Stalked (36 page)

Stride stood over the man’s shoulder. “What is it?”

“Pictures. Lots of them. Mostly of the same woman.”

Craig dragged the mouse and clicked a tiny icon, and a string of thumbnail images scattered across the black screen.

“I can run them all like a slide show,” Craig said.

“Do it.”

The first of the pictures zoomed out to full size. Stride’s heart sank. It was Serena. He recognized the area, which was downtown Saint Paul, in Rice Park near the Ordway. Another photo clicked onto the screen, and this was Serena, too. Near the Duluth courthouse. He forced himself to look at the entire collection. They were almost all of Serena, more than sixty images. Secret photos, taken from a distance. Some were near their own home, on the beach, through their windows.

This guy had been planning to take Serena for a long time.

Stride pointed at an image in the middle, which was nothing more than a flash of white light. “What’s that?”

“A mistake,” Craig said. “The camera probably went off accidentally.”

“Pull it up again.”

Craig restored the image to the screen, and Stride leaned in, staring at the photo. The blob of light was obviously the camera flash firing, but he could also make out something else, which looked like brown spots and wavy dark lines.

“What’s that?” Stride asked.

Craig looked closer. “I’m not sure.”

“I think it’s wood.”

“Too smooth for that.”

“Wood paneling, I mean. Cheap stuff.” Stride looked around the apartment. There was no wood paneling anywhere. He checked the bedroom and the bathroom and didn’t find any panels there that matched the photo.

“Do you put wood paneling inside your vans?” he asked.

Craig shook his head.

“So where was this taken?” Stride asked, but he was talking to himself. To the air. Thinking that wherever the wood paneling was, Serena was there now. This was Deed’s hidey-hole.

While he was running down a mental list of places that had fake wood siding, Guppo called back.

“Tell me you got him,” Stride said.

“Yeah, but there’s a problem.”

“What?”

“The match is perfect,” Guppo told him. “He’s got records in Arizona, Texas, and Alabama. Drugs, murder, extortion, and two rape charges that were dropped when the women got cold feet.”

“Sounds like our guy,” Stride said. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem is, he’s dead.”

“Say what?”

“The Alabama authorities claim he’s dead. He was a witness in a narcotics trial, and two officers were escorting him back to the state CF in Holman. They ran square into a hurricane, and all three died.”

“Did you say a hurricane?” Stride asked, hoping that Guppo had made a mistake and knowing that he hadn’t.

“Yeah.”

The dread he was feeling mutated and multiplied. Stride knew where this was going. He was there when Serena got the call last fall from the Alabama police and remembered the look of relief on her face. She felt liberated. Free.

“They found the two cops,” Guppo said. “The car, too, which was a wreck. No sign of foul play, though. They figured the prisoner washed out to sea.”

That was the logical conclusion, and it was wrong. He didn’t wash out to sea. He escaped and headed north like a laser beam. Stride remembered how Serena described the dead man who had tortured her past. Brilliant, ruthless, charming, scheming. Exactly the kind of spider who would love to play games with his prey and then eat them. A drug dealer. A blackmailer. A rapist. A killer.

“What was his name?” Stride asked, but he already knew.

“Take your pick,” Guppo told him. “William Deed, alias Billy Deed, alias B. D. Henry, alias Billy ‘Dog’ Ketcher, alias Blue Dog.”

She was wrong. Terribly wrong. It wasn’t Tommy Luck standing over her. It wasn’t anyone from her days in Las Vegas at all. This was worse. This was a ghost from years ago, from her childhood, a ghost straight from hell.

“You’re dead,” Serena gasped.

Blue Dog grinned. “Yeah, I’m like the invisible man. I don’t exist.”

“The Alabama police called me,” she insisted, although the evidence was in front of her eyes. “They said you were killed in a storm.”

“You don’t know the prison system down South. They’ve got so many bodies crammed into a cell that one less inside is a reason to celebrate. I’m sure they figured the storm did them a favor.”

Serena was flooded by memories. Images she had locked away long ago in a dark corner of her brain broke free like rats bolting from their cages. She was in Blue Dog’s apartment in Phoenix again. Fifteen years old. The summer heat was an inferno, her skin so chapped it bled when she scratched it. Cockroaches watched her from the walls. So did her mother, no better than a cockroach herself, her eyes hungry and wild from the coke. Blue Dog’s eyes were black and clear; he never used drugs, he just sold. He was grinning as he took her, splitting her open like a nail violating wood. The same grin he had now.

He saw her remember. “We had some good times, huh?”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s the plan. I’ve spent the last ten years thinking about you. The thought of paying you back was about the only thing that kept me alive inside.”

“I’ve paid the price my whole life for what you did to me,” Serena told him. “That should make us even.”

“Maybe, but you should have left it alone, and you didn’t,” Blue Dog said. “You came after me.”

That was true. Serena remembered that summer ten years ago. She had to go to Phoenix to get background on a case she was working in Vegas. While she was there, her teenage memories all came back, and she wound up drinking for three days in a dive south of the city and waking up in a motel near the airport with a man she didn’t know. Cockroaches were on the wall there, too. She went to a shrink who said she had unresolved issues about her mother and Blue Dog, which was like paying a hundred bucks to hear that you get wet when you walk out in the rain. That was the same therapist who asked if she ever had an orgasm with Blue Dog. The bastard.

So she did her own kind of therapy. She took a month’s leave and followed Blue Dog’s trail from Arizona to Texas and then to Alabama, where she found him up to his old tricks, running a crack and extortion empire in Birmingham and sleeping with a black girl who couldn’t be more than sixteen. She hooked up with the Alabama police, and they watched Blue Dog blow away a street pusher who was keeping some of the product for himself. He shot him in the head, right there on camera, before they could clamber out of the stakeout vehicles and arrest him.

Serena studied him. He was older; you could see it in his face and in the gray streaks in his long hair. He was the same, though. Tall, almost six feet six, and broad like a grizzly. The same ego, too. He still had the need to control the world, the need to make women get on their knees, the need to prove he was smarter and tougher than anyone else.

That was the only advantage she had. She knew him and how he thought. He wasn’t a stranger.

Her first job was to stall him. Keep him talking. Serena knew that half the city had to be on alert now, and Jonny would be looking for her everywhere. The more time she gave him to find her, the more her chances increased of escaping alive. She was a realist, though. She knew that she was probably about to die.

“Where are we?” she asked.

She could see that the small enclosure was some kind of shanty with one overhead bulb casting shadows. She saw cheap wood paneling, a sink, a minirefrigerator, and empty beer bottles littering the space. It was narrow, maybe seven feet wide and about twelve feet in length. She saw two windows on the far wall, taped over with gray duct tape. The door on her left had a diamond-shaped window, also taped over. When the wind gusted, the entire frame shuddered.

“Still hoping someone will find you? Don’t count on it.”

His eyes danced. He was becoming aroused by her naked body. He pulled a chair next to the bed and leaned over her and began playing with his knife on her skin again. Her flesh rippled, having him close to her. She was still freezing, and she hated that the cold kept her nipples hard, which made him leer and smile. He flicked at them with his blade and then leaned over and suckled her, licking off the blood.

Keep him talking
, Serena thought.

“If this was between you and me, why did you put so many other people in the middle of it?”

Blue Dog shrugged. “Who, fuckers like Dan Erickson and Mitch Brandt? I told you before, these people are no different than me. They all have secrets.”

“How did you find out about them?”

She assessed how she was bound. She was on a low cot, no more than a foot off the ground. Her legs were spread, draped off the bed and tied with duct tape to the steel legs of the frame. Her body stretched two thirds of the way up the length of the cot. Her arms hung down on either side of the bed, and when she pulled on them, she realized that they were tied with cloth, not tape. A stretchy fabric, like a cotton T-shirt, was wrapped around her wrists and knotted tightly, and then pulled back to the other legs of the frame about a foot behind her and knotted again. She had some play in her arms. When she put her hand down, she could rest her palm on the floor. She felt ice-cold metal.

“There was this young computer hacker in Holman,” Blue Dog told her. “He was in for molesting boys, a real sick fuck.”

He said this without a trace of irony.

“A guy like that’s not going to last long without protection,” he continued. “I made sure nobody messed with him.”

“Yeah, you’re a saint,” Serena said.

Blue Dog laughed. “Fuck, he was going to wind up giving blow jobs anyway, so it might as well be my cock he sucked.”

“I didn’t realize you were queer.”

Blue Dog’s grin evaporated, and he turned his knife on its point and jabbed it an inch deep into the flesh of Serena’s right shoulder. She screamed and jerked back. The bed frame rocked. He yanked the knife out and wiped the blood on the mattress. Waves of pain washed over her.

“You better learn to be polite, or this is going to be a long night.”

“Like it’s not going to be anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But there’s long and then there’s long.”

Serena closed her eyes. She laid her left hand down on the floor again. The bed had moved. She explored the floor with her hand, looking for anything sharp that she could use to attack the strip of fabric that connected her wrist to the frame of the bed. She felt crumbs and puddles of frigid water that had dripped through the ceiling, but nothing that could cut.

“So what did this guy do?” she asked.
Keep him talking
.

“He taught me everything he knew about computers. I realized there was a lot more money to be made online than I ever did on the street. The real money is in everything people want to keep hidden.”

“Blackmail.”

“Sure. I got to town, and I started keeping an eye on you. But a guy’s got to make a living. I was in no hurry. I found other ways to let off steam.”

“So why come after me now?”

“It’s time to get out of the city,” Blue Dog said. “The cops are getting too close. But you and I have unfinished business.”

Out of sight, under the bed, Serena spread the fingers of her left hand and stretched them as far as she could. She brushed the very edge of a piece of metal, but it nudged out of her reach as she touched it.

Blue Dog reached around behind his back and pulled out a revolver. It was a small-frame, airweight Smith & Wesson that looked like a toy in his hands. Serena mentally took stock of the gun. Light and easy to conceal. Five rounds. She wondered if she would be alive to see the last four.

“I’ve thought a lot about how to do this,” he told her. He put the barrel of the gun to the cap of her right knee. “You know what it feels like to get a bullet right here? Makes you want to die. I thought about doing both your knees, and then poling you after that.”

Serena wriggled and tried to move the bed.

“Then I thought, you won’t feel me inside you if I do that. I don’t want you in so much agony that you can’t feel what it’s like.”

He put the gun to her forehead. The barrel was warm where it had been inside his pants. “I also thought about making you suck my dick.”

“You put anything in my mouth, you’re not getting it back,” Serena said.

Blue Dog laughed. “Yeah, I’m a practical guy.”

“You’ll never get away with this.”

“We’ll see about that. You think we’re still on planet earth? Let me show you how wrong you are.”

He pulled the revolver away from her head and pointed it upward at the ceiling, and without hesitating, he squeezed the trigger. Serena felt the shock waves inside her skull. Dust and paint fell in a cloud, and a stream of water dribbled over her chest like a mountain waterfall from the hole that punctured the roof. The echo screamed in her ears. Her head throbbed as if he had put two live wires to her temples.

No one came running. There were no sounds outside except the constant, whistling roar of the blizzard. Serena shivered as the falling water kept on, soaking her skin.

“See?” he said. “It’s just you and me.”

Blue Dog stood up. He grabbed an out-of-fashion men’s tie from the floor and dangled it in her face. It was wide, with black-and-yellow slanted stripes. “Is this ugly or what? I found it in the farmhouse where I hid during the hurricane.”

He strung it around Serena’s neck and began to pull the ends tighter.

Blue Dog unzipped his pants. “Remember this guy?”

Serena knew she was running out of time. Her hand stretched again for the metal piece on the floor and missed it. She didn’t even know what it was or whether it would help her cut through the fabric that tied her to the bed.

Blue Dog climbed onto the cot at her feet, and the springs beneath them groaned under the weight of their two bodies together. The bed moved a fraction of an inch. He lowered his weight down on her. His shirt dampened as it rubbed against her wet chest. His hands took hold of the two ends of the tie and began pulling them in opposite directions, narrowing the loop that hung around Serena’s neck. Below, between her spread legs, she felt him try to invade her.