R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning by R.S. Guthrie Read Free Book Online Page A

said.
    “Right. More victims. We’re done.”

3
     
    Present Day, two months post-abduction
    HAILEY AWOKE in a different cell, this time strapped to a chair. Her head felt like it was filled with hardening concrete mix. She thought maybe she’d been drugged, but it was difficult to concentrate, to remember what were her last memories. Dinner. She remembered eating the ration of potatoes, meat scraps from the bowl, on hands and knees, and lapping up the milk.
    Her captor wasn’t particularly unkind. Excepting the feeding like a dog behavior.
    She could not focus; she only really knew she was in a chair because of her seated position. Her arms were tied behind her back; her legs were bound to the legs of the chair.
    “You’re awake,” he said, startling her so close to her ear. “It’s time, my lovely.”
    “W-who are you?”
    “A friend.”
    She’d never seen her captor. He spoke to her often through the slat he could have easily used to give her a tray and flatware. Almost kind. She felt a strange attraction to him. Stockholm Syndrome, probably, but also because she’d not known her own father and there was something deeply fatherly in the tone of her captor’s voice and certain words and phrases he used. He never spoke unkindly or unfairly to her, even when she cried or snapped and called him every hateful name in the book.
    “I’ve never seen you,” Hailey said, trembling, even though she was well-secured. “You could let me go and I wouldn’t know what to tell them.”
    “I could never do that to you,” the voice said.
    “What?”
    “I’m here to give you a gift. Something I know you will cherish forever.”
    “A gift?”
    “Death.”
    Hailey’s trembling grew to a quake. Then she began sobbing. “Please don’t hurt me. I want to go home.”
    “You weren’t home ,” the man said. “How long has it been since you were actually home? Did you ever really even know one?”
    “My mother,” she began.
    “Will never even know you’re gone, will she?”
    Hailey cried harder. She wouldn’t. Her mother hated her; spat in her face and called her a “drug whore” the last time they spoke, over seven months past. Her, saving for college, at worst smoking a little ganja.
    The man put his gloved hands on either side of her face and he kissed the top of her head. “If you only understood how lucky you are.”
    “Please don’t hurt me,” Hailey whispered again. She was so terrified she wet herself.
    “Oh, baby. You aren’t going to feel a thing.”
    The man removed his hands from her face and placed a noose around her neck. The same kind of noose she’d stared at for hours on end. The same type noose she’d always known would one day be tied for her neck . She’d long since become convinced that indeed this was Judas. The rope fibers pricked at the soft skin of Hailey’s slender neck. The man tightened the knot at the base of her skull and she felt another bee sting.
    Hailey stopped wailing. A strange calmness descended on her. Euphoric.
    “Who will I be?” she said.
    “What?” Judas said, thrown off, unsure where he demanded sureness from himself at all times.
    “How will I be famous?”
    The drug—Dilaudid, an extremely strong opiate unknown to Hailey—had her feeling almost excited at the prospect of posthumous fame.
    Judas was silent for a few beats. Then she felt the cool wetness of a kiss on her right cheek and just before a lever was pulled and the world fell out from beneath her feet and she went weightless for a moment in time, the killer spoke:
    “Nicole Brown Simpson.”
    “How gauche,” Hailey thought dreamily.
    Then, mercifully—nothing.

4
     
    MY SON, Cole, sat across from me at the restaurant table, that look of discomfort screwing up his face as I’d seen it so many times in his teens. It was hard for a parent to stop parenting. A teen would say he doesn’t need parenting and he’d be dead wrong. A twenty-seven-year-old man would say he doesn’t need