Prior Bad Acts

39

CAREY DIDN’T KNOW how long she had been unconscious. She came out of it layer by layer, first becoming aware that she was breathing, then moving an arm, a leg. Still, she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t dead. She lay curled in a fetal position, disoriented, dizzy. Then she opened her eyes and saw nothing but blackness.

Panic hit instantly.

Was she blind?

She brought her hands up to her face to feel for a blindfold, even though she knew there wasn’t one.

Her heart was racing. Her breathing was too quick and too shallow. She felt as if she wasn’t getting any air at all.

Raw fear raked through her.

Instinctively she lashed out, pushed her hands out in front of her, and hit something solid. She tried to straighten her legs, but there wasn’t enough space.

She turned onto her back and did the same thing again, with the same result.

Her first thought was that she was inside a coffin.

Memories of old horror stories flashed through her brain. Stories of people being buried alive.

As a prosecutor, she had once worked a case where a woman had been left for dead, buried in a shallow grave. She had been stabbed multiple times, but when the ME determined cause of death, it was asphyxia. The woman had breathed in dirt particles after she had been buried. Her nose and mouth had been full of freshly turned earth.

Carey tried frantically to push at the lid of her coffin. It didn’t move.

She called for help, the sound seeming to come back at her instead of traveling beyond her small, dark prison. Even so, she cried out again and again, until her throat was raw.

No one came.

Tears trailed from the outer corners of her eyes into her hair as she lay on her back, wondering, waiting. Time lost all meaning.

Periodically, she kicked at the lid of her box. Realizing she had no water and that her mouth was already dry, she stopped trying to call out.

The power of fear was like an animal inside her, trying to escape.

She couldn’t breathe.

She felt faint.

If she hadn’t already, she was going to die.

Lucy.

She had to keep thinking of Lucy.

Was she nearby? Had the abductor taken her daughter as well?

Carey thought about what Kovac had told her. About Stan Dempsey, about what he had said on his videotape.

“I wonder how differently she would feel if her daughter were raped and sodomized and hung up from the ceiling like a slaughtered lamb.”

Tears filled her eyes once more. The idea of someone’s hurting Lucy, torturing Lucy, hanging her by the neck, made Carey’s stomach turn and her heart feel as if it were being torn from her chest.

She had seen the photos from the Haas murders. She had been as horrified as anyone-more so, considering she had a child of her own and considering that the fate of the man accused of committing those crimes hung in the balance in her own courtroom.

Was that going to be her fate, the fate of her daughter? To die as Marlene Haas and her foster children had died? Or had Lucy already been killed? Was she lying in her bed at home with her throat slit to prevent her from identifying the perpetrator?

And what about Anka? An innocent in the dramas that Carey found herself in. Whatever someone might have had against her, Carey hated to think that one of the few loyal, trustworthy people she knew would be made to pay for her imagined sins.

The voice on the phone late Friday night echoed in her mind over and over: “I’m coming to get you, bitch.”

A man’s voice.

Stan Dempsey’s voice. Or Wayne Haas’s voice. Or the voice of any one of the thousands of people who hated her for having ruled against the admission of Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts as evidence in the case against him.

Or the voice of a man twenty-five thousand dollars richer, courtesy of her husband.

The sound of a door closing startled her from her speculation. Someone who might rescue her? Or her captor?

“Help me!” she called. “Help me!”

Another door slammed, closer. The box dipped down slightly, and an engine started.

She was in the trunk of a car, and the car was backing up.

Whoever sat behind the wheel of this car probably meant to kill her. She had to do whatever she could to prevent that from happening.

She needed a plan.

She needed to focus.

She needed to live.