The Serial Killer's Wife by Blake Crouch, Robert Swartwood Read Free Book Online Page B

he turned and walked away, and Elizabeth waited ten full seconds before placing the BlackBerry to her ear.  
    “He’s gone.”  
    “He sounds like he cares about you,” Cain said. “Is it just a schoolboy crush or are you lovers?”  
    She returned to the living room but immediately stopped when she saw the television. “What is that?”  
    “What is what?”  
    “Above Matthew’s head.”  
    “You see that now, do you? That’s because originally it wasn’t turned on.”  
    “What is it?”  
    “You’re a bright woman, Elizabeth. You tell me.”  
    On the screen everything looked the same as it had before: Matthew tied to a bed, tape over his mouth, a blindfold over his eyes. What had changed were the bright red numbers hovering above his head:

    100:00:00

    “Don’t do this,” she whispered.  
    “You have one hundred hours to get me what I want. Every hour a picture will be sent to the BlackBerry. It will show your son and the time. If you don’t get me what I want before those one hundred hours elapse, I will detonate the bomb. The last picture I’ll send will be your son’s remains.”  
    Staring at the screen, at those bright red numbers, she whispered, “What do you want?”  
    “Your husband’s trophies,” Cain said.  
    And the numbers began to count down.

 
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 14

    T HE FIRST THING she did after Cain disconnected was rush into the bathroom. She made it to the toilet just in time before the dry heaves. Nothing came up—not after she had vomited back at Reginald Moore’s house—but she still stayed there for several minutes, trying to get that image of her son out of her mind. Thinking it never should have come to this. How did it come to this?  
    At some point she stood back up and went to the sink. She washed her hands, her face, even rinsed her mouth out with Listerine. She dried her mouth and face with a towel, started to turn away but paused as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.  
    This morning—less than eight hours ago—she had stared into this same mirror as she applied her makeup and did her hair and the thought that had gone through her mind was that she hadn’t lost it, at least not yet. Almost thirty-five years old, the starting of crow’s-feet around her eyes, she had managed to keep her looks while the rest of her body—her stomach, her thighs, her ass—had begun to grow more than she would have liked. Not that it wasn’t her fault, no longer working out, not even following along to one of those yoga DVDs she had ordered from Amazon, all her attention focused on Matthew and work, work and Matthew, and now Todd, that she just didn’t have the extra time.  
    Thinking of Todd now, how she had pushed him away, forced him to leave when she needed him most, she touched her stomach, could feel the scars through the fabric, the strange patchwork that—
    No, stop it. She didn’t have time to think about that. The clock was literally ticking, right above her son’s head. She had to hurry.  
    Back out in the living room, she stared one last time at her son on the screen—doing her best to ignore those red glowing digits—before turning the television off.  
    She went into the kitchen and opened the junk drawer. She sorted through the clutter and pulled out a Phillips head screwdriver. She wished she had a gun, some kind of weapon, but the closest thing would be one of the steak knives in the other drawer, and even those were pretty dull. She realized she had nothing to take with her other than the BlackBerry right now in her pocket (she’d ditched her own cell), so she grabbed her keys off the floor and hurried toward the door.  
    A glance through the peephole told her nobody was in the hallway. She disengaged the chain, opened the door, checked both ends of the hall. Nothing.  
    She stepped out, locked the door behind her automatically, and then hurried toward the stairs leading to the parking lot.  
    As she approached