The mound moaned.
He’d stuffed an oily rag in her mouth and twined her wrists together in front of her with fat, coarse rope that burned and scratched her skin every time she moved against it. She couldn’t see her ankles, but they felt bound together in the same fashion. To make her more cooperative, he’d shot her up with something that had caused her to pass out. When she awoke, she found herself bound and naked, curled up on her side in a fetal position. The blanket thrown over her body reeked of urine and feces. Was it her waste or someone else’s? As limp as a rag doll, she couldn’t lift her head or roll onto her back. Music floated over her and around her. She didn’t recognize it. An opera? She hated classical music.
Bastard was in the shower; she could hear the water running and the son-of-a-bitch humming. He was happy as hell. She wished he’d slip and fall and crack his crazy skull open. She prayed to hear the thud. Closing her eyes, she practiced the positive-thinking techniques that one of her therapists had taught her. She visualized a SWAT team in black bursting through the door, their guns drawn. She visualized his body riddled with bullets, oozing blood like a sieve. She visualized walking out of this place. Stupid cow, she told herself, and opened her eyes to her dark reality.
The worst part was that she’d come to him willingly. Eagerly! She should have guessed there was something wrong with him. His lovemaking had been too intense. Angry. Really, he’d seemed off to her from the moment they met, but she’d been desperate to have a man, especially one who seemed interested in listening. Now her desperation was going to get her killed. Most pathetic was that no one would notice her absence, at least not soon enough to do her any good. That was her fault, too. Having perfected her bridge-burning skills, she’d isolated herself from anyone who ever gave a damn about her personally. When it came to work and school, her boss and her classmates had grown accustomed to her spotty attendance. They’d write off her disappearance as yet another one of her psycho episodes.
The shower lurched to a stop, and the rag doll shuddered. He’d be back in the bedroom soon.
HE CAME OUT with a towel wrapped around his waist, his chest glistening with water. “You’re awake,” he said flatly.
Eyes narrowing into dark razors, she visualized a knife going into his back, stabbing him again and again. Die, you crazy fucker! Die right now! She flinched as he neared her corner, expecting him to pounce. Instead, he sat down cross-legged on the floor across from her.
“Do you know why you’re here?” He reached out and caressed her cheek with the back of his hand.
She shuddered but didn’t have the strength to pull away. She felt her eyes start to close; she was going to pass out again.
He clapped his hands in front of her. “Are you listening?”
Her eyes snapped open, and she moaned a response. She visualized his head exploding in front of her. Gray matter flying. Hitting and sticking to the walls of his bedroom.
He trapped her chin in his hands. “Do you know why you’re here?”
She moaned and managed a small movement, a shake of her head. More a protest than a response.
“Not yet, though,” he said, uncrossing his legs and getting to his feet. He looked down at her. “We must get to know each other … intimately.”
She shook her head again.
He crouched down in front of her and wrinkled his nose. “First order of business is a bath.”
She grunted loudly in protest.
“A shower, then. Would you prefer a shower?” He smiled. “I’ll take your silence as acquiescence.” Using two fingers, he plucked the blanket off her and deposited it on the floor. He hooked his hand over the ropes tying her wrists together and started to drag her on her back across the wooden floor toward the bathroom.
Mustering all her strength, she thumped her heels on the floor and squeaked a muffled scream beneath the gag.
“That’s enough,” he said.
When he dragged her past a floor lamp, she kicked at the base with the bottom of her feet and toppled it.
He dropped the rope and grabbed a fistful of hair from the top of her head. “We’ll do it the hard way, then.”
While she continued screaming, he dragged her into the bathroom by the hair and backed into the shower stall with her. He released her head, letting it crack against the tile floor, and stepped around her body. Her legs were still sticking out. He picked them up and folded them into the stall. Reaching inside, he adjusted the showerhead so that it was aimed at her face and turned on the cold water.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” he said, and snapped the shower door shut.
She gurgled a scream to the glass.
His response was to turn up the volume on his CD player.
On her back with her legs bent up, she shivered and moaned under the icy spray. Her head throbbed. Her wrists and ankles ached from the bindings. The gag in her mouth was collecting water. Instead of turning her face away from the shower, she closed her eyes and visualized herself dead in the stall before he got back. She started to drift off, and her head tipped to one side. The cold water continued to hammer her face while her ears drowned in a booming aria from an Italian opera.
Chapter 21
ABOUT HALF A mile long and a couple of blocks wide, University Grove was a swath of land huddled next to the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus, bucolic and agriculture-themed, noted more for livestock studies than for student demonstrations. The hundred or so single-family homes gracing the Grove’s curving, oak-lined streets were built specifically for university professors and administrators, which meant the compact community contained a good chunk of the state’s intelligentsia. Chemists. Economists. Physicists. Architects. Anthropologists. An economic adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had lived in the Grove, as had a member of the team that developed the atomic bomb.
Bernadette had learned about the neighborhood during her research on Professor Wakefielder. While waiting for this particular member of the intelligentsia to drag a body past a window—preferably one with open blinds and excellent backlighting—she gave Garcia an architecture lesson.
“Modern functionalism,” she said, pointing to a blocky home on their side of the street. “I also detect the strong influence of the Bauhaus.”
“What does that mean?”
“Hell if I know.”
Garcia looked across the street at the handsome homes on either side of the surveillance subject’s well-kept Tudor. They all had generous lots, offering plenty of room between neighbors. “I’d love to own here.”
“Actually the U owns the land,” she said. “The profs buy the houses and pay rent for the land.”
“What happens when they want to sell?” asked Garcia.
“It can’t be to Joe Six-Pack. It has to be to another university faculty member or staffer.”
“So you and I couldn’t live here,” he said.
“Even if they sold to regular slugs, we couldn’t afford it,” she said.
He grinned. “Hey. Maybe you couldn’t, but I—”
“Don’t go there,” she said.
“I suppose we’re not brilliant enough,” he said. “We’d feel out of place.”
“I always feel out of place,” she said cheerfully.
Dressed in jeans and jackets, the pair sat in the front seat of an undercover beater that looked remarkably like Garcia’s personal beater. Their heap did not look out of place. It was parked between two other junkers, one a weathered Toyota sedan and the other an old VW “hippie van,” as Garcia called it. It seemed the profs on this block did not put their money into their rides.
Garcia shifted the driver’s seat back and stretched out his legs. “Does anything suck more than a stakeout?”