Her Dying Breath (28 page)

“Then who ran Brenda off the road?” Deputy Waterstone asked. “The psycho Strangler or the hit man?”

Nick stiffened, the image of Brenda in that hospital bed taunting him. “Good question. I don’t think it was Seven. She’s sending messages to Brenda to gain publicity. If another subject escaped with Seven, he has no reason to go after Brenda either.”

“But somebody did,” Jake said. “Maybe because they thought she was getting too close to Seven.”

Nick contemplated that suggestion. That was possible. But Brenda had shared everything she’d learned with him, hadn’t she?

Unless…she knew something about Seven from her stay at the sanitarium. Something she was hiding.

Seven had known he would come. She knew his weaknesses. His penchant for tawdry affairs, solicitous women, his secret desires.

Desire he kept well hidden from the press.

But she would rectify that. Or at least, Brenda Banks would.

Hatred burned deep in her soul as she waited for him to arrive at the bar. She checked her face in her compact, studying her dark hair and eyes, wondering if he would remember her.

She doubted it. When she’d seen him, they were children.

The memory made perspiration bead on her neck. She’d cried out for help that night, but no one had heard her.

Now he would be the one shouting for help.

Laughter bubbled inside her. But no one would come to his aid either.

Stowing the compact in her purse, she fingered the vial of pills. She’d done her research. She wouldn’t need drugs to make Ron Stowe follow her or to tie him up.

He liked it rough. Liked to be dominated and abused. Liked to be forced to his knees and to beg.

A smile curved her lips. The bartender slanted her a suggestive grin, but she aimed a cool look his way. Then, quickly reminding herself that she needed to blend in, she wet her lips with her tongue and leaned over the bar so her breasts strained at the top edge of her satin tank top, well aware that half the men at the bar fidgeted and adjusted themselves like dogs in heat. Any minute she expected them to salivate and attack.

The urge to teach each of them a hard lesson teased at her nerve endings.

But she had an agenda to follow.

And she couldn’t allow indulgences with irrelevant parties to distract her.

The senator’s son slipped into the dark bar, his face shadowed by a fedora that she supposed was a disguise. No doubt he’d had to ditch his security team to meet her, just as he’d ditched his daddy’s campaign fund-raiser tonight.

She’d promised him it would be worth it.

Lifting to her cheek the red rose she’d brought with her so he could easily spot her, she watched him maneuver through the throng at the door. Other patrons danced on the crowded dance floor, cigarette smoke blending with alcohol and cheap perfume.

Her mind began humming, as if she were locked in that room again. Seven steps to the right, seven to the left, seven back again, seven across.

Her finger traced the square on the bar, over and over and over again.

Goddammit, Seven. Stop it. Someone will notice.

She gripped the rose tighter with the other hand, her breath hitching as a thorn pierced her skin, the pain a reminder to focus.

Ron Stowe noticed her then. She felt his eyes on her. Felt the moment his breath hitched in his throat as he approached.

Her tits hardened at his heated gaze, her thighs growing moist.

A moment later, he dropped onto the bar stool beside her. “You’re even sexier than you sounded on the phone.”

Seven smiled, her heart fluttering with excitement as he ordered a drink. She wasn’t good at conversation, but a man like him preferred to talk about himself. So she let him.

A half hour later she led him outside to her car. “Get in,” she ordered.

“What will happen if I don’t obey?” he murmured.

Seven lifted a bloodred nail, then pinched his cheek so hard he winced. “Then you’ll have to be punished.”

He climbed in quietly, then she drove them to the cabin she’d rented and ordered him into the bedroom she’d prepared for their night together.

“This rendezvous has to remain between you and me,” he said. “I’m paying for your discretion.”

Anger heated her blood. He was paying her? Like a common whore? “Did I say you could speak?” she asked in a lethal voice.

“No, but I need to know—”

“If you speak again without permission, your punishment will be much more severe.”

A frisson of fear darkened his eyes at the sight of the whips and the chains attached to the poles in the wood floor, but he obviously believed she was still playing out a fantasy.

So he allowed her to attach the restraints.

Anticipation bubbled inside her as she picked up the whip and began his torture.

B
renda showered and dressed quickly, her nerves on edge. She didn’t belong here in this princess fairy room with the white provincial furniture and the pink polka-dotted curtains and the dozens of perfume bottles that her mother had collected on her travels as a gift to her darling, precious little girl.

Her dream had disturbed her almost as much as the fact that someone had run her off the road the night before.

Almost, but not quite.

Still, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was almost as if the nightmare had been real, a memory, not just a figment of the concussion and the hydrocodone she’d been given at the hospital.

Maybe it was a memory.

No…that was impossible. Agnes said she’d adopted her at birth. She and William even had pictures of them holding her as an infant.

She chucked the pills in the trash, worry needling her. She did not want to get hooked on painkillers.

When the teenagers she’d befriended in high school had experimented with pot and dabbled in other recreational drugs, she’d pulled away from them. She’d been terrified of becoming
like the drug addicts she’d seen on television. Or maybe it was because Agnes had pounded a strong fear of addiction into her.

Not that her mother didn’t enjoy her cocktails. But she’d stressed moderation to the point that it had been ingrained in Brenda the same way her Southern manners had.

She glanced again at the childhood sketches of the kids in her school, then dialed Nick’s number, eager to hear if they’d made progress on the case.

He didn’t answer, so she left a message asking him to call her. “I’m going to talk to some of the mothers of the subjects and start compiling the personal profiles on the families.”

But she should stop by and see Amelia first. Maybe she’d drawn that sketch of Seven for her.

Downstairs it was quiet, and she strained to remember what her mother had said the last time she’d peeked in on her. In the kitchen, she found a note saying she and her father were attending the fund-raiser for the senator’s campaign.

Grateful she didn’t have to deal with saying good-bye and a lecture about her leaving, she snatched the keys to her father’s extra car, a Lexus sedan, let herself out the door, and phoned Amelia.

But Amelia didn’t answer either, so she phoned Joe Swoony’s mother. The older woman welcomed her call and agreed to the interview.

“As long as you don’t paint my son as an idiot,” she said. “No telling what kind of future he could have had if that awful Arthur Blackwood hadn’t stolen it.”

“I promise to honor and respect him,” Brenda said, surprised the woman didn’t hate Blackwood even more than she did.

If it had been her child he’d abused and subjected to his cruel experiments, he wouldn’t have seen the inside of a jail cell.

She would have killed him.

“Someone tried to kill your father.”

“What?” Nick gripped the phone as the meeting broke up. “When? Who? How?”

“In the chow hall,” the prison warden said. “I don’t exactly know how it happened, but a fight broke out, a guard’s gun was ripped off him, and the inmate fired.”

Hell, he half hoped his old man was dead. He deserved worse.

“Was he hit?”

“A flesh wound. A gang fight broke out then, and the guy who shot at your father was killed.”

Something about the scenario nagged at Nick. Stabbings and gunfights were the norm in maximum-security prisons. But if this inmate had targeted Blackwood because of his Slaughter Creek crimes, someone might have put him up to it.

Not that most of the town didn’t hate his father or have reason to want him dead.

“We isolated him for now and are looking into the matter,” the warden said.

“Did the Commander have any interaction with this inmate? An altercation maybe?”

“Not that I know of, but of course we’ll investigate the situation.”

“Has he received any mail or visitors?”

“We’re still examining the mail. Same as before. Hate mail, love letters. People are so fucked up.”

“Get me all the information you can on this inmate,” Nick said. “I want to know everyone and anyone he had contact with in the last three months. Check his snail mail, phone calls, and visitors. If someone paid him to kill my father, I want to know who the hell it was.”

“All right,” the warden said. “But you know your father isn’t exactly popular in here. He’s ranked with the worst.”

The pedophiles, Nick thought. Because his father was a child predator.

Now that someone wanted to silence him, maybe his father would finally talk.

Nick hung up, then explained the situation to Jake and Agent Hood.

“You think whoever was behind the project is afraid Blackwood will talk?” Agent Hood asked.

Nick hissed. “Maybe. They certainly went to a lot of trouble to keep it quiet before.”

“I’ll follow through on his mail and the visitor log,” Hood offered.

“I’ll question the inmate’s cell mate,” Jake said. “Maybe someone inside the prison knows what’s going on.”

“We’ll go together,” Nick said as he jangled his keys. “Hopefully now that his own ass is on the line, the Commander’ll talk.”

But Nick remembered the cold lessons his father had taught him about surviving interrogation tactics when he was a child, and he doubted it.

Still, they had to try.

He had a bad feeling, though, that Arthur Blackwood would take his secrets with him to his grave.