Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [528]
Her cell phone interrupted them and Dr. Patterson managed to grab it before the second ring, like someone expecting news, any news.
“Hello?” Then her entire face softened. “Hi, Maggie,” she greeted her friend. “No, I’m okay. Yes, I did meet Tully at Joan’s apartment. Actually, he’s here. No, here at my brownstone.” She listened for a few minutes then said, “Hold on.” She handed him the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Hey, O’Dell.”
“Tully, can you tell me anything about Sonny?”
“Well, we were able to get into her e-mail.”
“Already?”
“Dr. Patterson figured out the password. There’re daily e-mails from this guy, but we were just talking about that. They sound pretty chummy, in a friendly way, not a romantic way. Right?” He looked at Gwen for her agreement. “But here’s the thing. His e-mails stop the day she disappeared.”
“Can you track him?”
“I’ve got Bernard working on it. So far it looks like he uses a free e-mail account and there’s no customer profile on him anywhere that I can find. I’m betting he uses a public computer. Probably the local library or maybe one of those cafés that have computers available.”
“Have you talked to Cunningham today?”
“No, he’s in meetings all day. Why?”
“He managed to get out of a meeting long enough to call me.”
“Uh-oh. You’re busted?”
“Not sure. Look, Tully, I just don’t want you getting into trouble for helping me out on this.”
Tully glanced up at Dr. Patterson. She stood on the other side of the counter, sipping coffee and watching him, thinking he was focused on listening to O’Dell when he couldn’t take his eyes off of her.
“Tully, do you hear me?” O’Dell was saying in his ear. “I don’t want you getting into trouble over this.”
“Don’t worry about it, O’Dell.”
CHAPTER 39
He fixed her soup, hearty chicken noodle. It was just canned—that’s all he had—but it smelled good even after he had dissolved the crystals in it. She’d never notice the tiny white residue. Especially after he crumbled saltine crackers into it.
He placed the small bottle back behind his mother’s secret stash, her array of “home remedies” that included molasses and honey and vinegar alongside cough syrup and plenty of children’s aspirin. The brown bottle contained the magic crystals she insisted would make him well. It wasn’t until after she was gone, her control over him broken only by death, that he discovered the brown bottle with the real label hidden underneath an old expired prescription. The real label simply read in bold, black letters, “Arsenic.” He had kept it just as he had found it, realizing that some day he might need that kind of control over someone. And he had been right.
He found her sitting at the window, exactly where he had left her with the restraints now wrapped around the chair. She stared out at the woods through the tempered glass. He had specially ordered and installed the custom-made glass himself. Thick and unbreakable, it allowed a view and let the sunshine in, but on the outside it simply looked like a mirrored solar panel for heat. It provided an excellent work environment—sunny and cheerful, yet private and quiet, protecting his specimens.
She looked up at him. This time her hand didn’t move, though he could see the red welts on her wrists where she must have fought the leather restraints again. And then he saw the scratches and grooves in the chair’s arm. She had ruined the wood. She had done it on purpose. His mother’s chair, a Duncan Phyfe he had reupholstered himself, and she had ruined it by rubbing the buckles of the leather restraints into the wood.
He felt the anger rising but it came with bile, threatening to back up from his stomach. He could taste it. No, no. He couldn’t be sick. He wouldn’t. He mustn’t think about the chair. No anger. He couldn’t afford to make himself sick.
He placed the tray on the table next to her and avoided looking at the scarred chair arm.
“You must be hungry,” he said, as he pulled up a stool from his workbench.
“I don’t feel so good, Sonny,” she mumbled. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why? Why?