Read Hide My Thoughts: A Romantic Suspense Thriller Book (Hide Me Series 2) Online
Authors: Lisa Ladew
Hide My Thoughts: A Romantic Suspense Thriller Book (Hide Me Series 2) (3 page)
“How are you doing?” Blaise asked her.
Katerina shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I feel pretty on edge.”
West held up a paper bag and tried to hand it to Katerina. “My dad’s friend prescribed these for you – if you want to take them. There’s sleeping pills and something else that might make you feel better.”
Katerina felt that swift and irrational anger sweep over her again at the sight of the bag. Then her eyes settled on the blue beer can in West’s hand. This time the anger blazed high enough to be called rage. She bit her tongue and tried to breathe through it, then shoved her hands under her legs to keep them from attacking West - possibly scratching his eyes out. West must have noticed her agitation because he looked at her with obvious concern in his eyes. The concern fueled Katerina’s anger into a raging bonfire.
He had no right to be concerned about her.
Jordan spoke, and her voice swept over Katerina, scattering the anger to the four corners of the room. She shook her head.
What was wrong with her?
“Sleeping pills? Are you having problems sleeping, Kat?” Jordan asked.
“Yes,” Katerina mumbled. She took the bag from West’s hand and fought the urge to fling it against the wall. The urge subsided and she tried to breathe deeply. No one said anything and Katerina felt herself getting angry at the awkward silence in the room.
They all knew. They were all judging her.
Argh!
Mentally she tore her mind away from the thoughts that were torturing her and blurted out the first thing that came into her head.
“Blaise, what is your background? Are you Spanish?”
Blaise smiled, appearing to be relieved at the question. “I’m from Honduras. My family came to America when I was five years old.”
Katerina’s mind inexplicably relaxed. “Really? I’m surprised you don’t have an accent,” she said, looking pointedly at Jordan.
“I did have one. But I’ve been seeing a dialect coach. There is a job in public relations at the department that I really want to be assigned to. My sergeant thought it would probably help if I didn’t have an accent, so I started seeing the dialect coach to try to get rid of it. It worked pretty well, yes?”
Katerina smiled, delighted. She was about to respond affirmatively when Jordan spoke. “That’s racist, that they wouldn't give you a job because you have an accent.”
For the first time, Blaise looked at Jordan. Katerina watched him closely and was confused when she saw no warmth in his eyes. He was being polite, that was all. “It may be racist, but it’s reality. I decided to work with it, instead of fight against it.”
Katerina looked at Jordan, who looked nervous, probably because of Blaise’s frosty tone. But Katerina wanted to know one more thing.
“Blaise, do you have a girlfriend?”
Blaise eyed her warily, like he could see where this was going. “No, no girlfriend,” he said reluctantly.
West broke in and Katerina felt like he was trying to save Blaise. Irritation flickered inside of her again. These were two grown men, they couldn’t handle a few questions?
“So what do you know about the investigation? Are there any new developments?” West asked.
Blaise turned his attention to West and pulled a tiny notebook out of the back pocket of his jeans.
“Before I answer, I want to ask Katerina a question.” Without looking at Katerina, he stated his question like he was reading it out of his notebook. “Can you tell us anything that we don’t already know? You found the bodies under the house. Do you have any idea at all who this new killer is?”
Katerina shook her head violently and bit her lip. This time it was frustration that bubbled up inside of her. She was suddenly sick to death of being such an emotional basket case. “I’ve tried. For the last two days I’ve done everything I can think of to see if I know who could be doing this. I sat with every single thought and emotion and image left inside me and tried to pick over it for some hints or a clue for you guys. I have nothing.”
“Do you think if we took you back to Frank’s house, you could do what you did last time? Stand in the house and come up with something there?”
Katerina shook her head and looked at West imploringly. She didn’t want to do that again. “I don’t think so. I can try, but after we did that the last time – I came home and did everything I could to get rid of all of those memories and images. I can’t explain it very well, but, I …” Katerina felt her cheeks heat as she remembered asking West to help her forget. Something about being with him, and touching him, seemed to be able to burn the memories out of her brain from Frank Phillips. Three days ago she would’ve said it worked about 95%. But now, she wasn’t so sure. Were all of these alien thoughts and insane emotions actually coming from memories still left behind by Phillips? She didn’t want to have to explain all of this to Blaise. He always seemed slightly skeptical about the things she had seen anyway. He believed her, but seemed to think there was some sort of logical explanation for all of it that they just hadn’t figured out yet. Either that, or she was just a freak. Besides, she didn’t want to tell him exactly how West helped her forget.
Katerina sighed. “If you want me to go back to the house, I will, but I don’t think it will help things. I don’t think I’ll come up with any names for you.”
“Fair enough,” Blaise said. “Here’s what we found. There were seventeen bodies buried in the dirt underneath Phillips’ house.”
Katerina sucked in a breath and she saw Jordan turn white next to her. West squeezed his beer can hard enough that it crumpled in his fist.
Blaise went on like he hadn’t even noticed. “There were fourteen women between the ages of twenty and forty, most of them completely decayed, which tells us they’ve been down there for at least eight years. There was one woman over forty and one man over forty, and one man between the ages of twenty to forty. These last three bodies were at the very bottom and all were completely decomposed. None of the skeletons have been identified. We are working on that now. Some of the younger women might be foreign. The medical examiner says their dental work is strange, like it was done in another country, but he can’t narrow down which one.”
Blaise stopped talking and flipped a few pages in his notebook.
West leaned forward in his chair. “What about the rest of them? Can’t you identify anybody by their dental records?”
“It’s not that easy. There’s not some sort of central depository where everybody’s dental records are held. If someone has been reported missing and is suspected to be dead for a long time, and suddenly a body shows up that they have reason to believe might be that person, the police can try to procure their dental records to check that. But we can’t just run records through a computer database like we can fingerprints. We have tried comparing all of these sets of teeth to dental records of outstanding missing persons cases, but so far we have no matches.”
Katerina’s mind spun. Seventeen bodies now. And still no one had a clue who any of them were.
Blaise flipped another page in his notebook and kept talking. “We think the man and woman who were at the very bottom might be Phillips’ aunt and uncle. They both disappeared twenty-two years ago. Phillips himself filed a missing persons report on them. He said they went on vacation and never came back. I’ve looked at the police reports and the investigating officer found no reason to suspect Phillips. They were supposed to have gone on vacation to Mexico, and the story checked out. Several people reported talking to them about their upcoming vacation. Supposedly they just never came back and nothing ever came of the investigation.”
Jordan clucked her tongue, something she did when she was irritated or frustrated. Blaise looked up at her and she covered her mouth with her hands, looking mortified.
Blaise looked back at his notebook and went on. “We are also operating under the assumption that the other man might be Frank’s brother. His brother disappeared around the same time, but we don’t know much about that because no missing persons report was ever filed. No one ever missed him. They just assumed he had run off or joined the Army or something. He was always disturbed, and people were probably happy to see him go.”
“His brother’s alive,” Katerina said quietly.
Blaise looked at her expectantly.
“He talked about his brother, at the old morgue, when he was holding me down. He said something like, ‘Did my brother send you? What will my brother think if he gets you back in pieces? Or is that what he wants?’”
West’s beer can crumpled again and Katerina glanced at him. This time he was the one who looked angry enough to hurt someone.
Blaise nodded. “I remember you telling us that, but we still have to look into it. Maybe Phillips was delusional.”
That would make sense too
, Katerina thought.
“What is the brother’s name?” West asked.
“Dylan Phillips.” Blaise grimaced. “He was a real jerk. I wouldn’t be surprised if people did nothing but breathe a sigh of relief when he disappeared.”
Katerina clenched her hands into fists.
That wasn’t the brother’s body under the house.
She knew it. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was certain the brother was the one who was hunting her now.
West lifted his chin, motioning for Blaise to go on.
“Frank and Dylan Phillips grew up in a very abusive household. We have police reports going back almost to their birth of people calling the police for domestic violence calls at their farm. Things were different back then though. CPS almost never took the kids away. And the cops almost never arrested anyone for domestic violence. They just calmed things down. When the boys were eight and ten, their mom took off and no one ever saw her again. The boys got in almost constant trouble at school. Both of them, but mostly Dylan, the older boy, would get sent home repeatedly for things like pinning girls to the wall and trying to kiss them or pulling up their skirts. When they were ten and twelve, there was a major incident and the boys finally got taken away from their father. Dylan went to live with their aunt and uncle and Frank went into a foster home. Frank never got in trouble again but Dylan was arrested for rape at thirteen. Dylan seemed to have very little control over himself and by the time he was seventeen he had been expelled from school and in and out of juvenile Hall multiple times. He’d been convicted of rape several times and they were about to try him as an adult."
Blaise sucked in a deep breath and looked at both of the women before he went on. “Instead, he opted into an experimental program and chose to be castrated for a lighter prison sentence.”
Katerina and Jordan both gasped, while West made a face and put both hands between his legs. “They cut off his-”
Blaise shook his head quickly. “That’s what I thought too. But castration is not cutting off a penis. There’s chemical castration and there’s surgical castration. In surgical castration they take your testicles. He was surgically castrated.”
Katerina’s thoughts whirled crazily. “He chose to do that?”
“It seems so. He may have been pushed into it by his aunt and uncle, but the doctor and prison staff say he went into the operation willingly.”
“If a man is castrated, can he still have sex?” Katerina asked.
“They can, but the loss of the testicles also decreases testosterone, and normally decreases the sex drive. That’s why it is offered to some criminals. Supposedly it helps them control their impulses.”
Katerina stood up and walked past Jordan to the kitchen. She turned around and came back quickly, her posture rigid, her face set determinedly. “What about the bodies of the women that were found in Westwood Harbor that you said were similar to the bodies that we found in Tetam County? They weren’t raped, right? This is the brother. I know it is! He’s doing the same thing that Frank Phillips did, except he’s not raping them.”
Blaise held up a hand. “That is a theory that we are looking into. We have thought of that. But, like I said, the brother disappeared ages ago. There has been no record of him anywhere in California for the last twenty years.”
“Maybe he’s been hiding in Frank Phillips' basement,” Katerina said heatedly. “Just because the man hasn’t had a job or paid his taxes doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist anymore.”
Blaise shook his head. “It’s not that simple. We’ve been questioning Phillips’ neighbors and everyone he knows and works with. No one has seen him with a man that looks like his brother. We’ve been questioning everyone who knew the two boys back then. No one has seen Dylan Phillips in California in twenty years.”
“What about their dad?” West asked.
“Killed during a break in years after Dylan disappeared. The case was never solved.”
Katerina continued to pace. She knew she was right. “Do you have a picture of Dylan?”
“No pictures. There are no pictures at Frank’s house and none of the yearbooks from his high school have a picture of him either. He just wasn’t in school enough. There are some pictures of him when he was under ten, but they aren’t very helpful in showing what he would look like now.”