Red After Dark (Blackwood Security #13) - Elise Noble Page 0,118

no sign of him. The jars were the only possibility for sustenance.

Rune shuddered. “Either food or body parts. This place feels like a serial killer’s lair.”

As best as we could ascertain, we were in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. There was no traffic noise, but the local wildlife seemed particularly active at night. Screams and grunts and cries were commonplace. A bear or a serial killer both seemed very real possibilities, as did Bigfoot. The place was straight out of a horror movie.

I cringed as I reached for a jar, then nearly dropped it when something skittered over my hand. Another spider? A centipede? A cockroach? Yuck. I wiped away some of the grime and held my prize up to the light. Orange blobs floated inside.

Rune stood on tiptoes to read the label. “Peaches. August eighteenth, 1982.”

“Urgh. They’re ancient. Probably full of bacteria.”

“I’m not so sure. Alaric bought me a book on shipwrecks, and I remember scientists testing hundred-year-old canned goods they found underwater and concluding they were edible.”

“Really?”

“The vitamin content had degraded, that’s all.”

In the absence of any other options… “I’d better try them first.”

I popped the top on the jar, flipped it back, and gave the contents a sniff. What do you know? They actually smelled like peaches. I wiped my hands on my jeans and fished one of the slimy little suckers out of its juice.

“Wish me luck.”

It didn’t taste of an awful lot, which I guessed was a good thing under the circumstances. I gave a quiet whoop.

“It’s okay! Can you eat them?”

“As long as I’m careful about the salt and sugar content.”

“Here, try one.”

There were at least fifty jars stacked up, and if even half of them were edible, we could cope for a fortnight. As long as I didn’t succumb to hypothermia without my sweater, that was. At least I’d worn a raincoat on my visit to Riverley—Rune and I could curl up under it at night. Would Alaric be able to narrow down our location? Would Black pay up? Or would Ridley come back and finish us off first?

CHAPTER 46 - EMMY

“WE FOUND HIM once, and we’ll find him again,” Black told Alaric, but fifty hours after Beth and Rune had been taken, we were worryingly short on clues.

We knew for certain that Ridley was our perpetrator, at least. The police hadn’t been convinced at first because what escaped murderer would drive a hundred miles hell-bent on revenge instead of going to ground? A psychopath, that was who. We explained that, but they were still sceptical until we presented them with DNA evidence.

It was Barkley who found it. When we got back to Riverley, the first thing we did was stop to inspect the crime scene, and she’d escaped from the car, bounding around as a dozen people tried to catch her. We’d all been annoyed until she started barking at the ring she’d found in the grass.

Beth’s ring. Alaric had bought it for her before they left London. Sparkling blue sapphires to match her eyes, a sort of pre-engagement ring, he said. Bloody hell. They were that serious?

Alaric had bent to pick it up, only for Black to smack his hand out of the way.

“Don’t touch. It’s evidence.”

“There’s blood on it.” Alaric spoke in a choked whisper. “Beth’s hurt.”

“We don’t know whose blood it is. Somebody get me a pair of gloves and an evidence bag.”

A Rapid DNA test gave us the answer we needed—Beth had injured Ridley. Good on her. I only hoped his retaliation hadn’t been too devastating.

We found Beth’s phone in her handbag and Rune’s smashed beyond the treeline, but what we couldn’t locate anywhere was Rune’s insulin. Alaric insisted she kept a supply with her at all times, and if she still had it intact, that might buy us some time.

Which let’s face it, we desperately needed since we only had two solid clues. Firstly, we knew Ridley had stolen a dark green Toyota sedan back in Norfolk. The woman he’d carjacked was shaken but miraculously unharmed. However, nobody had seen the car since, and thanks to the story being front and centre on every news bulletin, the whole damned country was looking for it.

The second clue? Tennessee. We knew Ridley had been near Sevierville yesterday because that was where he’d sent the ransom note from. He probably thought he was being cute, submitting it via the comment form on Blackwood’s website, but he most likely didn’t realise we’d recorded the IP address of his