Particles of Obsession (A Shadow of Death Romantic Suspense Book 2) (10 page)

Time comes in ripples. A few minutes of consciousness, followed by blank spaces that I either can’t remember or I’m not conscious. I don’t dream, I don’t feel rested. I’m not even sure if I wake up every time she takes blood.

Over a day has passed, but I can’t be certain exactly how much time has passed. I just know that the killer walks in while the sun is still shining through the window. She’s not in costume this time, but in her black clothes and ski mask. She unlocks the handcuffs, and my arms drop down beside me.

“It’s time to go,” she says.

“What?”

“It’s time to go.”

Images of a dug-out grave and being shot in the head fill my mind. She smiles at my expression.

“No, I’m not going to kill you,” she says. “I’m setting you free after some arrangements are made.”

“What arrangements?”

“I’ve told you enough,” she says. “You should just go on with your life. Meet a man, have children, exercise everyday so that you don’t die from heart disease.”

“Heart disease isn’t always caused by a person’s lifestyle,” I mutter, my mind barely grasping what’s happening.

“True,” she says. “Sometimes it’s caused by abnormal conditions.”

Abnormal conditions: where all things terrible and all things pure are created.

* * *

T
he killer parks
near the college. It’s dark out, so maybe a day hasn’t passed by. How much blood could she have taken from me within a day?

She loops her arm under me and pulls me out of a car. I don’t think she owns the car—the backseat had a child’s car seat, cereal littering the seat, a stuffed monkey, a duffle bag with a soccer ball patch sewn onto the front, and a pamphlet that makes me think of the pamphlets Jehovah’s Witnesses give out. Then again, it could be her car. I haven’t really figured out any details about her except her obsession with John.

She helps me walk to the greenhouse. It’s lucky that she’s strong. My feet barely graze against the grass that has grown a little too long. With the school previously on lockdown, maybe none of the employees were allowed to mow it.

She helps me sit down on the grass in front of the greenhouse and pulls out a handgun. I can’t see well when there’s just moonlight and I can barely keep my eyes open, but I’m still wary of being shot.

My body slumps over and I close my eyes. Time begins to jump all over the place again. In a half-dream state, I imagine that I’m a time traveler, and I can’t remember anything I changed in the past because that would disrupt some time continuum. What would I change?

I would save my sister. I would save Andre. I wouldn’t have gone into my parent’s magic shop alone. Or maybe I would have, in order to not endanger anyone else, but I would have been more prepared for an attack. I would have believed John sooner, and I wouldn’t have been afraid of caring for him…or maybe loving him. I would have written down my life story in order to prevent people from walking down the same path I did. The killer is right in a way—my actions have been selfish. Maybe she would have stopped killing after Alex if I had just disappeared. I could be living in Mexico or some island far away. The police would never find me and she would…

She would have found a way to kidnap John.

John—there he is, his footsteps soft in the long grass.

It’s as if the thought of him has beckoned him here to the greenhouse.

“I’m alone,” he says. “You don’t have to worry.”

“I always have to worry,” the killer says. “You’ve been a lot more proactive than I thought you would be. It’s not like you’re a murder-mystery writer.”

“Well, my apologies for caring about who’s killing off my students,” he says. “Am I allowed to know who killed them off yet? Or are you going to stay hidden all this time?”

“I know you’re angry, but this will all make sense—”

“I’m well past angry at this point,” he says. “You have killed all these people and for what? To get my attention?”

“Let’s just go,” she says.

“I’m not going to go anywhere until you explain things to me.”

“That wasn’t our deal,” she says. “You said you would come away with me without resistance or any secret plans if I brought her back here alive and left everyone else alone. That’s it. That’s all I had to do. If you break your side of the bargain, make no mistake that I have no problem breaking my side of the deal.”

“No,” he snaps, his voice cutting through the air like a blade. “We’ll go. She’s not part of this. She never should have been. But we need to…we need to call someone or something. You can’t leave her out in the cold like this.”

“We’ll use one of the campus emergency phones,” she says. “Let’s go already.”

As I open my eyes—barely, seeing only a tiny slit of the world—I can see the shadow of the killer and John. I want to get up, to tackle the killer, to yell to get someone’s attention, but my mind goes blank again.

I
climbed
into Alex’s window. He was pacing back and forth, his movements so jerky, it looked like he could have been an android.

“What was so urgent?” I asked. “Why did you need me here so quickly?”

“You lied to me,” he snarled, continuing his frantic pace. “You shoved a note into that forensic scientist’s mouth? Tell me, just fucking tell me why you would do that? She has nothing to do with your anger over these students. She can’t impede your success. Why would you attack her? The only reason is that you were jealous of her for spending time with Dr. Zimmer. You lied to me. You
are
in love with him.”

“We’ve already talked about this,” I said, my thoughts racing to find the perfect explanation. The perfect lie. “I’m not in love with him. The only reason I did what I did to the forensic scientist is because she was investigating us a little too closely. It was to protect you.”

“You didn’t need to assault her to protect me,” he said. “You could have left misleading evidence or called in with a false tip. There was a thousand easier ways, but you acted like a savage bitch. The only time you’re irrational is when you’re emotional, so don’t try to make this about me. You’re in love with
him
. You’re a hormonal bitch that can’t stop humping his leg.”

“Did you ever think it
is
about you?” I hissed. “Maybe I was emotional because I was afraid they would track the poison back to you.”

“No,” he stated. “You would have told me if you were afraid. You would have told me to be more careful. You would have involved me in your plans. This was personal for you. You may see me as some stupid frat boy that you can manipulate, but you should know by now that I’m so much more than that. Have you read the papers? They refer to us as the Shadow because they don’t know how people are getting killed. I can do the same thing to you and nobody would know what happened to you. You’d just be victim number four and quickly forgotten. I’m the only one who truly cares about you. Your parents don’t care, you don’t have friends, and let me assure you right fucking now that Dr. Zimmer could not give two shits about you. You have nothing except for me.”

I wrapped my arms around my waist, my arms forming an “X” over my stomach.

“I killed for you and this whole time, you’ve been in love with him,” he said. “How could you do this to me?”

I glanced away from him. The gun on his nightstand was one I hadn’t seen before. I wondered if he had bought it legally and if he had recently bought it to kill me. If he had bought it to kill me, he wouldn’t have gotten it legally. If there was one thing he was proud of, it was the fact that he could commit crimes without leaving a single trace.

If he was going to kill me—if he was even planning to kill me—I wasn’t going to go down without tearing him apart, too.

“I didn’t do anything to you,” I said. “You did this all to yourself. You knew from the beginning what this was all about. You were just in denial. Don’t act so shocked and angry. You were just too in love with me to care about what I truly wanted. Guess what? I never wanted you, so I guess you have one less thing than I did.”

“You fucking bitch,” he snarled. He reached for the gun.

I had no choice. It was kill or be killed. It was self-defense or whatever you want to call it. You can’t dodge a fucking bullet. You can’t escape from a room before a bullet pierces your spine and your boyfriend puts three more bullets in you out of spite.

I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and the gun with my right. As I spun around to point the gun at his head, I could see his eyes widen. He always had a tendency to forget that he wasn’t the most athletic one in this relationship, nor was he better with guns.

In his eyes, I could see him as a little boy, proudly showing his science project to an indifferent father figure. I could imagine him as a young teenager, pretending to not care about chemistry while all of his friends got into sports. I remembered him telling me as we were tangled up in the sheets of his bed that he had only slept with one other woman before me and it was his mother’s thirty-six-year-old best friend. He had never told anyone that before because they began sleeping together when he was thirteen and he felt wrong every time he thought about it.

I pulled the trigger.

There was no thought attached to the bullet as it tore through his skull. I hadn’t even been noticed, at first, that it had a silencer, and the silencer worked quite well. I just knew that this was a man who told me he loved me, who acted like he loved me, but he didn’t truly love me. When you loved someone, you loved them recklessly, completely, without reservation. I loved John despite his affection for other young women. There was nothing he could ever do that would make me stop loving him or even cause my love for him to lessen. That was how love worked.

Alex’s body fell to the bed, and I tried to feel something about shooting him, but I couldn’t.

“Did you hear that?” a voice downstairs asked. The silencer may have worked well, but that didn’t mean the gunshot was completely silent. I wiped the gun off with one of Alex’s blankets. I stared at him for a few seconds until I heard someone knocking on the door.

“Alex? What’s going on in there?” the male voice asked. “Did something get knocked over?”

I slipped out his window, closing it behind me. I got onto the roof of the patio and climbed down the tree. Even with this deep ache in my chest, I’d known that this would have had to happen eventually. I would have left Alex for John and Alex wouldn’t have tolerated that.

Still, it was a shame. He was a good partner and now I had to travel the rest of this journey alone until John understood my place in his life.

In that sense, this was a new beginning.

“
S
he’s lost
about thirty percent of her blood volume. We found a needle hole in her arm, so the only conclusion we can draw is that a syringe was used to withdraw it—”

“But why, doctor?” Detective Stolz’s voice mutters. “I know your concern is with the medical aspects, but did you notice anything else? She’s been missing for nearly six days. Can you tell if she was withdrawing the blood herself, or if it was someone else?”

“You think that she was withdrawing blood from herself, then stopped by the college’s old greenhouse, and someone else called for help, then vanished?” the doctor asks.

“It’s possible,” she says. “Maybe she wanted us to believe she was dead, so she was saving up her own blood to leave in the greenhouse.”

“Well, did you find any bags of blood at the greenhouse?”

“No,” Stolz grunts. “But…why would someone else be taking her blood?”

“Maybe she sold it on the black market,” Detective Macmillan suggests. “Maybe she was selling it behind campus.”

“I’m sorry, detectives, I don’t think so,” the doctor says. “With how much blood she lost, someone else had to be involved. She would have been too weak to even walk to the greenhouse. She wouldn’t have been able to drive either.”

I open my eyes. As I expected from the sterile smell, I’m in a hospital. There’s a needle in my arm, transfusing blood into my body. It makes me feel guilty—people took the time out of their day to donate blood and it’s going to me, the idiot who got captured by a psychopath.

Detective Stolz and Macmillan step into the room.

“You’re awake,” Stolz says, pulling up a chair next to my bed and sitting next to me.

As I look over at her, I realize for the first time that I’m handcuffed to the hospital bed. I suppose when I’ve spent the last couple of days chained to a bed, I get used to the feeling.

“How are you feeling?” Stolz asks.

“Shitty,” I say.

“That’s understandable,” she says. “But are you feeling well enough to tell us what happened?”

“It’s a long story,” I say, and I mean it. I’d have to start explaining from the moment I decided to break into Alex’s room.

“Well, lucky that I have no one to go home to,” she says. “Do you want to start at the beginning, or skip to the part where you’re missing a lot of blood?”

“I didn’t kill Alex,” I say.

“Mmm,” she says. “Okay. So, how did your DNA get on the window sill?”

“I showed up there after he was killed,” I say. “I was going to, I don’t know, confront him, maybe I was going to kill him. But he was already dead when I got there. I knew how it would look, so I took off.”

Stolz leans back into the chair, crossing her legs. Her eyebrows are slightly raised in amusement. She doesn’t believe me. I might as well keep going.

“I decided my best bet was to hide out with John Zimmer. He was hesitant to believe me, but he decided to give me the benefit of the doubt.” I pause, leaving the thought of
unlike the rest of you
out of the conversation. “We tried to figure out who really killed Alex. I now know that someone else influenced or was the mastermind behind Alex’s victims. Alex never had any motive to kill those people and he had said something to me about not knowing everything behind the murders, so I knew there was more. He never told me what I was missing, so I could only assume that someone else was involved that he was protecting. This person sent us part of Kiona’s ear as some kind of threat after John sympathized with Kiona in his blog.”

I take a deep breath, exhaustion setting in, but I know I have to get my whole side of the story out.

“Will John corroborate all of this?” Stolz asks.

“So, we decided to use his blog to our advantage,” I say, ignoring her question. “We would lure this killer out by pretending that John and I had fallen in love and I would be at the greenhouse alone. She did come out—”

“How did you know it was a she?” Stolz interrupts.

“She spoke,” I say. “She said…
I don’t want to hurt you
. She managed to escape, though. She’s strong and athletic.”

“Why didn’t you ask for the police to back you up?”

“Because you were all assuming I was guilty of murder,” I say. “If I told you where I was, you would have just arrested me. After that, I heard about the whole thing at Costume Artillery. I thought I could sneak over to the shop by going through my parent’s store, but that was what the killer expected and she ambushed me from there. She kept me in some hotel as a hostage. I think she was trying to get John to do something for her by, I don’t know, showing that she was hurting me. And I guess after she took my blood, John came to the greenhouse. He promised her that he was alone, he got her to call for help on one of the campus phones, and he promised to leave with her. I don’t know where they went.”

“So the one person who can back up your story has disappeared with this killer?”

“Yes,” I state. “I swear I’m telling the truth.”

“What does the killer look like?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Macmillan is standing outside of my periphery now, but I can hear his sigh fill the room.

I ignore his sigh. “She was dressed in this old Victorian outfit. I assume she stole it from the costume shop and it covered her face. Her hands were pale, so I assume she’s white.”

“Tuskmirth has mostly white students,” she says. “That isn’t helpful at all.”

“I’m sorry—I was busy being tortured. Do you think I slashed my own leg up too?” I ask.

She tilts her head. “We’ll check out your story. You did have some flunitrazepam in your system. Do you remember anything about the motel room?”

“It was small. The room had dark green drapes. There was…the bed that had white sheets, there was a wooden nightstand right next to it, a couple of lamps with navy blue shades. There was a painting…it had a red barn on it and a few cows. A wooden desk, and the bathroom. I don’t remember going into the bathroom, but she drugged me, so I could have gone in there, but I don’t have any memory of it.”

“Right,” she says. “I’ll try to look for that. Do you have any idea how far away it is from Dr. Zimmer’s house or the college?”

“No.”

She grimaces. “Macmillan and I will go check out some motels.”

I lift my hand so that the handcuff chain clinks against the hospital bed’s side rail.

“Is this really necessary?” I ask.

She shrugs, standing up. “I would have trusted you not to run before, but now…nope. So, they stay on.”

“Stolz,” I say. Her first name is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. Kate? Kelly? Kristy? She turns around to look at me. “Just find John. Please. My alibi doesn’t matter right now. He could be in danger. She’s crazy.”

She nods. “I’ll do my best.”

“Feel better,” Macmillan says, following her out.

I look down at my handcuffed wrist. I can’t stay here. The detectives have good intentions, but they haven’t made the leap of faith to believe me. They’ll never figure out who she is before she either kills John or escapes with him to another country.

I was too young and naive to save my sister, but this time I’m fully aware, and I’m not going to let him die.

* * *

M
acmillan returns
to my hospital room that night. He sets a small, stuffed dog beside my bed.

“I know people usually give gifts at hospitals, but I wasn’t sure what you would want,” he says.

“I love it,” I tell him. I reach toward it, but the handcuffs stop me an inch away from it. I force a smile. “It’s great. I love dogs. It will be nice to have some company.”

He picks up the stuffed dog and sets it down on my lap, which brings him very close to the edge of my bed. I take his hand with my left hand—the one that isn’t handcuffed—and squeeze it.

“Thank you, Macmillan,” I say, letting go of him. He sets his hand on the bed’s side rail. “This is really generous of you.”

“It wasn’t that expensive,” he says. “It’s not a big deal.”

“It is a big deal,” I say, picking up the toy. I rub its ears between my fingers, enjoying the soft texture. “Everyone thinks I’m a murderer, but you have to have your doubts if you’re buying me this.”

“I think, even if you did do it, it doesn’t make you a bad person,” he says. “Even Stolz has to understand that if someone kills another person’s loved ones, they have some karma coming after them.”

“But I didn’t kill him,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, nodding. “Well, then, I’m sure we’ll find some evidence to back that up.”

Though I have no personal feelings for Macmillan, I wish a little bit more of him believed in me. John believed in me.

“Have you figured out where John is yet?”

“No,” he says. “Stolz and I checked all of the places he could be, but he’s not there. Stolz actually sent me over to ask you some questions about things we found since she figured that you don’t like her all that much.”

“She doesn’t like me,” I say, trying not to sound sulky. “I’m just being kind enough to return the feelings.”

“Right,” he chuckles. “Okay. So, we know about the ear. What about the perfume blood?”

“Excuse me?” I ask. “The what?”

“You don’t know about that?” He pulls a file out from his bag and flips it open. He takes out a crime photograph and shows it to me. It’s an old perfume bottle—round, made of glass with etched designs in it, and has a cord and bulb attached to the intricate top. There’s some kind of dark red liquid in it.

“That’s blood?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “If you didn’t know what it was, we suspected it was your blood.”

I grimace. “It could be.”

“There are a couple more antique perfume bottles like this—filled with blood—so it makes sense,” he says. “Especially if she was trying to threaten him into doing what you said. Our forensic team…I mean Ed Bunt…he’s checking to see if it’s yours.”

“Look, Macmillan,” I say. “You have to realize I wasn’t the one who killed Alex. I mean, I was in forensics. If I had really wanted to kill someone, I wouldn’t have left forensic evidence behind.”

“That’s true,” he says. “But it doesn’t prove anything.”

I reach forward and grasp his hand. It feels much warmer than I expected. He looks down at our hands.

“John Zimmer’s time is running out. Quickly. I’m the only one who can figure this out. I’ve had more contact with the killer than anyone. If I could just see the crime scenes, walk where the killer has walked, just be part of the investigation, I’m sure I could figure this all out.”

“You could just tell me what you know.”

“Macmillan, you know that’s not how witnesses work. We remember better when we’re in the right circumstances. The killer said a fair amount to me. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of it, but I’d remember it better if I could dwell on it on my own.” I move my hand back to my lap. He watches it leave his hand. “Just, please unlock me from this bed. You have good instincts, Macmillan, I know you do. You know I’m innocent. I can’t just sit here while John has gone off with that psychopath. I need to find him. His life is in danger.”

“Stolz would kill me,” he says.

“Well, then the police will arrest her,” I say. “Macmillan—”

“My name is James,” he says.

“James,” I say. “Please. Please.”

“I can’t,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

He turns abruptly, half-stomping out of the room. I open up my right hand, where the handcuff key is. I had taken it out of his pants pocket—where it always is—when he had set the stuffed dog on my lap. When I had first squeezed his hand with mine, it was a simple magician’s trick my father had taught me—diversion. If a person’s attention is drawn somewhere else, you could literally rob them blind.

Then, I just needed to convince Macmillan that my only option to escape was through him and make him uncomfortable enough that he would leave. He’s an authoritarian—I knew there was never a real chance he would have set me free.

Now, I just need to hope he doesn’t check his pockets for the key for the next five minutes.

I unlock the handcuffs and find my clothes folded up in a plastic bag. The jeans still have a slash on the thigh and blood on them, but at least I’ll be clothed and won’t draw too much attention to myself as I leave the hospital.

The sun is beginning to set. Time flies when you’re always a fugitive.