Truth & Lies: A Queen City Justice Novel (25 page)

She was still trying to piece together the details when a man moved into her line of sight. Then she knew why she recognized the voice.

The hottie with the vacant eyes from the grocery store.

Oh fuck.

“I was very disappointed to see you carrying on with that other man. That…
cripple.
”

Deck.

Was he safe? Had he seen what happened?

“What did you do to him?” Her voice didn’t sound right. Her words were slurred. Her brain still felt foggy. He’d shot her up with something. It must still be in her system.

“Nothing.
Yet.
And I won’t as long as you cooperate.”

Dana took deep breaths, trying to keep herself calm. The headache began to abate somewhat, though her panic was still drilling her with the same intensity. “What do you want?” she asked. Her heavy tongue garbled her words.

“I want you for my playmate. My wife is really going to like you. And who knows. Maybe if you’re good, you and she can trade places.”

What the hell was he talking about?

This guy was deranged.

What did he mean to do to her? And why hadn’t she had one of her GPS devices on her when she was running? She hadn’t even had her phone.

He rose and came toward her. His shoes clicked on the floor with each step, the sound echoing through the spartan room. He held his hands behind his back, and she feared that he had a knife or gun. Visions of the women whose deaths she’d been investigating flashed through her mind like a PowerPoint briefing from hell.

The last image was that of Deck. How could she leave the face of the earth without laying eyes on him again? She just couldn’t.

Please, God. Help me.

Her captor brought a small shopping bag forward, and she breathed a sigh of relief that he didn’t mean to kill her just yet.

The relief was short-lived, however. He upended the bag so that its contents fell onto her stomach. Very tiny bits of lace and Lycra lay staring up at her.

The pieces of the puzzle finally clicked together in her brain.
He
had to be the killer. How did he find her? Did he know who she really was?

“I want you to clean yourself up. Shower. Be very,
very
clean when you are done. I don’t want to smell that other man on you.” His nostrils flared in distaste. “And then I want you to put these on.”

Dana’s fear sent a lightning bolt of clarity to her brain. She wouldn’t have long to mentally retrieve everything she knew about this guy and make a plan to outsmart or overpower him.

The good thing was he wouldn’t be expecting her to try.

Making herself look extra-frightened—
yeah, like that was difficult
—she mumbled a few choice words in Croatian, making them sound as if she were practically mewling, though in truth, if words could kill, he’d currently be twitching on the floor.

It was a test. If her cover had been blown, he’d probably call her on it. If not, then she wanted him to believe she was completely cowed.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she whimpered, making her accent extra thick. Hopefully, with as lethargic as her tongue had been before, he wouldn’t realize she hadn’t remembered it when she spoke the first time.

“After your shower, we’re gonna create a little Dear John video for your
former
fiancé.”

Just like Anka Pierovich.

Dana took some comfort in the fact that he wouldn’t be making a video if Deck was tied up in the next room or, worse, dead. And this might be an opportunity for her to get a message to him and to the team.

But what more did she know that she didn’t know before? Only that the killer was an extremely attractive man in his late twenties with Mediterranean features and was completely unhinged. That he’d stalked her in Kroger.

Oh!
Her phone. She had images of him on her phone. They probably wouldn’t do Deck or the team much good without a name, but who knew? Maybe they’d get lucky and he’d have paid by credit card.

But how to tell him while actually making the video that Mr. Psycho wanted her to make?

That line of thinking ended abruptly when he pulled out a very deadly looking .357 Smith & Wesson snub-nose revolver. “I’m going to untie you. I do not want to shoot you, but if you make any sudden moves, I will.”

Dana nodded, believing him. That wasn’t a weapon you brought for show. From this close range, that revolver would put a hole in her front the size of a quarter and a hole out the back bigger than her fist.
Thanks, but no.

He untied the ropes at her feet first, and then came up to the head of the bed to untie her wrists, his gun pressed against the crown of her head. While she was certain he hadn’t been nominated for any awards for sanity, he was obviously intelligent and had honed his hostage-taking skills with practice.

“Pick up your clothes,” he said.

She was the very picture of compliance.

“Shoes too.” He indicated a pair of platform stripper shoes with a five-inch heel, made of some sort of clear plastic material. She managed not to say,
You’ve got to be kidding me,
but just barely.

She picked up the shoes.

He stepped back. “Bathroom’s in there.” He indicated a door she hadn’t seen earlier because it’d been behind her. “You have fifteen minutes. My wife will be in to do your makeup after the video.”

She tried to make that piece fit into the puzzle as she knew it, and couldn’t. Did he have an accomplice? A woman accomplice? Nothing in the profile Doc had compiled suggested that was possible. Not that profiles were a 100% exact science.

She shut the door and turned on the shower without undressing. A quick search of the cabinet below the sink yielded nothing except an extra towel.

Two drawers in the vanity were empty, but the top one contained an electric shaver, a plastic toothbrush and toothpaste, deodorant and lotion. In the shower, she found shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, and a bath puff. It was almost like a hotel, except…not.

Of course, there was nothing sharp that could be used as a weapon.

Nothing else in the bathroom whatsoever.

The lid to the toilet tank had been removed—this guy was thorough—and the parts inside the tank looked to be pretty flimsy. Even the light fixture was on the ceiling, a good eight inches out of reach of her fingertips, even on her tiptoes. The bulb might have made a halfway decent weapon. Would one conveniently unlocked window (off the first floor) be too much to ask for?

Apparently.

She stripped out of her running clothes and stepped into the shower, hoping that a little water in her face would wake her up and help her figure out what she was going to do. Plus, when her fifteen minutes were up, she had no problem believing he would hurt her if she wasn’t prepared to his specifications. She couldn’t risk his wrath until after she made the video.

Just let Deck get it in time.

The clothes he’d given her were somewhere between scandalous and downright illegal. Certainly, in poor taste. She put her underwear back on before sliding into the skirt. It was a spandex band not more than eight inches long. She tugged it on. Even when she let it ride as low as she could, it still barely covered her cheeks. The top was equally revealing. She felt a lurch in her stomach when she looked into the mirror over the sink. It was horrible. Added to which, the mirror wasn’t even made of glass. It was Plexiglas, which meant that her image was wavery. Not that she necessarily wanted to see the details clearly. It also meant that the mirror was another thing she could check off the list headed:
Things that
wouldn’t
make a good weapon.

The door opened without warning. “Your time’s up.” The gun appeared as he did. “We need to make the video.”

He seemed antsy, and she didn’t want to do anything to set him off.

While she was in the bathroom, he’d set up the camera. “Sit here,” he demanded, indicating the floor. Like she was supposed to sit in this skirt? Keeping her knees together, she slid down the wall to the floor.

She was going to scuttle to do his bidding. At least until this video was in Deck’s hands. That was the most important thing. Because even if they weren’t able to get here in time to save her—
think positive, Yenichek
—they could catch this freak, and she could keep any other women from getting killed.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she whimpered, channeling the most pitiful of victims. Just because she hoped she could get a message to Deck and he’d be able to call in the cavalry didn’t mean she was putting all her eggs in one basket. Overtaking him when he least expected it was still in the offing.

“I’m almost disappointed,” he remarked. “I really thought you’d have more fight in you.”

You have no idea, asshole.

This wasn’t quite the same setup as in the Anka Pierovich video. Anka had been sitting in a chair with, they assumed, her hands bound. Because of the constraints of the skirt, Dana was sitting with her heels against her butt, her back against the wall, and her knees up to her chest, leaving—
ta-da
—her hands up near her face…which was only important if you knew how to speak with your hands. And as luck, and her proficiency with languages, would have it, she did.

Now all she had to do was slowly sign a message and pray that either Deck or someone on her team figured it out and that Mr. Psycho here would be too intent on the words coming out of her mouth to notice.

He went behind the camera and turned the light around so it was once again shining in her face. She tried not to wince.

“I want you to tell your former fiancé that you’ve found someone else and that you won’t be back. Be certain to let him know that he is nothing to you and never was. Make it good.”

“But—” Even a total ninny would make some protest.

“Make it good, or I kill him, and then you.” He waved the gun at her, and she believed him.

The red light on the camera came on, and Dana began speaking. “I want you to know that I meet a new man,” she began, keeping her accent heavy. Slowly, she let the middle and ring finger of her right hand drop, leaving her index, thumb, and pinky up in the ASL sign for “I love you.” If he was never able to hear it from her lips, he should at least know that she meant it. “I never
love
you,” she said, her voice trembling at the blatant lie. She prayed that the emphasis she put on love would make him take note.

As if she were fidgeting, she spelled out C-I-N-C-Y and then the sign for gardens—interlocked fingers of both hands spread out and then touched each side of her nose—which put her hand up too close to her face for Mr. Psycho, who waved his gun and she dropped it. And then her right hand, shaped in a “C” moved to the relaxed palm of her left, in a sloppy sign for “picture.” “I sorry I never say this in person. I couldn’t
call
you
.
I left my
phone
at your house.”
Look at the pictures on my phone, Deck.

She looked over the camera at Mr. Psycho. He gave her an impatient “give me more” gesture with his gun hand.

What else could she say?

He hit a button on the camera, and the red light went out. “Tell him he should never try to contact you. That you never want to see him again.”

She nodded, and he turned the camera back on. “I never want to see you. Do not try—” She drew a shaky breath that wasn’t just for show, even as she signed “FBI.”
God
, please let her get out of this alive. “—to contact me.” She signed “I love you” again as the red light went out.



Saturday, December 13—2:30 p.m.

Oakley Neighborhood, Cincinnati, Ohio

Deck sat in his easy chair, ice packs strapped to his leg with Ace bandages. He’d actually dug into one of the prescription painkillers he hadn’t needed for weeks. His leg had definitely not appreciated the three blocks of sprinting that he’d given it. It was a miracle he hadn’t fallen, but now he could barely stand on it.

Which of course made him even more useless to the police and FBI than usual. Before he’d left, Sherwood had insisted that he stay here and wait for a call, either from the team or Dana or the killer.

The doorbell rang, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He levered himself out of the chair faster than he would have thought possible, putting all his weight on the arm crutch.

Could that be Dana? Could she have gotten away?

He ripped open the door, praying he’d see a set of freckles and dimples staring back at him.

His heart lurched. Well, the freckles and dimples were there, but they were about two feet lower than Dana’s would have been. A boy—maybe eight—who he’d seen around the neighborhood held out a disk in a CD jewel case to him.

“What’s this?” he asked, holding it by the corners to avoid compromising any fingerprints.

“A guy in a tan car down the street gave me five bucks to bring this to you.”

Something in his chest cracked.

“Where?” He looked out at the street. It was just before people would start coming home from work. Not many cars were out there. None of them occupied. None of them tan.

It was all he could do not to grab the kid by the shoulders and shake him.

“Can you describe him?”

The kid backed a couple of steps away and shrugged.

Deck tried to bring the intensity on his face down a notch or seven. “Sorry, kid, but this is really,
really
important.”

“He was old…”

“Old like…Mr. Bob with the Borzoi?” That guy took his dog out for a stroll about eight times a day, and he was chatty. He knew all the kids in the neighborhood by name, and vice versa.

He squinted with concentration. “No. Old like you.”

If his sanity wasn’t holding on by a thread, he would likely have found some humor in that. Dana certainly would have.

Dana.

“What did he look like? What color hair?”

“Dark.”

“Was he black or white?”

“White. But really tan.”

“What was he driving?”

“A tan car.”