There seemed to be only one answer to these questions and it was like a second punch of dread to the chest.
Beatrice.
Ballard realized she had read the ex-wife wrong. Beatrice had told Trent about her.
But that still didn’t account for Ventura, for the jump from the customer named Stella to Ballard. Ballard had said nothing to Beatrice about going to the dealership and actually speaking to Trent.
She then recalled the call on the PCH and remembered telling Trent that she was out of town. He mentioned the surf truck. Had he tracked her through her van? She flexed against the bindings once more and still couldn’t move.
She then heard his voice, and it chilled her.
“Don’t bother, Renée. You can’t break those.”
Ballard looked into the mirror but could not see him anywhere in the room. Then he stepped out from an alcove and came up alongside her. He walked past and then turned to look down at her. With two hands he roughly pulled the gag down over her chin and left it hanging around her neck.
“Where’s my grandmother?” Ballard asked, her voice tight with fear. “What did you do to her?”
Trent stared at her for a long moment, seemingly savoring her fear.
“I assume she’s still sleeping in her bed at home,” he finally said. “You should be more worried about yourself.”
“What did you give me? You drugged me.”
“Just a little shot of ketamine. I keep it for special occasions. I had to make sure you were manageable during the ride in.”
Ballard immediately computed a piece of positive news. She knew about ketamine. Over the years she had dutifully read and studied all departmental bulletins regarding the spectrum of date-rape drugs that had come into vogue and then turned up in sexual assault cases. Ketamine’s primary and intended use was as an anesthetic. But she also knew that its effects didn’t linger long. She could already feel herself shaking off the trancelike lethargy she had awoken with just minutes ago. She would soon be fully alert. She had to count it as a mistake on Trent’s part, and where there was a mistake, there was hope.
“Fuck you, Trent,” she said. “You think you’re going to get away with this? No chance. There are people who know about you, people I’ve talked to. Reports written. I have a partner. I have a lieutenant. This is over. You are over—no matter what you do to me.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“I don’t think so, Renée,” he said. “They’re going to find your surf truck parked at a beach far up the coast from here, and there will be no sign of you anywhere. They’ll know that you’ve been unhappy, and even your grandmother will have to say you seemed distant and a little depressed.”
Ballard wondered if he had been in her grandmother’s house the whole time she was there. Had he listened to her conversation—what there was of it—with Tutu at dinner?
“Meanwhile, they may come talk to me, but what will they have, Renée? Nothing. They’ll have nothing. And I’ll have witnesses who heard me call you and tell you the car you ordered was in. They’ll say I begged you to come to the dealership but that you said no, you no longer wanted it.”
He paused there for effect.
“You’re the detective,” he finally said. “How does that play? No body, no evidence, no case.”
She didn’t answer and he came forward then and leaned down, putting one hand on the chair post next to her left ear for balance. He then reached down and dragged his other hand across her thighs and then down between them. She went rigid.
“You’re mine now,” he whispered.
She turned her face and tried to pull back in the seat, but there was nowhere to go. He brought his hand up and squeezed the muscle of her right biceps as if to check her strength.
“I like a good fight,” he said. “I knew when I first saw you that you could fight. You’re going to be fun.”
He then caressed her right nipple as he straightened up with a smile.
“Another thing I like?” he said. “No tan lines. I had you down for tan lines when I saw you at the dealership. That smooth brown skin—what are you? Are you Poly? Maybe half white, half Polynesian? Maybe a little Mexican too?”
“Fuck you,” she said. “What I am is the one who will take you down.”
He laughed at that.
“We’ll see, Renée,” he said. “And we can talk about all of that later. But right now, I have an important question for you.”
He then reached over to the table and picked up the key. He held it out in front of her face. Ballard recognized it—the key Beatrice had given her. She’d had it in the pocket of her jeans.
“Where did you get this?” Trent asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ballard said. “It’s not mine.”
“Well, I know it’s not yours, because it’s a key to my house. I tried it on the front door. But it was in your pocket and I want to know how you got it.”
“I told you, it—”
Suddenly Trent’s left arm shot outward and he grabbed Ballard by the throat. He moved in and used his leverage to slam her head against the back of the chair and hold it there. He leaned down and she could feel his hot breath on her face.
“Don’t lie to me.”
She couldn’t respond. His grip was crushing her airway. She could feel darkness closing in again before Trent finally let go.
She tried her voice but her throat felt damaged.
“I’m telling you, it’s not my key.”
“I found it in your clothes! I go through your clothes and find a key to my own—”
He stopped abruptly. He looked at the key, and Ballard saw a dark realization cloud his face.
“That bitch,” he said. “She gave you this. You talked to that cunt ex-wife of mine, didn’t you?”
“No, Trent,” Ballard said. “I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”
Trent waved the key six inches from her face.
“Liar,” he said. “She gave you this. She kept it and she gave it to you. So you could come into my home. That fucking bitch!”
He stepped away and raised his hands in fists next to his temples. Ballard could see the rage in his eyes. He then abruptly turned back to her.
“Well, you know what?” he said. “What I’m going to do is set up a little reunion with her and me and you, Renée. This is going to be fun.”
“Trent, wait,” Ballard said. “You don’t want to do that. You do anything to her, and it will bring the police right here to your door. You know that an ex-husband is at the very top of the list whenever a woman is murdered. With me, you might have a shot at getting away. Not her. Leave her out of this.”
Trent tossed the key onto the table and took a position directly in front of Ballard. He leaned down and put his balled fists on his thighs.
“Isn’t that all noble of you to try to save her like that? But what happens if, like the surfer girl, the wife just disappears without a trace?”
“Same thing, Trent. They come right here.”
“I don’t think so. Not when the wife is a sadomasochistic porno queen. You know what I think? I think they’ll say, ‘Good riddance to her.’”
“Trent, don’t do this. She has nothing—”
She didn’t get to finish. Trent reached forward and with both hands roughly pulled the gag up and back into place across her mouth. He then reached back to a rear pocket and produced a black eyeglass case. He opened it to reveal a syringe and small amber vial with a label on it. Ballard knew it was ketamine and he was going to drug her again.
“Just need to put you out for a little while,” Trent said. “And when I come back, we’ll have a party with my beautiful bride.”
Ballard struggled against her bindings, but it was a lost cause. She tried to talk against the gag but couldn’t form words. He stuck the syringe through the rubber top of the vial and drew a quantity of clear liquid.
“They use this stuff on cats and dogs,” he said. “
It works pretty good on humans too.”
He put the vial and eyeglass case on the table and went through the process of holding the needle up and flicking it with his finger.
“Don’t want any bubbles now, do we?”
Ballard felt tears forming in her eyes. All she could do was watch him. He then leaned down, putting one hand on the chair post again. He harshly stabbed the needle into her left thigh. Ballard jerked, but that was all she could do. Trent slowly pushed down the plunger with his thumb and she felt the needle’s contents course into her body.
“Hits pretty fast,” Trent said. “Two minutes tops.”
He stepped back and started putting the syringe and vial back into the case.
“Might need this with the bitch,” he said. “She knows how to put up a fight.”
Ballard watched him from a distance, as if through a tunnel. She could already feel the ketamine moving into her system, doing its job. She tried to flex her muscles against her bindings and couldn’t do even that. She was helpless. Trent noticed and looked over at her after snapping the eyeglass case closed. He smiled.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
Ballard stared at him as she felt herself slipping away. Soon the tunnel collapsed and became a pinhole of light. And then even that was gone.
27
Ballard tasted blood. She opened her eyes but was disoriented. Then it all came back. The upside-down house. The chair. The bindings. Trent. The gag had torn both corners of her mouth when he had pulled it back into place. Her neck felt stiff and hard to move. Once again, her vision wobbled as she brought her chin up.
The room was dark. Trent had turned the light off when he left. She could see only the dim outline of light around the curtains across the room. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious or how long it would be before Trent came back.
She looked around and saw a dark image of herself in the mirror, still bound. She tensed her body and found the bindings as strong and unyielding as before. She tried to calm her thinking and lower the sense of panic she felt.
She started with Beatrice. Trent had gone to get her. She knew where the upside-down house was and where Beatrice lived and worked. It was a minimum twenty-five-minute drive each way in routine traffic. If it was the middle of the night, he would be much faster. If it was the middle of the day, much longer. Trent would also have to find a way to abduct and control Beatrice. If she was alone at the warehouse, that would be one thing. If she was in the midst of video production, there would be people around, and that would complicate matters considerably and cost Trent time.
There were too many variables and none mattered, because Ballard did not have the starting point of knowing how long she had been unconscious. The one thing she did know gave her an adrenaline shot of hope. She was now alone and Trent had made a mistake. Earlier, when she had looked at herself in the mirror, she had seen that her wrists and ankles were bound to the chair posts with black plastic zip ties. They looked like the kind bought at a hardware store. Thin and designed to bundle cables or for other industrial and household needs, not the kind carried by police and used for binding human beings.
Regardless of their purpose or strength, Ballard knew that all zip ties had one thing in common; they were totally susceptible to the laws of physics.
In law enforcement, zip ties, or flex cuffs, were officially considered temporary restraining devices. They were not in the same league as handcuffs for the simple reason that one was made of plastic and the other was made of steel. There were plenty of stories and warnings passed in official memoranda, roll-call rooms, and the back hallway chatter of station houses. The message was simple: always keep your eye on an arrestee in flex cuffs. It didn’t matter how strong they were. Plastic is subject to the laws of physics. Friction creates heat. Heat expands plastic.
Ballard tried to move her wrists, this time not pushing against the restraints but rather moving her hands up and down along the vertical chair posts. The bindings were so tight that she could not move them more than a half inch either way. But one half inch up and one half inch down was enough. She started moving her arms like pistons, up and down, up and down, as quickly as she could, creating friction between the plastic and the wood. The hard plastic straps almost immediately started cutting painfully into her skin. But soon she could also feel the heat she was creating, and that pressed her to move her arms faster and harder.
The pain grew almost intolerable and soon she could feel blood starting to drip from her wrists down across her hands. But Ballard didn’t stop. And soon the half inch of movement became an inch and then two inches as she felt the plastic start to loosen.
She bit down on the gag and tears streamed down her face, but she kept going, stopping every two minutes by her count to quickly check the circumference of the binding. She was giving the same effort on both sides but soon it became clear that the binding on her left wrist was reacting to the friction and heat more quickly. She stopped the effort on the right side and doubled down on the left, sending all her strength into the piston action of her arm.
Her arm ached all the way up to her shoulder and neck but she pressed on. Soon blood and sweat on her wrist and hand made them slick, and suddenly, on an upward pull, her hand came all the way through the binding, its edge scraping skin off the side of her palm.
She had one hand free and she screamed into the gag, a primordial cry of release. She brought her bloody hand up, her fingers still numb, and managed to pull the gag down over her chin.
“Motherfucker!” she yelled to the room.
She moved quickly after that. Trent had left the key on the table. Ballard could see it glinting in the light from the sliding door. She reached for the table but was a foot short. Using her free arm as a pendulum, she rocked the chair forward until it tipped. As it toppled, she made a grab for the key, but she missed and fell face forward in the chair.
But now on the floor she could easily reach the leg of the table. She pulled it over and tipped it forward. The key slid onto the floor within reach. She grabbed it but her thumb and finger were too numb to get a secure grip.
She tried to shake life back into her left hand while she went to work with her right, once again moving her arm up and down the chair post. Soon she had enough feeling in her left hand to grip the key, and she used its teeth like a saw on the softening plastic binding her right. In moments the second binding snapped and both of her hands were free.
Still lying sideways on the floor, she unbuckled the belt that was around her torso. Her ankles were still bound to the chair. She turned onto her left side and, bending sideways, was able to grab one of the cross struts between the front and back legs of the chair. She tried to jerk it loose from the legs but it was solidly in place. Using the heel of her already bleeding hand, she swung a blow down on the strut and again it was unmoved. She hit again and then again with similar result.
She put everything into the next swing and wasn’t sure if the crack she heard was the strut or a bone in her hand.
“Goddammit!”
She paused a moment, until the pain eased some, then grabbed the strut and pulled. The wood had split and by pulling it in the middle, she broke it loose. She then slid her plastic binding down along the leg and free of the chair.
With all but one limb free, Ballard was able to manipulate the chair and brace it against the room’s wall. She then kicked through the remaining strut with the heel of her free foot, not feeling much pain from the impact because her foot was completely numb.
Finally free, Ballard sat on the floor and tried to rub feeling back into her ankles and feet. As sensation returned, they began to pulse with a stabbing, burning pain. She tried to stand and walk but was unsteady and she pitched forward onto the floor. She crawled the rest of the way across the room to the pile of her clothes.
Her clothes had been cut in so many places, they were completely unusable. Her hope that her cell phone would be in the pile was dashed as she remembered le
aving it charging in her bedroom when she had gone out to the garage.
She knew she would need to look elsewhere in the house for a phone and for clothes. She tried to get up again, putting her hand out and using the mirrored wall for support. She left a bloody handprint.
With her other hand she yanked back the curtain and saw that the light that leaked around the edges came from an overhead porch light. It was dark outside. It looked like the middle of the night.
Just as she realized this meant Trent’s travel time across the empty streets of the Valley would be considerably less than she’d hoped, the house seemed to shake with a loud vibration from above.
The garage door was opening.
Adrenaline flooded Ballard’s body. She moved across the floor, still unsteady on her feet. She opened the door to the room and stepped into a small hallway. She saw stairs going up and a trapdoor opening on the floor. She hesitated, then stepped back into the room with the mirror and closed the door. She knew where she was in the house but didn’t know the layout beyond the room she was in. She knew she could go through the sliding door and up the exterior stairs. That would put her naked and free on the street. She could knock on doors until she got to a phone and a 911 call.
But what about Beatrice? It was Ballard’s duty to protect and serve. If Trent had abducted his ex-wife, could Ballard get help to the house in time to save her?
She heard a door closing sharply up above. Trent was now inside.
Ballard looked around, and her eyes fell on one of the broken cross supports from the legs of the chair. It had splintered lengthwise to a sharp point. She quickly reached down and grabbed it, then tested the point against her thumb. It was sharp and it could break skin. It would be a matter of grip and thrust.
She moved behind the room’s door with her newfound weapon. And almost immediately she knew it was a bad plan. Her hands and feet were still partially numb and painful. The weapon she held required a close-in assault, and Trent was far bigger and far more powerful. She had the element of surprise but even if she moved in and stabbed Trent in the back, she would be unlikely to bring him down, and then she would be engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a much stronger foe.