“Maybe not. But then there’s also his car, which has a soiled trunk full of your DNA—thank you for that. They’ll find that abandoned, twenty or so miles away from here.”
“They’ll find his body.” My heart is starting to beat harder in my chest, working against the toxins.
“Not soon, anyway.” He sounds so confident. Do I even want to know what he did with Grady?
I want more information, but I can’t let this drag on much longer. I’m beginning to feel the heavy pull of what he put into my body, and I don’t know how much longer I have. Playing dead may be my only option.
And so I do, staying as still as possible, closing my eyes for longer periods of time, until I’m afraid that I’m not pretending anymore.
And then the chance that I’d assumed I wouldn’t have happens.
“Shit,” I hear him mutter.
A small plastic container from the bag of Grady’s DNA slips out of Jace’s hand to land on the floor. It must have rolled under the bed because he curses somewhere below, as if he has turned and stooped to get it.
Summoning all the energy I can, I seize the rock clock from the table. It’s heavier than I’d imagined, and I have to struggle to maintain my grip. Swinging my bound hands as high as possible, I slam it down, hard, on the top of his head.
And then what’s left of my conscious brain screams at me to run.
I slither off the end of the bed and bolt out the door and down the hall, expecting hands to seize me at any moment and pull me back. I don’t stop, though, using the stair rail to keep me from falling as I stumble down into the basement. I don’t stop even when the snow bites into my bare feet.
I run and run, tripping up the driveway, my balance off either because of my bound hands or my panic or the drugs.
I dare to check over my shoulder only once. I don’t see Jace, but he’s there, I know it. I can hear his feet, pounding into the ground. Or maybe that’s just my heart that I hear, pounding in my ears as I run.
I reach the road and don’t know whether to go left or right. It all looks the same—dark and empty—but I have to choose one and hope that I’m not guaranteeing my own death. “Which way . . . which way . . . which way . . .” I close my eyes and try to remember which direction he turned in from, when I was trapped in that trunk, but I can’t.
I choose right, and hope that it truly is right, even as I struggle to stay on my feet, struggle to focus.
The frigid cold keeps my body going, but I’m so tired. I don’t know that I can go any farther. But I think I see something. Far in the distance. Beams of light. A beacon for me, maybe.
I just need to . . .
My knees buckle and sink into the snow, but I barely feel the cold anymore.
I guess that means I’m not going to make it.
A door slams somewhere, my ears catch muffled voices. “Jesus . . . Call 9-1-1!”
CHAPTER 48
Maggie
January 4, 2016
Detective Childs exhales loudly as he sops the runny egg yolks up with a piece of rye toast.
“Is now the right time to say I told you so?” I murmur, my voice still raspy, not fully recovered. They can’t be sure which caused more damage—the screaming that injured my vocal cords or the tubes thrust down my throat to try and pump the lethal dose of Oxy out of my stomach.
But I’m alive, so I don’t care.
“Where do you see this going, Chester?” Doug asks from his seat next to me. He was there when I woke up in the Ellenville Regional Hospital, two hours north of New York City, near the Catskill Mountains, where Jace had taken me.
“A lot of different departments involved now. Us, local sheriff, state.” His chocolate eyes drift over the sidewalk on the other side of the glass, and the pedestrians rushing past on their way back to work after the holiday season. “He’s got some fancy lawyers, but the bastard sure looks guilty.”
Jace wasn’t two steps behind me that night. He was unconscious on the floor of that bedroom with a deep gash in his head. Not enough to kill him, but the corner of the clock made for a sharp weapon, and I hit him hard. I must have stepped on the broken glass by the door on my way out. The police followed the trail of blood from my foot up the driveway and found him there, along with the bag of evidence he was in the process of planting.
“I knew I didn’t like Grady for murder,” Doug mutters, shaking his head. “Too many things didn’t add up.”
Grady. I don’t know what to feel about Grady, and what happened to him. On the one hand, he was a sick guy with a perverted fascination for Celine. He violated her privacy, manipulated her weaknesses, and lied to me about everything.
On the other hand, he was the guy who kept me warm on the rooftop, who gave me a few moments of respite amid what was probably the hardest time of my life.
Did he really deserve what Jace did to him?
His body hasn’t turned up anywhere. We may never know exactly what Jace did to him. He vehemently denies any involvement with Grady’s disappearance, even though they found him with Grady’s hair.
Childs’s laugh booms in the fifties diner. It’s the same place where I met him the day he handed me Doug’s business card. To think, had I not hired him, had I let this go, both Grady and Jace would have gotten away with their crimes. “Easy to say now, Dougie.”
Doug scoffs. “Hey, who’s the one who bugged Maggie’s phone?”
“Illegally,” I mutter, but I don’t care that my PI had the sixth sense to stick a tracking device into the back of my cell phone as soon as we realized Grady was missing.
“Told you, things didn’t add up. A guy like Grady would know that he can’t just delete files on her computer and be done with it. On the day she died, no less. And the vase . . . No way your friend would mistake that for an authentic.”
I smile. Doug didn’t even know Celine and he had faith in her talent.
Thanks to that tracker in my phone, which Zac was monitoring, they knew that I left Celine’s auction but never made it back to the hotel. They found my purse—with my phone inside—tossed on the side of the freeway, heading north.
But had that lovely couple not been heading to the airport at that ungodly early hour, no one would have found me on the side of that lonely old road until it was much too late.
“Well, Jace looks guilty and he admitted everything to me.”