Angel's Dance (23 page)

“
Isn’t this amazing?”
Clear asked, casually indicating the photo.

“
Hmm… quite elegant. Too
bad you can’t see the dancer. Not really what you are looking for,
is it?” he asked, miraculously maintaining a calm tone.

“
Oh, well, not for me..
but still. A picture like this would look great on the mantelpiece,
don’t you think?” She moved forward to brush the photo frame,
praying Grant would keep Louis busy.

She was immediately sucked into the
image. This time she was not seeing from Louis’ frame of mind, but
from Kat’s.

The girl was absolutely terrified!
Clear’s heart broke. She was in a windowless room and her sense of
reality was warped. Clear couldn’t tell if it was from drugs, lack
of sleep or perhaps lack of food. The poor kid was barely able to
stand. There was a bright light directly overhead, which prevented
her from really seeing her captor. She only knew where he was when
the camera flashed. The room echoed strangely and Clear couldn’t
tell if it was truly because of the room or if it was because of
drugs in Kat’s system.

“
Please…” Kat murmured.
“Please let me go? My mom… my mom must be.. so worried…”

“
You cannot leave. How can
I bring about your full potential if you leave? You do want to be
brilliant don’t you?” The man asked. Clear couldn’t be sure that it
was Louis. Kat tried to peer through the gloom and see her captor.
Clear growled in frustration, because Kat’s mental image of him was
still the strangely deformed, creepy old man. This was not right!
She looked harder past Kat’s attempts, but Clear could not see
anything.

“
I don’t even care!” Kat
yelped, almost collapsing. “Where is Bella?” She dropped to the
floor, refusing to do what he wanted anymore.

It felt like inhuman speed, but
suddenly her captor was directly behind her, squeezing her throat
and preventing her from turning to look at him. He whispered
harshly in her ear. “Bella failed to embrace her gift. She is no
longer with us.”

Kat began to tremble with fear. She
knew that Bella was dead, but she had to ask. “Did you let her go?”
she whispered, fighting back the tears.

He chuckled in her ear. “I removed her
atrocious flailing so that it will never besmirch another person’s
eyes!” He caressed her cheek with the other hand and leaned in so
that his cheek was pressing against hers. Hard, angular. The light
beard tickled in an uncomfortable way. “But we don’t want to do
that with you. You… could be so much greater. But it requires
sacrifice, my lovely. A large amount of sacrifice.”

His breath was hot and cloying and
smelled of death. Kat cringed trying to pull away, but his grip was
iron fast.

Suddenly Clear realized
that this was a different person from the one who had been speaking
earlier. Kat had not made this connection, because of the haze she
was in. Kat’s last thought was ‘
my dad is
gonna kill you
!’ As she squeezed her eyes
shut against the man groping her.

Unexpectedly Clear was
knocked out of the vision. She looked around trying to figure out
what had happened, and still feeling disoriented from the jump.
Grant had Louis slammed up against the wall and the photograph of
Kat was lying on the floor, having been knocked off the wall. Clear
pulled away quickly as Grant continued to slam Louis against the
wall. She was absolutely horrified. She had never seen Grant so
angry, so full of malignance and hate. More terrifying was that
although Louis’ face was flashing between fear, confusion and
terror, she felt absolutely nothing from him.
Crap!

Chapter Fifteen

Grant had realized almost immediately
what Clear was doing. She was looking to get a premonition. He
tried to continue a conversation with this man, but it was hard,
knowing that the picture was his daughter. “You know this is a
lovely image, but I think she really needs something more like
this.” He indicated the next photo. It was a standard portrait.
Louis began to follow, but hesitated.

“
Please, don’t touch
that,” Louis said to Clear. “It is a part of my private
collection.”

“
She is a tactile
learner,” Grant muttered through grinding teeth. He was only barely
keeping himself in check.

Louis reached for Clear. “Ma’am,
please, you cannot touch that!”

Grant lost it. He snatched
Louis up by the back of his shirt and slammed him into the wall.
“She can and
will
touch it, you sick little bastard!” he growled and he rammed
into the man against the wall. The look in Louis’ eyes made Grant
hesitate for just a second. It was a feral vicious look that a cat
gets when playing with a mouse. That moment of hesitation found
Grant sitting on his ass. Louis went after Clear again and Grant
scrambled to trip him up. Louis hit the wall face first, his arm
bumping into Clear and the picture. By that time Grant had
scrambled back to his feet and pulled the man up, pinning him
against the wall with his feet barely scrabbling against the floor.
He held his forearm across the man’s throat and got right in his
face.

“
Your private collection
is
my daughter
!”
Grant slammed him into the wall again and then pulled him up. “Now,
I want to know where the hell she is right now! You tell me and
I
might
…” he
slammed him against the wall again. “Might let you
live!”

The man’s face became a mask of terror
and confusion. “I… I.. don’t know what you are talking about!” he
shouted, clawing at Grant’s arm.

Grant snapped and began slamming the
man as hard as he could against the wall over and over and over. He
heard snapping and cracking and didn’t care if it was the wall
collapsing or the man’s spine cracking.

The fog of mania began to lift when he
heard Clear whimper. She was clinging to his arm. “Grant… please,
Grant.. you have to stop. If you kill him, we won’t find your
daughter. Please Grant!”

Grant stopped banging Louis against
the wall and relaxed the arm Clear was clinging to. “So he does
have her?” Grant spoke through gritted teeth, still pinning Louis
with his other arm. He risked a glance at Clear.

“
I.. I don’t know,” Clear
whispered. “But he has been with her since she disappeared. He
knows who is holding her, if he isn’t the one holding her. He took
that picture
after
she was taken.”

Louis eyed her coldly and
calculatingly. Grant slammed into him. “Don’t you
dare
look at her! Don’t
look at anyone or anything but me because I may very well be the
last thing you see in this life, unless you tell me where Kat
is!”

Clear reached into his pocket. “I need
to call Bryce. He cannot let this man’s father go… I think… I think
they are in on it together and have been from the beginning.” Clear
visibly shuddered.

She moved to the middle of the room to
call Bryce. Grant couldn’t really hear her conversation. He leaned
in on Louis, who unnervingly showed absolutely no fear at his
threat of death. “So, got anything to tell me?” Grant growled
menacingly.

“
You’ve got the wrong
guy?” Louis cocked an eyebrow at him condescendingly.

“
Wrong answer.” Grant
pressed hard against his windpipe making it impossible for the
prick to breath. As the man’s face turned red, Grant slowly
released the pressure. Louis was taking short gasping
breaths.

“
Wanna try again?” Grant
offered.

“
Do you?” Louis asked, if
anything even more arrogant than before.

“
You must have a death
wish,” Grant muttered under his breath. Then he pulled out his gun
and pointed it at Louis’ head.

“
I don’t have a death wish
at all,” Louis replied casually. “And until I tell you what you
want to know, I am sure to remain alive and well. Well enough,
anyway.”

Clear gasped in exasperation. “I don’t
have proof! I know that, but please you absolutely have to believe
that I know what I am talking about when I tell you that Louis is
the guy. The photo proves that. He and his dad have to be working
together. If you let that man go, he will kill Kat. Is that what
you want?”

Bryce growled over the
phone, “Of course not! But if he isn’t everything you just claimed
then it is
my
ass
on the line! You’ve got to give me something. There is a reason
that we have laws in this country!”

“
I will get you something!
But it is going to take some time. Louis is a psychopath. A
clinically verifiable psychopath. In other words he has no fear of
being caught, no remorse for the harm he has done, and no
conscience. It will take a lot of work to get him to talk.” She
groaned. “I think his father is the same.”

“
You’ve got until tomorrow
evening. How are you going to do it?” Bryce challenged. At that
point Clear glanced over and saw Grant with his gun to Louis’
head.

“
Um… I’ll get back to you
on that!” She hung up and ran to Grant.

“
Stop! Grant!” She was at
his side in seconds. “Give me the gun.” she said firmly. Grant was
shaking with rage. How was she going to do this, indeed?

“
I was just explaining to
your crazy friend here that it wouldn’t do any good to torture and
threaten me.”

Clear glared at Louis. “Oh, I am fully
aware that it will do no good. You are a psychopath.”

Louis looked slightly surprised.
“Trying to hurt my feelings won’t work either,” he
scoffed.

“
I didn’t say it to hurt
your feelings. And it wouldn’t matter, because you
have
no feelings. That
is why you can do what you have done. Your father is the same way,
isn’t he? You learned it from him?” She put her hand on his arm and
got a flash of images of other girls. Girls being forced to dance,
being emotionally, mentally and physically tortured and then being
disposed of like empty milk jug bottles. He may not have feelings,
but he still has memories. Some of those memories are very vivid.
She could tap into that and maybe find Kat.

She smiled at him. “No man is an
island,” she murmured.

Grant had tied Louis up in a chair
with Clear’s help and was now thoroughly searching the place while
Clear continued to question Louis. It was excruciatingly painful
for her. This man was desperately sick. He and his father had been
at this since he was an early teen and Clear couldn’t even begin to
imagine how many women fell victim to their charms and felt the
torture of their evil souls.

Through trial and error she had
figured out how to get the information from him. But doing so
required her to think and talk about unbelievably horrific things.
He wasn’t saying much in response, but the images flashing through
his little brain were giving her more than she could have ever
hoped.

“
I get Bella. She was at
your father’s studio. She was vulnerable and so desperate to make
it. An easy target, really.” As she spoke, images of their
manipulation and abuse to Bella kept flashing through Clear’s mind.
“And really, you had been emotionally and mentally torturing her
for months and she willingly came back every time. She wanted you
to make her the best, just as you promised. So, what made you lose
interest so quickly?”