Threat of Danger Read online

  On the day of their escape, Jess had been delirious when Derek had carried her to safety. Derek had been focused only on her, on getting away. Neither of them had been memorizing distance or direction.

  As far as the police were concerned: no camper. And no kidnapper either. His body had never been found. The river had swallowed him. There had never been a shred of evidence to support the two college kids’ wild story, except their injuries. But who was to say they were caused by a crazed kidnapper? Deputy Muller had made that point over and over.

  At the time, Jess hadn’t understood why the police wouldn’t help her. She’d figured it out in hindsight. With the lack of evidence, Muller had always known that he wasn’t going to solve the case. But if there hadn’t really been a kidnapping, then he hadn’t failed.

  He’d wanted a stellar track record. He’d probably thought he’d be sheriff in no time. The joke was on him. Here he was, still a deputy a decade later.

  Jess had hated his guts back then, and found now that her feelings hadn’t changed. She showed him into the living room anyway. The sooner he said his piece, the sooner he would leave.

  He plopped into the nearest armchair as if he owned the place. Jess sat on the couch. Derek came to stand by her side. She was grateful for the implied support, even if she didn’t find Muller as intimidating as she had ten years ago.

  He had a comb-over now, his teeth yellowing either from too much coffee or smoking. He was still in shape. He must keep up with exercise so he could keep up with the criminals.

  “What is this about?” Jess asked, taking control of the conversation from the start. She wanted to make sure that he understood that she wasn’t the frightened, traumatized little Jess he’d bullied the last time.

  “Human remains were found in the woods yesterday,” the man told her with theatrical gravity, watching her with close, cold attention, like a snake watches a mouse.

  “I found some bone shards when I was walking,” Derek said next to her.

  The deputy shot him a censoring look.

  Bones in the woods.

  A chill enveloped Jess. “What does this have to do with me?”

  “We have the CSI team out from Burlington to go over Hannah Wilson’s car and the body we found with it. So I had them look at the bones.” Muller paused for effect. “They say those bones have been sent through some kind of a grinder. Most likely a wood chipper.”

  The temperature in the room dropped as fast as if someone had thrown the doors and windows open, letting a snow squall blow in. Jess rubbed the sudden goose bumps on her arms.

  When I’m done with you, you’re going through the wood chipper. There won’t be enough left of you to identify. You’ll never be found. The kidnapper’s voice had been muffled, coming through the black mask he hadn’t taken off for a second, but Jess hadn’t forgotten a word.

  Even now, ten years later, sitting on the couch, safe, she couldn’t suppress a shudder. “Do they have DNA results?” Her voice was embarrassingly thready. “Do they know whose bones Derek found?”

  “Not yet.” A speculative gleam lit up the deputy’s eyes. “But the wood-chipper angle made me think about you. Why don’t you tell me again what happened back then? Refresh my memory.”

  Derek rolled his shoulders back, then put a hand on the back of the couch as if to emphasize that she was under his protection. He was massively solid, as if a hand grenade couldn’t budge him.

  “Is this necessary?” Derek’s cold tone was as hard as everything else about him. “I went through it all with you already. Jess and I were together every second while we were held. She doesn’t know anything I don’t.”

  Muller shot him a cold look of authority, pushing back. “I could question Miss Taylor alone.”

  She shifted closer to Derek.

  He sat on the arm of the couch until they were an inch from touching. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Muller bristled, shifting in his chair as if he was about to stand. He might still be just the deputy, but he played that role to the hilt. “I could take her in.”

  “Not unless you’re arresting her for something.” Derek’s tone hardened another notch, into Navy SEAL steel.

  “I never said I was arresting her.” The deputy’s eyes flashed with undisguised frustration. Yet he backed down, settling back into his seat. He didn’t seem keen to test whether or not he could make Derek leave.

  “I need full cooperation. From the both of you.” He gave his official glare. “This might very well be a murder case.”

  Those last two words slammed into Jess’s chest like twin punches.

  Murder case.

  Whether Jess was comfortable or not, whether the questions brought back difficult memories or not, didn’t matter. She wanted to help. She sat up straighter. “I have no problem with answering questions.”

  Muller nodded, some more of his huff and puff fading. “Why don’t you start at the beginning.”

  She hated starting at the beginning. Why couldn’t they just cut to the wood-chipper threats? But Muller was leaning forward already, his gaze fast on her face.

  “Minute by minute,” he instructed before he shot Derek a You don’t say a word glance.

  “Derek and I were at the movies,” Jess began. Just say it and get it over with. “He brought me home. Nobody was here. Dad took Mom and Zelda to the new fabric store in Burlington. I asked Derek if he wanted to come in. He asked me if I wanted to go out to the old cabin with him instead.”

  “To have sex,” Muller clarified.

  Derek’s posture stiffened. Jess put a hand on his knee to keep him from starting a fight with the deputy.

  She’d already confessed everything ten years ago, no reason why she should be embarrassed now, but she still felt heat creep onto her face. “Yes.”

  “And you did engage in intercourse.” He wasn’t asking.

  How in hell did he still remember? All that had happened ten years ago. Had he memorized her file?

  Derek shifted his weight. Before he could bark something at Muller, or lunge at him, Jess quickly said yes again.

  That day with Derek at the cabin had been her first time. She couldn’t tell if it’d been good or bad. In her mind, the memory of the two of them together had been inseparably jumbled up with the stark terror of what had happened immediately after. Even now, nausea was rising in her stomach. She let go of Derek to pull a throw pillow over and hug it against her middle.

  “When was the first time you realized you two weren’t alone in the woods?” Muller’s voice held a tinge too much interest.

  “When he kicked the door in.”

  “And you were both naked?”

  “Yes.” A small detail, but, again, he remembered. “He had a rifle,” Jess said. “He let Derek dress, but he didn’t let me. Then he made us go with him to the camper.”

  She remembered freezing, and the memory made her shiver.

  “I need to know everything he said. Word for word.”

  Jess steeled herself and told him. And when her hands began to tremble, she hugged the pillow tighter.

  Derek stayed silent, stayed where he was. She couldn’t have handled it if he tried to put his arms around her to offer comfort. She couldn’t handle any contact at the moment, and he seemed to sense that.

  She went on with the story while Muller stopped her with stupid questions like, “Were you scared?”

  The deputy hadn’t been kidding. He wanted every detail, including what she’d been thinking during every minute of the torture.

  After Jess and Derek had escaped, they’d become the focus of true crime enthusiasts who wouldn’t leave them alone. They wrote, they called, they reached out to her online. In hindsight, Jess wondered whether Muller was like those people. Maybe he’d become a police officer in the first place because he got off on this kind of thing.

  Years ago, at the hospital, he’d wanted to know if the rape had been bad. His tone had been asking, Are you sure you didn’t enjoy it? He’d
also asked if she had rape fantasies.

  On behalf of her eighteen-year-old self, Jess wanted to jump up and sock the bastard in the face. Instead, she kept answering the questions he asked.

  Because the bones were human.

  Because a girl was missing.

  She wanted the police to find something, even if, at the same time, she did not want her suspicions and intuition confirmed. She didn’t want her gut feeling—that the kidnapper had not died in the river—to be right. She wanted to be wrong about the masked man kidnapping others. Because the others hadn’t come back. Which would mean that they’d been killed.

  Holding those dark suspicions in her heart over the years had been draining, but seeing them confirmed might be even worse. Jess didn’t want to be right. She would rather be paranoid and delusional, like Mark Maxwell had called her.

  She answered more questions. She answered every question the deputy had. Then they were finally done, and Muller took his leave.

  Jess watched the deputy’s cruiser disappear down the driveway, and she relaxed by degrees. The relief lasted only seconds. Then she was just drained.

  Derek came up behind her.

  She didn’t turn as she asked, “Why didn’t the sheriff come himself?”

  “Sheriff Rollins has one foot and two toes in the grave. He’s aged some since you last saw him. He keeps getting reelected because he’s one of the local good old boys and everybody likes him. Muller pretty much does everything these days.”

  She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “You know what I don’t understand? Why did they think at first that the girl in the water was Hannah? I mean, the body was near Hannah’s car, but didn’t her parents identify her?”

  Derek stayed silent.

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “What? Do you know?”

  His reluctant expression clearly said that he did, but he didn’t want to tell her.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “Bad.”

  She waited.

  “The girl had been in the water for four or five days,” he said.

  Jess understood that was a long time for a body, but the water had to be near freezing, so rapid decomposition couldn’t have been the problem. She waited for Derek to finish.

  “The current kept rolling her against the foot of the bridge, the big cement pillar. The body was caught there pretty much the whole time. When they found her, what was left of her clothes were just muddy strips. Most of her face rubbed off.”

  She turned back to the window, wishing she hadn’t asked. The images in her mind filled her with horror.

  “You remember Billy Gellar?” Derek asked from behind her. “Skinny little twig who got run up the flagpole freshman year in high school?”

  How could she forget? The poor kid had been mercilessly bullied, culminating in the flagpole incident. Derek had cut him down, then taken him under his protection.

  “He’s Mayor Gellar now,” he said.

  “No way.”

  “He went into finance. Wall Street for a while. Made a ton of money. Came back. The kids who used to harass him are now kissing his ass.”

  She really liked the sound of that.

  “Jared became a vet,” Derek said. “He married Selena.”

  They’d been high school sweethearts, the it couple. “Good for them.”

  Jess knew Derek was doing his best to distract her. Since she needed the distraction, she went with the flow. “How about the others?”

  Derek launched into an update. A lot of people had moved away, but a surprising number had stayed. Some of his stories were funny, some were sad. All were interesting. He was a born storyteller, and he knew just how to string her along, make her forget about everything else. Little by little, Jess relaxed again.

  Then, in the middle of a sentence, Derek put an arm around her waist from behind like he’d done at the top of the stairs, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Like before, Jess wanted to push him away. But, like before, her body sagged into the comfort of his. And this time, she stayed there.

  Derek’s strength was a solid brick wall behind her, a familiar shelter, the embodiment of her girlhood fantasies. Sinking into his comfort was ridiculously easy.

  Yet while her body rested, her mind couldn’t. They couldn’t go back to this, whatever this was. They’d barely had it ten years ago, and then even that brief connection had been gone in the blink of an eye. “We’re different people now.”

  “I know.”

  “We have too much of a past.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think I can ever get over that shared past.”

  “I know.”

  Was that frustration in his tone or sadness?

  His warm breath fanned the tip of her ear, feeling like a caress on the sensitive skin of her neck. “I’m not asking for anything, Jess. I’m here to give you whatever you need.”

  She had no idea why she suddenly had moisture in her eyes.

  What did she need? Other than to run fast and run far.

  Closure. Yes, closure would be nice.

  She needed closure in the form of certain knowledge. She needed to know for sure what had happened to the masked man. She needed to know that he wasn’t still out there preying on innocent young girls. She needed to know that nobody else would be hurt by him like she had been. Or worse.

  She needed to move out of Derek’s arms.

  Just another second or two, she told herself. She didn’t understand why connecting like this had been difficult with Eliot earlier, why she’d turned away from his embrace when she could have turned to him. Why did this feel so natural with Derek? It had nothing to do with logic or reason or even what she really wanted. This pull between them bypassed her brain completely. Pure physical, instinctual response.

  She shifted forward, easing into slipping away.

  “Where is Eliot?” Derek asked without letting her go.

  She wished she could see his eyes, and at the same time she was glad they weren’t face-to-face. “Out taking pictures of the cliffs.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  Did Derek’s embrace tighten ever so slightly, or was she imagining it?

  She thought about his question for a second or two. “I could have been.”

  “Under different circumstances,” Derek agreed. “But you need a man who will jump off a cliff for you for real, who would take a bullet for you for real, no safety equipment. You need real, not special effects and sleight of hand.”

  She pulled away to face him as anger boomed to life inside her chest. That anger made it possible to put a little distance between them. The real world had hurt her. She liked the make-believe of Hollywood. She liked when the victim washed off the blood after the shoot and walked away laughing.

  “I can jump off a cliff for myself,” she snapped at Derek. “I can fight for myself.”

  The rest remained unspoken, but from the frustrated look on Derek’s face, he heard it loud and clear. He hadn’t been able to save her from torture back then, and he wouldn’t be able to protect her now. She was healthy and in the best shape of her life. He was injured.

  “I don’t need a man to protect me,” she told him in a gentler, more reasonable tone. She didn’t want him to feel bad, but she needed him to understand who she was now.

  “I know,” he said. “You became who you became to make sure. I think we both did.” His tone held a note of . . . regret? Wishing that their past hadn’t determined the rest of their lives?

  “I like who I became,” she told him.

  The corners of his lips twitched. “I like who you became too, Jess. A lot.”

  Her heart gave a mad flutter.

  She raised a hand to ward him off. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “No come-ons.”

  “Why?”

  They’d talked about that already.

  Words deserted her now. Or, rather, her true reasons were too nume
rous and too convoluted, and perhaps they didn’t entirely stand up to closer inspection. So she simply said, “I can’t.”

  “OK.”

  Just like that. OK. And then Jess was suddenly even angrier, and didn’t even know why.

  Because Derek had given up so fast?

  She stomped away, into the mudroom, and grabbed her boots. “I need to catch up with Eliot. He’s waiting for me.”

  “When are you leaving for the airport?” Derek asked, his tone inscrutable and detached. So was his face—unreadable.

  Jess held his gaze while she took a few seconds to think. A hundred thoughts ran through her mind. But, in the end, making the decision wasn’t difficult. “I’ve decided to stay.”

  The bones changed everything.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wednesday

  “I HAVE MY eye on you.” Derek watched Mark Maxwell closely, although the light in the little alley between the newspaper office and the Taylorville Museum wasn’t great. He’d backed the man in there once he finally caught up with him.

  “Is that an implied threat?” Maxwell was all puffed up and sure of himself, knowing damn well he was in shouting distance of the sidewalk.

  “It’s a spelled-out threat. If I find out that you had anything to do with Jess being hurt, you’re going to beg for the safety of a jail cell.”

  Maxwell stepped back. “You’re insane.”

  He was the right body type, right height. He’d been in the middle of the investigation back then, and he’d inserted himself into it now. But was he the masked man? No matter how carefully Derek watched the asshole, he couldn’t tell.

  “You had a printout of the police reports on the missing girls,” Derek said. “Want to explain how you got that?”

  “Confidential source.”

  “You have a keen interest in this case. One might say it’s an obsession.”

  “I’m a reporter.”

  “There’s only one thing that’s worse.” Derek let his eyes finish the sentence: A dead reporter.

  Judging by the way Maxwell pulled back again, he read that loud and clear.

  “You’re going to stay away from Jess Taylor.”