But it was him. She knew it was him. She felt it.
And now Harper was on his way to the cabin. Even if he never found it, soon Wade would call 911 and it would be over for Beckard. He had to know that, didn’t he? Sooner or later, his lies would unravel and he would have to run.
So was that what he was doing now? Running?
If he was smart, anyway.
Harper had told her Beckard was taken to the hospital, then later driven home by one of the troopers. The sergeant had been smart about it; he wouldn’t contact Beckard until he found the cabin and talked to Wade and Rachel. When they had all the evidence they needed, they would swoop in and take Beckard. But only then.
“It’s tricky,” Harper had said. “He’s one of us. If we move on him now, and it turns out you’re lying to me—”
“I’m not,” she had interrupted.
“If it turns out you’re lying,” Harper had continued, “my career is DOA. You understand, right? I can’t move on him yet, not without corroboration from these college kids.”
She had nodded grudgingly. Harper had his livelihood to think about, and to just take the word of a woman who had been caught carrying a shotgun around in the woods, who had already admitted to trying to kill one of his troopers…
Yeah, she didn’t blame him. She would have done the exact same thing in his shoes.
Of course, none of that made waiting in the interrogation room after he left any easier. She also swore the temperature had started dropping again. Harper had believed enough of what she had told him to take off the handcuffs, which allowed her to get up and walk around to fight against the growing chill.
She paced back and forth, walking the entire length of the room at least a dozen times in as many minutes. They had taken her watch when they processed her, so she didn’t know what time it was. When he was in here, Harper had told her his lieutenant wasn’t going to wake up for another three hours. Six in the morning, she guessed. Maybe seven, if the higher-ranked trooper was a late riser.
And Harper had just left thirty minutes ago — or had it been an hour now?
Time had a way of slipping by when all you had was gray concrete to stare at. Suddenly she wished there was a two-way mirror across from her so she could get someone’s attention. The door remained locked from the other side, and she couldn’t see anyone in the hallway through the security window. When she tried the door, it wouldn’t budge. She wondered if she could ram it open with her shoulders, but it felt too solid, and she wasn’t sure she could risk it with her broken ribs. Besides, although she couldn’t see a guard outside, that didn’t mean there wasn’t one further up the hallway.
The quiet inside and outside the room was unsettling. The entire building had seemed asleep when she first showed up, but it was downright dead at the moment.
And she was tired. So tired.
Maybe it was the ribs. Or the bruised skin around her wrists and ankles. She had also gained a couple of extra bumps when the troopers tackled her back at the crash site, because apparently the rest of her body hadn’t been hurting enough.
Gee, thanks for that, guys.
With nothing to do and no one to talk to, she continued pacing the room, willing Harper to hurry up and reach the cabin. If he could find it. There was no guarantee of that, either, especially at night. She remembered being led out of the woods in the police cruiser and the seemingly endless walls of silent trees standing at sentry on both sides of the highway.
Podunk country. What did you expect?
The click of the door opening snapped her back. She was on the other side of the table, looking across the room.
“Did you find the cabin?” Allie asked.
“The cabin?” he said, pushing the door open and standing in the open frame with a gun in his fist.
Beckard.
He looked like shit. Worse than shit, really.
His face was purple and black, with a big Band-Aid over the bridge of his broken nose so that when he talked, his voice sounded slightly muffled. His right hand was bundled up in thick gauze tape and hung loosely at his side like a useless sack of meat. Which explained why he was using his left hand to hold the gun. He was favoring his right side, where she had put buckshot through him last night, as he stood there looking in at her.
Allie wondered what the chances were that he was not ambidextrous. It was hard to shoot a gun straight, and even harder to shoot a gun with your weak hand. That same ex-cop had taught her that. Even this close, it might be worth taking the chance to test his accuracy—
He must have seen the spark of a plan forming in her eyes, because he smiled. “I’d like to take you with me, but I’m not against shooting you and starting over. Understand?”
“You shoot me, and everyone will hear the gunshot.”
He shrugged. “You’ve been a thorn in my side all night, missy. At this point, if I can’t take you with me, I’m just gonna end it now and call it a career. It’s been one hell of a ride already. Ten years. Brett Favre wishes he had my winning streak.”
“Bullshit.”
“You think so? Try me, then.”
She stared into those dark, soulless eyes and knew he meant it. He would die here if he had to, if it meant taking her with him.
Remember, he’s a psychopath.
She nodded. “All right. So now what?”
He reached behind his back (she could see him wincing with the effort and thought, Hurts, asshole?) and brought back a pair of handcuffs and tossed it onto the table. It skidded across the metal surface and over to her.
“Remember,” he said, “we both get out of here alive, or neither one of us does. Frankly, I don’t give a shit anymore.”
Chapter 18
The state police had its own stretch of land just off the main highway, with the closest town more than ten miles further down the road. The unremarkable one-floor building housed fifty or so troopers that worked the three shifts and would have been easily missed if not for the brightly-lit parking lot and spotlights along the outer walls.
Beckard knew the building intimately, including where to enter without being seen and how to leave in the same manner. He also knew that Allie was being kept inside the interrogation room in the back of the hallway, though he was surprised by the lack of a guard outside her door. Alarms went off inside his head and Beckard fully expected some kind of trap to be sprung. He stood in the narrow passageway for a good two, maybe three minutes with the Glock in his hand, listening and waiting for his fellow troopers to converge on him.
But they never did.
Finally, he decided there was no trap and went to collect Allie.
He marched her at gunpoint to the same side door he had used to enter unnoticed. The door was accessible by an access panel that he, of course, knew the code to. As she moved quietly in front of him, Beckard could picture her eyes shifting, looking for a way out — something, anything—even if he could only see the back of her head. Maybe a few hours weren’t enough to know a person, but Beckard felt as if he knew this woman intimately.
She’s just my type, too.
“Faster,” he grunted. “Remember. If I don’t get out of here, you don’t get out of here. If you think I won’t shoot you purely out of spite, you’re dead wrong.”