HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) Read online

  The person out there banged loudly a third time.

  Chapter Three The hallway was surprisingly cool, though dim.

  Sarah stood outside of apartment #506, listening intently for any sounds within, as sweat beads accumulated along her hairline. She blotted them away, which drew her attention to the fact that her arms and back had grown dewy with perspiration as well. The five flights of stairs had winded her greatly, so she wrestled her trench coat off and slung it over her purse.

  At that moment she could’ve sworn she heard something, a noise, like the taps of sneakers across hardwood floors, coming from inside the apartment.

  Sarah pressed her ear to the door and debated knocking a fourth time. The fact of the matter was that if there was someone inside, they hadn’t answered her first three knocks, so why would they answer the fourth? She thought she heard whispering voices, or perhaps her mind was playing tricks on her. At the very least, she sensed someone was inside.

  Pretty soon Linden would notice she wasn’t at the crime scene and he’d give her a call. She hadn’t confirmed with the Lieutenant that she was coming here. She didn’t want Linden, the department, a lost cluster of uniform officers wandering around, muddying the already muddy waters of this burgeoning case. If Linden called, she would have to admit where she was, and get formal about this visit. But until then she was planning on making headway on the anonymous tip alone. The operative word: headway, something Sarah had been finding it harder and harder to make unless she worked alone.

  All things considered, Sarah knew it would be a far more valuable use of her time to go back to the station and investigate who the caller had been, get a trace on the number by looking into the cell towers in the area to see where the call bounced in from. It was protocol to assume a tip like that would have to have come from someone who was pulling information first hand. Authentically anonymous tips tended to be distracted sounding, mostly useless details mixed in with a nugget of gold. The call she had received was fast, efficient, to the point, and contained only pertinent information. In this instance, Sarah agreed with protocol and wanted to find out everything she could about the caller. She wanted to confirm her instinct that the caller lived here in apartment #506, or equally as likely, that he knew the person who did.

  Sarah had only had time to superficially canvas the tenant that was leased to this apartment during her drive over. Hunter Mann. When she had read the name on the display screen in her vehicle, Sarah’s guts twisted in a downward spiral, her heart sank joining it.

  And that’s when the faint scent of blood filled her nostrils. She would recognize that smell anywhere. Sarah looked down and discovered a thick crack beneath the door. Someone was bleeding inside, and judging by the punch of tang iron in the air, she was guessing they were long since dead. She needed to get in there. She also needed to avoid suspension. She had failed to do things by the book these past few months and the departmental warnings were piling up.

  Sarah took a few steps back and drew her gun, pointing it down towards the ground and kicked hard against the door. It buckled slightly, but held. Steel doors like this one that were secured with a deadbolt among other locks didn’t cave easily. Sarah took a deep breath and kicked again. This time the frame loosened remarkably, causing a wide rift along the left edge where the steel met the frame. At her angle, she still couldn’t see into the apartment, but heard faint clangs beyond the ebb and flow of ambient street noises. It sounded like soft shoes tapping against metal. Sarah knew in her gut whoever was in there was descending the fire escape. She needed to get inside before they got away.

  There was one thing Detective Sarah Voss liked about working cases in the worst part of Brooklyn: she could do whatever the hell she wanted and the neighbors wouldn’t report it.

  Sarah lifted her gun, pointing it at the deadbolt, and fired.

  The door popped open and she entered quickly and cautiously, her gun leading the way. She was hoping to get to the windows, confirm her suspicion that the resident was fleeing down the fire escape, but Sarah couldn’t. There were bodies here, and they stole her attention.

  At the far corner of the room lay a dead man. He had been shot in the chest from midrange, maybe ten feet away. He hadn’t been dead long, possibly five hours, but forensics would have to confirm the exact time of death. Sarah crossed quickly through towards the window, but didn’t make it that far when something in the bathroom caught her eye. A woman’s arm dangled over the edge of the bathtub. Sarah should’ve proceeded to the window, stepped through it onto the fire escape, and done what she could to find out who had ignored her persistent knocking and fled, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the arm in the bathroom.

  When Sarah entered the bathroom, stepping deeper inside, she was first struck by the odd fact that there was no shower curtain. She noticed the rings across the metal rod above the shower. It wasn’t that there was no shower curtain, she realized thanks to the rings. It was that the shower curtain was missing. All this was to say that Sarah had a hard time looking down at the woman’s body, mainly because it wasn’t a woman’s body. She had known that the second she stepped foot into the apartment. It was a little girl. Sarah pegged her for being thirteen years old, tops.

  The girl was completely naked, shot in the chest from point blank range. The clothes were removed postmortem by her estimation. She could tell based on how the blood at the gaping wound seemed contained, as though something had absorbed it prior.

  Most disturbingly, a word was carved into the girl’s forehead at jagged angles.

  As Sarah read it, she realized it wasn’t a word. It was a name.

  “Hunter.”

  A sharp pang of nausea lurched from the pit of her stomach, shooting upwards until it burned her heart. Tears sprang to Sarah’s eyes, stinging them fiercely as she gasped for air. It was a reaction unlike any she had ever had at a crime scene. But the girl in the tub, her blond ratty hair, her youth, the way her eyes glared vacantly downward, was thoroughly heartbreaking. The sight brought Sarah into a state of anguish.

  In a fast motion, Sarah extracted her cell phone, flipping it open from the base, and speed dialed Linden as she drew in long breaths of air, collecting herself.

  “We’ve got bodies,” she said. “Get here as fast as you can.”

  * * *

  Twitch was the first to let go of the ladder and drop to the pavement below. He landed smoothly in a deep knee bend, softening the blow. He immediately glanced up at Ash and Hunter, then higher to the window from where they had come. They weren’t out of the woods yet. He had heard the shot. What kind of detective fired shots to break into an apartment? Didn’t the cops need a warrant to get in? They were running out of time. And if that detective, that frazzled looking woman Twitch had seen on the street earlier, was that much of a maverick to break into Hunter’s place, then they needed to be gone already. The crazy bitch might climb down the fire escape after them. Killing a cop would be the last thing they needed. Why the fuck was Hunter lingering around the top rung?

  Hunter needed to know that none of the New Hampshire men had come back for her to finish the job. She didn’t think any of them would go against Grizzly’s instructions and come back to take her out, but she needed to be sure. She didn’t trust anyone, least of all the unpredictable, murderous farmhouse maniacs. At the risk of being caught or shot, Hunter clung with a white-knuckle grip to the railing, waiting, watching, listening for evidence of who the person inside her apartment was.

  After a moment, an older woman stepped out from the bathroom. Her face was aged with creases both deep and superficial. The lines around the corners of her eyes and the sides of her mouth were noticeable. She was pretty, though older, but her hair was a frizzy mess. The front and back of the woman’s shirt were darkly stained with sweat, Hunter observed, as the woman turned this way and that, looking around the apartment.

  Then Hunter noticed a badge clipped to the woman’s belt to the side of the buckle. This was exactly what Hun
ter had been afraid of ever since she had shot Dale behind the sugar factory. She knew the cops would come eventually. She just didn’t think it would be this quickly. How the fuck was she going to get out of this? Everything inside her apartment now served to screw her. Hunter wasn’t seeing a way out of this, and she really didn’t want to die, rotting in prison. Or would that be the safest place for her, away from the men, away from the farmhouse and the barn, away from her father?

  “Hunter, get your ass down here now,” whispered Ash from the street below.

  Hunter did. Quickly and quietly she placed one foot after the next, descending the fire escape ladder. When she was nearing the final few rungs of the ladder, Hunter realized something.

  It had been her father.

  There was no way the cops could’ve connected Dale’s body at the sugar factory with her exact address this quickly. When Ash had comforted her, telling her that it would take at least a few days for the cops to make that leap, he was right. Unless they were psychic, there would have been no way for them to put two and two together like that. Not this fast. It had to have been her father. Had he made a call? He had to have told the cops to come looking for her here.

  And that’s when Hunter realized the magnitude of her father’s sickness. He really was giving her absolutely no choice. He set the whole thing up. She would have to flee New York City. If she didn’t, she would undoubtedly be arrested. Tipping off the police was Grizzly’s insurance that Hunter wouldn’t say fuck it, abandon her sister once again, and stay in Brooklyn. He was forcing her to leave.

  It was terrifying how smart he was, how thorough, how well planned. He had referred to it as a game, and to him it was. That’s what was so incredibly sick about the whole thing. He was killing girls, torturing them, manipulating others, and it was all a game to him.

  Part of her wished she were strong enough, defiant enough to climb back up the fire escape and allow herself to be arrested. She wished she had the gumption to go to the police and tell them the truth, the whole truth, but Hunter didn’t have it in her. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life in prison. She had suffered enough.

  Or was that not the issue?

  By the time Hunter reached the final rung of the fire escape and let go, she accepted the real truth in her heart. The only form of justice she would be willing to accept, the only justice she wanted, was to see her father dead. Not just dead, Hunter wanted to kill him herself. Hunter wanted to kill every last man at the farmhouse.

  That’s why she couldn’t turn back. That’s why she couldn’t involve the police and go about this the right way. During all these years of freedom she had only wanted one thing: to go back one day and take them all out.

  It didn’t matter that Grizzly had forced her hand, manipulated her into returning. She was planning on it anyway, and she was looking forward to it.

  Ash held Hunter’s hips, lowering her from the last rung of the fire escape into his arms, as Twitch pulled the dark sedan, headlights off, at a crawl through the alley to meet them.

  Ash set Hunter on the ground gently, but didn’t let go. He held her tightly pressed against him, palms spread firmly across her lower back.

  “You have to stay with me,” he whispered.

  “I am,” she said quietly.

  “Not just physically, Hunter. I mean you have to stay focused, present, stay with me,” he clarified.

  Hunter could see the fear behind his eyes. He was getting to know her, her tendencies, her weaknesses, and those weaknesses endangered them all. He was scared. What could she possibly say to put his mind at ease? Nothing. The fact of the matter was that she scared as well.

  “I’ll do my best,” she said, finally responding. It was clear her words did little to comfort him.

  He reached up, holding the back of her head tenderly, and pulled her close. When his lips pressed against hers, Hunter melted in a wave of comfort. Ash was her home. She could never have gotten through any of this without him. If her father had hired anyone else to track her, retrieve her back to the farmhouse, Hunter would be dead by now. She knew that.

  The sedan rumbled beside them, idling with a low purr, beckoning them inside. Ash released her and Hunter jumped into the backseat. Ash in the passenger’s seat as Twitch switched the gears from drive to reverse, backing out of the alley from where he had come.

  When they hit the street, Twitch flipped on the headlights and pealed out onto the empty city street. Hunter looked out the back window at her apartment. She spotted the detective’s car parked amongst heaps of trash. That woman detective must still be upstairs, which relieved Hunter for a moment.

  Then the shrill cry of sirens filled the night.

  “Just in time,” said Twitch, nearly under his breath. His eyes were glued to the road as far as Hunter could tell. She had turned back and was looking at Twitch’s reflection in the rearview mirror.

  “We have to go back,” said Ash. He sounded panicked as he patted himself down from chest to back pockets. “I don’t have anything with me.”

  “We can’t go back,” said Twitch firmly. “Did you see the cops pulling up?”

  Ash appeared to have gone white with dread. Hunter had never seen him like this. He was always so cool, calm, and collected, always a step ahead, well planned, in control. She could see his eyes widen. It didn’t look like he was breathing.

  Hunter placed her hand on his shoulder. The bandage at his neck was starting to peel off his skin, probably from sweat, she guessed. Everyone was hot, especially from nerves.

  “I don’t have my weapons. We can’t exactly walk into a firearms store and buy them,” he shouted, his voice cracking in anger.

  “We can in New Hampshire,” said Hunter.

  “Not if cops have an APB out on us,” said Ash.

  “I’m sure they already do,” said Hunter. “We’re driving a dead man’s car, but Ash, there are some things we don’t have a choice about. We need to get out of the city and figure things out as we go.”

  “Ash,” said Twitch for the fifth time. Neither of them had been listening. “Ash! I got your trunk!”

  “You what?” e said, not trusting his hearing.

  “I have your weapons. I got the black trunk,” Twitch said.

  “You do? How?” said Ash as a smile began to replace his panicking breaths.

  “What do you mean ‘how’? You want me to sit here and explain how carrying things works?” Twitch responded in a tone of boastful sarcasm that put everyone at ease.

  “You’re the man,” Ash boomed, while ruffling Twitch’s hair into a playful mess with his hand.

  Hunter was smiling as well. There was still so much to figure out, everything in fact. Everything was up in the air and that should’ve worried her greatly. But as Twitch drove coasting up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, all Hunter could do was stare out the window at the bright city lights that shined starkly against the black night sky that seemed to tremble with its own darkness.

  Goodbye, New York, she thought.

  She had no idea when she would be back, if she would be back, if she would make it through whatever lay in store for them at the farmhouse. She had no idea if she’d make it out alive.

  The car had fallen silent. Ash looked over at Twitch behind the wheel. The bandage on Ash’s neck itched against his skin as he turned his head. The laceration beneath burned.

  Ash watched as tears rolled down Twitch’s cheeks.

  “It’ll be okay, man,” said Ash softly, his tone returning to its usual deep, comforting, velvety timbre.

  “Molly’s dead,” said Twitch. “How is that going to be okay?”

  “Andy, Devon, Margot, and Jenna aren’t,” said Ash. “Hunter’s sister, Blair, is still alive.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Twitch.

  “We have to believe it,” said Ash.

  Twitch began to slowly shake his head.

  “This is a suicide mission, you know that right?” he said finally, as he wiped the tears from his
dirt stained cheeks.

  It had been on everyone’s mind, the possibility that they’d all be killed, the probability that they were walking into a trap.

  Hunter caught Twitch’s gaze in the rearview.

  “Remember the fifth rule?” she asked from the backseat.

  Twitch’s eyes grew wide. He began to nod, though only slightly.

  Ash turned around, his eyebrows rising in question.

  And Hunter provided the answer, “Kill or be killed. Welcome to adulthood.”

  * * *

  There were so many cops crawling around Hunter Mann’s apartment that Sarah feared the evidence would be compromised. Why couldn’t Linden keep a better eye on them, get them to focus their search of the apartment? Christ, he was getting more and more useless by the minute.

  She returned to the bathroom and hovered over forensics, two guys on their knees at the tub who were pulling various chemicals out of a kit that lay on the bathroom floor.

  “Anyone got a photo of the resident? Hunter Mann?” asked one of the guys loudly over his shoulder, as the other took a closer look at the letters carved into the girl’s forehead.

  “Swiss Army knife, I’m guessing,” he said before turning back to Sarah, “but I won’t know until I’m back in the lab.”

  A uni entered, holding a faded photograph in his hands. He handed it to Sarah.

  “It’s a guess,” said the uniform officer. “This could be Hunter Mann, or a friend of hers. Most of these photos are random shots of the city.”

  Sarah studied the photo in her hands. The girl in it had dark brown hair, wavy. She immediately glanced up at the girl in the tub who had blond hair. Sarah then kneeled down beside forensics.

  “It’s not the same girl,” said Sarah, as an immense wave of relief washed through her.

  Forensics studied the photo in Sarah’s hand and agreed.

  “Someone murdered this girl and carved another girl’s name into her forehead?”