Sandra Lutrell felt a pinch on her arm and awakened from a horrible dream. She felt strange and groggy. Her head ached. She tried to reach up to rub the sleep from her eyes, but she couldn’t move her arms.
Her eyes fluttered as she tried to pull herself into full awareness. At first she didn’t recognize her surroundings. The space around her was small with gray metal walls. There was a Coleman lamp on the floor that cast a sparse puddle of illumination onto the concrete. The room was longer than it was wide, and eventually she recognized it as the interior of a storage container like the one she had used to store some extra furniture when she had first moved to Chicago from Nebraska. The job had been an upgrade, but the apartment had been a downgrade. She hadn’t been able to find a house she liked right off and had used a storage facility outside Jackson’s Grove for six months until she found the perfect place. She had fallen asleep in that same house last night.
Sandra tried to move her head but discovered that it was restrained as well. She felt cold and glanced down to find that she was still in her pajamas. Her mouth opened to scream for help, but then she saw the man in the shadows at the opposite end of the container. The darkness obscured his face, but she could see that he was dressed all in black. A syringe dangled from his right hand.
She remained completely still, her eyes wide and her muscles frozen with fear.
His words cut through the cold, moist air and sent shivers through her body. His voice was soft and lacked confidence, as if he were vying for her approval. “I just injected you with a small dose of adrenaline to counteract the other drugs that I gave you and speed up your recovery.”
Other drugs? Awareness of the implication of those words came slowly. Sandra’s thoughts were still scattered and only semi-coherent. But when realization struck her, it hit with the force of a freight train. She had been kidnapped. A man had come into her home while she slept and had stolen her away. But what would happen now? What did he plan to do with her?
She opened her mouth to plead with him, but the words wouldn’t come. Fear gripped her tongue.
He stepped forward into the light. A pair of oval wire-rimmed glasses rested on his nose, and his face was thin and pale. His brown hair was short and combed neatly to the side. All of which gave him a bookish appearance betrayed only by the above-average muscle tone showing beneath his tight black clothes. He had one of those ageless faces where he could have passed for early twenties or late thirties without anyone questioning him. He could even have passed for a teenager if it hadn’t been for the thick shadow of stubble that covered his cheeks and chin. He didn’t appear angry or insane in any way. In fact, if Sandra had passed him on a lonely street at night, she wouldn’t have felt the least bit threatened by him.
His quiet appearance gave her a boost in confidence, and she said, “Please, just let me go, and we can forget that any of this ever happened. No harm, no foul. You don’t want to go down a road that you can’t come back from.”
His gaze strayed away from hers, but then he said, “I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
He reached into a small leather bag sitting near the Coleman lamp and brought out two clamp-like devices that seemed vaguely familiar. He moved toward her.
“What are you doing? Please don’t—”
Her words became a scream as his left hand grabbed her face with surprising strength. Using his thumb and forefinger, he held her eyelids open. She tried to blink and pull away, but the restraints held her in place. With his right hand, he inserted one device into her eye, and she remembered where she had seen such an instrument before. Her eye doctor had used something similar to hold her lids open during her last visit.
Sandra bucked and cried out for help, but she could do little to prevent him from repeating the procedure with her left eye. Tears rolled down both her cheeks and clouded her vision, but she was unable to blink them away.
The man reached back toward the leather bag, and she caught the glint of something shiny in his hand.
“Please don’t do this. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“There’s no point in screaming. No one can hear you. I realize you’ll try anyway, but I would suggest that you use your last breaths for a more useful purpose.”
His hand moved toward her leg, and Sandra saw the scalpel. Her screams reverberated off the metal walls. A terrible pain sliced through her inner thigh. Then he leaned in close, and his eyes burrowed deep into hers.
“I’ve just made a deep diagonal incision through your femoral artery. It’s one of the primary paths of blood flow. You’ll be dead within a moment unless I seal the wound.”
Sobs racked her body. “Please, no. I—”
“I’ll stop the bleeding and release you if you answer my questions honestly.”
“Anything you want! Just let me go.”
“Okay, Sandra. Why are you happy?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“We don’t have time, Sandra. You only have a moment before you die from blood loss. Tell me now. What is the key to your happiness?”
She was beginning to feel light-headed, her leg pulsing and gushing blood with each beat of her heart. The room spun, and a nauseous feeling snaked through her abdomen. Her mind fought for an answer. “I don’t know. I guess I just try to focus on the good things in life and see the best in people.”
He smiled. “That’s a good, simple answer. Thank you, Sandra. Maybe, after I take your soul, I’ll be able to do the same.”
“What? You said you’d let me go.” Her leg throbbed and ached. “You need to stop the bleeding!”
“Again, I’m sorry, but I lied. Even if we were sitting in a hospital right now, there’s little they could do for you at this point.”
He reached back to the leather bag and retrieved a small cup. He filled it with some of the blood gushing from her leg. Sandra watched in horror as he raised the cup to his lips and dumped its contents down his throat.
A part of her couldn’t believe this was actually happening. This was something that happened in the movies or in those true-crime documentaries. It wasn’t something that she had ever even considered could actually happen to her. Was this really the end? There was so much that she still wanted to do. So much life left.
Her vision faded in and out, but she fought against the coming darkness.
He pulled up another chair across from her, and then she felt a cool liquid splashing over her bare skin. The strong smell touched her nostrils, but her mind couldn’t identify it.
His stare drilled deep into her, and Sandra was unable to look away. For the first time, she noticed his beautiful green eyes. Those eyes were the last thing she saw before he sparked a match and flames engulfed her body.