Before He Takes Read online

  She sensed an opportunity coming and responded before she could let her fear drown out her bravery. “Yes,” she said, already thinking of the potential rape.

  Her captor hesitated for only a moment and then Delores heard the jingling of keys. She heard a slight clanging as he inserted a key into the lock on the outside of the container.

  “Get back against the far wall,” he instructed her.

  She did as he asked. When she crept backward, a desperate plan etched itself out in her mind and although it seemed almost ridiculous, she knew that this might be her only chance. If she failed, she’d be beaten, raped, and maybe killed. And if she chickened out and did nothing, she’d have to endure the embarrassment of this man watching her urinate and then raping her.

  Slowly, the doorway to the container opened. Dusty light spilled in. She squinted her eyes from it and then she saw him peering down at her, having to duck down to look inside.

  There was a sick sort of smile on his face. “C’mon,” he said.

  She did, walking on trembling legs. He offered a hand for support and she realized just how huge his hands were. From outside of the container, he looked even larger than he had when she had viewed him from inside. He was massive.

  “This way,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder and leading her to the far corner of the barn.

  She did her best not to seem too obvious as she looked around. What she did manage to see, though, was another container like the one she was in. It was empty, the door standing wide open. She also saw a workbench with glass vases and spray paint sitting on it.

  “There you go,” he said, pointing to the corner.

  “Can I at least get some privacy?” she asked.

  “No. I’m not turning my back on you. You think I’m stupid?”

  A flare of anger rose up in her and it was the deciding factor in going through with her plan. It terrified her but she knew she had to do it.

  Embarrassed, she unbuttoned her pants, pulled them down along with her panties, and squatted in front of him. She looked to the ground as she went. The relief was immense but she had never felt more humiliated in her life.

  When she was done, he provided nothing for her to wipe with. She pulled her pants back up and the moment they were at her waist, he was there. He took her by the arm and led her to the other side of the barn where there were two old horse stalls.

  “That one,” he said, pointing to the closest one. “Put your hands on the gate.”

  She was shaking from head to toe now. But she obeyed because her plan required it. She turned her back to him and the moment her hands were on the gate, his massive hands gripped the waist of her jeans and pulled them down.

  “As long as you don’t scream,” he said, “I’ll keep it real gentle.”

  She could not see him. She only saw the wall of the horse pen in front of her. She could hear his zipper as he undid his pants and then she felt his hand on her back, on her buttocks. He stepped forward and just as she felt him angling to thrust inside of her, she reached back between her legs and grabbed the first thing her fingers found.

  Her fingernails dug into his testicles. She gripped them tight, digging her nails in and twisting. He howled in pain, so loud it was ear-piercing.

  She turned from the gate, still squeezing harder than ever. She gave one final crushing flex of her fist and then went running. He lunged for her as she did but he went to the ground with his pants around his ankles. Delores managed to get hers up rather easily and ran straight for the door as he howled behind her.

  She must have gotten him good; there was blood on her fingers and skin under her nails. But she had no time to enjoy that. She needed to focus on escaping. She nearly fell to the ground but managed to catch her balance. Her captor reached out for her and his grasping hand missed her by less than six inches. He was in clear and visible pain and it took everything within her not to deliver a kick, another punch, something…

  Delores went through the barn door and stepped outside. The moment she was in open space, she started screaming. She realized almost right away, though, that her screams might be useless. She was in a large backyard that was surrounded by nothing but forest. Another barn sat to her right.

  She started for the house, still screaming, but then stopped. In the midst of her screams, she heard something else.

  Another voice. Another scream. And it wasn’t the man behind her, who was now coming through the barn doors, either. It was a woman…and she sounded terrified.

  Delores badly wanted to investigate but she knew that she was already on borrowed time. I’ll make it out of here and send the cops, she thought. They can find the other woman and bust this creep.

  But she knew she had to check. She ran for the other barn and found it locked. She banged on the door. “Is someone there?” Delores asked.

  “Oh my God! Yes!”

  The reply was heartbreaking. Even more so because Delores could not get to the woman. “I can’t get in right now, but I’ll send the police,” she said. “Just hold on!”

  Delores nearly took off straight ahead, toward the house, but she saw the dirt driveway and wasn’t sure she could outrun the man on such a flat stretch. Very far back in the data banks of her memory, she recalled doing research for a book where she’d spoken with a survival expert who had suggested escaping through a forest was much easier than escaping through open plains. And while there were no plains ahead of her, there were forests on all sides.

  She ran to her left, where the forest was no more than thirty feet away. As she passed the tree line, she dared another look over her shoulder. The man in the denim shirt came after her, still hobbling but coming much faster.

  Delores ran into the trees, running blindly through a forest she was unfamiliar with. Already, she had been slapped in the face by a stray branch, causing a thin trail of blood to run down her cheek.

  She was done with looking over her shoulder. She knew he was back there and that was enough for her. She had to keep moving, had to trust that these woods would eventually come to an end and deliver her to a road.

  She dodged trees and sidestepped stumps but she never stopped moving. She ran in what she thought was a straight line. She could faintly hear the man tearing through the forest behind her but it was drowned out by her own labored breathing and the occasional desperate cry that rose up out of her throat.

  And then there was another sound. It was a dreamlike sound because it made no sense, but it was most definitely there. And it was coming from directly ahead of her.

  It was the rhythmic churning of some large engine. There was an underlying wind-like sound to it that at first made no sense.

  A train, she thought then.

  And by God, it sounded close.

  This pushed her even harder. Behind her, she could hear her captor let out a curse and a strangled “NO!”

  Apparently, he had heard the train, too. Delores somehow found yet another gear. Her hamstrings were begging for mercy and her lungs felt like dancing flames, but she pushed on. The sound of the train grew louder and she could see thin breaks in the trees revealing slivers of the afternoon sky up ahead.

  She didn’t know how long she had been running…five minutes maybe but surely no more than ten. Still, it felt like she had run a marathon. Her heart was hammering hard in her chest and she was sweating badly. Still not daring to look back, Delores broke through the tree line ahead of her, the strips of blue she had seen through the trees now a wide open expanse of sky.

  And there, twenty yards in front of her, were the train tracks. The train blared by, shaking the ground. She watched the cars roll by, jostling on the tracks and blasting warm air by her. It was then that she chanced a look back over her shoulder. She saw the man in the denim shirt coming through the trees. The look of maniacal hatred on his face was terrifying…enough to get Delores running for the train.

  And just what in the hell do you think you’re going to do? she asked herself.

 
She knew what she was going to try. And if it didn’t work, the worst that might happen was that she’d die. And if she died, she wouldn’t have to concern herself with what this pervert had in store for her.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Delores started to chant.

  She ran toward the train. With each sprint ahead, she could feel its vibrations in her feet. They traveled up to her stomach and even seemed to cause her eyes to tremble. She watched as one car passed, then another. Her eyes relayed the information to her brain and even though her muscles seemed to want no part of this insane plan, she continued running forward.

  She took in the racing shapes of the train cars, knowing her chances were slim, knowing that basic physics was working against her and that she—

  She saw the thin rails of handholds on the side of one of the cars and before she could talk herself out of it, she jumped.

  Her right hand found the rung of the makeshift ladder that scaled the side of the car. Her body followed her extended arm and slammed into the lower edge of the car. Her grip nearly released from the impact but her left hand then scrambled and found purchase on the rung. By the time she realized she was somehow holding on, she also felt the tug of gravity at her legs.

  She was dangling from the train car, her legs whipping like paper in the breeze. Delores cried out and reached up to the next rung. She pulled herself upward, the shaking from the car and the tracks like some invisible hands pushing against her. With a scream of determination, she managed to reach to another rung and finally set her feet on the lower-most rung.

  Now what?

  She had no idea. She looked backward and could see the man that had been chasing after her. He was a shrinking speck in the distance. She then trained her eyes on the edge of the car. It was a faded red color, complete with a sliding door, the latch of which was about three feet away from her left arm. From what she could tell, the latch was loose; it had not been secured.

  She could feel adrenaline speeding through her body, could even taste something like copper in the back of her throat as her body was soaked with it. She crept to the farthest edge of the rungs of the thin ladder and then stretched her left hand out.

  Just before her fingers touched it, the door slid open. It happened so suddenly that Delores shouted out in surprise. A man looked out to her and for a sickening moment, she was sure it was him—the man in the denim shirt that had kept her in the container. But a simple blink of the eyes showed her a haggard man, looking to be in his sixties. His white beard was filthy and his eyes were wide and confused.

  “What the effing hell?” the man said. “Lady, are you nuts?”

  She supposed it was a vagrant, a drifter who hopped rail cars to get from place to place. Whatever he was, he was her savior in that moment. He reached out to her, offering his hand, and she took it.

  “Can you do this?” the man asked.

  Delores nodded, but she was crying. She fumbled for the man’s hand, took it, and gave it a hard squeeze which she did not release. The man gave her a nod and pulled. Delores let go of the rung, screaming. She felt herself falling down but also straight across. The old man looked very weak and she feared that she’d only pull him out of the car with her, sending them both to their deaths to the embankment below the tracks.

  What she felt instead was something hard slamming into her stomach and then the feel of something solid and steady beneath her. The old man had managed to pull her into the car. Her feet were still dangling out. She pulled them in quickly, sobbing and gasping for breath.

  “Thank you,” she managed to wheeze to him.

  He was kneeling by her, looking her over. He smelled atrocious but in that moment, he was the most glorious man on the face of the planet as far as Delores was concerned.

  “What the hell were you doing out there?” he asked her.

  She tried talking but it all came out in sobs. The few words she did manage to get out, though, told most of the story. “A man…kidnapped me...two days…escaped…”

  “My God,” the old man said.

  Had she not been in a tremendous amount of pain, her eyes glazed with tears and her heart still pumping wildly, she might have noticed the peculiar look in the man’s eye. She might also have noticed that he was unbuttoning his filthy pants.

  “Well then,” the man said, “that makes me feel real bad about what I’m going to do.”

  She barely had time to register the words before the man’s hands were in her hair. She gasped in surprise and pain as he lifted her head up off the floor. When he slammed it back down, the noise it made seemed amplified inside of her own head. The man then did it two more times. On the third strike, Delores slipped away, feeling something sharper than sleep coming toward her as the almost-gentle trembling of the train car lured her further down.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  One of the things that drove Mackenzie absolutely nuts was chasing down a lead and knowing almost right away that it would produce nothing. The only reason she was not feeling totally defeated as she and Ellington drove down a side street in Bent Creek was because she also knew that sometimes even the weakest lead could produce some sort of fruit.

  After four hours of phone calls, checking records, cross referencing, and searching the Bent Creek archives from the past twenty years or so, Mackenzie, Ellington, and a team of four Bent Creek officers had only come up with one potential lead—one single person that connected the three victims. And it was a tenuous connection at best.

  “You look depressed,” Ellington pointed out as he slowly drove down the side street in search of a particular house.

  “No…just not a fan of hunting leads that likely won’t pan out.”

  “Oh, I feel you there,” Ellington said. “But an instructor of mine at the bureau once had a pretty great analogy about thoroughly investigating every single lead, no matter how hopeless. He said to imagine walking along a river after a rain and kicking over every rock you get to. There’s going to be something under every rock: worms, bugs, debris. Every rock will reveal something different than the last, therefore they are all worth looking under.”

  “Fitting,” she said. “But I’d rather not think of potential leads as rocks to kick.”

  Ellington parked the car, having finally found the house in question, and shrugged. “Eh, whatever works for you, I guess.”

  They got out of the car and looked at the house in front of them. It belonged to the grandmother of Naomi Nyles, eighty-one-year-old Mildred Cole. When they had called from the station, the old lady had seemed a little too excited to be receiving company, even if it was in the form of FBI agents coming to ask about the disappearance of her granddaughter. She’d even given them the go-ahead to knock and then come in because, as she put it, her “damned hip keeps flaring up and I never know when it’s going to lock up, so I just stay in my chair all the time.”

  Following the old woman’s directions, Mackenzie and Ellington walked inside after knocking. “Hello, Ms. Cole?” Mackenzie said as they stepped into a small foyer.

  “Yeah, in here,” came an old cheerful voice from the right of the foyer.

  They walked into the living room and found Mildred Cole sitting in a large recliner. A glass of iced tea sat on an end table beside her and the television was loud and blaring. Currently, she was watching a home renovation show.

  “Thanks for agreeing to meet with us,” Ellington said.

  “Sure, sure,” Mildred said. “Ain’t like I got much else to do, now, you know?”

  “Well, we’ll try to make it quick,” Mackenzie said, having to nearly shout to be heard over the television. Mildred eventually picked up on this and muted the TV with a remote that she pulled out of one of the recliner’s many folds.

  “I guess they still haven’t found Naomi, have they?” Mildred asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Ellington said.

  “But we’re hoping to uncover anything about the lives of the missing women that we can,” Mackenzie added. “That includes lookin
g for even the smallest connection. And as we were looking through the backgrounds of these three missing women, we found one solid connection. And that was you. And since you happen to be the grandmother of one of the missing, it seemed like an obvious lead for us.”

  “I saw the news about the third lady today on TV,” Mildred said. “Delores Manning. A sweetheart if I ever knew one.”

  “Speaking of which,” Mackenzie said, “we uncovered the fact that you once babysat Delores. Do you recall how long you watched her?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember exactly,” Mildred said. “Her mother was never really in the picture, you know. Sometimes Delores was here until eight or nine at night before her mom would pick her up—drunk off her ass, I might add. I guess Delores was about thirteen or so when she stopped coming here.”

  “And other than her mother, was there any drama with Delores?”

  “None that I remember. She was always a good kid, writing in her notebooks. She always knew she wanted to be a writer.”

  “Now, for Crystal Hall,” Ellington said. “Our research shows that you once worked for her father at the slaughterhouse in town. Is that right?”

  “Oh yes. And that poor girl would be there sometimes. She’d go to her father’s office after school and do her homework. Her dad was always busy…a good man but busy as hell, you know the type. Her mother passed when she was nine and the family never recovered. So I’d help Crystal with her homework as well as I could. But when it got to algebra and nonsense like that, I wasn’t any help. She was a sweet kid. I think when she got older, though, she became a little…well…she liked the boys. I’ll leave it at that.”

  “You mean she was promiscuous?” Mackenzie asked.

  “That’s putting it mildly. The first time she was caught was behind a convenience store at the age of fourteen, I think. The man she was…well, servicing was nineteen. The gossip mill says that on two occasions, her father hunted her down and found her out in the woods with boys. Found her right in the act one time.”