Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 117443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
He punched her, his fist catching her face just under her eye. She was thrown against the wall. She lashed out again, but the angle was wrong and instead of landing a serious blow, she only caught his bicep.
They both began screaming.
Chapter 36
The light had started to fade hours ago, darkness was now settling in. Chris hated the feeling of helplessness. True to his word, Caleb had taken them straight to the Rapid City police chief, who after confirming their story about Hayley being the survivor of a serial killer’s attack, he immediately listed her as a missing person.
Chris didn’t particularly like the sensationalism, but given that it was a serial, the local news media began flashing an old photo of Hayley from North Carolina that had run after her first run-in with the psychopath. Getting her picture out there was their only hope, as they had no leads. The local crime scene unit had dusted the state police cruiser for prints. Which Chris knew wouldn’t be helpful. They already had this guy’s prints on file from before and he was not surprised when they declared they were unable to match them, yet again, to anything in any database they had access to.
The fact that he’d had a car waiting to transfer her to was problematic. It meant he’d thought out every last detail of the kidnapping. Chris still couldn’t figure out how he’d known where to find them in the first place. He kept running through the return trip home in his head but knew, without a doubt, that they had not been followed.
He’d fucked up, but he couldn’t for the life of him see how. And if he was feeling guilty, Easy was nearly suicidal at this point, blaming himself for her kidnapping. But Chris didn’t blame Jimmy. Not at all. This guy managed to track a Ranger across state lines. Took down a State Trooper and stole his cruiser and got Hayley to let him into the house. If anything, they’d failed because they’d underestimated the kind of psychopath they were up against. Chris had made the mistake of thinking genuinely crazy people couldn’t be all that intelligent. And now his mistake might cost Hayley her life.
He refused to give up, though. Refused to think of her as dead. If this guy had waited all this time to find her and gone to all this trouble, he wanted her. He wanted her and that kind of desire would only be placated with time spent with her. Chris wouldn’t let himself think about what that time would entail. He told himself it didn’t matter. All that mattered was finding Hayley alive. They could heal anything else.
As half of Rapid City PD filled his living room and his boys were sitting quietly at the dining room table, fresh out of ideas to find the girl they all loved, Chris opened the back door and stepped outside.
Once away from the house and in the relative dark, he stopped in the middle of his yard and looked up at the night sky. “Do whatever you have to,” he said quietly. “Just come home to me.”
**********************************
Hayley searched the car one last time for anything she could use. So far she wasn’t finding anything, anywhere. It had taken a very long time to summon the courage to go into the bathroom and check his pockets. She’d held her breath, convinced he would grab at her, but his sightless eyes only stared at the ceiling. She’d turned off the light and locked the bathroom door behind her for good measure. Coming up short, she slammed the door and turned back to the cabin. She had found keys, but the car wouldn’t start. It had been disabled. She’d found her cell phone, no battery though. The cabin itself had no phones that she could find. She hadn’t found a phone on him. He’d left his laptop in the car, which she grabbed on her first search, but it was password protected and she couldn’t use it.
She sighed and sat down on the bottom step of the porch. It was dark now and the night was cloudless. Even though she couldn’t see, she could tell that her hand, though temporarily “bandaged” with a kitchen towel, was bleeding again. The cuts from holding the shard of glass were deep and needed stitches. Her face her where he’d punched her and her knees had bits of glass still embedded in them. She’d tried to clean them up but there were no tweezers and she wasn’t left handed anyway.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d won the battle but not the war, as Chris would say. She didn’t know where she was or how to leave. Or how far it was to get anywhere where there might be help. She’d checked out back. That had been a mistake. She’d found a grave dug fairly deeply at the tree line. Apparently he’d planned for everything.