Chapter 14
Fourteen
Muted but frantic barking jerked Paisley to consciousness.
Duke.
She turned her head toward the sound, straining to see. But there was only blackness, and the motion made her muscles scream. Everything hurt and her mind seemed shrouded in fog. She tried to swallow, only to find something blocking her tongue. The strangeness of that dragged her back to awareness.
Not something. A gag. And she couldn’t see because she was blindfolded. Her arms and feet were immobilized. Bound to a chair? Wood creaked as she strained to move. The rest of it came back in a rush. The woods. She was attacked. Drugged.
Fresh fear spiked beneath the remnants of the drugs.
Where was she? How long had she been out?
Where was her kidnapper? She couldn’t hear anything over the roaring of her pulse and Duke’s continued barking.
He was alive, and he was nearby. That was…
something. Struggling to calm herself, she inventoried her body.
Aches from the fall, soreness from where her arms had been wrenched back.
But she didn’t feel any major injuries or signs of violation.
For the moment, she seemed to be alone. No doubt, that wouldn’t last. What was her kidnapper’s end game?
This whole thing had begun as such comparatively benign contact to have escalated this far.
What the hell did he want? Was he planning to keep her, Misery style?
Was she expected to be some kind of plaything?
Closing her eyes, she wished desperately for Ty.
Did he even know she was gone? If he knew, he was looking for her.
No matter what headspace he was in, so long as she was in danger, he wouldn’t stop trying to find her.
She knew that beyond the shadow of a doubt.
He was going to come for her. She just had to hold on until he did.
The shriek of rusty hinges echoed through the space.
A space that sounded far larger than she’d imagined.
Paisley repressed a scream as footsteps made their way across a creaky wooden floor, wondering if she should pretend to still be unconscious.
But she couldn’t stop from jerking her head toward the sound, trying to track the movement as the person circled around her. Clearing the room? Rescue? Ty?
A low, male voice cursed and rushed toward her. At the sense of hands near her face, Paisley flinched. The blindfold slid away.
“It’s okay. I’ve gotcha.”
She blinked unfocused eyes at the man kneeling in front of her chair. Not Ty. Joel Fisher.
He holstered his service weapon and moved behind her to work the gag free. As soon as it was out of her mouth, she flexed her jaw, trying to get feeling back.
“Are you okay?”
She was too stupefied to see him to focus on anything else. “I…what are you…how are you here?”
With a wry half smile, he began to work at the knots on her ankles. “Just call me the cavalry. I was already on my way up here, so I joined in the search when you disappeared.”
“How long have I been missing?”
“Since this morning.”
So it had been hours, not potential days.
“Why were you even coming here?” Where was here? Was she still somewhere in Eden’s Ridge?
“Deputy Brooks called to discuss the transfer of your protective detail. I understand you’ve had some problems up here.
We’ve got a safehouse ready back in Nashville.
” Joel paused, his hands on her knees, and looked up with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
Earnestness mixed with…a sort of manic adoration. “I’m going to keep you safe.”
Something about this didn’t feel right. Ty didn’t like Joel and wasn’t particularly impressed with him as a detective. Maybe that was colored by jealousy, but even if he was abdicating his own role in her case, he’d find someone he knew and trusted to pass it to.
“Let me get your hands loose.” He straightened, and her gaze dropped to his feet and the dark brown boots he wore. Mud was splattered across the toe of one. Paisley angled her head, squinting at the shape it made. A cross.
Oh my God.
Panicked adrenaline dumped into her system, but she said nothing as Joel began to untie her wrists.
She needed her hands free if she was going to do anything.
And what the hell was she going to actually do?
Wiggling her feet, trying to get the feeling back into her toes and legs, she finally took a look at her surroundings, searching for anything she might use as a weapon.
She was in a church. Or what had once been one.
Much of the glass in the lancet windows was cracked or gone entirely.
What remained was obscured by a layer of filth.
A handful of old wooden pews marched in uneven rows toward where she sat.
The pulpit—or where one must have sat—was behind her.
A large, broken cross leaned against the raised platform of the dais.
There was nothing she could swing. Nothing she could even move in her current condition except the chair she sat in.
If there was a door other than the one he’d come through, she couldn’t see it from her position.
The pressure on her arms released at last. On a relieved sigh, Paisley hunched forward, rubbing at her wrists and hands. She needed to buy some time. Every extra minute was another one for the drugs to wear off. And another one that actual help might be on the way.
“Duke. Is Duke okay?”
“He’s fine, I think. Sounds it, anyway. I spotted him in a crate out back.”
What kind of crate will actually hold my little Houdini? She could hear it now, the sound of him rattling the cage. “Why hasn’t anybody let him loose yet?”
“I was more concerned with you.” He held out his hands to draw her to her feet.
“I can do it. I need to do it.” Stubbornly, she shoved to her feet, swaying a little. “You’re here alone?”
“Yes. We split up to search for you. I followed a wild hunch and ended up here. We need to hurry. We don’t know when this guy will come back.”
Moving behind the chair so she could use the back for balance, she insisted, “I’m not going anywhere.” If she changed locations, how much harder would it be for Ty and his people to find her?
Confusion flickered over his face. “What? Of course, you are. You can’t stay here.”
Paisley shook her head, brain frantically trying to find a way out of this. How could she keep stalling him? “I’m not going to live running forever, always looking over my shoulder. I can be bait. You can call for backup. He has to come back for me eventually, and y’all can take him down.”
A muscle ticked in Joel’s jaw. “That’s not an option. We need to go.”
“Why isn’t it an option, Joel?”
Again with the jaw clenching. He definitely hadn’t counted on her being noncompliant.
“There’s no radio signal here. We have to hike out to get one.”
“On the radio you’re not carrying? Or is it because you’re not going to call for backup? Because you don’t want to be caught?”
“What are you talking about? Did he hit you over the head?”
“I recognize your shoes from when you took me down.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “Why couldn’t you just do what you were supposed to?”
Seeing her opening, she shoved the chair into him with all her might, hoping to knock him off balance.
Seconds. It was only going to buy her seconds.
But she lunged for the door, dodging pews and broken floorboards.
Her hand curled around the knob, yanking it open.
She hurtled outside, into weak, winter sunlight.
For one glorious moment, she thought she’d make it. But Joel snagged her around the waist.
“Let me go!”
He yanked her off her feet, pivoting them both back inside.
But not before she saw the streak of her dog loose and racing into the woods.
As it was the last place Paisley was seen, the Misfit Inn had been turned into incident command.
Search and rescue had been deployed, combing the woods more thoroughly, searching for any additional clues.
Ty had called Metro Police in Nashville to confirm what he already knew—that Fisher wasn’t around.
He’d taken personal leave four days before.
That wasn’t an indictment on its own, but the report from Carissa Knowles, who’d co-taught the citizen’s police academy with him was a heavy weight on that side of the scale.
“He really liked her. Everybody did. She was the belle of the class, and everybody had more fun because she was there. But Fisher definitely skated the line with her. Flirting even though she was taken. Touching her more than strictly necessary. She definitely got special treatment and special attention. He got a charge out of all her questions. Like they made him feel all important—big man on campus, as it were. Which was especially affecting for him because he went through a nasty divorce a couple years before. He didn’t take it well when he asked her out and she shot him down. ”
“What did he do?”
“To her face, nothing. But there was plenty of that grown-man sulking. He stayed some kind of friends with her. In my opinion, he thought he could wait her out until she was single again. But that didn’t work out for him either. She never went out with him so far as I know.”
That tracked with what Paisley had told him herself. “Are you aware of any history of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior from Fisher toward anyone else?”
“He’s had a few slaps on the wrist, but no formal sexual harassment charges. And that’s entirely because many of our superiors are cut from the same cloth.”
“Do you know anything about her case?”
“I knew she’d been up here for something, but not specifically what. Let me see what’s in the system.” The clack of keys sounded in the background. “There is no case.”
“What?”
“There’s not a damned thing in the system after the mugging. If he was investigating this, he was doing it off-book.”