“Collins!” Brantley shouted. “Show yourself, man. It’s over.”
There was a snickering sound coming from the living room, so Brantley moved that direction, gun at the ready.
“Jake? Is that you?” he asked, keeping his tone cool, that of a parent talking to a child. “We need to talk.”
A giggle this time. It came from the far corner of the room.
“We found your hidin’ place,” he said, shifting so he was moving along the wall, toward the kitchen.
He could see Collins crouched down beside the couch in the far corner, as though he was actually hidden from view.
“You said I wouldn’t find it, but I did, Jake. The game’s over.”
“Nuh-uh,” the childlike voice said. “I tricked you.”
“Tricked me? How’d you trick me?”
“They’re not all here,” he called back, another giggle following. “You missed one. My brother took her after he killed her. You’ll never, ever find her.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Oooh. You can’t say bad words.” The tone of the voice shifted from jovial to accusatory, his head peeking up over the arm of the couch. “You’re gonna be in trouble for that.”
“By who, Jake?”
“The mean lady.”
“What lady, Jake? Talk to me. Who’s gonna be mad that I said bad words?”
Detective Collins, or rather Jake as seemed to be the case now, unfolded himself from the corner, standing tall. He was wearing a ratty T-shirt and a pair of jeans that had seen better days.
“Momma,” he answered, his eyes widening as though he was expecting her to appear at any moment. “She’s gonna make you pull your pants down.”
Brantley watched as horror reflected on the detective’s face, his eyes darting to the hallway.
“Does she spank you, Jake? Is that the trouble you mean?”
He shook his head adamantly. “Not only that.” His eyes darted around the room.
He honestly didn’t want to know the horrors this man might have suffered as a child, but he needed to know what pushed him to do such heinous acts, so he asked, “Does she hurt you, Jake?”
His eyes were wild now, his hands trembling. “She can’t find us here, Brantley Walker. We can’t let her find us.”
“She won’t,” he assured him. “Your mother won’t find us.”
“Yeah, she will. She always does.”
“What does she do when she finds you?” he asked, keeping his gun trained on the man.
“Bad things.”
Christ. They had figured something tragic had happened to make this man regress into a child, but he hadn’t considered all the horrific ways she could’ve inflicted that pain.
“Like what, Jake? Does she not like when you play hide-and-seek?”
He shook his head, lower lip protruding in a pout. “No.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause I’m only s’posed to play games with her.”
He could feel his gut churn, but he asked anyway. “Like what?”
“The feel-good kind. It’s our secret game. I’m not s’posed to tell nobody.”
Oh, fuck. “But you don’t play those games anymore, do you, Jake?”
The man nodded.
“What does that mean, Jake? You do play them?”
Another nod. “With my friends. I play the game with my friends. To make them happy. It’s supposed to make them happy.”
“But it doesn’t?”
“He doesn’t let me play for long.”
Brantley frowned, trying to keep up. “Who? John?”
John/Jake shook his head. “Not John. He’s nice. He loves me.”
Brantley waited, holding his breath.
Again, the detective looked around, eyes wild as though he expected someone to jump out at him.
“Who, Jake? Who’s the mean one?”
“Jack,” he whispered loudly. “He’s the mean one. He doesn’t like playin’ games.”
There was a third one?
“I try to make it better when he’s done. I really, really try, but they cry when we play. I don’t know why, but they cry.”
“Then what happens, Jake?”
The response didn’t come, but right before Brantley’s eyes, the man’s expression shifted, hardened, his posture straightening. Gone was the child, in his place the grown man they’d originally talked to at the police station.
“John?” Please, God, let it be John and not another one.
“You shouldn’t be here, Walker.”
Okay, good. It was John.
“We’re here to help you,” Brantley said softly. “We’re just here to help.”
“They’re dead, Walker. They’re all dead.”
He sure as fuck hoped not. And since Reese hadn’t returned, he could only pray he’d found the women and he had called emergency services.
“We know you were protectin’ Jake. He told us. That’s why you did it, right? That’s why you hid their bodies?”
“I had to,” he said, his tone adamant. “He doesn’t deserve what happened to him.”
He saw the man’s eyes dart toward the coffee table.
“Don’t move, John,” Brantley ordered, taking control of the situation. “Don’t fuckin’ move.”
“You can’t take him,” John stated, his tone hard. “You can’t take my brother. He won’t survive without me.”
“We’re not gonna take him. He needs to get help, John. We just want him to get some help.”
“They won’t help him. They’ll hurt him. They always hurt him.”
“He said there’s one woman missin’,” Brantley said, hoping to divert his attention. “Who’s missin’, John? Where is she?”
John shook his head, glared back. “You need to let this go, Walker. You need to leave. Let it go.”
“I can’t do that. You know I can’t. Those women have families, John. Their families miss them.”
“Families are overrated,” he snarled.
Brantley figured in John’s case that was true. He didn’t want to think about what his mother had done to him, what horrific things she’d put him through that had made his brain splinter like that.
In the distance, Brantley could hear the faint sound of sirens. Hopefully they were headed their way.
“She’s gone,” John said, his tone somber. “I couldn’t save her. He didn’t want him to play with her anymore.”
“Who, John? Was it Jack?”
John’s eyes rounded like saucers at the mention of the name. He started shaking his head, a move similar to the way the child identity had. “Don’t do that, Walker. I’m warnin’ you. Don’t do that.”
“Tell me where she is,” he said easily, trying to stay calm.
“He didn’t want Jake to play with her anymore,” he repeated. “I had to. I had to.” The detective stared at him, eyes cold. “She’s gone.”
“Where? We need to get her, John. That’s your job. It’s your job to find them. Help me find her. Tell me where she is. We can save her, John.”
“They’ll find her soon enough. The water’s shallow.”
“Water? Is she at the lake?” Brantley pulled out his phone, hit the button to dial, wishing like fuck he had a direct connection rather than a fucking cell phone. “JJ, I need your help.”
“Where are you?”
He ignored her question. “She’s at the lake,” he relayed.
“Who?”
“One of the women. John hasn’t told me where, but she’s at the lake. Call someone. Have them get over there now.”
“Will do.”
Footsteps sounded to his left, but they were a familiar sound. He wasn’t sure how he knew it was Reese, but he could sense his presence.
“Police are on the way,” Reese said, his gun raised and trained on John when he stepped out of the hallway into the room. “They’re in bad shape, but they’re alive.”
“I can’t let you take him in,” John said calmly, his eyes darting down to the coffee table again. “I can’t let them take Jake.”
“He needs help,” Brantley repeated. “They just want to help him.”
Christ Almighty, he hoped like hell backup arrived soon.
“No.” The tone of his voice firmed, became harder. “They’ll lock him up. Put him in a cage. He can’t be in a cage. Never again.”
The sirens grew louder, approaching the house now.
“John, the police are outside. They’re here to help the women. We need to get them help.”
Clearly ignoring him, John took a step forward, toward the table.
“John, I need you to stay where you are.” Brantley glanced at Reese, back to John. “We’re not done talkin’.”
“We’re done,” he said, taking another step forward.
“John, don’t do this.”
“I have to. I can’t let Jake be taken. They’ll hurt him again.”
“No, they won’t. He can get some help. You both can.”
Another step, then another.
Brantley’s finger shifted to the trigger. “John, stop movin’. Now.”
“I can’t do that, Walker. You know I can’t.”
A few feet away, just out of his visual range, he could hear Reese breathing calmly.
“I’m not gonna hurt you, Walker,” John said, his voice odd now. “Jake doesn’t want me to hurt you. He likes playin’ this game with you.”
The detective reached down.
Fuck.
“John, don’t do this,” he warned.
The next few seconds happened in slow motion, but at a speed Brantley could do nothing to stop. A fist pounded on the front door, startling John. He lunged, grabbing a pistol from under a newspaper on the coffee table. Later, Brantley would question why he hadn’t cleared the room, checked for weapons.
In a move too quick for anything but reaction, John lifted the gun…
“Don’t do this, John,” Brantley shouted, the words still hanging in the air when the gun fired, the detective crumpling to the floor.
Dead by his own hand.
***
Reese managed to make his way outside after the officers stormed in, the EMTs following close behind. There was nothing anyone could do for John Collins. The man’s brains were sprayed across his living room wall.
Despite all their efforts, despite the fact they had three of the four women alive to see another day, Reese was most disturbed by the news that had been delivered a few minutes ago. Officers had found the naked, severely beaten body of Shelly Masters dumped in shallow water beside a private pier at the very lake she was taken from nearly a year ago.
He wished he could say he was bothered by what had happened, by the fact the detective had taken his own life, but he wasn’t. Not after seeing the state those three women were in. Terrified, tortured, and yes, scarred both mentally and physically by what they’d been through. Reese had no idea what had been the motivation behind the anguish Collins had delivered to those women, but whatever it was, it had come out in the form of white-hot rage.
“You okay?”
Brantley’s hand touched his shoulder and Reese stopped, turned to face him. He didn’t say a word, just met Brantley’s eyes. There had been a moment when Collins had gone for the gun that Reese’s worst nightmare had arisen. For terrifying seconds, he hadn’t been sure what the detective was going to do, but he’d feared that Brantley was going to be the one on the receiving end of that bullet. Reese’s finger had been on the trigger, but he hadn’t gotten the chance to fire before John had done it for him.
“I’m okay,” Brantley said, clearly reading Reese’s need for reassurance. “I would’ve taken him out first.”
Or Reese would have.
That didn’t change the fact that Reese had been terrified in those few seconds.
“We’ll give our initial statements here,” Brantley explained. “I told Special Agent Jones they could hit me up for more later. She’s meetin’ with the mayor. It’s a huge clusterfuck since he’s a police officer.”
Reese could only imagine. Damage control was going to be necessary.
“Have you looked at the rooms where he kept them?” Reese asked softly.
“I was gonna do that now. You can stay out here.”
Reese shook his head. He couldn’t. “I’ll go with you.”
He could see the concern on Brantley’s face but there was no rebuttal. Reese followed Brantley into the house, past the police and the FBI agents who were processing the crime scene.
When they stepped through the hole in the Sheetrock, Reese took a deep breath, expelled it.
The stench was horrible.
“We’re worried about the structural integrity of the house,” one of the agents stated. “He took down some of the support walls.”
Yes, John Collins had removed the walls separating the two bedrooms and the bathroom to make one large room where he kept the women. The irons that had been affixed to their ankles were empty now, spread across the floor near the twin beds they’d been chained to. From what he could tell, the chains were long enough for them to reach the toilet but nothing else.
There were no windows, no Sheetrock on the walls or the ceiling. It looked as though the detective had sound-proofed the space. Probably to ensure no one heard them. The flooring had been ripped out, leaving only stained and scarred plywood beneath. A sink with a dripping faucet sat just out of their reach. The bathtub didn’t appear to work. Based on how frail the women had been, it was likely he fed them just enough to keep them alive.
“How were they when you found them?” Brantley asked.
“They were chained to the beds.” He motioned to one of the four beds. “Jody was trying to hide, crouched between the bed and the wall, Debbie was unconscious, and Maria was awake but not lucid. Naked and terrified. Battered. Beaten. Drugged.”
“But alive,” Brantley said, his voice low, reassuring. “They’re alive, Reese.”
Yes, they were. Three of them, anyway. As for whether they would be happy about that, he didn’t know. They’d been through a horrific ordeal, something they would live with for the rest of their lives. They would see this in their nightmares. God knew he would.
“This is where the smell’s comin’ from,” Brantley noted.
Yeah. Reese figured they hadn’t seen soap and water the entire time they’d been here. Probably not much food either.
“We need to get home,” Brantley finally said after they’d stood there for several minutes.
Reese looked over at him. “Somethin’ wrong?”
“No. It’s just where we need to be.”
Reese nodded, understanding. There wasn’t anything they could do here, and the DPD was competent enough to handle the rest. Since this was an internal matter, it would require some finessing on their part. One of their own detectives was a serial killer.
Fortunately, he was no longer.
They arrived back in Coyote Ridge at seven that night. It had been a long day, but even as exhaustion set in, Reese found himself revived the instant Tesha came running at him when they pulled into the drive.
“Looks like someone’s happy to see you,” Brantley said as he put the truck in park. “You spend some time with her. I’ll take our shit inside.”
Reese didn’t argue, hopping out of the truck and going to his knee as Tesha all but barreled into him, head-butting his hand for a scratch.
“You miss me, girl?”
Tesha hopped and pawed, yipping a couple of times.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you speak.” Getting to his feet, he headed to the backyard, snatching up one of the tennis balls along the way. He lobbed it in the direction of the barn, watched as the dog took off after it.
“Hey,” JJ greeted, stepping out of the barn with Baz and Trey behind her. “Y’all made it.”
Reese nodded, watched as Tesha pranced around the ball, picking it up, dropping it again. “We did.”
“You okay?”
“Will be.”
“Anything you need us to do?”
He shook his head. What he needed was some quiet. Some alone time with Brantley where neither of them had to puzzle through information. One night. That was what he needed to regroup. Tomorrow he’d be back to normal.
“All right, then. We’re gonna say hi to Brantley, then head out.”
“Talk to you tomorrow,” Baz said, following her.
Trey stopped at his side, slapped a hand on his shoulder, then squeezed. “Y’all did good.”
“We,” Reese corrected. “We couldn’t’ve done it without you, Trey.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” Trey smiled. “But I’ll take it.
When he was alone, Reese took a seat on the steps of the back deck. The sun had dipped below the horizon, the twilight beginning to fade into darkness. None of that mattered because the LED spotlights mounted on the house and the barn lit up with motion, so it was almost as though it was daytime.
“Well, that’s new,” Reese said when Tesha trotted over and dropped the ball at his feet.
Reese had to lean forward to get it, but he did, sending it out into the yard again. Once more, Tesha returned with it, dropping it and waiting.
And that set the tone for the next half hour. Tesha would take a break every so often, wandering around the yard, drinking from the water bowl sitting on the deck. All the while, Reese remained where he was, the images of the day running through his head on a loop. Those women, the detective. He had asked Special Agent Hillary Jones, the one overseeing the case for the FBI, to let him know how the women were doing. She had confirmed that she would be delivering the news to Shelly Masters’s family herself. As for the survivors, Jones had texted him a short time ago to say they were all three in the hospital and would remain there for a few days while their injuries were tended to. She had confirmed that Dale Henderson and Alicia Struthers had both arrived, as had Maria Espinoza’s parents, all grateful that their loved one was alive.
They would survive, he knew. Time would heal their physical injuries and, if they were lucky, some of the mental wounds as well. Reese knew how that was. He battled his own demons, though he’d grown adept at keeping them bottled up because they were too horrific to reflect on. But seeing those women in that room, chained up the way they had been, it brought some of those memories flooding back.
Tesha bumped his hand, drew Reese back to the present. He forced a smile, figuring if he did, it would eventually stick.
“Probably should make some dinner,” he told the dog, getting to his feet.
When he turned around, he saw Brantley standing inside the house, shoulder propped on the doorjamb as he watched him. The concern he saw on his face was understandable.
“Shower with me?” Brantley prompted when Reese approached.
“Then dinner?”
Brantley nodded. “I’ll make sandwiches.”
Good idea.
***
Baz sat on his couch, head tilted back, eyes closed. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the television, didn’t even manage to fix himself dinner like he’d planned.
No, from the moment he walked into the apartment, he’d been dead on his feet, the events of the day draining all the energy from his body.
And to think, he wasn’t the one who had found those women, freed them, or watched the detective take his own life. Still, it felt as though he’d been right there with Brantley and Reese, not two hundred miles away. Brantley had called, filled them in on what went down, then asked JJ to gather all the evidence they’d uncovered that would help the police and the FBI to close the case up neat and tidy. Along with Trey, the three of them had worked diligently to gather it all together before JJ sent an electronic file over to the special agent now in charge.
He didn’t miss it, he realized. Didn’t miss being on the front line, seeing the carnage, dealing with the emotional aftermath. Trey had asked him if he would, and Baz had wondered there for a little while. But he didn’t and he knew that he wouldn’t. He was content to sit on the sidelines, to run the op from behind a computer screen, JJ at his side.
What did that say about him? he wondered.
His cell phone chimed.
Baz shifted as he dug it out of his pocket, checked the screen. It was a text message from JJ, so he unlocked the phone, read it. Smiled.
Getting to his feet, he went to his front door, opened it.
And there she was, standing in the hallway outside his apartment.
JJ lifted a bag, waved it. “I brought dinner.” She lifted the other hand, revealing a six-pack of beer. “And this.”
Taking the beer from her, he stepped back out of the way, then closed the door when she came inside.
As he’d learned with JJ, her curiosity dictated her movements, and she waltzed right into his apartment, scoping it out from top to bottom.
“A little plain, don’t you think?” she asked, pivoting to look at him. “Kinda dark. You need some art on the walls or somethin’.”
“You brighten the space up quite nicely,” he told her, setting the beer on the end table.
Baz took the paper sack from her hand, set it down, too, then pulled her into him. He cupped her face and stared down at her. “This is a pleasant surprise, by the way. I didn’t expect you to show up.” He narrowed his eyes. “In fact, I didn’t realize you knew where I lived.”
She smiled, her green eyes lighting up. “Mad hacker skills, remember?”
“Yes. I remember.”
Baz kissed her.
He’d been battling the urge all day, reminding himself they were at work and he had to focus. It wasn’t easy when every single thing JJ did made him crazy with lust. He wasn’t sure he’d ever met a woman who affected him on this level before. From the moment he’d set eyes on her, Baz had been a goner. She was different. She mattered.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, the words spoken against his lips.
“Depends.”
“On?”
“Whether or not you’re stayin’ the night.”
JJ pulled back, stared up at him. “Why does that matter?”
“If you are, then yes, I’m hungry. We can eat, drink a couple of beers, chill. Then I’ll take you to bed and ravish you all night long.”
He liked that there was a hint of pink that flooded her cheeks.
“And if I’m not?”
“Then we’ll bypass everything but the ravishing.”
“I can probably be persuaded,” she said, rising up to meet his lips again. “But the ravishing doesn’t have to wait until after dinner.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “And it doesn’t have to happen in the bedroom.”
“Where would you prefer it happen?”
JJ peered around him briefly, looked back up at his face. “The couch looks like a damn fine place to start.”
Baz learned shortly thereafter that she was right.
Damn fine place to start.