Sweet Dreams Boxed Set (106 page)

“Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” he said and cut the strap before pulling her out through the broken window.

“My phone,” she mumbled. “The police.”

The glass had cut her in several places. He could see blood rolling down her arms. But she seemed too disoriented to fully comprehend what was going on, which was fortunate. She only knew she was afraid.

“I’ll call them for you,” he said and dragged her over to his car, at which point he threw her in the trunk and took off.

***

As soon as he got a few blocks from where he’d left Evelyn’s car, Jasper slowed down and removed his mask. His desire to get away from the crash site as soon as possible had to be tempered by the threat of drawing attention for driving like a bat out of hell. It was important to act as if he was just an every day guy, someone with nothing to hide. He’d found if he could sell that well, most people would believe whatever story he told or whatever image he portrayed, and acting bold and confident contributed to his success.

So he calmed down and pretended as if he hadn’t just kidnapped the psychiatrist so many people would recognize from TV. 

He hoped he’d escaped without anyone spotting his car. It seemed like it. No one had come running. But even if he had gotten away cleanly, there was the issue of his banged up vehicle. It was obvious that it had been in an accident. As soon as possible, he needed to get off the road and stay off the road.

Which he planned to do as soon as he reached Waltham. That would take fifteen minutes. It’d be another five or ten before he could get to his hideaway.

Jasper didn’t want to stop before he reached his safe spot, so he wasn’t pleased when Evelyn started to scream and kick at the trunk lid. He’d disabled the release the manufacturer had installed, so she couldn’t get out, but she could certainly draw attention, which meant he had to do something.

After pulling into an alley, he opened the trunk and covered her mouth with a rag dosed in a homemade version of chloroform.

“That should do the trick,” he muttered when she went limp, and hopped back behind the wheel.

***

As soon as Amarok got home for the night, he tried calling Evelyn. It’d been only thirty minutes since he’d talked to her before, but he couldn’t reach her. “Hey, it’s me again,” he said as he turned on the TV and lay down on the couch. “You’ve probably gone to bed. You could use the sleep. Good luck finishing the move out of your office tomorrow. Wish I was there to haul things around for you.”

When he hung up, he didn’t expect to hear from her until morning. So he was surprised to receive a call from her number only seconds later. “There you are,” he said, and silenced his TV with the remote.

The person who responded wasn’t Evelyn; it wasn’t even a woman. “
Who is this
?”

“Who is
this
?” Amarok responded.

“Officer Pierce Schwartz, of the Arlington Police Department.”

Amarok sat up. “Police department! Why do you have Evelyn’s phone?”

“Can I get your name, please?”

“Of course. It’s Sergeant Benjamin Murphy. I’m an Alaskan State Trooper living in Hilltop. I’m also a friend of Evelyn Talbot’s. What’s going on?”

“I’m afraid she’s been in an accident,” came the response.

Amarok’s stomach twisted into knots. “Where? How?
Is she okay
?”

“We don’t know,” he said. “She’s gone.”

***

Once he pulled deep into the copse of trees to make sure his car would remain hidden even if someone came out to this remote area, Jasper left Evelyn in the trunk and trudged down the hill to get the wagon he used to transport supplies. It was dark and there was no one around—he’d never seen anyone here—so he was breathing easier now that he was off the beaten path. But he was growing worried about the fact that she hadn’t woken up yet. Had he used too much chloroform?

Those chemicals could be dangerous. And he’d been acting so fast. It wasn’t as if he’d had the opportunity to measure...

As soon as he got her into the wagon, which wasn’t easy since it’d been created for children and her limp body sprawled all over, he checked for a pulse—and breathed a sigh of relief when he found one. Good. Her heart was beating. That was fortunate.

Using a flashlight to avoid the briers and bigger rocks, he carted her down the hill and dumped her on the bed inside the shack.

“Welcome home,” he said. “I think you’re going to like what I’ve done to the place. For one, I haven’t set it on fire yet, so that’ll be an improvement.” He’d been tempted. That visit Hillary had received from the police had sent him into a full-blown panic. But he was glad now that he’d held off and hadn’t gone too far. Since he’d been home he’d kept a close eye on the news. He’d also spoken to the detectives who’d come by, and they didn’t seem particularly suspicious of him. They were checking every car within a twenty mile radius of the kidnapping that had the same make and model as what the witness had seen and, fortunately, a lot of people in the Boston area had blue Toyota Camrys.

“Can you believe we’re back together? After so long?” he said to Evelyn’s inert form. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? We haven’t seen each other since high school.”

He took out the picture he kept in the secret compartment of his wallet and taped it to a chair, which he put in front of the bed. He wanted that to be the first thing she saw when she woke up, wanted her to know he’d be coming back for her. Then he set about tying her to the iron frame like he had the last woman. He didn’t think she’d mind the old, crusty pools of blood. It wasn’t easy to get a mattress down here.

“I guess I can’t ask if that’s too tight around your wrists,” he said. Then he laughed, since he didn’t give a shit anyway. He hoped it
was
good and tight, hoped it cut off the blood and made her miserable. It’d give her a taste of what she had to look forward to.

He was almost done when his cell phone rang. His wife had flown off to meet her sister in New York City so they could see a Broadway musical and spend the night at a hotel in the theater district. So what the hell was she doing calling him in the middle of the night?

He hesitated, wondering if he should answer it. If he were asleep, he wouldn’t answer it. So he let it go to voicemail. Then he checked to see if she’d left a message.

“What the hell’s going on?” she cried. “Chelsea just called me crying. She said she’s sick. That she’s throwing up, and you aren’t anywhere to be found.”

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered and hurried up the hill to where he’d left the car so that he could get a better signal before calling her back. He’d given the girls some cough medicine that was supposed to help them sleep. He’d expected them to be knocked out until morning. So what was Chelsea doing up? He couldn’t have given her too much. He’d been careful about the dosage. But maybe she was allergic to it.

Hillary answered on the first ring. “Andy? Where are you?” she asked. “You told me you’d watch the kids so that I could have this little trip with my sister!”

“I
am
watching the kids,” he said. “I just ran to the store to get some Pepto Bismal. I’ve been sick, too. Haven’t been able to keep anything down.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

He stared up at the clouds moving over the moon. “Because I didn’t want to bother you, didn’t want to ruin your trip. And what can you do about it?”

“
So you left the kids alone
?”

“For like fifteen minutes! They were both sleeping soundly. I checked on them before I left. And I knew I wouldn’t be gone long.”

“You realize child protective services could take them away from us if we were to get reported, don’t you? Miranda’s eight and Chelsea’s only six! What if you were to get in a car accident? What if you couldn’t get back to them?”

“Stop freaking out!” he snapped. “I’ll be with them in a minute. Don’t you even give a shit that I’ve been puking my guts out?”

There was a long pause. “I do. I’m sorry. I just...I was so scared there for a minute. I couldn’t imagine what you could be doing this late at night.”

He thought of the car and the fact that he was going to have to tell her he’d been in an accident. That wouldn’t fly now. He’d have to leave the car right where it was, walk a few miles to reach a more populated area and call a cab. It’d be better, for everyone’s sake, if he woke up in the morning and pretended it’d been stolen after he returned from the store. He couldn’t risk having anyone notice that the paint scratches matched those on Evelyn’s car, anyway, not after the police had already been around once to ask about his vehicle.

“Don’t worry about anything,” he said. “I’m going to be fine, and I’m taking good care of the kids.”

She sniffed but seemed to be calming down. “Okay. That’s nice to hear. Will you...will you call me when you get home? The kids aren’t answering now.”

And once he called them and instructed them to leave the phone off the hook, under the guise that he wanted to be able to hear how they were doing, they wouldn’t be able to answer later, either—not until after he could get home. “Just go to bed. I’ve got everything handled. We’ll check in come morning.”

“Okay,” she said, but he knew she’d be checking back regularly. He had to get his ass home as soon as possible, and that was going to take some time, especially now that he had to stop by an all-night drugstore.

“Damn kids,” he muttered after he disconnected. Someday, he was going to kill them too.

Chapter 15

The birds were chirping so loudly that at first Evelyn thought she was sleeping outdoors. The smell of fecund earth seemed to indicate the same thing. She was close to trees and water and... nothing else that she could determine. Was she in the country?

No matter how intently she listened, she couldn’t hear any cars or people or activity. What was going on?

It wasn’t until she managed to lift her heavy eyelids and look around, to see the sunlight peeking through the boards of the roof overhead, that she realized where she was. Then her heart jumped into her throat, nearly choking her, as if whatever had been stuffed into her mouth wasn’t enough to contend with.

She was back in the shack! Back where she’d nearly been killed!

Automatically, her hands tried to come up, to see if she was bleeding out. Had he cut her throat? She was too numb with fear to be able to feel the pain, if it was there, but she couldn’t check. Although she had her clothes on, she was tied, spread-eagle to an iron bed frame.

A whimper caused her to turn her head to see who could be making that frightened sound.

Then she realized it was coming from
her
. Her brain was so foggy, so...sluggish—and despite the numbness that’d invaded the rest of her body, her head felt like it was about to explode. The golf ball in her mouth, held in by a gag, made it so difficult to breathe. Only if she remained calm could she get enough air by dragging it in through her nose.

What’d happened? How did she come to be here? Was the person who’d abducted her a psychopath she’d studied? Or maybe another enemy—someone who didn’t agree with her approach to treatment—trying to recreate the trauma of her past?

Because as much as this place looked like the shack where she’d been tormented for three days at sixteen, it couldn’t be. After he’d left her for dead, Jasper had torched it.

She thought it had to be a copycat—until she saw the picture. Then her stomach cramped and she gasped, nearly sucking the ball in her mouth down her throat.

“Oh no! God, no!” she moaned, but it didn’t sound like actual words. She wasn’t able to articulate.

“Help me!” came out like more of a scream. “Please!” didn’t sound much different. Jasper had found her. That was who’d run her off the road last night!

No, she tried to tell herself. The driver of the blue car had to be some other man,
any
other man.

But she knew in her heart it wasn’t, and that knowledge made her tremble. Soon, she was shaking so badly she could feel the bed jiggling beneath her.

Where was he? The shack was so small that, unless he was under the bed, she’d be able to see him. That meant he had to be in the regular world, living whatever life other people thought he lived—like before, when he’d go to school and baseball practice as if he didn’t have her tied up in a place just like this. He wasn’t someone who acted odd or reclusive. He was a chameleon who behaved however he had to behave in order to blend in, be liked, escape notice.

But he wouldn’t
stay
in the regular world for long. Evelyn had no illusions about that. He was too sadistic. No doubt he was already counting the seconds, anxious to return, to inflict what pain he could—which was considerable—so that he could watch her suffer.

She’d been through this once, knew what he had in store.

Squeezing her eyes closed, she tried to hold back the tears that welled up. She couldn’t allow her sinuses to fill, or she’d suffocate. Even more importantly, she had to subdue her fear, which was also rising, or it would drive her mad before she could even attempt to save herself.

Concentrate
! She had to put whatever minutes she had left to good use. Once Jasper returned, it wouldn’t take much time for him to rape her. That was where he’d start. And it would be brutal, would probably leave her so injured she wouldn’t be able to escape even if he left her untied. So, as impaired as she felt by fear and the aftereffects of whatever he’d used to drug her, she was at her strongest right
now
. She had to use that strength to her advantage; it was all she had.

Breathe. That’s it. In and out...

Despite this self-talk, tears rolled into her hair as she looked around. Had he left anything behind that she might be able to use to get free? Her wrists and ankles were tied so tightly, the situation felt hopeless, but she couldn’t succumb to despair. She’d never make it out of this alive if she did.

Honestly, it wasn’t the dying part that scared her. It was everything that would happen before.