HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) (5 page)

              Suddenly its headlights went dark and the idling engine died. Twitch paused, watching from the shadows. A woman stepped out of the driver’s door. She looked older, maybe forty, maybe fifty, it was hard to tell. Her dark, frizzy hair was pulled up in a strange mess, and her long taupe trench coat seemed crumpled. If this was a detective, she looked haggard, spent, faded, or at least that’s how she appeared from where Twitch was standing.

              That might be a good thing if she was an old exhausted woman, he thought. It gave him a fighting chance of beating her upstairs.

              He yanked his loose jeans up and headed off, running towards the back alley.

              If he could get up the fire escape in the back, then he could climb up all the way to Hunter’s apartment on the fifth floor or hop through the second floor landing and take the stairs. Either way, he would keep up his pace and beat her to them. The last thing any of them needed was to get arrested. Twitch was determined not to let that happen.

*              *              *

              Inside the apartment, Ash quickly moved towards the window. He lifted it, opening it as wide as it would go, but just as he was about to step out onto the fire escape, he realized Hunter was no longer directly behind him.

              He turned.

              Hunter was standing paralyzed in the center of her apartment.

              “Come on,” he whispered.

              “We’re leaving my apartment with two bodies,” she whispered back. “We have Dale’s car. We’re never going to outrun this, Ash.”

              “We have to try,” he said. “Think about your sister. We have to help her.”

              Suddenly a memory claimed Hunter’s thoughts, giving her pause. It was of her sister, Blair.

              Hunter had had no understanding of how it happened. She remembered how her father had taken her that day, in broad daylight, right out of the front basket of her mother’s shopping cart. That had been the last time she had seen her mother, but she had not understood how her father had gotten Blair. One day when Hunter had been nine and long since accustomed to life at the farmhouse, her father had brought Blair home. Blair had been four years old. The last time Hunter had seen her was with her mother before she had been taken. Blair had been a mere infant, a smiling lump of warmth. Her father had deposited the four year-old girl into Hunter’s arms and told her to teach her little sister how to live here. It had been one of the saddest moments of Hunter’s life, sad because it had been mixed with so much joy. She had loved her sister, and yet knew the horrors that would befall her now that she was there. The years together had become more and more heartbreaking, until eventually Hunter learned to turn her back on Blair. It had been too painful to admit she had a sister.

              She should have taken Blair with her that night when she had escaped the farmhouse. Hunter had been too far gone to think about anyone but herself. Now was Hunter’s chance to make it up to Blair.

              She hated that her father was manipulating her once again, forcing her to return to the farmhouse to save her sister. He must have known that would be the only reason she would ever go back. Part of her wished she could say to hell with it and let her sister be killed up there. It had been difficult, but possible to leave Blair behind in the first place. But that had been because Hunter had been in a mode of strict survival. She wasn’t in that mode anymore. She was able to think clearly, to live, to breathe. She would never be able to forgive herself if she didn’t at least try to save her younger sister.

              Ever since this whole thing had started, ever since she had come home to her apartment and discovered Thomas standing in the middle of her studio, Hunter had wanted to return to the farmhouse and kill all of the men who  had a hand in torturing her for all those years.

              Now was the time, but did they have a fighting chance?

              “Hunter!” shouted Ash, though he only meant to whisper.

              “I’m coming,” she said.

              And just as she was about to cross to the window and join him, there was a loud bang on the apartment door.

              Hunter froze. She looked at Ash, her eyes growing ever wider.

              Again, someone on the other side pounded against the door.

              Hunter looked at the dead body of Travis on the other side of the room, the old bloodstain from Thomas’ death, Molly’s lifeless body slumped in the bathtub. If whoever was on the other side of that door saw this scene, Hunter and Ash would be arrested without a moment’s hesitation.

              The person out there banged loudly a third time.

              The hallway was surprisingly cool, though dim.

              Sarah stood outside of apartment #506, listening intently for any sounds within, as sweat beads accumulated along her hairline. She blotted them away, which drew her attention to the fact that her arms and back had grown dewy with perspiration as well. The five flights of stairs had winded her greatly, so she wrestled her trench coat off and slung it over her purse.

              At that moment she could’ve sworn she heard something, a noise, like the taps of sneakers across hardwood floors, coming from inside the apartment.

              Sarah pressed her ear to the door and debated knocking a fourth time. The fact of the matter was that if there was someone inside, they hadn’t answered her first three knocks, so why would they answer the fourth? She thought she heard whispering voices, or perhaps her mind was playing tricks on her. At the very least, she sensed someone was inside.

              Pretty soon Linden would notice she wasn’t at the crime scene and he’d give her a call. She hadn’t confirmed with the Lieutenant that she was coming here. She didn’t want Linden, the department, a lost cluster of uniform officers wandering around, muddying the already muddy waters of this burgeoning case. If Linden called, she would have to admit where she was, and get formal about this visit. But until then she was planning on making headway on the anonymous tip alone. The operative word: headway, something Sarah had been finding it harder and harder to make unless she worked alone.

              All things considered, Sarah knew it would be a far more valuable use of her time to go back to the station and investigate who the caller had been, get a trace on the number by looking into the cell towers in the area to see where the call bounced in from. It was protocol to assume a tip like that would have to have come from someone who was pulling information first hand. Authentically anonymous tips tended to be distracted sounding, mostly useless details mixed in with a nugget of gold. The call she had received was fast, efficient, to the point, and contained only pertinent information. In this instance, Sarah agreed with protocol and wanted to find out everything she could about the caller. She wanted to confirm her instinct that the caller lived here in apartment #506, or equally as likely, that he knew the person who did.

              Sarah had only had time to superficially canvas the tenant that was leased to this apartment during her drive over. Hunter Mann. When she had read the name on the display screen in her vehicle, Sarah’s guts twisted in a downward spiral, her heart sank joining it.

              And that’s when the faint scent of blood filled her nostrils. She would recognize that smell anywhere. Sarah looked down and discovered a thick crack beneath the door. Someone was bleeding inside, and judging by the punch of tang iron in the air, she was guessing they were long since dead. She needed to get in there. She also needed to avoid suspension. She had failed to do things by the book these past few months and the departmental warnings were piling up.

              Sarah took a few steps back and drew her gun, pointing it down towards the ground and kicked hard against the door. It buckled slightly, but held. Steel doors like this one that were secured with a deadbolt among other locks didn’t cave easily. Sarah took a deep breath and kicked again. This time the frame loosened remarkably, causing a wide rift along the left edge where the steel met the frame. At her angle, she still couldn’t see into the apartment, but heard faint clangs beyond the ebb and flow of ambient street noises. It sounded like soft shoes tapping against metal. Sarah knew in her gut whoever was in there was descending the fire escape. She needed to get inside before they got away. 

              There was one thing Detective Sarah Voss liked about working cases in the worst part of Brooklyn: she could do whatever the hell she wanted and the neighbors wouldn’t report it.

              Sarah lifted her gun, pointing it at the deadbolt, and fired.

              The door popped open and she entered quickly and cautiously, her gun leading the way. She was hoping to get to the windows, confirm her suspicion that the resident was fleeing down the fire escape, but Sarah couldn’t. There were bodies here, and they stole her attention.

              At the far corner of the room lay a dead man. He had been shot in the chest from midrange, maybe ten feet away. He hadn’t been dead long, possibly five hours, but forensics would have to confirm the exact time of death. Sarah crossed quickly through towards the window, but didn’t make it that far when something in the bathroom caught her eye. A woman’s arm dangled over the edge of the bathtub. Sarah should’ve proceeded to the window, stepped through it onto the fire escape, and done what she could to find out who had ignored her persistent knocking and fled, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the arm in the bathroom.

              When Sarah entered the bathroom, stepping deeper inside, she was first struck by the odd fact that there was no shower curtain. She noticed the rings across the metal rod above the shower. It wasn’t that there was no shower curtain, she realized thanks to the rings. It was that the shower curtain was missing. All this was to say that Sarah had a hard time looking down at the woman’s body, mainly because it wasn’t a woman’s body. She had known that the second she stepped foot into the apartment. It was a little girl. Sarah pegged her for being thirteen years old, tops.

              The girl was completely naked, shot in the chest from point blank range. The clothes were removed postmortem by her estimation. She could tell based on how the blood at the gaping wound seemed contained, as though something had absorbed it prior.

              Most disturbingly, a word was carved into the girl’s forehead at jagged angles.

              As Sarah read it, she realized it wasn’t a word. It was a name.

              “Hunter.”

              A sharp pang of nausea lurched from the pit of her stomach, shooting upwards until it burned her heart. Tears sprang to Sarah’s eyes, stinging them fiercely as she gasped for air. It was a reaction unlike any she had ever had at a crime scene. But the girl in the tub, her blond ratty hair, her youth, the way her eyes glared vacantly downward, was thoroughly heartbreaking. The sight brought Sarah into a state of anguish.  

              In a fast motion, Sarah extracted her cell phone, flipping it open from the base, and speed dialed Linden as she drew in long breaths of air, collecting herself.

              “We’ve got bodies,” she said. “Get here as fast as you can.”

*              *              *

              Twitch was the first to let go of the ladder and drop to the pavement below. He landed smoothly in a deep knee bend, softening the blow. He immediately glanced up at Ash and Hunter, then higher to the window from where they had come. They weren’t out of the woods yet. He had heard the shot. What kind of detective fired shots to break into an apartment? Didn’t the cops need a warrant to get in? They were running out of time. And if that detective, that frazzled looking woman Twitch had seen on the street earlier, was that much of a maverick to break into Hunter’s place, then they needed to be gone already. The crazy bitch might climb down the fire escape after them. Killing a cop would be the last thing they needed. Why the fuck was Hunter lingering around the top rung?

              Hunter needed to know that none of the New Hampshire men had come back for her to finish the job. She didn’t think any of them would go against Grizzly’s instructions and come back to take her out, but she needed to be sure. She didn’t trust anyone, least of all the unpredictable, murderous farmhouse maniacs. At the risk of being caught or shot, Hunter clung with a white-knuckle grip to the railing, waiting, watching, listening for evidence of who the person inside her apartment was.

              After a moment, an older woman stepped out from the bathroom. Her face was aged with creases both deep and superficial. The lines around the corners of her eyes and the sides of her mouth were noticeable. She was pretty, though older, but her hair was a frizzy mess. The front and back of the woman’s shirt were darkly stained with sweat, Hunter observed, as the woman turned this way and that, looking around the apartment.

              Then Hunter noticed a badge clipped to the woman’s belt to the side of the buckle. This was exactly what Hunter had been afraid of ever since she had shot Dale behind the sugar factory. She knew the cops would come eventually. She just didn’t think it would be this quickly. How the fuck was she going to get out of this? Everything inside her apartment now served to screw her. Hunter wasn’t seeing a way out of this, and she really didn’t want to die, rotting in prison. Or would that be the safest place for her, away from the men, away from the farmhouse and the barn, away from her father?