Prior Bad Acts

53

THE QUIET LASTED For so long, Carey began to think she had been abandoned. Maybe the car had been left on train tracks, and she was waiting as her death hurtled toward her. Maybe the car had been left in the back of a junkyard, and she would die of dehydration after days of suffering. Maybe anything.

She felt through the broken pieces of plastic from the light cover to find a shard she could use for a weapon in case her captor ever came to get her.

She wondered who he was. Stan Dempsey? Had he really gone that far off the deep end? He was a cop, for God’s sake. How could he reconcile hurting people, maybe killing people, with having served twenty-plus years as a police officer?

Justice, Kovac had said. Dempsey was meting out justice as he perceived it. If he was performing an act of justice, how could it be a crime?

She wished she could have seen the videotape he had made and left behind for his colleagues to find. What was his demeanor? What was his tone of voice? How did he look? How did he sound?

How about it wasn’t Stan Dempsey at all? How about the note David had made to himself:$25,000. What if Kovac had been right from the start, and her husband wanted her out of his life badly enough to hire someone to do it?

She wondered if Kovac was looking for her. Almost certainly he was. He would have called early, or come over and helped himself to coffee. But how would he have any idea where to look? She was the needle in the haystack.

She thought about Lucy. Where was she? Was she afraid? Was she with David? Was she alive?

Shoes crunched on gravel. A key slid into the trunk lock and turned.

As the trunk lid went up, sunlight hit Carey full in the face and blinded her. The silhouette of a person loomed over her, but she couldn’t make out features. She could tell the hair was shoulder length. A woman’s haircut, she thought.

“You can come out now, Carey. I have everything ready for you.”

The voice of a man.

He bent down over her to lift her out.

Terrified, Carey swung her arm and stabbed at him with the broken shard of plastic, driving the tip into some part of his face. He cried out and stumbled backward.

Out of the trunk! Out of the trunk!

Her mind raced faster than she could move. She had been in the cramped trunk long enough to have become stiff, and her body had already been hurting from the assault. The concussion made her head swim as she tried to scramble out of the trunk.

Her feet hit the ground, but her legs were weak, and buckled beneath her. She landed on her battered knees, pain spiking through her. Awkwardly she got her feet under her and tried to push forward, to run before she was fully upright.

The world around her tilted one way, then another. She stumbled forward, fell, tried again, stumbled, fell. The ground rushed up at her, hard-packed dirt and clumps of dead weeds that had faded to beige. She put her arms out to break her fall, and tiny stones dug into the heels of her hands.

It was a nightmare, and the worst part of it was that she knew she was wide-awake.

As she tried to rise again, hands caught her from behind, pulled her up, and held her. Carey tried to kick, tried to struggle. She didn’t have the strength to fight him or pull free of him. Even if she had, she couldn’t outrun him. And even if she could have outrun him, there was nowhere to run. All around was nothing but countryside and clumps of bare trees and fields of dry cornstalks.

Fear shook her like a rag doll. She tried not to cry out loud, knowing her abductor would likely find her fear exciting, arousing. But tears filled her eyes and coursed down her face, and she couldn’t help it.

“You don’t have to run,” the soft voice said. “I would never hurt you, Carey. You’re my angel.”

He turned her toward him and held her at arm’s length.

“Oh, my God,” Carey whispered, terror rising in her throat to choke her.

The first thing that struck her was the gaping wound in the hollow of his cheek where she had stabbed him with the shard of plastic. Blood poured from it, ran down over his jaw, down his throat, onto the brown sweater he wore.

The second thing that struck her was the makeup-the painted lips, the overdone eye shadow, the smudged mascara, the blush on his cheekbones. The stubble of his beard was dark beneath the caked foundation makeup.

He reached up with one hand and pulled the blond wig from his head.

“It’s me,” he said as if he were an old, dear friend. “Karl. Karl Dahl.”