CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
With urgency that bordered on recklessness, Ella stormed through the streets of Cedarburg like a bullet.
Her mind was a maelstrom of panic. Each thought collided with the next like molecules in a boiling test tube.
She wasn’t in a cruiser, but she flew past red lights regardless.
As she turned onto a narrow country lane, her GPS told her that she was just over a mile from her destination.
What would await her at the other end? Another cabin nestled in the woods?
Another scene that could be straight out of a nightmare?
These thoughts hammered in her head, relentless and unforgiving.
On her dashboard, her call was still connected, but still silent.
During the ten minutes she’d been racing through the night, she hadn’t heard a whisper or a shout or a sign of life from the other side.
She couldn’t risk calling or texting for backup in case the caller heard her down the phone and ended the call, so she had to make this trip alone.
Ella's car careened down the serpentine country lane.
The road was a ribbon of gray which unfurled beneath the sweep of her headlights as the miles dwindled.
She began to visualize the potential scenes that awaited her: a confrontation, a rescue, a trap.
Did Derek know her real identity, and if so, how?
Was he able to see through her ruse during her time at the group session?
Or maybe he'd watched her, researched her, and concluded that she was more than a local woman bound by phobias.
The headlights cut through the darkness to reveal a clearing ahead. The winding lane came to an abrupt stop as Ella’s car emerged on the edge of a crystal lake. She double-checked the location the phone and matched it with the map on her GPS.
This had to be it.
And she had to make the rest of the journey on foot.
Without hesitation, Ella flung the car door open and stepped into the moonlit night with her cell clutched tightly in her hand.
It guided her forward. She skirted past the edge of the lake, into the dense woodland tapestry.
Ella was a blur of panic, her feet barely touching the forest floor as she bounded through the grass and mud and felled branches.
Each leap was a liaison with danger as she vaulted over tangled underbrush and skidded past trees.
Her ears were finely tuned to the symphony of the night, yet, above the cries of nature, her focus was on the silent phone clutched in her palm.
As she delved deeper into the woods, the air grew cooler, the scent of pine and earth invading her nostrils.
Everything became a little thicker, a little more intrusive, branches up above forming a natural cathedral over her head.
It had to be here somewhere.
Derek Graham’s phone was within spitting distance, but where?
Every muscle in her body was coiled to react. She could feel the adrenaline in her veins, pushing her forward even though her mind screamed for caution.
Suddenly, she stopped. The GPS marker on her phone had halted, indicating she was close.
Ella scanned the darkness, her eyes searching for any sign of the cabin, any hint of movement.
Her hand instinctively went to her weapon.
Ella moved ahead, peering from shadow to shadow, looking for any anomaly, any manmade structure amongst the natural.
The forest seemed to conspire in secrecy, but then, the faintest outline of something artificial materialized amongst the trees.
At first, it was nothing more than a trick of the light; a mere suggestion of structure that could as easily have been illusion as reality.
Piece by piece, the cabin offered itself to her: the rough-hewn texture of its wooden walls, the stark angle of the roof cutting a clear line against the sky, windows that stared back like unblinking eyes.
With the cabin now in full view, Ella's urgency transformed into reckless abandon. Her heart ascended to her throat as her feet pounded the forest floor with renewed fervor. Anxiety clawed at her insides, but the distance between Ella and cabin quickly evaporated.
Ella charged and tensed for impact. She summoned all of her strength into her upper body and transformed her shoulder into a battering ram.
The door, unprepared for the fury of her assault, gave way with a groan of stressed wood and rusted hinges, swinging open to reveal the shadow-laden interior of the cabin.
Ella aimed her pistol at the scene in front of her – the centerpiece of the room – blinking rapidly to adjust her vision to the darkness.
Slowly, the cabin’s secrets unfurled.
Ella's heart, already a captive to fear, now raced with the shock of misunderstanding.
‘What the hell?’
Ella's gaze locked onto a sight that twisted her expectations into knots. There in the center of the cabin was Derek Graham, but not as the predator she had envisioned.
Instead, he lay bound and helpless. Chains secured him to a table. Beside him, an array of metallic fear gleamed under the sparse light - a small, surgical-grade table stood there, and its surface boasted a collection of needles and syringes.
And there, within arm's reach of the needles, sat a cell phone. Its screen was connected to a call.
Flashes of days previous flickered before her inner eye with the intensity of a strobe light, illuminating moments she had misinterpreted, conversations whose meanings had been lost in the translation.
Derek Graham was not her killer.
He was the victim.
Ella's brain stalled because this didn't make sense. Derek's deepest fear, according to his neighbor, was drugs, because drugs killed his son.
This scene wasn’t that. This was a surgery suite. A table of syringes and vials of clear liquid. Why?
Her eyes fell on the phone again. The call was still active. Her call.
Then ice-cold logic crashed down on her.
Every time I see a needle, I remember that you can do everything right and still lose.
She’d been baited.
This scene wasn’t a test of Derek’s fears.
It was a test of hers.
Each breath was a struggle against the ride of panic that threatened to drown her. The sight of Derek Graham, chained and helpless. The table of needles, syringes. This scene was designed to invoke her own fear.
Confronted with a strange echo of the past, the room began to spin. It bled into a nightmare that Derek might not escape. She was no doctor, nor had she ever administered injections to anyone.
‘Derek,’ Ella cried as she rushed over to the bound victim. His body lay sprawled across the table. The chains seemed a cruel surplus to his weakened state and bound him to his metal prison without any chance of breaking free.
She found the pulse at his neck. It was clammy and pallid, but beneath her fingertips, there pulsed the faint but unmistakable rhythm of life.
‘Derek! Can you hear me?’
The victim managed to shake his head, then it lolled in the direction of the needles. ‘Drugs. Morphine.’
Ella fished for her phone, punched in her distress signal number, and hit send. Backup and medics would be en route to her location immediately, but judging by Derek’s heart rate, his nervous system was on the verge of shutting down within minutes.
‘Morphine. He said.. it will keep me alive.’
The syringes beside her were harbingers of a traumatic past that Ella had fought hard to bury.
But this was not then, and if she had to push through her worst fear to save this man’s life, then it was an easy decision.
Derek didn’t deserve to be a pawn in this psychopath’s game, and Ella’s phobia wasn’t going to be the barrier between a life lost and a life saved.
‘Derek, hold on. Keep breathing. Stay with me.’
Ella swept Derek for cuts, bruises, strangulation marks, anything that might give her an insight into his condition, but there were no visible gashes and no signs of blood beneath his white shirt.
Derek’s ragged breaths and the foam accumulating around his mouth drew Ella to one conclusion – poison.
Ella turned to the three syringes beside her.
Each contained a slender vial of clear liquid.
With no medical expertise, injecting Derek with any of them was a gamble.
All she had was memories of watching her dad do this 27 years ago – but what were the specifics?
Isolate the vein, inject ten milligrams every six hours, but was it a different drug?
They were drugs with unpronounceable names, but she remembered morphine being a part of the concoction.
Even so, would morphine even help here? If Derek had been poisoned, what effect would morphine have?
She thought of stimulants and depressants, and how one could counterbalance the other in the right circumstances.
If Derek had been injected with a stimulant or convulsant, morphine could help relax the muscles and combat seizures or nervous system shutdowns.
She had to try, because the alternative was to watch Derek die.
Ella grabbed the first syringe with one hand, Derek’s wrist with the other. The world dissolved, and she was four years old again, peering from behind a doorframe. The glint of the afternoon sun on a needle. Her father’s steady hand. Her mother’s thin, bruised arm, offered up without a fight.
No time for memories or phobias now. The man on the table was real flesh and blood.
The dilemma of dosage gnawed at her. The whole syringe? All three? The questions swirled. All she knew was that one dosage of morphine could stop the pain, but too much could send Derek straight to the grave. The clear liquid gave away no secrets, offering no hint of its nature or potency.
She needed to focus, to get this right, or there’d be just as much blood on her hands as her unsub’s.
Ella squeezed Derek’s wrist and probed for a vein in his forearm. She traced the needle up and down, ready to strike, but then Derek’s entire body jerked against the metal table.
‘Keep breathing, Derek. I’ve got you. Stay still.’
Finally, her fingers felt the telltale sign — the subtle, raised pathway of a vein.
Ella positioned the needle, held her breath, and aimed for the vein, but her hands trembled too much for accuracy.
She could see those images from yesteryear as vivid as anything, but she banished them to the back of her brain and held her hand still.
She tracked the vein, pierced the skin, and pushed in three, four, five millimeters deep.
She wasn't sure what it was supposed to be.
She'd crossed a threshold that left no room for turning back, and she depressed the plunger, sending a portion of the clear liquid into Derek's bloodstream.
Then, the unsettling response came. Derek's body twitched and spasmed. A moan escaped his lips and sent a wave of dread crashing over Ella.
The sight of foam once again forming at the corners of Derek's mouth was like a dagger to the heart. Torturous thoughts emerged – had she exacerbated his condition? Was the liquid in the syringe not an antidote, but a further poison or an accelerant to the one already in his system?
‘Derek, can you talk to me?’ She gave his cheek a firm tap. ‘Give me a sign, anything.’
Derek's eyelids flickered, and a weak grunt escaped his lips. It was a small response, but it was proof he was still here. It meant Derek was still holding on to the fragile thread of life.
‘Stay awake. I'm going to give you another dose. Just hold on.’
But Derek, his strength ebbing like the last light of day, mustered the energy to shake his head weakly. His incessant twitching stopped. Ella still held him by the wrist, praying that the medicine had worked its magic.
‘It’s over,’ Derek mumbled.
A simple declaration.
Ella's heart clenched at his words, recognizing in them the universal, unspoken language of defeat. It was the tone, the look she had seen before — the same resignation she had witnessed in the eyes of those who had lost the will to fight against their inevitable fate.
‘Derek, no!’ Ella shouted. ‘Medics will be here soon. The morphine will take effect. You’re going to live. Don’t give up on me.’
‘Let me go.’
But Ella grasped Derek by the shoulders, as if her physical touch could anchor him to life.
‘Stay with me, Derek! You have to stay alive!’ she screamed.
She prepared another dose of morphine, searching again for the same vein she’d just stabbed.
With less accuracy than the first, Ella deposited the morphine into Derek’s system, but this time, there was no response to the penetration of flesh.
‘Find him,’ Derek rasped.
‘Who? Who did this?’
Derek’s eyes opened and closed in rapid movements. ‘Group… name... don’t know.’
‘The group? Someone from the group?’
Derek’s eyes fluttered – the last ditch effort of a man tethered to the world of living.
‘Yes…. the man…nic.’
‘Manic? Nick?’
And then Derek went limp. His eyes closed, and one final breath escaped from his nose.
‘Derek, come back! Please, come back!’ She clutched his shoulders with both hands, her gentle shakes turning furious. Each shake was a plea for Derek to defy the impossible.
But Derek remained still.
The floodgates of her emotions burst open.
Ella dropped the syringe to the ground and searched for a pulse, a heartbeat, a sign that Derek still had one foot in the real world.
But she found only silence where there should have been life.
Ella whispered into the void – a futile plea to a man who could no longer hear.
‘I’m sorry, Derek.’
She’d lost the game.