Page 80 of The Drowned Woman
“I couldn’t. Not until I was certain—”
She held a hand up and he stopped. “You lied, you cheated me out of so much, you made me feel like crap, and you didn’t trust me. I love you but I won’t live like that. Not ever again. Do you understand?”
He nodded, eyes locked on hers, waiting for permission. Leah held her breath as well, taking another step. Only six more…
“Say it,” Risa commanded.
“I understand. I’m sorry. I should have never doubted you.”
“How will you make it up to me? Will you let Leah go?”
“Yes,” he breathed. “If you stay with me.” He gripped both her arms and turned his head, looking right at Leah. Her stomach dropped—he’d known what she was doing all along. This was just another one of his damned games. His laughter echoed from the walls. “Go on, Leah. Run. But run fast. As soon as I have Risa situated, you’ll have my undivided attention.”
Leah was torn. He held Risa tight, so tight that she whimpered in pain. “Please don’t hurt her,” Leah called down.
“I’d never hurt her. She’s just going to take a little nap. And then we’ll be leaving. For good.” He marched Risa backwards until she was pinned against the wall. Then he reached into his pocket for a syringe.
Risa’s eyes widened with terror. “Run, Leah!”
Leah was powerless, unable to help Risa. So she did the only thing she could do to maybe save them both. She ran.
The door opened up into a darkened hallway. There were no lights except one coming from the front of the house, barely reaching the shadows back here. Weapon. Phone. Some way to bring help or stop Jack.
She stumbled toward the light. It led to what appeared to be some kind of reception area. Dom sat on a couch positioned in front of a computer. From his pallor and sagging, expressionless features, it was clear he was dead. An old-fashioned phone was on the wall beside the door. She grabbed the receiver. Dead.
She had to find help. Leaning over the coffee table, she spun the laptop away from the corpse and clicked out of the video site, hoping to be able to message Luka or the police. The screen filled with images from surveillance cameras showing multiple views of an empty road, and a building with a white van parked in front of it—the old pumphouse.
Jack’s boots pounded up the steps.
But now that Leah knew where she was, she had options. She ran outside, the wind catching at her open parka, billowing it like a cape. Jack’s van was parked at the front door, covered in mud, and wet grass clung to its wheels. She tried the door as she passed it. Locked.
With every breath she expected to hear Jack calling her name, taunting her as he closed in on her. No way in hell would he leave without ensuring Leah’s silence. One way or another.
She sprinted across the overgrown lawn, avoiding the muddy dirt drive where she’d leave footprints.Wait. Think, Leah.Jack would expect her to try to outrun him, head straight to the road. It would be anyone’s first instinct. But he had a car and she didn’t.
When she was a kid, she had played in the woods between the pumphouse and the railroad tracks—sometimes even on the tracks, crossing the bridge. It was against Nellie’s rules, making it irresistibly tempting to a bored, lonely young girl.
The tracks. There’d be no help there, but with the bridge over the marsh, they took a more direct route to Route 11 than Old River Road did. Plus, if Jack got too close, there was a place where she might be able to trap him. The marsh.
As a kid, she’d watched them with their digging machines laying the foundation for the new railroad bridge. Once they’d finished, she’d seen the water reclaim the area as marshland. Land that no matter how dry it appeared was always shifting, greedily pulling in anything that dared try to cross it. When she was a little girl she used to pretend it was quicksand and throw various sized rocks over the new bridge, see how long it took them to vanish.
The larger and heavier, the faster the marsh devoured them.
A bright beam of light stabbed the ground beyond her feet. Jack had found her.
Forty-Nine
Through the Honda’s open windows horizontal rain pelted Luka as the car swayed and lurched in the current. If he was lucky, it’d be weighed down in the mud and silt of the shallows and his only worries would be wet shoes and finding a phone so his guys could intercept Jack.
He pulled his left knee up as high as it would go and with his foot felt blindly for the manual trunk release. Just as he was rewarded with the pop of the latch opening, the current, roiling and swollen with the weeks-long deluge, caught the front end of the car and swung it away from the bank.
The car spun, water gushing in through the floorboards and open windows. Luka spared a moment to glance in the rearview mirror. The trunk had popped all the way open but there was no sign of anyone escaping. What if Leah was unconscious, unable to swim past the water rushing into the trunk? Had he just doomed her?
The car ground to a stop a short distance downstream, its hood facing toward the bank, the rear sinking in the deeper water. Luka’s teeth ground together as he tried to keep them from chattering. Still no sign of Leah.
Jack had searched Luka’s pockets and taken everything. But he’d left Luka’s badge clipped to his belt. Probably so the entire world would immediately know that the corpse in the Honda was the detective who’d failed to catch the Chaos Killer.
It was a mistake. Because behind Luka’s gold shield was a small pocket with his credentials and a keyring with two keys: one the universal key for the department’s pool vehicles and the other a spare handcuff key. Luka twisted his body and slid as low in the seat as he could go, arching his hip up until his fingers could reach his belt.
