Concealed
Sydney’s battered body pressed tighter against the door until they finished making the turn. For a second, she debated finding a way to open the door and fling herself out of the car, but she had a feeling she knew where they were headed and there was no way Sydney was letting this woman go there alone. She’d just have to bide her time and wait for another moment to run.
They drove a while longer, and then the car jerked to a stop. Sydney’s suspicions were confirmed when she saw the fuzzy outline of her home in front of them.
“What do you want?” Sydney’s voice was rough as if she hadn’t used it in months. “Where’s Wade?”
The woman spun on her so fast, Sydney didn’t have time to dodge Marcy’s hand as it slapped across her face. “Sorry to do that but you need to sit back and relax. We have a little situation going on at the moment. Just be quiet and let me think, please.” She flashed a knife and tapped the edge on the steering wheel. The silver of the blade reflected in the moonlight. “What do I want? If I’m being honest, I really don’t want anything from you. I, for one, am glad you have Faith. But the others, well, they’re not. They’re really angry and—” Marcy winced, grabbing her head. “They’re fighting me on this. They have been ever since that night.” She looked toward the house, her eyes wild. “I was right to give her to you, but they’re going to take her from you. And not you, or your hunky boyfriend, are going to be able to stop them.”
“No! You can’t have her.” Sydney screamed and tried to ram the woman with her shoulder, but she was swatted away like she weighed next to nothing. Marcy’s hand slammed down hard on Sydney’s neck, pinning her face against the dashboard and cutting off her airway. When she spoke again, Marcy’s voice was noticeably rough, deeper.
“Now listen here, you bitch. Touch me again and I’m gonna start snapping bones. We understand one another?”
All she could do was nod her head and stare at the woman strangling her. In the course of a few seconds she had changed, not just her temper but her face and voice too. There was a roughness to Marcy that hadn’t been there before and it terrified her. And Sydney couldn’t help but wonder who were the ‘others’ Marcy kept mentioning? Was she working with someone? Had Ronald and Marcy been together, stalking her all along?
Marcy released her and Sydney gasped for air. “I-I love Faith.”
“So does her mother!” she growled, the knife, now in her right hand, sliced wildly through the air as she stabbed at the leather beside Sydney in anger. There was a momentary flurry of motion and curses until Sydney once again felt the tiny prick of the knife positioned against her side. “You do remember her, don’t you? The woman who carried her for nine months, loved her, sang to her, and dreamed of a life with her.” She leaned across the seat, her face inches from Sydney’s while the steel of the blade dug deeper into her side drawing blood. “Do you know what you did to her when you took her baby? You broke her!”
The way Marcy kept referring to herself in the third person was alarming. Sydney’s internal warning alarms were going off. The mood swings and the rage were scary, but strangely familiar. She thought back to her mother’s ranting and the months she spent in the women’s shelter. She’d grown up around mental illness all her life. This woman obviously wasn’t stable, but just how ‘broken’ was Marcy?
EVENINGS AROUND THE ELTON sheriff’s office were typically uneventful. At least they had been until two murders rocked the small town to its very roots. Add to that the nightmare that was going on with Sydney. Now Wade’s days were full of conference calls, questions, and visits from all branches of law enforcement, it seemed. What he wouldn’t give for a quiet evening right about now.
Wade glanced at the clock to find the hands had barely moved at all since last he checked. Earlier in the day, he had reached out to an old bird at a local police station in Montana that was so small it made Elton look like a metropolis. He was hoping this would be the lead he needed to confirm who this man from Sydney’s past was so they weren’t tracking a ghost. But the person he needed to speak with hadn’t been in, so Wade left an urgent message. And he was slowly going insane from the wait.
He had been searching the Internet for days to pin down the exact town where Sydney had been when she left the highway that night. He was hoping to confirm that one of the men who worked there years ago, a volunteer deputy, was named Ronald Washington, or ‘Donny’ to his friends. Wade dug further and found that, even though Donny had been with the sheriff’s office, he was a sleaze with a string of arrests for assault, a number of domestic charges, and restraining orders that were all later dropped by his wife, Amanda.
The calling card of a habitual abuser, Wade thought to himself.
A little more than three years later, he had disappeared. Maybe he went on the run, maybe his wife finally took a shot at him, or maybe he found a secluded cabin and became a mountain man. Whatever the reason, the guy was a ghost now, which really bothered Wade.
The piece of information that didn’t add up was the fact that his wife was named Amanda, not Marcy. Sydney suggested that maybe Marcy had been a girlfriend he kept on the side, which was a definite possibility. However, if that was true, it was going to make it difficult to connect her to Faith without more information. If he confirmed Ronald’s identity it would at least be a starting point. Wade was desperate for something to sink his teeth into on this case. He was hoping this local sheriff’s office would give him answers rather than raise more questions.
Until then, he considered several ‘what if’ scenarios with the facts he had.
What if this guy got a partial plate on Sydney that night? She said he watched her drive away. If he wanted to find her, he had a lead. It’d be a long search, but if he was in with the law enforcement, he had connections. It would explain how he would have been able to track her over the years and how he could find her when she moved. As far as Marcy went, if Sydney was right, Ronald could have easily disposed of her body that night in the mountains of Montana and then went back to his life with Amanda. Stranger things have happened. The problem was, Wade liked to deal in facts, not speculations. And right now, he was praying for just one fact he could work with to help Sydney.
His eyes wandered to the clock again. “Seriously? How busy can they be in nowhere, Montana?” Wade stood up and raked his fingers through his hair in frustration. He wasn’t used to standing around waiting. The inaction was killing him.
“Easy, boss. There’s probably an escaped cow or two they have to get off of the highway.” Sam laughed, trying in vain to lighten Wade’s mood. He’d been pacing all afternoon and the guys knew something had him stressed. They assumed it had to do with what was going on with Sydney. Everyone at the station believed it was a simple case of harassment, but they didn’t know the half of it. “You know Billy went to check on that injury accident in Hightown?”
“Yeah,” Wade scrubbed his hand down his cheek, “I’ll swing by the diner and get Sydney when her shift ends.”
So much had happened in the last few weeks that Wade found himself sifting through the images in his head. The woman they found dead at the edge of town, then Angie’s lifeless body was dumped behind the diner, Sydney’s face when he told her that there had been someone in her house, Wade making love to Sydney, waking up with her draped across his chest, the smile Faith gave him when she opened his present, the shattered windows on Sydney’s car. The good all intertwined with the bad into a never ending nightmare.
Frustrated, Wade grabbed the file on Angie’s murder off his desk and thumbed through it again. Right on top was the picture of her, face down and covered in stab wounds beside the dumpster. A dumpster he found a picture of Faith wedged behind. Wade stared at the scene for the thousandth time, looking for something small he might have missed. He couldn’t help but feel like it was right in front of him.
Sam looked over his shoulder and shook his head. “You have to stop staring at that picture. You could probably draw it from memory by now.”
“I’m missing something. There’s something here.” Wade set it aside and flipped through the countless lab results done on the blood and tissue samples found near her body. Nothing out of the ordinary, of course.
“Wade, you’re doing everything you can to find her killer. Whoever this was, they were good, and the sonofabitch took their time. They did their homework and planned this out.”
Wade froze, and grabbed the photograph again, holding it from a distance and compared it to the woman they found in Greenville. He’d been thinking the same thing since he arrived on the scene that night, but he hadn’t dared to say the words out loud. The build, the hair color, and age were a match in both pictures.
Dead ringers for Sydney. Coincidence or design?
He was in Elton. Ronald killed both of these women on his way to town and he’d been there for days.
Wade let his mind acknowledge the truth he had been avoiding. He grabbed the file the FBI had left about the other murders they were trying to connect these ones to. As he flipped the pages, all the women were blonde and early twenties. On his second pass he noticed the cities they were from all aligned with where Sydney had lived recently. Indianapolis, Nashville, and he’d bet if he were to ask Sydney, she would confirm she had, at one time, been in Decatur, too.
“Shit,” he said as he threw the file onto the desk. “He’s been following her all along. But he seems to miss her by a few months every time.”
“What are you talking about?” Sam reached down and picked up a paper that had rolled under the fax machine. He absently looked at it, before his eyes went wide with surprise and he handed it to Wade.
“I don’t care about another fax from the Feds.”
“You’ll care about this.” He thrust the paper at Wade more forcefully. “I think we found the guy you’re looking for.”
Wade skimmed the fax from a California court of records and found a J. Ronald Washington’s date of birth…and death. “It’s not him,” Wade mumbled but he kept reading, looking for anything that could help. Was he the brother of their man? There was a case number scrawled at the bottom, so he had Sam pull it up on the computer. He barked at Mrs. Watts to call the diner and tell Sydney to stay put until he got there.
“Oh, Cara called about fifteen minutes ago, Wade. You were on the phone with the guys from Greenville. Sydney headed home early. She wasn’t feeling well.”
“This isn’t happening,” Wade muttered as he scrambled around the office, searching for his phone on his desk. He needed to hear her voice, then he could calm down and figure out what all this meant. But for now he had to know she was safe.
Because something told him she wasn’t.
“His wife, Amanda, killed him.” Sam’s head popped up over his monitor with a grim look on his face. “It was a total bloodbath. He was stabbed over a hundred times. Amanda was on the run for a long time. Her lawyers claimed insanity and she’s been locked up for the last two months in Atascadero which is a mental hospital outside of Fresno. That explains why you couldn’t find them in Montana.”
He had started to dial Sydney’s number when he found her text message. “We don’t have any female officers,” he said to himself then realization slowly started to hit him. The events of the last weeks fell into alignment, and the one common thread to all of them was Sydney.
He grabbed Sam by the collar. “Go find Sydney and call Billy back, now. One of you take the route from the diner that goes past the pond, another one of you go past the farm and I’ll go to her house. I want to know the moment you see her headlights, understand?” He didn’t wait for a response, he grabbed his jacket and started calling Sydney’s cell phone repeatedly, praying she’d pick up. When it clicked over to voicemail, he thought his head was going to explode. He was almost out the door when Mrs. Watts screamed his name.
“I don’t have time for this.” He went outside and drew up short when he realized his cruiser was missing. “Where the hell is my car?”
“Wade, it’s a doctor from a hospital in California. She said she had to speak with the sheriff, that it’s an emergency.”
“I have to find Sydney!” he bellowed, his fear and frustration bubbling over until he felt a trembling hand on his arm.
“I think this is about Sydney,” she whispered, turning his blood to ice. With a vile curse, he stormed back inside and grabbed the phone off her desk.
“What?” he snarled into the mouthpiece, unable to keep from pacing as he listened. He had too much adrenaline in his body, too many places he needed to be.
“Sheriff? Is this the sheriff?”
“You need to start talking, now. I’m in the middle of an investigation and you’re holding me up. Talk fast.”
The rage in his voice made her cut to the chase. “My name is Dr. Margaret Lee and I’m a physician at Atascadero. There’s a woman, a patient of mine, headed in your direction, I believe.” She rattled off her name and DEA number as proof of her identity. Mrs. Watts took the piece of paper Wade handed her and ran to his computer to check it out. When she confirmed the woman’s identity, Wade started peppering Dr. Lee with questions.
“The mental hospital? You work in California?” The car Luke saw in town had California plates. What were the odds?
“Yes. I believe someone is in grave danger which, you know, exonerates me from doctor patient privilege. I have a patient, a very disturbed woman by the name of…”
Wade didn’t wait for her to finish, his worst fear coming to life. “Amanda Washington.”
“You know her?” She sounded somewhat relieved, but Wade’s irritation was growing by the second.
“I know of her. Why is she coming here? From what I understand, she killed her husband and is locked up.”
“She was locked up. Then, about four weeks ago, she escaped. Somehow she snuck out during a shift change in the infirmary, but that’s irrelevant. She’s been my patient for the last six months while she was awaiting trial, and in that time I got to know her very well. When she’s on her meds and lucid, she’s reasonable but when she’s off them, I have serious concerns.” The woman was rattling off the information as fast as she could, but it was still taking too long to get to the point.
“A crazy woman is coming to Elton. Tell me why?”
“Do you know a woman named Cindy or Sydney? The last name I have for her looks like Jackson, but I think she’s going by something else now. I’m sure there’s more than one Sydney in town, but she has a little girl who goes to—East Elementary? I tried calling the school, but they refused to give me any information.”
“What does Amanda want with this woman?”
The woman was quiet for a moment and when Wade was about to demand an answer to the question, she finally spoke. “Have you ever heard of DID or Dissassociative Identity Disorder?” Every word out of this woman’s mouth was ratcheting Wade’s anxiety higher. He kept looking at his phone, hoping and praying for a message from Sam or Billy saying they found Sydney.
His throat closed up, but he managed to grind out, “It’s like multiple personalities, right?”
“Right. Amanda is the main personality. She’s cripplingly depressed. If left to her own devices, she’d sit in a dark room and not speak unless spoken to. She has other personalities that aren’t as…docile.”
“You need to talk faster. Much faster.” Wade’s knuckles went white on the receiver of the phone. Mrs. Watt’s eyes were huge as she eavesdropped on his side of the conversation, clearly not liking the part she could hear.
“She has a personality named Marcy who is her caretaker. She’s the one who was the peacemaker for Amanda. She always tries to smooth over things and make Amanda’s life easier. Her other personality, he’s more explosive. Charles is her guardian. When Amanda cannot defend herself or feels physically threatened, he surfaces and he can be incredibly violent, so use caution. He broke her husband’s arms and fractured his skull multiple times before he died.”
A thought came to Wade. “Is he a smoker?” When
the doctor confirmed his suspicion, Wade let out a string of curses. The cigarette butts on the shattered glass from Sydney’s car made sense now. Tara may have done the damage, but this Charles personality had also been there.
“I think she’s already here.”
“I was afraid of that. I got a letter a few days ago, saying she was going to, I’ll quote her, ‘Take back that which was rightfully hers and stolen from her by a whore in the night.’ The writing sounds like Charles to me, his violent nature showing in it. Next, I received a picture of a woman and a young girl walking down a sidewalk. Off in the corner I could make out the name of the school. You have no idea how many East Elementary schools there are in the United States. Then today, in the mail, I received the article from your local paper about the woman who was killed at a diner.”
“She’s killing women that look like Sydney,” Wade mumbled to himself.
“That’s what the note indicated. I believe that Charles is the one exacting his vengeance here. Amanda desperately wants her baby back, but she isn’t capable of searching for her, or even caring for her if they were reunited. But Charles comes out and will go off like a rabid dog after her heart’s desire.”
“I think she might have Sydney.” It chilled him to the bone to admit that, but neither Sam nor Billy had called to say they’d found her. Mrs. Watts was on the phone, jotting something furiously on a notepad. She didn’t look happy as she handed him the paper.
Found her empty car by Connor’s field.
“I have to go,” Wade ground out through gritted teeth, his anger barely contained.
“Wait!” the woman yelled in desperation.
“She has her!” he shouted, taking his aggression out on this faceless stranger. “I don’t think you understand me.”
“The girl is who Amanda’s after. She claims she wants her daughter back. I have no idea if the child is real or not.”
“She’s real. I’ve met her.” Wade gripped the phone tighter as his stomach turned.