in. She had to try. The pipe clunked as she struggled. Come on, you bastard, come on . . .
The door opened, and one of them stepped in. It was the thin sickly one. His face twisted in fury, spittle at the corner of his mouth. He kicked her in her gut, and she groaned, her breath gone.
Then the other guy strode inside, pulled the sickly man back.
“You make any more noise, I’ll kill you,” the sickly man snarled at her.
“Daniel, don’t. She won’t make any more noise. You see? She’s silent now.” The other man glanced at her. “You’ll be quiet while my friend and I talk, right?”
She nodded, still trying to catch her breath, doing her best not to throw up into her gag.
They left, shutting the door behind them. Their voices were low now, or maybe she faded away; she couldn’t be sure. She inhaled the fetid air and sobbed.
After a while she calmed down. Began to think. That guy, the one named Daniel, he wanted her dead. He was the violent one. The dangerous one. A psycho, a monster.
But his friend was different. He needed her alive, maybe for ransom. Isn’t that what he said? That she’d make everything better? He was probably talking about money. Maybe they thought her parents were rich. What would happen when they found out that they weren’t?
But then they said other things. Empty her into a bucket. It doesn’t work when it’s not fresh. What could it all mean?
The door opened again. The other guy stood in the doorway. He beamed at her.
“Don’t worry—we won’t hurt you. We need you alive. I’ll get you some food and drink later, okay?”
She nodded.
“But you need to stay quiet. If you make any noise, we won’t be able to keep you here. And we’ll have to kill you.” His voice was casual, straightforward. A man stating an unarguable fact.
Two psychos. Two monsters.
She tried to talk into her rag, and he shook his head. “Later. We can talk later.”
Then he crouched by her side and raised his hand. To her horror, she saw he held a small disposable scalpel. She let out a muffled scream, and he instantly put the scalpel against her throat.
“Remember,” he whispered. “You promised to be quiet. You’ll be quiet, right?”
She nodded, trembling.
He sliced the fabric of her right pant leg, exposing her thigh.
“This will hurt just a bit,” he said. “No screaming.”
The scalpel plunged through her skin. She tensed, her eyes widening, as the blood ran down her leg.
And the man put his lips to the cut and sucked.
CHAPTER 47
“Rhea’s office is that way,” Tatum said, looking down the street. He held the photos from the crime scene, matching the sunlit, peaceful surroundings with the dark, ominous images of blood, tire markings, scattered possessions. “She was walking home from work.”
“We don’t know that,” Zoe said, crouching to look at the tire markings on the sidewalk. “She might have been returning from a night out. Two in the morning is an unusual hour to return from work.”
“Her office has an alarm system, and they checked the logs. The alarm system was turned on at two twenty-nine. Martinez is there now to see if he can figure out why she left so late at night.”
Zoe stood up. “Look at all those windows,” she said. “Snatching a grown woman here, even in the middle of the night, is . . .”
“Insane?”
“Or very desperate.”
Tatum looked at her worriedly. She had that distant look on her again. Was she storing the details in her mind to relive the event at night?
It was after two o’clock. They’d gotten the lab report an hour before—the DNA retrieved from the blood on the keys matched the DNA taken from the saliva in the previous murders. It belonged to the unsub. The Rhea Deleon kidnapping case was officially part of their joint investigation.
“The van came from the direction of her office as well,” Tatum said. “Do you think they were following her?”
“Maybe,” Zoe said. “But I doubt it. She would have noticed a van driving slowly behind her. No, I think they were on their way somewhere, saw her, and decided to grab her. The unsub was probably driving. I don’t know if Glover realized it was about to happen.”
“That matches our theory that Glover’s cognitive functions are impaired and that he can’t drive.”
“It makes sense.” Zoe nodded. “Letting his accomplice take the wheel is a significant yield of control. Not typical for Glover, unless he had no