Left to Kill (Adele Sharp #4) - Blake Pierce Page 0,18

years. She thought of Amanda—what the poor girl had suffered. What would the others be enduring this very moment? A second passed. Then another. Each one a reminder of the plight of the kidnapper’s victims. If they were even still alive… each served as a reminder of the scalpel of wasted time extracting each moment in a pound of pain.

“Well, if he’s not a killer, that means we have a chance of recovering these people that Amanda mentioned alive.”

Adele was still pacing the small kitchen, and she heard the rumbling sound of a jet engine overhead for the third time in the last half hour.

She crossed her arms and stared back at John, adopting a similar posture to his. “Do you think we can trust Amanda’s word? The detective back there seemed to think she was hallucinating.”

John scratched an ear and pressed a hand against his laptop lid. He seemed grateful to put the files out of sight. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I get where the detective is coming from. The girl isn’t exactly a reliable witness. Maybe she hallucinated.”

“You think she’s been hallucinating for five months?”

John shook his head. Breathed softly, his nostrils flaring from the pressure of the air. “Obviously not. She’s been missing. But as far as others being there. A killer having them, we don’t know. Normally, for us to be called in on a case like this, there tend to be bodies, or multiple victims. Right now, we’re relying on the testimony of an unreliable witness, who is still alive.”

“Barely alive.”

John shook his head. “Either way. It’s a strange case. But like you said, I think we should check out the scene where she was found.”

Adele was grateful partly to be able to leave the small, stuffy motel room. And also, she was grateful to be moving again, to get out of a sitting position. No more hospitals, no more cramped motel rooms. A strange thing, to be grateful a crime scene was in a forest, but there it was.

“Let me get my jacket, I’ll be right there,” she said, calling over her shoulder as John moved from the table to the motel room door.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The stranger gripped the steering wheel of his van, moving at a gentle clip up the highway outside the Black Forest. He had a pleasant smile fixed to his lips, and he was humming softly with the dulcet tunes of classical music emanating from the speakers of his minivan.

Inwardly, though, the stranger’s mind was in an uproar. Looking at him, it would’ve been nearly impossible to detect the emotion. And yet, every few moments, his right hand would grip the steering wheel and twist. His left hand stayed stony. Still, motionless, empty.

“Run away, will you,” he murmured, quietly. He spoke to himself, still through smiling lips. The man was a chameleon. He knew how to play the part, perhaps better than anyone else.

A couple of drivers moved along next to him. These roads were generally empty late at night as people liked to avoid the patches of highway with broken safety lights, following the snowstorm two weeks ago. But during the day, a decent amount of traffic made its way through the forests.

The man, of course, used this road every day. This was his home.

And a home had to be respected. A disrespected home became a house. And a house became a burden. And a burden became something to abandon.

The man’s right hand gripped the steering wheel again, knuckling white against the leather.

Disobedience. So stupid. All children had to be punished. If they weren’t punished, they would misbehave. And there was nothing more damaging to a home than disrespectful kids. He’d grown up knowing that. He cleared his throat at the thought and adjusted the edges of his sleeve. Just above his left hand, he could make out the twisting, melted portion of skin that had healed poorly. The cigarette burns went all the way up his arm, over his chest, down his back. He’d known punishment. And it had made him turn out how he was. Well behaved. The smile constantly fixed to his face. People had often been drawn to him, purely based on his personality.

“You catch more flies with honey,” he murmured softly, reiterating a comment his mother used to say.

For the first time in a while, his smile flashed authentic, and he caught a glimpse of his teeth, well-maintained, pure white in the mirror facing back.

Everything about the man was well-maintained, neat. The interior of