New York to Dallas - J. D. Robb [5]
“It takes some time. Did Julie wake up?”
“He finished breakfast, and even took the dishes away. When he came back he gave her something else. I think I went crazy. I was screaming, I guess, and I tried to get loose. I thought he was going to kill her. I thought—”
“He didn’t. Remember that.”
“I couldn’t do anything. He slapped me a couple times. Not hard, just light taps. That was scary, too. He said if I didn’t behave he’d, Jesus, he’d cut her left nipple off, and did I want to be responsible for that? He had one of these hooks Julie uses to hang plants and stuff, and he screwed it into the wall. He used the sheets to tie her up, and hung them over it so she was sitting up when she came out of it. She was so scared. I could hear her trying to scream behind the tape, and she was struggling against the sheets. Then he put the knife to her throat, and she stopped.
“He said, ‘That’s a good girl.’ He said to me that two things could happen. He could cut Julie, nipples, fingers, ears, little pieces of her could fall on the bedroom floor until she was dead. Or I could have one hour to go to the Homicide Division of Cop Central and speak to Lieutenant Eve Dallas, deliver a message, and bring her back. If I took longer, he’d kill Julie. If I spoke to anyone else, he’d kill Julie. If I tried to use a ’link instead of talking to you in person, he’d kill Julie. I told him I’d do anything he wanted, but to please let her go. Let Julie go deliver the message instead of me.”
He had to rub fresh tears from his eyes. “I didn’t want to leave her with him. But he said if I asked that again, or anything else, if I questioned him in any way, he’d take the first piece off her so I learned my lesson. I believed him.”
“You were right to believe him, Tray.”
“He told me what to say, made me repeat it over and over while he held the knife on Julie. He cut me loose, kicked some clothes and the flips over. Sixty minutes, he said. If it took sixty-one, she’d be dead because I couldn’t follow instructions. I had to run. I didn’t have money or plastic or credits, nothing for a cab, for a bus. Maybe if I’d gotten another cop, quicker, he wouldn’t have had time to hurt her.”
“Maybe. And maybe he’d have slit her throat. That doesn’t take much time. She’s alive. I know this man, and you can believe me when I tell you he could have done worse.”
She pulled out her card, passed it to him. “You’re going to want to talk to someone about what happened to you. Someone who’s not a cop. You can tag me when you’re ready, and I’ll give you some names.”
She walked away, thinking of paperwork. She’d wished for murder, she remembered, and had gotten worse.
At Central, Eve used the bullpen for a brief, gritty briefing on Isaac McQueen.
“The subject is a thirty-nine-year-old male, brown and blue—though he changes both regularly. Six feet, three inches, at two hundred and twenty pounds. He has studied and is adept at hand-to-hand, including several areas of martial arts, and he kept in shape in prison.”
She flashed his prison ID on screen, studied the lines a dozen years in a cage had dug into his face. Women found him handsome and charming, she knew, with his slow, flirtatious smile. Young girls trusted his almost feminine features, the full shape of his lips, the twinkle of dimples.
He used that, all of that, to lure his prey.
“He favors knives as weapons and as a means of intimidation. His mother was an addict, a grifter of considerable skill who taught him the ropes. They had an incestuous relationship, often working a mark as a couple. She also fed his addiction for young girls. Together they abducted, raped, tortured, and subsequently sold or disposed of their victims until Alice McQueen’s body was pulled out of the Chicago River in the fall of 2040. Her throat had been slashed. Though McQueen never admitted to the murder, he is believed responsible. He would have been nineteen.
“He is also believed responsible for the abduction of at least ten minor females in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas, and the murder of Carla Bingham, Philadelphia,