Guilty as Sin (51 page)

“I thought I could help,” Magda said softly as she walked out after him, clinging to Christian’s arm. “I give a clue, point in the right direction—”

“It would have helped if you’d gone to the police years ago and stopped him!” Tommy wheeled around on her.

Magda began to cry softly. “He would send me back to Hungary without Christian, told me he would hurt him.”

“We’re not going to let anything happen to you or Christian,” CJ said quietly, “as long as you tell us everything you know.”

Tommy wanted to punch a wall, he was so infuriated. Magda might have finally had a crisis of conscience and given them a crucial clue, but there was nothing she could do to help them find Kate.

He listened impatiently as CJ scrambled a helicopter and several search and rescue boats. Within ten minutes, a boat from Bonner County Marine Patrol pulled up to the dock to pick up Tommy, CJ, and Deputy Roberts. In the meantime, another deputy had arrived to take a statement from Magda and Christian.

“I have no idea what his end game is or how he thinks he’s going to get away from us,” CJ said as the boat rumbled out into the water

Tommy’s jaw clenched. “There’s over a hundred miles of coastline and lots of places to hide for someone who knows the lake well.”

“Every boater and Jet Skier on the lake will be looking for him. We’ll find her, Tommy.”

K
ate didn’t think she was out for long, but it was long enough for John to bind her hands and feet tightly with zip ties and shove her to the deck of the boat. He hadn’t gagged her, but the rumble of the boat’s engine was loud enough to drown her out if she tried to scream.

CJ knows you were with John. Tommy does too. As long as you’re still alive, you can be found.

But how long would it take before they even thought to look for her? The only person who knew she was in trouble was Christian, and he’d bolted in a panic when John arrived. Would he think to tell anyone what he saw?

She’d stayed quiet, keeping a wary eye on John as he sped over the water, his head darting anxiously around, keeping his distance as much as possible from the other boats. After a while he slowed the boat down and finally parked it along the shore in a U-shaped cove that backed into a densely wooded area that looked completely deserted.

“I’d hoped to have more time to prepare for our trip,” John said tightly as he jumped down onto the beach to drive the anchor into the sand. “But your little discovery pushed up
my schedule a bit.” He hopped back on the boat and stood over her, shaking his head like she was a disobedient child. “There you go again, Kate, ruining my plans. I was already going to punish you for Tricia. Now I’m afraid it’s going to be much, much worse.”

He moved so quickly she didn’t even have a chance to brace herself before his foot connected with her stomach. She gasped in pain, barely able to breathe as he drove all the breath from her lungs.

She curled into a ball, bracing herself for a blow that didn’t come. Instead he was digging through the storage bins under the padded benches that lined the sides, clearly agitated when he didn’t find what he was looking for.

Kate tracked him as he paced, tapping his foot, checking his watch and the sky.

She didn’t know what he was waiting for, but if she had to guess, she’d say he was waiting until dark to start moving again.

Eventually he sat down in the captain’s chair, and though Kate tried to ignore it, she could feel his stare burning a hole through the top of her bent head.

“It could have been so different, you know,” he finally said. “If you had only understood how much I loved you.”

Her head snapped up. “You
loved
me? Is that why you planned to kidnap, rape, and kill me like you did to those other girls?”

“I never wanted to hurt you. I thought if I could get you alone for a while you would understand how much I cared for you—”

Her mind reeling, Kate said, “Is that why you kidnapped and beat Tricia? Because you cared for her? You think Ellie Cantrell and Stephanie Adler felt cared for when you were beating them to death? You’re a monster. I don’t know how I never saw it.”

“I’m not a monster!” John roared.

Fear pulsed through her as he surged to his feet and loomed over her, his face a furious mask, a thick vein throbbing in his forehead.

“I loved them! I loved them all! All I wanted was to love them and to care for them, but they were all a bunch of ungrateful bitches who weren’t capable of understanding how I honored them.”

His hands reached for her and Kate scrambled away until her back hit one of the bench seats.

Then with a shake of his head he seemed to catch himself, the fury dimming. “I never wanted to hurt any of them,” John said, sounding almost grief stricken. “But they would be so mean to me, so disrespectful, and I would get so angry…” His voice trailed off. “It always started out as a punishment.”

Kate swallowed back a surge of nausea, remembering his promise to punish her.

“It all worked out for the best, though,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact, stripped of any trace of grief. “If they couldn’t accept my love, I could hardly let them go.”

“So you had to kill them,” Kate said.

“I can’t let betrayal go unpunished,” he replied. For a brief second, a softer, wistful expression came over his face. It quickly disappeared, his expression once again stone cold. “But then she tried to leave me too. For eight years I gave her everything she could have ever wanted, and she showed me her gratitude by trying to sneak off in the middle of the night.”

“Jennifer didn’t commit suicide then,” Kate said.

“No one ever gets to leave me,” John said coldly.

Kate felt a surge of pity for the woman.

Something of it must have shown on her face, because he
sneered, “Don’t feel sorry for her. She was living in a trailer park with her meth-head mother who made her do disgusting things in front of a web camera to pay for her drugs when I rescued her. And when you think about it, you can blame her for what happened to Tricia.”

“How so?” Kate could barely choke the words out, disgust made her throat so tight.

“If she hadn’t tried to leave, I wouldn’t have needed to find someone new to love,” he said as though the answer were obvious.

“And now you’re back to me, full circle. You think you’re somehow going to convince me to love you?”

His mouth pulled into a smile that sent a chill straight to the bottom of her soul. “You think I want to be loved by Tommy Ibarra’s whore?” He squatted down until he was on her eye level. “You lost your chance a long time ago. But I realized the other day, when I had my hand around your neck, your body against mine, you could serve another purpose.”

Kate swallowed back a surge of bile as he reached out with one hand and ran his hand over her shoulder, down her chest until it covered her breast. His fingers closed over the curve, squeezing until tears gathered, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of crying out in pain.

“While I want my lovers to give themselves to me freely, I find that being around them inspires certain urges—” He gave her breast a meaningful squeeze to make his point. “After everything you’ve put me through, I think it’s a fitting punishment for you to be the one to satisfy them.”

As he bent closer, her gaze zeroed in on the gun held loosely in his other hand. If she could just get her hands on it…

She flung her head forward as hard as she could, satisfaction surging through her as she heard the crunch of bone as her head
made contact with his nose. He staggered back, and she hurled herself at his gun hand, her bound feet making her clumsy.

She scrambled with her bound wrists and managed to knock the gun out of his hand. She threw herself on the deck, grunting as his knee landed in her back. He flipped her over and she struggled to secure her hold on the handle as her thumb fumbled with the hammer. A metallic
click
, her index finger closed over the trigger—

In that split second John grabbed her wrists and twisted. There was a sharp
pop
, and pain exploded in Kate’s chest.

The gun clattered to the deck as Kate fell back against the bench. She was vaguely aware of him picking up the gun and shoving it in his waistband, screaming something about her not getting off this easy.

She wanted to tell him the pain wracking her was anything but easy, but she couldn’t get the words past her lips.

She chalked up the dimming of his voice and the retreating of his footsteps to her battle to stay conscious, and it took her a couple moments to realize he’d left the boat. Was he coming back? Had he left her there to die?

Either way she had to do something or she
was
going to die, either tonight from the gunshot or later when he was finished with her. Adrenaline rushed through her as her body gave a last gasp to save itself. She pushed to her elbows and knees, forcing past the pain as she inchwormed herself over to the captain’s chair.

It took several minutes, but she managed to struggle to her feet. Though she knew it was a long shot, disappointment wracked her when she saw the empty ignition.

She was about to sink back to the floor when her gaze
snagged on a panel built into the dashboard. Her heart kicked into a flutter as she read the dark, glossy lettering of the built-in GPS system. Tommy had used the GPS on her phone to track her that day in the woods.

Kate hoped this worked the same way, because her strength was fleeing as adrenaline faded.

She fumbled her bound hands toward the on button, keeping a wary eye out for Burkhart all the while.

She pressed the button, uttering a prayer of thanks as the display lit up.
It’s working.

Tommy spent the next few hours in an agony of helpless frustration as he fruitlessly scanned the lake for any sign of Burkhart’s boat from the deck of the sheriff’s rescue cruiser. Dozens of volunteers were searching the lake and the beaches by water and air and had thus far come up cold.

With a little digging into the purchase history of Burkhart’s boat, Tommy was able to get a line into the onboard GPS system.

Which would give them the ability to pinpoint Burkhart’s exact location. That is, if it had been turned on.

Psychotic or not, Burkhart was clever enough not to risk it, just as he hadn’t risked taking his or Kate’s cell phone with him on the boat.