Gerald crammed his latex gloves in his pants pocket. That hadn’t gone well.
Rephrase that. It’d been a fucking disaster.
Sitting in his car in the McDonald’s parking lot, he sucked on a Coke and took inventory of his injuries. His legs were going to be bruised for a week, and he had a finger sprain that’d swollen to twice its size. Damn thing had better not be broken.
Christ, she’d fought hard.
He’d never had a woman fight so hard. Surprisingly, in the past it’d been the women who put up the biggest fights. For some reason the men hadn’t. Maybe he’d simply picked men who didn’t mind being victims. The women had all minded. For prostitutes, they’d pissed off easily when they realized things weren’t going as planned.
Jacobs had surprised the crap out of him when she returned early from her run. From his observations, this woman never varied her routine. He should have left. Attacking her hadn’t been the smartest move, but he’d been frustrated with his empty search of the house. And his “interrogation” hadn’t accomplished anything either.
Except that the Jacobs woman had seen his face.
It didn’t matter.
He bit at the inside of his cheek. It didn’t matter. He kept his hair colored and his real eye color covered up. Maybe it was time for a change? Darken the hair a bit? Eyes too? He had every contact lens color available. He usually stuck to nondescript blues and greens. The people he worked with never noticed that his eye color slightly varied some days. Lots of people’s eyes normally do that.
No fucking way was he telling his boss that she’d seen him.
And he still didn’t know where Chris Jacobs was. He’d found nothing in the house. No addresses, no mail, no pictures. Nothing that indicated she had a brother.
If she hadn’t said she didn’t know where Chris was living, he’d almost think the guy was dead. People don’t vanish. There’s always a record, somewhere.
Now what?
Angry pale jade eyes filled his brain. She’d been scared, but determination had also shone from those eyes. Jamie Jacobs was quite a specimen. She was tall and lean and fit. No spare fat on that woman’s body. He could still feel her muscles under his fingertips. And her long, glossy dark hair. She reminded him of her brother a little bit. Chris Jacobs had been tall and lanky. Well, he’d grown tall and lanky during his two years. To start with, he’d been kind of a pudgy kid. At the end, both boys had been incredibly thin. Gerald had found it was easier to control them if they didn’t have much energy. He kept their calorie intake at a minimum.
How they both had managed to escape was a mystery.
Their escape was a personal affront to him. A score he’d wanted to settle for a long time. No one else had ever humiliated him like that. Not since he was a teen.
He’d been visiting the boys about once a week before they vanished. His day job was a nine-to-five requirement, and sometimes he was simply too tired to make the long drive to visit the boys. Truth be told, just thinking about his captives in their prison was enough mental fantasy fuel to get him to the weekend. He’d kept people before. Adults. Both men and women. People he’d found on the streets of Portland or Salem who seemed like they wouldn’t be readily missed.
Disposable people.
Male or female didn’t matter to him too much. Both were useful. Both served the needs he had. He’d been surprised to find that almost-teen boys worked as well. The younger children he’d snatched were a waste of time. He’d disposed of them quickly. But the older boys…that had been different.
He closed his eyes. When he was younger, boys had been the enemy. They hit him, kicked him, spit on him, and called him names. Girls had simply looked the other way. When he was thirteen he’d fought back. Bruce had been one of the worst bullies. He and his buddies had been taunting Gerald on the bus. It was his usual daily ride from hell. When they’d got off the bus, Bruce’s mouth hadn’t stopped. As they walked past the apartment garbage dumpsters, Gerald snapped. He remembered seeing red, feeling his anger bleed into rage. He’d dropped his backpack, grabbed the gate to the dumpsters, and swung it into Bruce’s face. Wailing, Bruce dropped to his knees, his hands covering the blood that dripped from his nose.
And Gerald felt the rush. The rush of pleasure and adrenaline and high that came from the dominance. He’d stood over the groveling boy, his heart pounding, and was instantly addicted.
It’d changed his life.
It’d awakened a bloodlust he’d never dreamed existed. The sight of the boy in pain from his action was energizing. And it proved that he had the ability to take control.
It was better to be the executor than the victim.
In the bunker, one of the kidnapped boys had fought back immediately. He couldn’t recall which one. But it’d been eye-opening. The rest of the children had cowered and annoyed him. But the older two boys had shown fight.
He’d kept the boys.
He would have never believed boys could do that for him as an adult if it hadn’t been for a phone call twenty years ago from the prosecutor.
He hadn’t seen the county prosecutor in two years. The prosecutor had dropped several of the charges pending against him when the police couldn’t produce key evidence. He’d sweated during the hearing, knowing full well the police had collected plenty of evidence that proved he’d been present at Sandra Edge’s murder. They didn’t have proof that his hands had touched her, but they definitely had proof that he’d been in the room with her and his buddy, Lee.
But then the blood and trace evidence from the sheets and carpets went missing. Not just a little bit of evidence, a lot of it. All the important parts were completely gone.
The prosecutor scared him. He’d been a sharp, intense, and intelligent man. Gerald had firmly believed he was going to prison for a very long time. Instead, he served a few months on a much lesser charge.
He’d gotten away with accessory to murder.
Lee ended up getting the murder rap. Which he’d deserved. He’d been the one who’d actually finished strangling Sandra, and he was stupid enough to admit it.
For two years, Gerald had stressed, waiting to hear that the evidence had turned up in a dark corner of a storage room somewhere. Instead, when the phone call came, the message and the person who made the call were unexpected.
Yes, the evidence was still in existence. No, it hadn’t been lost. Yes, the evidence would stay away from the courts if Gerald would do him a favor.
“What kind of favor?” he’d asked.
“I need a kid taken care of.”
A kid?
The former prosecutor had gone on to say he was fully aware of Gerald’s role in Sandra’s murder.
“Why me?”
“Because I know what you’re capable of. And if you don’t, you’ll be in prison for the rest of your life.”
“And after I take care of this for you?”
There’d been a long pause on the phone. “I might have a permanent job for you.”
Gerald had been interested in the job. He’d done it well for over two decades now and wasn’t about to let his employer down again. He knew when he’d kept the boys that his employer wasn’t going to be happy, so he didn’t tell him. His boss had been royally pissed that so many children had been affected when only one needed attention.
Gerald had shrugged. “I handled it the way I saw best. You needed fast action and you got it. No witnesses to anything. Plus, it confuses the motive. With so many kids gone, who was the primary target? Or was there a mass target? It’ll keep the police scratching their heads for years.”
After that his boss had no complaints about his job. He’d been impressed for two years when no evidence of the missing children had been found. No sign of the bus or the driver anywhere. His boss had never asked for details about how he’d accomplished the feat.
Then Chris Jacobs had walked out of the woods. Half dead, no memory, and miles from the underground bunker.
His boss had nearly blown a gasket. But when he learned of the boy’s brain damage, he relaxed a bit. At that point, he grilled Gerald on the fates of the other children and then relaxed a bit more.
Gerald had been crazy to hang on to the two boys for as long as he did, but they’d fueled his soul in a way that adults never did.
Now Jamie Jacobs was proving to be a challenge.
He watched the line of vehicles snaking through the drive-through, reliving the events of that morning. Jamie was the type of woman who made men turn around and watch as she walked by. He hadn’t been with a woman in over a month now, and he could still feel the silkiness of her skin from this morning. He shifted in his seat.
He needed to get laid.
He had a list of phone numbers of women who weren’t too expensive. Damn it. Every woman on that list belonged in Walmart, and he was craving Saks Fifth Avenue.
Gerald’s phone vibrated in his car console. He popped it open and scowled at the screen. Already? He’s asking for an update already? Shit. He hit the green button.
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck happened this morning? What did you do? There are cops crawling all over the Jacobs house.”
Gerald’s chest tightened. An adult bully. Gerald overlooked it because he knew it meant his boss was sweating a bit. And he liked the pleasure from putting his boss in that situation.
He had control. Not his boss.
“I was looking for a lead on her brother. You knew that. I didn’t expect her to come home so fast. She might have got a bit banged up on my way out.”
He wasn’t about to mention that the woman had neatly handed his ass to him.
“What’d you find?”
“I’ve got a stack of paperwork and mail to look through. A couple of address books, too.” He lied.
“I got something that’ll work a bit faster for you.”
“Like what?”
“Michael Brody, a reporter, is showing an unnatural interest in Jamie Jacobs.”
“I figured he was watching the story pretty close because of his brother, but you mean a personal interest in the woman?” Gerald’s gut twisted in an odd way. Something about Brody and Jamie together didn’t sit right with him.
“Exactly. A personal interest. And I know this guy. When he’s got his nose deep in a story, nothing gets in his way. He’s gonna dig until he unearths Chris Jacobs.”
“You want me to wait and follow him?”
“See? You’re smart. That’s why I hired you. Other than the one big fuck-up way back, you usually pull things through.”
Gerald swallowed the bitter words he wanted to hurl at the man. “You know me best, boss.”
“Damn right. And don’t ever forget I own your ass.”
Ditto.