Moments dragged by, moments that seemed like an eternity, moments that gave way to deeper night. She went through the Psalm again, focusing her thoughts, trying not to think about what awaited her. That shovel…that hole. That gun. That darkness.
Finally, when she thought she could bear it no longer, she heard the sound of his engine starting up, heard the car pulling away, heard it passing this place on the road, distancing itself from here.
Was he really gone?
She crawled out, looked around, saw only what the moonlight illuminated through the trees. He wasn’t here.
She got to her feet, feeling weaker than she had before. Blood pooled in her mouth. She spat it out and stumbled through the brush and trees, trying to reach the road. There had been no lights down this long, barren road. Maybe if she went the other way, farther down, she would find help.
She made her way to the road and looked to see if headlights searched the trees. She saw nothing. Staying close to the trees, she limped down the road, praying for rescue.
Eleven
Megan limped for what seemed like a mile and still saw no lights. Maybe she should go back in the other direction. Her phone had been thrown out the window somewhere along that road. Maybe she would hear it ringing or see it lighting up in the darkness. Then she could call for help.
She turned and went back that way, her feet slogging in mud. When she saw headlights coming, she thought of running out into the road and waving the car down. But something told her that it was her assailant, coming back to look for her. Knowing she could be passing up her only chance for help, she slipped behind the trees and hid as the person drove by. The car drove too slowly. Yes, it was him, all right.
Had anyone missed her yet? She was due back at her apartment hours ago. Maybe someone had called the police. Maybe someone would come.
As she walked back along the tree line toward civilization, she spat out more blood. She couldn’t move her jaw, and the pain of broken bones racked through her sides. Her weight on her knee ripped tissue with each step. What if she dropped right here in the dirt? How long would it take for someone to find her?
She kept going, not able to give up, walking what seemed like miles until the rain stopped and the clouds split, constellations marking the passage of time. She heard movement, the breaking of twigs, breath coming just on the other side of the trees. Could he have found a way to come at her from inside the forest? Or was something else stalking her?
And then she saw it. A deer, stepping gingerly out of the trees a few yards ahead of her. He grazed in the grass, then heard her and started. He peered at her through the darkness, his eyes locking with hers. Then he ran back into the woods, as if she were something to fear.
The knowledge of such gentleness just inside the trees gave her the feeling that all along that path was not evil. Maybe it was a sign.
Finally, she saw lights up ahead. A house, far back from the road behind acres of land—a house she hadn’t seen as they’d driven past earlier. One lamp burned in some room in the house. She caught her breath, thanking God, and dragged toward it, each landing on her right leg shooting anguish up her leg. She ducked under a fence and stumbled across damp earth until she reached a dirt driveway. Dizziness threatened to drop her as she got to the front door.
She reached the stairs and wobbled up them, banged on the door. What time was it? Was it the middle of the night? Would she wake someone from a sound sleep? Was anyone even home?
She saw a light come on upstairs, heard footsteps across the floor. She looked back toward the road, praying the predator wasn’t here somewhere, waiting for her. Dizziness came over her, and her mouth filled with blood again. She spat on the doormat and wilted to the floor.
“Who is it?” a woman asked through the door.
“Help,” Megan cried. “I need your help…phone.”
The porch light came on, and she knew they stared out at her, trying to decide whether to open the door. Finally, it cracked open, and she saw a kind-looking elderly woman, and a man with a rifle aimed right at her.
“Roy, she’s bleeding! Call 911!”
Megan didn’t allow herself to drift out of consciousness. “He…he was looking for me,” she said without moving her jaw. “He might come.”
The woman dropped to her side. “Honey, who did this?”
“A man…black town car. Please call.”
She lay in the shelter and security of that home, wrapped in a blanket and resting on the couch, as she waited for the police and ambulance to come. The kind couple paid no attention to her blood on their upholstery. For the first time since her attack, her mind sank into the exhaustion of her fight.
Megan stirred when the house filled with EMTs, and as they attended to her wounds and took her vital signs, she tried to give the police the information they needed. “He had a round face, brownish-gray hair, longer in back, touching his collar. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes. Black town car, leather seats.”
“Was there a name on the car? A company that he worked for?”
“No, he wasn’t a real driver. He’d been following me from my posts on GrapeVyne. He told me it wasn’t his car.”
As they put her on the gurney to take her to the hospital, she thanked the couple for helping her. As she was wheeled out, she saw the woman crying, the man comforting her.
Would they be able to go back to sleep, knowing a killer lurked so near? She prayed for their safety.
“Is there someone you need to call?” one of the EMTs asked her as they flew through town.
“Yes.” She thought of her parents, but then a more pressing concern rose to her mind. Her roommate.
“Oh, no, he has my purse and my suitcase. He’ll know my address. He has my keys. My roommate is there. I have to warn her.”
The EMT gave her his phone, and she called Karen’s cell phone. It rang until her voicemail picked up. Megan waited for the beep. “Karen, this is Megan,” she said. “A man picked me up at the airport and almost killed me. I’m going to the hospital, but he has our address. You need to get out. Go stay with Brennie or something. Don’t stay there. It’s not safe.”
She got off the phone and smeared the tears, touched one of the split places on her face. She didn’t even want to look in the mirror. “Please…could you ask the police to go by the apartment to check on her, and tell her to leave? She didn’t answer. She could be there asleep. He’ll go there and hurt her.”
The paramedic nodded. “I’ll talk to them as soon as we get to the hospital. What about your parents? They need to know what’s happened to you.”
She thought of her mother hearing of this. It would destroy her. The stress of this might do her parents in. Still, she knew it had to be done. They couldn’t hear about this from someone else.
“Okay.” Her dirty, blood-stained hands trembled as she took the phone and dialed their number. Her mother answered on the third ring.
“Mom?” She crumbled to pieces as she broke the news.
Twelve
The boy was brooding. Either he was mourning Ella’s death or guilt weighed him down.
David Carmichael, Ella and Krista’s father, wasn’t sure which it was. From his vantage point behind the wheel, hidden among the other vehicles in the Walmart parking lot, he watched the kids assembled around their cars, smoking, flirting, and gossiping, as if life went on.
For them, he supposed it did.
He rubbed his raw eyes, knowing he should have taken the sleep medication his doctor gave him after Ella was found. For the two weeks leading to her discovery, he had hardly slept a wink. How did a dad sleep when his little girl was lost? How could he even close his eyes, knowing she was out there somewhere with some maniac?
He’d dozed a few times in his chair, sitting with the phone and the laptop as he’d pored through her GrapeVyne Friends’ profiles, trying to figure out who might have abducted her or harmed her in some way.
In that two weeks, he’d lost ten pounds and aged
ten years. But he hadn’t been able to bring her back.
Since that time, he’d dreaded the mockery of nightfall. Each time he dozed, he had terrible dreams. He would jerk out of sleep and find himself covered with sweat, shaking like a drunk with the DTs.
The dreams bombarded him with images of suspects’ faces. Last night’s face was Tim Moore’s, Ella’s ex-boyfriend, whom she’d been forbidden to date. He’d cruelly dumped her, David had learned from her emails. Ella had fallen apart and chased him as if he were her lifeline. As if she had no one else.
Had he killed her to get her off his back?
He watched the eighteen-year-old who should never have had access to a fourteen-year-old girl. The boy leaned against his car, feet crossed at the ankles, looking down at the pavement as he smoked a cigarette. A girl breached the distance between him and the others and sidled up next to him.
He didn’t offer a smile. David wished he could hear what they were saying.
The girl looked young—too young to be with a guy that age. Maybe David would find her picture on Ella’s page when he got home. He could call and warn her parents that she might be flirting with a killer. He could tell police that Tim Moore was…
…was what?
The police had already ruled Tim out as a suspect, even though David told them that he and Ella had a relationship that ended badly. The kid wasn’t at work the night of her disappearance. So why hadn’t the police arrested him?
The girl said something to him, and the boy laughed.
Rage roiled up in David’s chest. He thought of getting out of his car and beating that grin off his face. He pictured himself grabbing the boy by the neck, dragging him into his car, and taking him out to that place where he’d buried Ella.
Help me, God. I’m not going to survive this.
Tim pushed off from his car and walked around to get in the driver’s side. The girl went to the passenger side.
“No,” David whispered. “Don’t get in.”
But the girl did. The car started up, and he saw Tim wave good-bye to the kids in the cluster. Then they pulled out.
David started his car and backed out of his space, watching to see which way they turned. He almost hit someone coming out of the store, slammed on his brakes.
When the person passed, he hurried to the exit and pulled out onto the busy road. He saw the old white Bonneville a few cars ahead and changed lanes to get closer. The car turned off and he followed, keeping two cars between them.
Where was he taking her? He thought of calling the cops, but they would just demand to know what the boy had done.
He followed them down several streets, until they came to a residential neighborhood near David’s house. Tim’s car pulled up to the curb of a small house with a well-groomed yard. The girl got out, bent back in to say something, then pushed the door closed.
David pulled into a driveway a few houses down, turned off his lights, and watched as the girl ambled across her yard and went in. Tim pulled away.
David waited until he was out of sight, then pulled back out of the driveway and followed him. He caught up to him as he pulled from the neighborhood back onto a busy street. His heart pounded as he followed him down some back streets…and finally to Tim’s own home.
David drove past as the kid got out and headed in.
But would he stay there for the night? He drove around the block, then came back and parked at the curb a few houses down. A light had come on at the back of the house. That was probably Tim’s room. He’d wait here a while and see if he went out again. If he did, he’d follow him.
Krista would tell him he was crazy to do this, but what else could he do? If the police had any leads, they hadn’t told him. Someone had to do something. Ella was dead. Her murder was brutal, her last hours torture.
What kind of father would he be if he let that go unpunished?
Hours passed, and his head began to ache. He hadn’t eaten since…when? He couldn’t even remember. Grief hung heavy in his throat, blocking out any appetites, except for revenge.
He wouldn’t rest until Ella’s killer was dead.
Thirteen
Ryan was in another meeting when the FBI called and insisted that they had to talk to him right away. He went to his office and picked up the phone.
“Ryan Adkins.”
“Ryan, this is George Carter, FBI.”
“Agent Carter, you probably need to talk to our team that works with law enforcement. They’ve been collecting the information your agency asked for about Ella Carmichael.”
“This isn’t about her. It’s a new case. A Rice student named Megan Quinn was abducted and attacked last night, here in Houston.”
Ryan closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. Not another one. “Don’t tell me. The attack is linked to GrapeVyne?”
“That’s right. She says the man told her that was how he knew where to find her. He’d been following her Thought Bubbles, and they led him right to her.”
“Wait. She told you? She’s not dead, then?”
“No, she managed to escape. She’s been able to give us some details about the perpetrator. But we need your help.”
Ryan woke up his monitor and typed in her name. Megan Quinn brought up five entries. He found the one from Houston and pulled her account up. She looked young, perky, cute, like Ella.
“Agent Carter, do you think this is the same person who murdered Ella Carmichael?”
“Could be. He told her he liked Christian girls, and Ella was a Christian too. It’s our strongest lead for the Carmichael case.”
“So what do you need from us?”
“I’m asking your security team to lock down her account, take snapshots of it, and give us a list of everyone who viewed her account for the last forty-eight hours, whether on the computer or on their cell phones.”
“All right. I’ll get my team working on it immediately.”
“I wanted to talk to you personally because we’ve got a real problem here. Guy’s still out there, and he has a voracious appetite. If we don’t catch him, there will be others. We’ll need full access to Megan’s account, and we’re going to set up some decoy accounts to lure him.”
“Have you compared the Friends the two girls have?” Ryan asked. “Ella was fourteen but Megan’s older, so they wouldn’t be likely to move in the same circles. Common Friends could be clues. But don’t trust your eyes. A predator would have a fake profile so he couldn’t be caught. The profile of a sixteen-year-old girl could really be that of a killer.”
“Yes, we have our cyber crimes agents working on it with us. We appreciate your help. Maybe we can get both of these cases locked up today.”
Ryan got off the phone and went back to Megan Quinn’s account, took snapshots of the days the agent asked for, then went back to the day of Ella Carmichael’s murder. Using code he had written to help his security team filter out bogus profiles, he ran a comparison of both girls’ Friends. Twenty common Friends came up.
He scrolled through the Friends, looking for evil, someone who would bury a young girl alive after beating her bloody. But everyone looked innocent and young.
Maybe Ryan could use GrapeVyne to help them locate this killer. And if it brought some peace to Krista’s family and to the girl who’d escaped last night, then it would be worth his time.
Fourteen
He’s here somewhere. I know he is.”
Krista whispered the words aloud to her computer screen. She hadn’t slept all night. She hadn’t even tried. Instead, she’d sat at the computer, taking copious notes about Ella’s GrapeVyne page. She’d filled three legal pads with details she’d gleaned from Ella’s Friends’ comments over the last year. Whenever she thought someone had posted something questionable or suspicious, she’d gone to their sites to see who their Friends were and what they were saying.
Out of Ella’s eleven hundred Friends, she’d screened about two hundred of them. That wasn’t nearly enough. But the details she’d learned a
bout these teenagers’ lives was enough to curdle her blood.
The girl whose face was up on the screen—a sixteen-year-old girl named Sara Miles—had given her Friends enough information to bring a predator right to her door. He would know the hours that she was home alone each day, what street she lived on, her parents’ names, her school and classes, her younger siblings’ names and activities. He would know that she was vulnerable and gullible, how she felt about her parents’ divorce, how intimate she got with her boyfriends. She was an open target for anyone with evil intentions.
Krista tried to think like a predator. He’d be like a lion in a butcher shop with this kind of information. He could literally shop through millions of targets, stalk his next victim, and hit when she was most vulnerable.
And none of these people realized they were playing into his hands.
The thought made her sick, literally. She felt her stomach churning, roiling, rising…
She got up and ran into her bathroom, vomited into the toilet. She flushed, then sat on the floor, waiting for the next wave. Leaning her head back on the wall, she thought of that stalker reading the things her sister had posted, driving by their house, watching for the right time. He probably got her Thought Bubbles on his cell phone. When she posted that she was going to Sinbad’s, he’d headed straight there.
When her stomach stopped heaving, she went back to her room. There was so much yet to be done.
She signed out of Ella’s account, and signed back in under her alias, Maxi Greer. A notification came up. She had twenty-five Friend requests. She went down the list, studying their faces and each of their profiles. Some of them she knew—they were Ella’s friends from school. But others were strangers.
She carefully wrote down everything she could find about each person before accepting them as Friends. A chill went through her. The killer could be here, behind one of these facades, stalking her already. She typed into her Thought Bubble,