Lucas and Samantha came in just in time to hear that, and Luke said, “Jonah’s probably right that he wouldn’t be a target for this unsub. However he views us, it’s likely he sees Jonah as the one he’s trying to outsmart. And odds are, he won’t come after him, at least not directly.”
“Outsmart or just drive nuts,” Jonah said. He noticed that Sarah was frowning, and gave her a questioning look, to which she replied, “I dunno. Something somebody just said in the last few minutes set off a bell, but I’m too tired to figure out what it was.” She shook her head. “Anyway, Jonah, be careful.”
“I will. You guys be careful as well.”
Lucas frowned slightly, then said to the others, “Okay, our shift. You guys go get some rest. If we catch a break with the case, we’ll call. Otherwise, plan to be back here around midnight.”
It was Thursday, not long before noon.
FOURTEEN
There was still no sense of time passing for Nessa. It might only have been a few hours, or a few days—or even longer than that—before she thought the black snake, that he was not here, at least for now. Not here. Not now. And he had not found her for all his searching, she was sure of that. Not yet.
But underneath the smooth, placid surface of her mind, where she hid from the dark snake, a clock was ticking away the minutes she had to try to escape, the minutes before he would surely come back, and she eventually realized that she did have a growing sense of her surroundings.
She kept telling herself that if she could only figure out where she was, or at least which way to go in order to escape, then when the time was right, she could get away. Run.
Go home.
She thought about the others she knew were around her, their breathing soft and even, and a part of her felt horrible that she was even thinking about escaping this prison without them. But a part of her knew that if she could escape, if she could only get away, then she could go for help. She could tell her parents and Chief Riggs where these other people were. And then they could be rescued.
Even her common sense told her that one little girl couldn’t help at least five other people, mostly grown-ups, to get away. All the time she’d been awake and aware, even hiding herself away beneath the surface of her mind, she knew none of the others had stirred.
At all.
That was scary. It was like they were alive enough to breathe, but not alive enough to . . . to really be alive.
Gathering her courage, Nessa opened her eyes and turned her head, trying her best to see something, anything, in the thick darkness around her. But she couldn’t. No window, no door, not even the sliver of light somewhere.
She also flexed her feet—she was barefoot, just as she had been when she’d gone downstairs at home to get a drink. Whenever that was. However long ago it had been. Beneath her feet just felt . . . cold and rough, uneven. Maybe ground without any grass. Or maybe something else. She didn’t know.
It wasn’t until she was slowly and carefully moving her fingers, and then her wrists, and then her arms that she realized there was tape on one arm, and tubing—and a needle stuck in her.
Nessa had been in the hospital once when she’d been thrown from a horse and badly injured. She could remember lying there mostly covered in bandages, but she also remembered getting the blood transfusion that had, the doctors told her, saved her life. She’d been extraordinarily lucky because her blood was rare and it had to be just the right donor.
She remembered that needle in her arm, and also the one in her other arm that had kept her arm from hurting too much.
She didn’t think this was that kind of needle. Or the kind that gave blood necessary to live.
When she felt around, she realized that the tubing was taped to her arm and then swung loosely upward, until it connected to a plastic bag attached to a thin metal pole.
Just like hospitals used.
She sat there for a while and thought about that, until another sudden thought, a dawning realization, made her consider what she was sitting on.
It was a chair, but not a normal chair. It had . . . it was . . . someone had changed it. Someone had turned it . . . into a potty chair.
As bad as everything else was, that embarrassed Nessa horribly. Someone had pulled her pajama bottoms down around her ankles, she could feel that now. Someone had pulled down her pajamas and sat her on a potty chair.
And he had done the same things to the others, she was sure of that. Because those were the smells she hadn’t really wanted to identify all this time. It was people, as helpless as she was, more helpless than she was, going to the bathroom in a pot or bowl beneath a chair like the one she was sitting on.
For some reason, that was the final catalyst Nessa needed. She moved slowly, as quietly as she could, and carefully removed the needle from her arm, pressing a fold of her pajama top against the place that bled when the needle was removed.
Then she sat there for a long time afterward, keeping the surface of her mind quiet, but underneath thinking so fast she could hardly keep up with herself. She shifted around a bit, silently, and then pushed herself to her feet, holding on to the chair a few moments until the dizziness passed. When she was as steady on her feet as she thought she was likely to be, she fumbled for her pajama bottoms and panties and slowly pulled them up.
Then came the scary part. The really scary part. Because she had to find her way out of here. She had to find her way in total darkness, by feel—and she knew only too well that she was bound to feel those other people breathing, to encounter them in the dark.
There was nothing she could do for them except escape and lead rescuers back here to save them.
But for now, she had to move very, very slowly, hands outstretched. She dared not bump into anyone—or anything—with any kind of force. Like those tall, delicate poles holding the IV bags. One of those, if tipped over, would fall with a crash, Nessa knew.
And all it would take to summon her captor was a sound.
Just a sound.
So Nessa held her hands out in the dark, dark place that held smells she could no longer bear, braced herself to touch whatever or whoever she touched without making a sound, and began to slowly, slowly make her way forward.
—
LUKE AND SAMANTHA were filled in on what the others had found, which was little enough, and what they had speculated, as per the notes Sarah had very neatly written.
Jonah pushed the pad across the table to them, then sipped his coffee and stared at the rather sparse evidence boards.
A picture of each of the victims. An unidentifiable shadow outline of the unsub. Beneath the picture of each victim was a list of their particular info: DOB, height, weight, hair and eye color, clothing when last seen. And below that, the scarce info of when and from where they had been taken, times approximate except for Luna Lang and Nessa, both of whom had appeared on time-stamped video.
“You’re frowning,” Luke said, sipping his own coffee. “Something bothering you?”
“Yeah . . . but I’m not sure what it is.”
“That seems to be going around,” Sam muttered.
“Go with it,” Luke told the chief. “Speak out loud. Stream of consciousness. Sometimes that’s where we find the things hiding from our conscious minds.”
Jonah was a little startled. “Hiding?”
Lucas hesitated, exchanged a glance with his silent wife, then said, “This is your town, Jonah. Your town. More than any other small town I’ve ever been in, the center of this place is you. Until this happened, there was no crime to speak of. You tended to stop trouble before it started, stepping in before things could get too tense. You talked, and the people of Serenity listened.”
“I’m chief of police, of course they listened,” Jonah said, more than a little uncomfortable.