ONCE BOUND Read online

  Riley called the front desk to schedule a wakeup call. The three agents took turns taking showers, then agreed on sleeping arrangements. Bill and Jenn got the two beds, while Riley took the sofa bed. It wasn’t very comfortable, but Riley had slept in far worse.

  In a matter of minutes, Riley could hear Bill’s noisy snoring, followed by Jenn snoring more quietly.

  Riley couldn’t help but envy them. She was having trouble keeping her eyes closed, to say nothing of falling asleep. She kept thinking about Chase Fisher and the impressions she’d gotten of him during their visit.

  Why had he kept reminding her of Ryan?

  She found herself thinking about something Fisher had said about his wife’s affair.

  “I feel like it was all my fault.”

  Why did those words keep resonating in Riley’s mind?

  As she lay there staring into the darkness, it started to occur to her …

  Maybe Fisher didn’t remind Riley so much of Ryan as he reminded her …

  Of myself.

  She shuddered at the thought.

  Fisher felt guilty—or at least claimed to feel guilty—about Reese Fisher’s life of gnawing, bitter boredom that had driven her to wander away from her marriage.

  Did Riley feel the same way toward Ryan?

  Did she harbor some feeling that she’d been in some way responsible for his failings and infidelities?

  No, she thought. It doesn’t make sense.

  At the same time, she knew perfectly well that making sense was beside the point. Irrational, unfounded, unconscious guilt could eat away at her as deeply as guilt that was based on any real wrongs she had committed.

  All the logical thinking in the world wasn’t going to help.

  She felt a lump of despair form in her throat.

  I can’t let myself feel this way, she said.

  But despairing thoughts started crowding in from all directions, and she found herself obsessing again about the last couple of days—over Liam’s departure, April’s hopes to follow in her footsteps, and whether she had any business trying to be a mother and an FBI agent at the same time.

  It was a feeling of awful and senseless futility. Riley had to swallow down a sob of despair.

  Don’t cry, she told herself.

  The last thing she wanted to do right now was wake up Bill and Jenn.

  Little by little, she felt sleep creeping up on her, but she took no comfort from it.

  Soon, she realized, the nightmares would start.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The man shuddered as his computer screen filled up with photos of the grisly murder scene.

  The body, bound by tape to the railroad tracks, looked like some sort of decapitated mannequin—at least until he brought up the hideous close-up photos of the victim’s neck. Then he was looking at images of an almost clinically clean cross-section of her trachea, esophagus, and spine, like something out of an anatomy textbook.

  And here was the head, lying where it had rolled down the stony embankment. The woman’s expression of horror looked much too wild, too exaggerated, to be real, as if it had been painted onto a mannequin’s head.

  But the man knew that it was all too real.

  This was all his doing.

  He had bound this woman in place, where she couldn’t escape her fate. And he had done the same with another whose pictures were also here on this site.

  But until now, he hadn’t seen the results that were on display here. He’d had to rush away from both murder scenes before the victims even began to regain consciousness. He’d had to get as far away as he could in order not to get caught.

  In fact, he’d never intended to even see these abominable images—and he certainly hadn’t intended for them to be on display before the whole world.

  But he should have known better.

  What he’d done was evil, even he harbored no delusions about that, and yet …

  What kind of a world is this? he wondered.

  What kind of people would studiously photograph these images and display them where even a small child could unwarily stumble across them?

  He was a sick man and he knew it.

  But he was living in a truly sick world, in which people’s worst cravings were provoked and slaked. The people who’d taken these photographs and put them on display had done so of their own free will.

  He’d had no choice.

  He’d been obeying the power that held him in its thrall—the visions and the voice that wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Now he felt a terrible nausea welling up inside him. But was it at the sight of these photographs?

  No, some evil spirit was tormenting him again, just like yesterday, and four days before that. After the killing near Allardt, where these pictures were taken, he’d sworn to himself never to do this again.

  He’d fought against the spirit until he’d become violently, physically ill.

  And now?

  Fight it, he told himself.

  Surely looking these images of what he’d done ought to be enough to deter him from ever doing such a thing again.

  But even now, he felt the fight ebbing out of him, and physical pain surged through his entire body, and emotional pain seared his brain—pain that could only be eased in one terrible way.

  He could hear an audible voice whisper in his ear …

  “Soon. Very soon.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was night.

  Riley was walking along a length of railroad tracks, enjoying the fresh warm air and the bright, moonlit sky.

  Then she heard a whimpering voice directly behind her.

  She turned around and saw a woman bound with duct tape to the tracks, her neck against one of the rails.

  Riley felt as though her heart jumped up in her throat.

  How was this possible?

  She’d just passed that spot a second or two ago. No one had been there then.

  She rushed to the woman and knelt down beside her. The woman seemed to be just regaining consciousness.

  “Where am I?” the woman murmured. “What’s happening?”

  Riley said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you loose.”

  But as she began to struggle with the seemingly endless coils of duct tape, the task quickly seemed impossible. The tape ripped off in sticky loops, but the woman was still bound.

  Then she heard another whimpering voice.

  She looked up saw another woman bound the same way just a short distance off.

  Riley gasped aloud and ran toward her, trying again to pull loose the tape that bound her. Again the tape looped and snarled, but this woman, too, was still tied to the track. Then she heard another whimpering voice and looked up and saw another bound woman, and beyond her another, and beyond her another …

  Riley couldn’t count the number of women who lay bound to the tracks before her.

  Then she heard a heavy rumbling and saw a light blazing up ahead.

  It was an oncoming train.

  Riley stood waving frantically.

  “Stop!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Please stop!”

  She heard a grim, gravelly chuckle behind her.

  She turned around. Standing on the tracks a short distance away stood a tall, gangly man wearing the full-dress uniform of a Marine colonel. His face was heavily lined with bitterness and drink.

  “What are you thinking, girl?” the man said with a laugh. “Do you think you can stop a goddamn locomotive?”

  Riley recognized him instantly.

  It was her own father.

  But how could it be him? He’d died last October.

  “Daddy, you’ve got to help me,” she said. “We’ve got to get these women loose.”

  “I’m afraid you’re on your own, girl. Now maybe if you’d bothered to come to my funeral …”

  He shook his head and let out a scoffing chuckle.

  “Naw, I didn’t care a damn about that. I’d have skipped it myself, except I didn�
��t have much choice, being the corpse and all.”

  Riley could hear the crescendo of rumbling behind her. The light from the approaching locomotive threw her own shadow over the tracks and illuminated her father brightly.

  “Daddy, what can I do?” Riley asked.

  She heard a pleading tone in her own voice.

  “Your job,” her father said. “Do your goddamn job. Just don’t get any ideas that you’ll do any good. Remember the laws of physics. An object in motion stays in motion—unless it’s stopped by something bigger.”

  He laughed a mean, ugly laugh.

  “And there’s no bigger object in all the world than evil. It’s like some locomotive hurtling through outer space until it hits a planet or gets swallowed up by a star or something even bigger.”

  “How can I stop it?” Riley asked.

  “Don’t be stupid. You can’t. Still, it’s your job to stop it. That really stinks, doesn’t it? It was like that for me in ’Nam, fighting a war that couldn’t be won. Well, now it’s your turn to fight and lose. It’s all for shit, everything you do. And it’s in your blood. It’s your inheritance. Good luck with it. I’m through with it.”

  Riley’s father turned and walked off the tracks and disappeared into the surrounding darkness.

  Riley whirled back around to face the long row of bound women and the ever-brightening headlight and the roaring crescendo of the engine. She could feel an intense vibration beneath her feet.

  Now she knew—the locomotive, the oncoming train, was nothing less than the juggernaut of evil itself, an endless succession of sadistic monsters and helpless victims, and they’d keep coming one right after another no matter how hard she tried to stop them.

  But her father’s advice was all she had in life:

  “Do your goddamn job.”

  She dashed forward, stepping over the victims one by one, yelling over the deafening noise and blinded by the engine’s blazing light, waving her arms frantically.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Suddenly the air was split by the deafening shout of the train whistle.

  Then Riley realized that it wasn’t a train whistle at all.

  It was the motel room phone ringing beside her sofa bed.

  It was her wakeup call.

  Riley groggily picked up the phone and thanked the receptionist making the call.

  She turned toward her colleagues, who were turning in their beds and grumbling to themselves.

  “Wake up, guys,” she said. “We’ve got a job to do.”

  *

  Riley and her colleagues were soon on the road making the two-hour trip from Barnwell, Illinois, to Allardt, Indiana. Bill was driving, and Jenn was sitting beside him in the front passenger seat.

  Riley sat behind them trying to keep herself occupied, doing her best to push last night’s ugly dream out of her mind.

  She exchanged text messages with the chief of police in Allardt, alerting him to their upcoming visit. Then she studied Bull Cullen’s report of his interview with Fern Bruder’s family in Allardt. He’d sent it to her last night at her request. According to Cullen, the family didn’t have any idea why their daughter had been murdered, or by whom.

  Cullen’s report struck Riley as perfectly thorough and competent, and it was entirely possible that she and her colleagues weren’t going to learn anything else from the victim’s family. But Riley knew better than to leave any stone unturned.

  Words still rang in her mind …

  “Do your goddamn job.”

  She also studied official reports of the first killing, searching for any variations between the two murders. It was an important consideration. Contradictory details might support their “copycat” theory, that either Chase Fisher or his wife’s lover had deliberately imitated the earlier murder.

  But Riley soon realized that she simply couldn’t tell one way or the other. Grisly photos of the first murder were circulating all over the Internet. Reporters and gawkers had apparently gotten past the barriers that the local police had set up to close off that crime scene. A would-be copycat could find all the information he needed online. It wouldn’t be at all difficult to duplicate the first murder quite precisely.

  While Riley was poring over this information, she listened to Bill and Jenn chatter away as Bill drove. He was telling Jenn stories about Riley herself. Riley had to admit that some of them were hilarious. Bill regaled Jenn about Riley’s more outrageous detective methods, and the many times she’d been taken off a case, or suspended, or fired. Jenn laughed and laughed, thoroughly amused by it all.

  Riley felt embarrassed, of course, and she half-wished that Bill would keep his mouth shut about her. Still, she couldn’t help but be pleased that Bill and Jenn were finally starting to hit it off. During the last case the three of them had worked on together, Bill hadn’t been entirely confident about Jenn.

  Maybe we’ll wind up making a good team, she thought.

  At the same time, she couldn’t help but worry about when or if something in Jenn’s dark past was going to catch up with her.

  If it did, was Riley going to wind up in trouble along with her?

  After all, Riley was already covering for her.

  And what about Bill, who knew nothing about Jenn’s involvement with the sinister Aunt Cora? Would he wind up in trouble as well?

  Riley wished she could get Jenn alone and ask what had been bothering her yesterday. But so far there had been no opportunity, not with Bill around.

  And that was what made Riley most uncomfortable—not being completely open with Bill. In all their years together, they’d always been able to confide in each other completely. Was that no longer true?

  And was it Riley’s own fault?

  Riley’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Bill’s voice.

  “We’re just entering Allardt.”

  Riley looked up to inspect the areas they passed through. Allardt had upscale neighborhoods that must be populated by commuters, which she understood to be true of all stops on the train lines from Chicago. But they soon drove past those, into an older district that must have been in place long before the affluent sections came into being.

  This part looked like a perfectly ordinary Midwestern town, with bungalows and ranch-style houses and old buildings. None of it looked especially prosperous, and they passed through a poor area on their way downtown. Poverty seemed to be creeping in, and some businesses were boarded up.

  Riley also saw graffiti here and there. Gangs had obviously found their way into Allardt, as they had into too many American small towns in recent years.

  And Riley knew that gangs meant drugs, and drugs meant despair.

  Riley remembered what Chase Fisher had said about Barnwell—that it had been ranked the third most boring town to live in.

  She wondered what list Allardt might top.

  When they reached the police station, Bill parked their car in front of it and they all went inside. They identified themselves and were promptly taken to Chief Bryce Dolby’s office.

  Of course, the chief had been expecting them, and he greeted them pleasantly and offered them seats.

  “Such an awful thing about what happened to Fern Bruder,” he said. “I hated to hear that it happened again over in Barnwell. A serial killer! We don’t get that kind of thing here in Allardt.”

  Chief Dolby immediately struck Riley as a kindly man. But his face looked tired, and she guessed that he was younger than he actually looked. She was used to that sort of weary expression on the faces of big-city cops, who routinely saw too much of violence and the worst in human nature. But in her experience, small-town cops usually looked much more cheerful and light-hearted.

  He continued, “I wish I could be of more help to you about all this. My people and I are out of our depth with this kind of case. The truth is, I haven’t got a single shred of information that might help you.”

  “That’s understandable,” Riley said. “The fact that a murder happened he
re doesn’t make it a local case. The killer might be absolutely anywhere. That’s why we’ve been called in.”

  Chief Dolby drummed his fingers on his desk.

  He said, “I understand that you want to re-interview Fern Bruder’s family. I called them to let them know you’d be paying them a visit this morning. They’ll be expecting you.”

  He paused for a moment, then added, “If it’s all right with you, I’d just as soon not come with you.”

  Riley was surprised.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I went there with Deputy Chief Cullen just the other day. One visit to Weston Bruder—Fern’s dad—will hold me for a while. I hadn’t seen him lately, and I’d rather not see him again until I absolutely have to.”

  He smiled slightly and added, “I guess that sounds rather petty of me. The truth is, we just don’t like each other very much.”

  Riley looked at him carefully and asked, “Anything we should know about?”

  “It’s personal, nothing for you to worry about.”

  Riley couldn’t help but feel uneasy about what Dolby might be leaving unsaid.

  She asked, “How do people feel about him generally here in Allardt?”

  Chief Dolby knitted his brow. Riley sensed that he was trying to choose his words carefully.

  “Well, it depends on who you talk to,” he said. “Some folks will tell you that Weston Bruder is one of the town’s finest citizens, a good Christian and a pillar of the community. But other folks …”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t want to speak ill of him,” he said. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter—not for your purposes.”

  Riley wasn’t sure why, but she wished Dolby would tell them more. But what was the point of asking? She and her colleagues weren’t here to indulge in small-town gossip. They were here to solve a murder case.

  As they left the station and got back into the car, Riley felt apprehensive.

  It already seemed obvious to her that Allardt fell far short of being a quaint and charming Midwestern town. And she sensed that she and her colleagues were about to get a lesson in what was wrong with it deep down.