By hiding in my ear.
“Checkmate,” he said.
Dizzy… dizzy… swaying… I handed the phone to Lien-hua and mumbled, “GPS…” The world was closing in. “Track her cell location with GPS… It’s the param-” I started to say, but before I could tell them who the Illusionist was, everything went black.
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Tessa opened her eyes.
She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious.
Something was stuffed in her mouth. Some kind of gag. It made her want to retch, but she was afraid that if she threw up she’d choke on the vomit and die like that kid from school did last year at that party when he got so drunk he passed out and never woke up.
Never woke up.
Calm down, Tessa. Calm down.
Never woke up.
Calm down.
She was on her side. Her hands stretched behind her back, tied together. It felt like duct tape. When she tried to move her legs, she couldn’t. Her ankles were tightly bound too. At least she still had her clothes on-thank God.
Her mind felt fuzzy, unclear. She looked around.
Where was she?
An ambulance. She was in the back of an ambulance, and they were driving up a curving road, into the mountains.
Drifting. Drifting. She blinked, tried to focus.
Slipped into unconsciousness again.
I woke up, looked around. A huddle of faces surrounded me.
“The guy tossed the phone,” someone was saying.
“The paramedic,” I managed to say.
“He’s back!” Ralph’s face loomed into view. “You OK?”
I nodded feebly. “It’s the paramedic.” I tried to speak, hardly made a sound. “The Illusionist. It’s him.”
“Put out an APB on the ambulance!” Ralph shouted. I saw Margaret calling it in.
“If it’s a paramedic, where’s his partner?” asked Lien-hua.
I knew the answer from my days as a wilderness guide, and I wanted to tell her that in isolated mountainous regions, EMTs and paramedics drive their ambulances home, so that when a call comes in they don’t have to drive back to town first, but can respond faster. And they don’t always arrive on the scene with their partner. I wanted to explain it all, tried to, but voices and visions whispered to me, blurred my thoughts, curved reality around me.
What kind of drug was that?
“Where’s that doctor!” yelled Ralph. Then he looked at me. “That was a good idea to track her phone, but he discarded it.”
“Where?” I managed to say. “Where did he toss it?”
“240 West.”
Location and timing…
“How long ago?”
Location and timing…
“’Bout two minutes.”
What was that paramedic’s name? I tried to think, tried to remember.
He never told me his name. Just told me it might leave a scar. “Find out who responded to the 911 call at the safe house,” I said.
“I’m on it,” said Ralph.
“He’ll probably switch vehicles, Ralph.” I felt so weak. “We can’t chase him… gotta get out ahead of him…” I felt weak and nauseous. I must have looked it too.
“We need to get you to the hospital,” said Lien-hua.
I slapped myself in the face to wake up. Some of my thoughts were positioning themselves in a straight line again, but not all of them. “Not before I find my daughter,” I said. “Get my computer. It’s still in the security room.”
“Pat-” she said.
“Please,” I begged. “Please. Hurry.”
She left for it.
“His name’s Sevren Adkins,” Ralph announced. He asked them where Sevren lived and then scribbled down an address. “We can’t track the vehicle, though. It’s an older model. No GPS.” Then he said something into the phone and turned back to me. “I’ve got Asheville EMS on the phone, Pat. Anything else you need to know?”
“Is he on their high angle rescue unit?”
He asked them.
“Yes!” he yelled.
That explains the cave connection.
“Find out if he used to work in Spartanburg, if he was the one who responded to the domestic abuse call from Grolin’s girlfriend. I want to know how long he’s been playing this game.”
A minute later Lien-hua returned with my computer. I fired up F.A.L.C.O.N. “Showtime,” I said. I typed in the address Ralph had given me. The image focused, zoomed.
Onto clouds.
Useless.
We haven’t found a way yet to see through the clouds.
Tessa was dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. The world was a blur. A blood-drenched dream. She remembered arguing with Patrick… the necklace… her knapsack… seeing that cop get shot… Agent Tucker trying to help her… the paramedic.
And then everything was swallowed by the clouds.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts. Her mind was filled with visions of puffy clouds floating overhead, forming into fairies and unicorns and dragons with wispy, bristling teeth, and she could hear her mother’s laughter from somewhere nearby and then she was coming home from her mother’s funeral and she could see her reflection in the bathroom mirror where she was pressing a razor blade against her arm and the blood was dripping, falling, spreading out across her arm and then down the hall and onto a treadmill and across the carpet, and then it was flowing from Agent Tucker’s neck, forming into shapes on the floor, clouds on the carpet, coloring the world red with crimson tears.
Bloody rain.
Calm down, Tessa. Calm down.
A terror still and deep settled over her, descended into her. She was tied up. She was with a killer. She was going to die.
She was afraid to make a sound, afraid of what he might do if he found out she was awake, but despite herself, she let out a muffled gasp.
The man driving the ambulance turned around and smiled. “Tessa,” he said. “So glad you could join me.”
Ah, so she was awake. Good.
It was more fun when they woke up early and had more time to contemplate what was about to happen to them.
He heard a cell phone ring.
What? He’d tossed the kid’s phone earlier. Whose phone was that?
Another ring.
He hadn’t checked both of her pockets, just the one.
She was carrying a second phone.
“Sevren lived in Spartanburg,” announced Ralph, hanging up his phone.
I tried to pull together everything: Grolin had been set up from the start. He was Sevren’s perfect little pawn, writing about locations in MountainQuest magazine that Sevren could later drop bodies into to make all the evidence point away from himself. And as a paramedic, Sevren would have known Vanessa from working at the hospital, could have convinced her to come to the golf course.
He’s showing us the board.
I thought of Tucker’s longitude and latitude theory and pulled up the geo profile and the computer’s chess game, grabbed the image of the chessboard, overlaid it onto the geo profile, resized it to fit. Locations, abduction sites, crime scenes. I added the golf course. The safe house.
Patterns… patterns… patterns…
I had to find him. I had to predict where he was going to go.
You don’t predict the future, Pat. You can’t.
But I had to.
Sevren stopped the ambulance by the side of the road. They hadn’t quite made it to his destination yet, just a little farther before he could switch vehicles, but he needed to get rid of that phone. He climbed into the back with the girl.
He fished the phone out of her pocket, stepped outside the ambulance, and hurled it into the gorge through the swirl of damp snow that had started descending on the mountains. Then he returned to her side.
Yes.
Maybe he could have a little fun with Tessa now that she was awake. Why not? He’d earned it. He watched her squirm for a few moments and then removed her gag.
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