“Lying to me and yourself will not change what has happened. Lawson was sent to take you, and you know it.” He gave her a quick sidelong look. “Now that he has failed, others will be sent. Professionals this time. They will go to your office and your home. They will watch your employees and your friends.”
Her throat tightened. “I’ll call the police—”
“By now Lawson has reported you to them,” he said, startling her again. “He will say that you arranged to have me attack him. That you are with me now. That we are armed, dangerous. The police will begin to search for us. They will block roads. They will issue warnings to the people. They will use the television.”
She went rigid. “If you know he’ll do that, then you had to be in on it.”
He stopped at a red light and turned to face her. “You are not the first to be taken. Nor will you be the last.”
Now he was going to tell her how many women he’d murdered, and how he planned to kill her. “You’ve done this before?”
“GenHance has. Many times.” He saw the light turn green and returned his attention to the road.
Every book she’d ever read featuring a serial killer had a scene like this, Jessa thought. The newly abducted victim, bound and helpless, begged for her freedom. The satisfied killer ignored her pleas or mocked her. So far Matthias had ignored every request she’d made, and his cryptic statements could easily double as taunts. Even his assurance that he was taking her to safety didn’t make her feel any better.
The safety might be for him rather than her.
The seat belt he’d pulled over her had three straps instead of two, which crisscrossed tightly over her from shoulder to waist. When she tried to loosen them, she discovered they had no give, and the belt clip on her left had no release button.
She was trapped, as surely as she had been in the restaurant. “If you really want to help me, Gaven, then please take this belt off me. It’s too tight and I can’t breathe.”
He didn’t look at her as he drove onto the ramp leading to the expressway. “If that were so, you would be unconscious by now.”
He was the last man on earth Jessa wanted to touch, but if she knew what he had done in the past, she could be ready for what he intended to do to her. Working an arm out from under the restraining straps, she reached over and clamped her hand over his.
Shadowlight.
A cutting wind scoured her face with tiny, stinging ice crystals, and she had to squint against the blinding intensity of white light. Taking a breath was the same thing as being stabbed in the lungs. Buried to midcalf in fresh, powdery snow, she felt her feet go numb.
The blizzard didn’t allow her to see much of her surroundings, but she was outside, alone, and so cold her body shivered with the helplessness of someone having a seizure. If Matthias were here, she couldn’t see him, but she slogged forward, wrenching her legs up and down, pitching forward as the snowdrifts collapsed under her weight. She landed on her hands and knees, and then she saw the vague shape of a man fighting through the snow ahead of her.
He struggled to stay upright against the wind. Under his arm he carried something, a snowy bundle too small to be a body but too large to be his laundry. The ice-encrusted scarf wrapped around his head covered all but his eyes, but it was Gaven Matthias. She could feel him as surely as she felt the wind and cold.
She couldn’t read his thoughts, however. His mind seemed wiped clean of everything but staying on his feet and taking the next step.
Jessa heard thunder, and what sounded like a low-flying jet over her head, and looked up. That was when the bomb went off, exploding with enough force to scatter the violent wind and create a momentary window of visibility. She could see the top of a ridge with an enormous shelf of snow that seemed to be rising higher.
It wasn’t until several smaller bombs went off and a cloud of white billowed at the base of the ridge that she realized the mountain was not rising but that the shelf of snow was sliding down, all of it at once—on top of her.
Jessa flung up an arm as the first chunks of snow crust pelted her, as hard as thrown rocks, and then a white ocean roared over her, lifting and rolling her, flinging her against tree trunks and bouncing her off boulders before it swallowed her whole.
As a crushing weight settled over her, her thoughts became a jumble of disbelief: Snow? Mountains? Not Atlanta. Where? Where is he? What did he do?
Her fingers slipped away from the disembodied hand she held, and she was glad. She didn’t want to see the airless void of white anymore. But the cold that bit into her aching body didn’t retreat, and the grinding weight pressing over her didn’t ease.
The sunlight never came.
After speaking to Cecile’s owners about the incident involving Lawson and his latest acquisition, and assuring them he would pay for all the damages they had incurred, Jonah Genaro called for his car. Before he left the office, he confirmed that Delaporte was dealing with the witnesses and the evidence left at the scene. Fortunately the waiter and Lawson had been removed by Lawson’s driver and taken for medical treatment to a private hospital owned by one of his subsidiaries, or he doubted he could have kept the police from becoming involved.
“I took the liberty of posting retrieval teams at Bellamy’s office and home,” Delaporte added. “She hasn’t surfaced yet.”
“Tap every phone line and have Riordan run a sweep for her mobile,” Genaro said. “Monitor her personal and business bank accounts and credit card activity. She’ll need money to flee the state. Have you identified the male accomplice at the restaurant?”
“Not yet, sir, but we’re still interviewing the witnesses. Descriptions indicate he’s a white male, early to mid-thirties, casually dressed and carrying a camera. The valet said he identified himself as a photographer Mr. Lawson called to the restaurant to take photos of him and Bellamy.”
Had Bradford Lawson staged this entire incident in order to blackmail him, or grab Bellamy for himself? Genaro felt his temper rise. “I’ll speak to Bradford. Send additional men out to keep Bellamy’s employees under surveillance. Use whatever means are necessary. I want her brought in before morning.”
At the hospital emergency room, a nervous charge nurse led him back to the treatment room, where two physicians were attending to Lawson, who was fighting restraints and raving.
Genaro’s suspicions that his director had staged the incident for his own purposes or profit faded. From the amount of blood spattering the gurney, Lawson, the two physicians, and the floor, whoever had attacked Lawson had not been playacting.
“What’s wrong with him?” he asked the senior physician.
“He has two knife wounds, one serious,” the doctor replied. “The rage seems to be chemically induced, possibly from cocaine and steroid abuse. We’re running a tox screen to confirm. He won’t allow us to bandage him.”
“Leave us,” he told the doctors, who reluctantly withdrew. When the door closed, he approached the gurney and stood over Lawson. “Bradford. What happened today?”
“What the fuck do you think happened?” Lawson snarled back, jerking at the straps holding him down. “That sorry bitch knew, Jonah. She knew before she got there. She brought protection with her and the fucker cut me.”
“Control yourself.” When he didn’t, Genaro wrapped his hand over Lawson’s wrist wound and tightened his fist until the younger man howled. “Do I have your attention now, Bradford?”
He groaned a yes.
“Good.” He eased back on his hold. “Pull yourself together and tell me everything that happened this afternoon at Cecile’s.”
As Lawson sullenly related the details of his meeting with Jessa Bellamy and how it had suddenly and inexplicably gone wrong, Genaro silently studied both of his wounds. The photographer who had attacked his employee had great skill with a blade; he had effectively crippled Lawson with two meticulously placed slashes but had not bothered to follow either with a jab to the heart or a major artery. Given the circumstances, the man who had come to Jessa Bellamy’s rescue had intended to disarm and disable, not kill.
That made it almost certain that he was not a photographer.
“Did the man have a military haircut, or use government-issued blades?” he asked Lawson when he had finished his tale.
“He wasn’t military. The bastard’s knives were strange. Old-looking.” He shifted his leg. “Fuck. Maybe handmade.”
“What about an accent? German? South African?”
“I don’t know. Not American. Maybe Dutch. He went right for my gun and my fucking leg, the cocksucker.” He squinted up at Genaro. “He had a tat on the left side of his neck. Black, maybe a snake.”
He went still. “What shape was the snake?”
“I don’t know. Like a number eight, maybe. But sideways.”
After grilling Lawson for another ten minutes, taking care to get a full description of the photographer, he released his wrist and went to the sink in the corner to wash the blood from his hand.
“When you find her, I want her first,” Lawson demanded. “All I need is a room, some cuffs, and eight hours.”
“Bradford, you’re not in any condition to deal with Ms. Bellamy.” He reached for some paper towels and carefully dried his hands before turning back to him. “Let the doctors finish working on you and get some rest.”
“You can’t leave me here like this,” Lawson raged. “Not after what she did. She planned this, Jonah. She knew I was coming for her. Someone warned her. Just have them sew me up and let me out of here, and I’ll find that fucking cunt myself.”
Genaro found it interesting that Lawson’s rage centered on Jessa and not the man who had attacked him. He knew about the younger man’s predilection for intimidating and sometimes battering his sex partners; on more than one occasion he’d exploited Lawson’s weakness to deal with female subjects who subsequently proved much more cooperative.