply embedded in my flesh, refused to grant a millimeter of additional slack. Then I rolled and repeated the maneuver.
On my second soggy thrust left, my trembling fingers contacted something small and hard. Breath frozen in my throat, I grasped and drew the object toward me.
Braille-reading details, I was stunned to realize my captor’s toss-away was a pocketknife. With the nail of one semi-numb thumb, I teased the thing open, braced it where a slight rise in the floor met the wall above the water, and started running the ropes back and forth across the cutting edge.
Progress was unbearably slow. The blade was dull, and I had to move carefully to avoid slicing my skin.
Sweating and panting, I sawed until my arm muscles cramped, my captor’s words skittering in my head.
… evil enough…
… experiment…
Snippets from earlier conversations percolated up to join the mix.
… classify an act as evil…
… manipulate variables with humans…
Where had that exchange taken place?
Red Rocks Cafe.
Lester Meloy had been present on that occasion, too.
Dear God! Was the UNCC student my captor?
I pictured Meloy. The boyish face. The neatly cropped hair.
The tattooed neck.
Quick as a muzzle flash, the inked letters reversed themselves in my mind’s eye.
LIVE
EVIL
The realization sent a sharp warning twist through my gut.
With all the force I could muster, I continued working to sever my bindings.
I’d been at it for what seemed hours when the last sodden fibers finally gave way.
With clumsy fingers, I freed my wrists, then my ankles and struggled to my feet. My legs were numb. My entire right side felt weak.
Drawn by what I thought was the distant hum of traffic, I slogged through the pitch-black tunnel. Palm-feeling my way along a wall, I eventually reached the entrance.
A barred gate covered the opening top to bottom. On the right, a padlock secured the gate to a heavy metal hasp embedded in concrete.
Again, I almost cried.
You’ve got this!
Heat sparked in my chest.
Feeling the jolt animals get when smelling a predator, I lunged.
To my surprise, the gate swung on its rusty hinges with a grating creak. The padlock was either broken or had not been properly engaged. Or it might have been purposely left open.
I didn’t have the focus to sort through the alternatives. Heart pumping, I shot through the opening.
The outside air smelled as sweet as any I’d ever breathed.
I drew two deep lungfuls.
Then I ran.