She stepped up to the closest garage door, punched a code into the panel, and waited for the door to ascend. Then she walked past the row of gleaming, expensive cars, pressed the button to close the garage, and opened the door to the house. The security alarm was, as usual, off — there were few burglaries in Roaring Fork, and never a one in The Heights…unless you counted Corrie Swanson’s breaking into the warehouse, of course. Her thoughts returned to the town meeting earlier in the day, and to the intimidating FBI agent in the black suit who’d descended on it like an avenging angel. She felt sorry for the chief: he was a decent guy, but he had a real problem with letting other people — like that witch Kermode — walk all over him. Nevertheless, she was glad the agent — Pendergast was his name, she remembered — had gotten Corrie out of jail. She hoped to run into her again, ask her about John Jay, maybe…as long as the chief wasn’t around.
Jenny walked through the mudroom, through the pantry, and into the expansive kitchen of the vacation home. Through glass doors she could see the Christmas tree, all decked out and blinking. Her parents and her younger sister, Sarah, would be upstairs asleep.
She snapped on a bank of lights. They illuminated the long granite countertops; the Wolf oven and dual Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer units; the three doors leading, respectively, into the laundry, the second kitchen, and the dining room.
She suddenly realized there had been no patter of nails on the floor, no shaggy, friendly dog wagging his misshapen tail in greeting. “Rex?” she called out.
Nothing.
With a shrug, she got a glass from one of the cabinets, walked over to the fridge — decorated, as usual, with Sarah’s stupid Nicki Minaj photos — poured herself a glass of milk, then took a seat at the table in the breakfast nook. There was a stack of books and magazines in the window seat, and she pushed a few aside — noting as she did so that Sarah had finally taken her advice and begun reading Watership Down—and plucked out her copy of Schmalleger’s Criminal Justice Today. As she did so, she noticed that one of the chairs of the kitchen table had been knocked over.
Sloppy.
She found her page in the book and began to read, sipping her milk as she did so. It drove her father — a high-profile Hollywood lawyer — crazy that she wanted to go into law enforcement. He tended to look down on cops and prosecutors as lower forms of life. But in point of fact he was partly responsible for her interest. All the cop action movie premieres she’d attended — produced or directed by her father’s clients — had left her fascinated with the job from an early age. And starting next fall, she’d be studying the subject full-time, as a freshman at Northeastern University.
Finishing her milk, she closed the book again, put her glass in the sink, and walked out of the kitchen, heading for the stairs up to her room. Her father had the connections to keep her from getting summer jobs with the California police, but there was nothing he could do to prevent her winter break internship here in Roaring Fork. The very idea of it made him nuts.
Which, of course, was part of the fun.
The huge, rambling house was very still. She ascended the curving staircase to the second floor, the landing above dark and silent. As she climbed, she thought once again about the mysterious FBI agent. FBI, she thought. Maybe I should look into an internship in Quantico next summer…
At the top of the stairs, she stopped. Something was wrong. For a moment, she wasn’t sure what it was. And then she realized: Sarah’s door was wide open, faint light streaming out into the dim hall.
At sixteen, Sarah had reached the age where adolescent privacy was all-important. These days her door was closed at all times. Jenny sniffed the air, but there was no smell of weed. She smiled: her sister must have fallen asleep over a magazine or something. She’d take the opportunity to sneak in and rearrange her sister’s stuff. That was sure to get a rise out of her.
Quietly, she crept down the hallway, approaching her sister’s room on silent feet. She came up to the door frame, placed one hand upon it, then slowly leaned her head in.
At first, she could not quite process what she saw. Sarah lay on her bed, tied fast with wound wire, a dirty rag stuffed into her mouth, a billiard ball at its center — Jenny noticed a number, seven, engraved into its yellow-and-white surface — and secured behind her head with a bungee cord. In the faint blue light, Jenny saw that her sister’s knees were bleeding profusely, staining the bedcovers black. As she gasped in horror and shock, Jenny saw Sarah’s eyes staring back at her: wide, terrified, pleading.
Then Jenny registered something in her peripheral vision. She turned in mid-gasp to see a fearful apparition in the hall beside her: wearing black jeans and a tight-fitting jacket of dark leather. The figure was silent and utterly motionless. Its hands were gloved and gripped a baseball bat. Worst of all was the clown mask — white, huge red lips smiling maniacally, bright red circles on each cheek. Jenny stumbled backward, her legs going weak beneath her. Through the eyeholes on each side of the long pointed nose, she could see two dark eyes staring back at her, dreadful in their lack of expression, in awful counterpoint to the leering mask.
Jenny opened her mouth to scream, but the figure — springing into sudden, violent motion — reached forward and quickly stuffed an awful-smelling cloth over her mouth and nose. As her senses went black and she sank to the floor, she could just hear — as the darkness rushed over her — a faint, high-pitched keening coming through Sarah’s gag…
Slowly, slowly, she regained her senses. Everything was fuzzy and vague. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. She was lying on something hard and smooth and that seemed to encircle her. Then, looking around in the darkness, she understood: she was in the tub of her private bathroom. What was she doing here? It felt as if she’d been asleep for hours. But no — the wall clock above her sink read ten minutes to one. She’d only been out for a couple of minutes. She tried to move — and realized she had been bound, hand and foot.
That was when the memory of what had happened came rushing back, falling upon her like a dead weight.
Instantly her heart accelerated, pounding hard in her chest. The rag was still in her mouth. She tried to spit it out, found she could not. The tight rope chafed at her wrists and ankles. Crime-scene photos she’d seen came into her mind, flashing quickly by in a terrible parade.
I’m going to be raped, she thought, shuddering at the recollection of that leering clown mask. But no — if rape was what he was after, he wouldn’t have tied her up the way he did. This was a home invasion — and she’d walked right into the middle of it.
A home invasion.
Maybe he only wants money, she thought. Maybe he only wants jewelry. He’ll take what he can get, then leave, and then…
But it was all so horribly stealthy — so diabolically calculating. First Sarah, now her…
…What about Mom and Dad?
At this thought, stark panic bubbled to the surface.
She struggled violently, jaw working, tongue pushing against the cloth wedged into her mouth. She tried to rise up, and an agonizing pain that almost caused her to faint lanced through her legs. She saw that her kneecaps had been beaten like her sister’s, white edges of broken bone jutting up through torn, bloody flesh. She remembered the baseball bat clutched in one black-gloved hand, and she moaned in fresh panic, thrashing against the bottom of the tub despite the awful pain in her knees.