Without Mercy - Lisa Jackson [54]
Her hands fell limp at her sides.
The fingers around her throat clamped even tighter, crushing her airway.
Somewhere high overhead, the owl hooted and flapped his great wings, but she couldn’t see or hear him. The only sound was the rush of blood in her ears. The only vision was the shadowy face of her assailant.
In those last few seconds of consciousness, Nona Vickers realized that she’d lost more than her virginity this night; she’d also given up her life.
CHAPTER 14
Cooper Trent woke up in a foul mood.
After a restless night, he gave up, rolled out of bed, and slammed shut the window he’d cracked open, thinking that the cold mountain air would help him sleep. Not that it mattered, as this old cottage was so poorly insulated that the elements tended to seep right through the walls.
Daylight was hours from splitting the night sky, but that was just too bad. He wasn’t going to spend another second tossing and turning and wondering what the hell he was doing here. He thought about what he’d discovered in the past few months, and it wasn’t much. Something was going on beneath the surface of this institution, but he hadn’t been able to put his finger on it.
Some of the students had opened up to him about Lauren Conway. In his phys ed classes, he’d done a few lectures about stress and relaxation, leading students to talk about things that bothered them. In two classes, the topic of Lauren’s disappearance had come up. Student opinion seemed to fall in two categories: those who thought she had been killed by the school while trying to escape, and those who’d thought she made it. “I like to think that she got away from this school and away from her parents. I can just see Lauren living in some city somewhere with a job and her own apartment. She’s living a life and laughing at Blue Rock,” Maeve Mancuso had said, and her friends Lucy and Nell had agreed.
“Even though she was a TA and had come here voluntarily?” Trent hadn’t been able to follow Maeve’s reasoning.
“Yeah, well, that was probably the first step into breaking away from her family.”
“She was twenty. Of age.”
Maeve’s frown had indicated he didn’t know anything. “Some parents run your life forever. Just ask my older sister!”
Maeve had an unrealistic theory, one that lacked foundation. If Lauren had escaped these mountains last November, she would have been spotted by someone in a nearby town or seen hitchhiking on the interstate.
Trent hadn’t pressed the issue with Maeve and her friends. To argue vehemently or in any way remind them that he was an authority figure would undermine their trust, and he needed the kids to open up to him if he was ever going to find out what had really happened to Lauren, which was, of course, his real reason for taking the job at Blue Rock.
Trent had also overheard a few conversations suggesting that a group of students had formed some kind of secret club. “They meet after dark, and you have to be hand-picked to join.” This he’d gathered from the buzz in the boys’ locker room. It sounded like a fraternity, but he’d found no evidence that the school was involved. Though he didn’t agree with all of Blue Rock’s policies, so far the teachers and staff seemed to be true to their mission. Blue Rock was a school dedicated to helping at-risk kids find their way back to their families and God. Some of their practices seemed extreme, but no school activity could account for Lauren Conway’s disappearance. Kidnapping and murder were not a part of the curriculum.
And the faculty was tight-lipped. Stiff. Which didn’t help him at all.
Trent wished he had something more definitive to report back to the Conways, since they’d hired him to find their daughter, but so far, he’d come up pretty damned empty-handed.
Scraping a hand over his whiskered jaw, he walked to the window, then snapped the shades open. What was the story with those dogs, barking in the middle of the night? They’d shut up after a while, but they’d shot all chances of sleep to hell.
He tossed on yesterday’s jeans and his faded