“You don’t need wireless to check sent emails. Plus if we got wireless, then anybody could track these laptops. Without wireless, they can’t.”
Mary lost track of which man was speaking, Ray or not-Ray. But what they said made her remember something. A laptop. A phone. She had those things. She could almost visualize them but not quite. And there was an email. Something about an email. It was so hard to think. She couldn’t summon up a single image in her head. She couldn’t form a sentence. Maybe the bigger one was another woman. They had been together. Mary felt the answer just out of her grasp. She could almost see her hands reaching for it, her fingers trying to pull it from thin air.
“You heard ’em. They’re onto us. We can’t finish ’em until we know what they told the cops.”
“Who’s doing the honors?”
“You are, like before.”
“Why me?”
“Why not you?”
“She’s a woman. Two women.”
“Oh please. They’re not women. They’re lawyers.”
Mary could hear what they said but couldn’t react. She was terrified but back in the fog. She couldn’t feel her own fear. She started falling asleep again. The pain took over, obliterating everything. She wasn’t strong enough to resist it. She tried to breathe, but her nose bubbled blood. She was losing consciousness.
She let it go. If the men were going to kill her, she couldn’t stop them.
She was half-dead already.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Bennie figured out where she was, by smell. She’d been put in a small building that had to be a smokehouse. It reeked of smoked meat. She sensed it was primitive or very old. The floor was dirt, which felt cool against her cheek. The air was filtered with ashes from a dormant fire that smelled close by. She was alone and she didn’t know where Mary was.
She lay on her side, blindfolded and gagged. Her hands were duct-taped behind her back, but her legs were not. She’d been too big to be carried like deadweight. They’d made her walk from the car to the smokehouse. She’d been beaten on the head and arms, but the pain was tolerable. She was keeping her emotions and her terror at bay. She had to be on top of her game to stay alive.
Bennie sensed she was in the country, not only because it was a smokehouse but because it was so quiet. She assumed there was a house or a cabin near the smokehouse, some distance apart. She knew there was a lot of deer hunting in central Pennsylvania. It would make sense to have a smokehouse to smoke venison near a hunting cabin. So either it was a cabin or house, but Bennie was praying that Mary was safe and alive.
Bennie swallowed hard, worried. She had been driven here alone in the trunk of a car, filled with tools that jangled, so it wasn’t Mary’s car. There had to be at least two men since she and Mary had both been abducted at the same time. She had no idea if there was a third man here. Her working theory was that Ray and Ernie had taken her and Mary. Mo was an outside possibility. Either way, it was proof that she and Mary had been right. The conspiracy had killed Todd.
Bennie tried not to panic. She figured that they had driven Mary separately. She didn’t know if Mary was here or in a different location. They couldn’t risk leaving Mary’s car in front of Simon’s house. Sooner or later somebody would notice and call the cops.
Bennie prayed that Mary was still alive. That last horrifying cry echoed in Bennie’s brain. Mary must’ve been struck hard on the head, with what Bennie didn’t know. If they had taken Mary where Bennie was, they were in the middle of nowhere. She doubted Mary was getting medical help. It would take time to reach a hospital once this was all over. And it had to be over. They would survive. Bennie would make certain. She just didn’t know how. Yet.
Bennie returned to her mental inventory. It was useful to review what she knew so she could figure out her next step. She estimated that the car trip here took about three hours. She had even managed to hear the directions coming through the car’s interior, even though she’d been in the trunk. The driver had used GPS, which told her that he was unsure of the route. So it must not have been his place.
They had taken the expressway out of the city, then the northeast extension, but after that left the highway. The terrain had turned from smooth asphalt to bumpy back roads. The ambient traffic noise had lessened. She’d heard a horse neighing at one point. The elevation had gone from flat to hilly. The air in the trunk was close, but grew cooler.
She drew a mental circle in her mind that intersected towns three hours away from Simon’s. It would’ve encompassed farmlands, and even parts of the Poconos or the forest. She tried to remember the street names that she heard as they got closer to their destination. It was easy because they were all bird names. Bluebird Lane. Mockingbird Road. The destination had been Eagles Drive.
Bennie tried to estimate what time it was. She was going to say about eleven o’clock at night. It wasn’t late enough for anyone to start worrying yet. Detective Lindenhurst might be surprised, but he wouldn’t be alarmed. Nobody from the office would know. Declan would have no idea. Anthony might start to wonder, but he was at the hospital with Feet. There would be no cavalry coming. She and Mary were on their own. And it was all up to her. Which, oddly, felt familiar.
She reminded herself that she’d been in dire straits before. She had been buried underground, for God’s sake. Left for dead. She had gotten out of that alive. She had stayed calm and cool and found a way out. She would have to do the same today. Tonight. Whenever. Now.
She rocked back and forth, trying to get enough momentum to start rolling. She wanted to see what the walls were made of and where the door was. She’d never been in a smokehouse but she knew it was a small building, usually of wood or stone. It smelled old and dusty. So there had to be a loose board she could break with her foot or a stone she could dislodge somehow. Something. Some way. She had to get out. She rolled over once and was about to roll over again, but froze.
She heard the jingle jangle of keys. Someone was coming. The sound came from over her shoulder, so she must’ve been facing away from the door. She didn’t want them to know she was awake and alert. She had played possum in the car. Until she figured out what to do, she was going to take that tack. She rolled back to where they had left her.
She heard the ca-chunk of the key in a lock, then the drawing aside of some sort of bolt, and made it back just in time to hear the door open. It scraped along the dirt floor. It sounded like wood. She made herself focus on the details not to be afraid.
The door must have been ajar because the air stirred the ashes and the dirt, but it felt cooler, blowing her hair from behind. The man’s shoes scuffed in the dirt. He must have a flashlight or phone light because she saw a sudden brightness through her blindfold, so he was shining it in her face.
“You and me have to have a little talk,” a man said. His voice came from up above. He was standing above her, near her feet. He sounded tall.