Stolen: A Novel of Romantic Suspense (43 page)

That eerie, eerie sound was one that would stay with her, Shay knew.

She halted just outside the door and looked at Elliot. “You called Hilliard, right?”

He nodded and showed her his phone. It displayed a text.

Shay pushed through the door. The first thing she saw was the wheelchair. The second thing was the blood … always the blood.

There was a man on the floor with a bloody, gaping hole in the center of his body—it didn’t make sense at the time, and it wouldn’t connect until later. He wasn’t familiar to her at first, but then his head swung her way and she saw his eyes. As he stared at her, those pale, almost colorless eyes left her frozen.

Jethro—

She’d been prepared to see him. She thought. But the sight of those eyes, the dragon from her nightmares …

Stumbling, she fell against Elliot, and the solid, secure strength of him steadied her. Desperately, she reached over, needing something to hold. His hand was there, callused, warm, and strong.

“Your dragon isn’t much of a dragon these days.”

That voice was eerily familiar. Like her own … and like another’s.

My pretty little princess … you’ll be a good girl while I’m gone, right?
That almost memory snapped into focus, and Shay had a flash of her mother, standing in the door, a hand resting on the swell of her belly.
I love you, baby doll
.

It was obscene, she thought, that she should have that final memory of her mother, brought on by the realization that she and her sister sounded so much like her.

Obscene. And wrong. She wanted to scream at the unfairness of it, but even as the tears tried to fight free, the anger burned inside her. She could rage at the unfairness
all she wanted, but this bitch was the obscene one. The wrong one.

You saved yourself … you’re stronger than you think
.

By God
, Shay thought,
it’s about time I showed it
.

“I don’t know,” she said, and the steadiness of her voice surprised her. “I’m looking at a dragon right now that looks pretty fucking awful.”

In all honesty, Leslie didn’t
look
like much of a dragon. As Elliot had said, she was Shay’s height, but she was rounder, curvier. There was a resemblance, she thought, in the shape of the face, although Shay’s features were sharper, more defined. They both had black hair. The similarities were definitely there, although Shay didn’t know if she would have blinked twice if she’d seen this woman on the street.

Well, actually, she probably would have gone out of her way to avoid her. There was something in Leslie’s eyes …

Crazy bitch
.

Just like Elliot had said. Her eyes were off. And that was another thing Shay could remember from those vague, surreal days of her murky childhood. “You know when I’d go and hide away in the closet?” she asked softly, ignoring the man who lay bleeding on the floor, ignoring Elliot.

“Yes.” Leslie smiled. “You hid away from the dragon. But he can’t hurt you now. You’re starting to remember more, aren’t you?”

Shay nodded. “What happened to Darcy?”

Leslie shrugged. “She was in the way.” She reached for a cloth on the floor, carefully wiping away the blood that stained the knife she’d been holding at her side.

“I spent two years talking to you, thinking you were her. How did you manage that?”

“Oh, that part was easy …” Leslie cleared her throat and then she smiled. It was unsettling, the change that came over her face. But it was nothing compared to what happened when she
spoke
. “Hey, girl … it’s me! Darcy, you know … that silly little bimbo who jumps at your every little word …”

Shay squeezed Elliot’s hand, shaking as she listened to her friend’s voice coming out of a stranger’s mouth. It was surreal—so fucking surreal. “Impressive,” she said, her voice faint.

“Nah, that’s an easy trick. I learned how to do that in high school. I didn’t have any big problems with her, you know. She was just … in the way.” Leslie rose, still holding the knife and eyeing Elliot with a queer little smile. “People can’t come between us, Michelline. You’re my baby sister and it’s my job to take care of you.”

Something wrenched in her chest. If she even dared …

“Darcy was my friend,” she said quietly.

“I know you think she was. But she just liked you because of what you did. What you let her do. She didn’t love you like I do.” Leslie brushed it off and glanced over at a computer. Shay followed her line of sight and felt her heart bump when she realized she was looking at the front door of the warehouse.

A camera. Leslie had rigged up a fucking camera.

The cops—they’d be here any second. She shot Elliot a look and saw that he’d seen it as well.

Taking a step forward, desperate to get her sister’s attention away from that monitor, she said, “Can you tell me where she is?”

“Why?” Leslie just stared at her, a puzzled look on her face. Genuinely puzzled.

She didn’t get it. If it didn’t touch her, it didn’t matter.

“Because she was my friend,” Shay said again. Shaking
her head, she added, “Even if you think I wasn’t her friend, that she didn’t care about me, I cared about her. And her family deserves to know where she is. She had sisters … sisters are important, right?”

Leslie frowned. “This doesn’t matter to me.”

The man on the floor had been oddly quiet, but when Leslie looked down, he groaned, shrinking away as though that might protect him. “
This
matters … don’t you care that I’m taking care of the dragon?” Leslie knelt by him and dragged the blade up his chest. “He can’t hurt you anymore, princess.”

“It will matter more if you tell me what happened to Darcy.” She shot a nervous look at the camera as Leslie toyed with Abernathy. Still blank
—shit
. Then a cop car appeared. Followed by another, then an unmarked one.

Elliot shifted his body, minutely. Shay didn’t dare look at him. Leslie barely seemed to realize he was
there
. It was as though he didn’t exist for her, as long as he didn’t get in the way.

Like Darcy … like Abernathy. They had gotten in the way.

Abernathy made another one of those horrible whines low in his throat, and Shay stared in horror as Leslie pressed the tip of the blade into the hideous hole in his groin. Suddenly Shay realized why there was a gaping hole there, why there was so much blood.
Oh, shit
 …

“I just need to know what happened to her, Leslie. She had sisters, too. And they must be worried. Tell me, and then we can talk about him all you want,” she said, her voice reed-thin.

“Fine.” Leslie’s voice was truculent as she jerked the blade out of Abernathy’s body.

She stood and focused her eyes on Shay’s face. Shay had the sensation of being a fly pinned to a board. It wasn’t pleasant. “You, being the wicked smart writer
that you are, have probably researched all the ways to dispose of bodies. I got the idea from you … you really are brilliant, you know. I’m so proud of you, sweetheart.” Leslie laughed and the sound was high, almost girlish.

It sent chills down Shay’s spine. “Which idea was that?”

“Alkaline hydrolysis.”

Shay’s belly pitched and hurled.
I won’t be sick—I won’t
.

“She was already dead when I did it, don’t worry. It’s that so-called
greener alternative
to cremation. And it was so simple. Some lye. Lots of heat. Water. Pressure. And in a few hours, she was nothing.”

I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be sick—

Elliot’s hand gripped the back of her neck and squeezed. Gently, but firmly. Shay sucked in a gulp of air. The metallic stink of blood didn’t do much to settle her belly, but as she stared into the mad eyes of her sister, she realized the very last thing she could do was get sick. The very last thing she could.

“That isn’t exactly an easy process,” she heard herself saying. Another glance at the computer
—shit, the cop cars
. If Leslie looked over there now and saw them, what was she going to do? “You need lots of heat. High pressure …”

Leslie nodded. “Yes, yes … I know all about that. Don’t you remember me emailing you about what a fantastic idea that was? Do you know what I went to school for? Veterinary medicine. They never did let me in, but that was what I wanted to do. I worked at a vet’s office when I met Darcy. All I did was schedule appointments and shit, but I knew how to work the equipment. All self-taught. And he had the equipment I needed. I did a
few test runs on strays, late at night—I’d go in to file, help them get caught up. I’m helpful that way.”

“How considerate …”

As though Shay hadn’t said a word, Leslie continued. “Plus, I wanted to make sure I knew how to clean everything up—better to have to explain having a dead animal than a dead
girlfriend
. And she didn’t suffer any. She was diabetic, you know. Had crazy problems with her blood sugar and she didn’t control it too well. We were out drinking one night … she was totally wasted. I mean, trashed. When we got back to her place, she passed out. I checked her blood sugar … it was low. She never woke up.” Leslie smiled and her eyes gleamed with pure madness. “I gave her some insulin to make sure she wouldn’t. She died a little while later. You see, I didn’t really
kill
her. I just let her die. She should have taken better care of her disease and she would have been fine.”

“Yes,” Shay mumbled. The monitor was blank again. She couldn’t see the cop cars. Where were they? “Why did you have to kill her?”

“Why?” Leslie stared at her. The look in her eyes was the sort of look an exasperated parent would give a particularly frustrating child. “Sweetheart … she was in the way. And she was
using
you. I’d been watching you ever since college and I could see it then, but I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. You never talked to anybody but her. I needed to get closer to you and she was in the way. I realized that she was my chance to help you. To take care of you again.”

Take care of me—

Shay slowly started to see red. It had been creeping in over the past few minutes, but now, as she stared at her sister, it was as if a veil of it had fallen between them—an insubstantial mist that overlay everything she looked at.

And still, like an inane,
insane
chatterbox, Leslie carried on. “She was doing all of these silly little chores and she felt so important for doing them, but none of it really
mattered
. She also had ways to talk to you and I knew you weren’t ready to talk to me yet. So I just stepped in. She’d already moved away from her mother’s—it took me nearly a
year
to talk her into doing that, stupid girl. She was scared to death to tell her mom about the two of us and she never did. Which is good, because no one ever came looking for me.”

“Tell her mom about the two of you …”

Leslie grinned. “Yes. I figured out the best way to get to her. Darcy never did come out of the closet, but that was fine. I went into the closet with her … I could swing that way if it let me take care of you, Michelline.”

It was another brutal punch, because Shay remembered emails from Darcy. She’d met somebody. Somebody really special. Somebody who made her feel really special. Hatred, pure, bright, and shining, rushed through her but she throttled it down, refused to let it show.

Leslie turned her attention back to Abernathy. “Now, can we talk about
him
?” she demanded, her voice falling into that needling whine that Shay found all too familiar.

This
was the woman she’d been dealing with for two years. The woman she hadn’t particularly cared for, who’d pretended to be her friend. Darcy had died, been murdered by a woman she’d thought cared about her.

Darcy …

“Yes,” Shay said quietly. “Let’s talk about my dragons.”

“Dragons?” Leslie shook her head. “There’s just the one, sweetheart.”

“No.” Out in the hallway, she heard something … it was faint, but she thought it might have been a footstep.

Leslie’s head cocked and she shifted her attention to the door for the briefest second.

“I went into that closet all the time to hide from
two
dragons.” Shay dropped her gaze to the pitiful bastard bleeding on the floor. “Him.” Then she looked at her sister. “And you.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
HOSE FOOTSTEPS HAD BEEN QUIET, ALMOST SILENT
, but still, Elliot had heard them. Shay had heard them.

And so had her sister.

Leslie Hall moved over to the computer and reached behind it, and he tensed—everything was about to get ugly. Fast.

The gun in her hand looked small, unassuming.

It wasn’t.

He knew for a fact that a baby Glock could do a hell of a lot of damage. “Who is out in the hall, Michelline?” Leslie asked, her voice disturbingly void of emotion. And her eyes … they were as lifeless as a shark’s eyes.

Locked on Shay’s face.

That crazed bitch killed anything and everything that got in the way of her goal—taking
care
of her sister. Would she even try to kill Shay if
she
got in the way?