Level Five (30 page)

             
Teddy held his gaze for several long moments.  “Are you asking me as a Detective or as your friend?”

             
“The answer should be the same either way.”

             
“I intend to work this case with the assumption that she’s still alive.” 

             
Jake could tell by the lift of Teddy’s chin that he wasn’t going to get any other answer out of his friend.  But he knew the truth.  Teddy thought she was probably dead.  The only hope that kept Jake going was the knowledge that if this was the same man who had taken Kelly and then Maggie, there had been no other missing woman reports that fit that particular profile.

             
If the perp hadn’t taken another woman yet, then there was a slight possibility Edie was still alive.  And that slight possibility kept Jake going.  He was beginning to believe what Frank had believed, that until Edie’s body was found, there was always hope.

                       
Chapter 28

              Edie roamed her small space in the center of the room, dreading the time she’d see
him
once again. She thought it was either Saturday or Sunday, although she couldn’t be sure.

             
She glanced at the laptop on the floor, the white page with the blue edges stared back at her, waiting for words to fill the empty space.

             
Her swollen eye was healing and her head no longer ached.  When she drew deep breaths, she still felt a bit of pain in her ribs, but for the most part she was healing.

             
The last couple of days had been relatively peaceful ones.  Anthony had come in each evening with a handful of notes scribbled on a legal pad. He’d watched as she typed them in.  His story had grown to fifty-two pages and he seemed pleased by the progress.

             
She was aware that with every word she typed, she grew closer to death. Once his story was finished he would have no more use for her.

             
There was no way to slow the process.  She couldn’t claim writer’s block for he provided her with the material to write.  She couldn’t say she needed more time to type up his notes. All she had was time.

             
Doomed.  The word had thundered through her head all day long. She was relatively certain that by now she’d been reported missing, but how was anyone going to find her? 

             
She was lost in a madman’s hoard, a treasure he’d picked up off the street to admire until he tired of it.  Apparently he kept everything except the women who had come before her.  He got rid of them easily, yet couldn’t throw away a piece of paper or a plastic sandwich wrapper.

             
Doomed.  Once again the word slithered through her head. She tried to stuff it back, swallow it away.  She refused to give up hope. It was as fragile as the spider webs that decorated the room.

             
She paced over to where the stacks of paper began just outside the bathroom door.  Here the stacks were three deep, the one closest to the wall rising up to just shy of a foot from the ceiling.  He had to have stacked them using a ladder. 

             
As she heard the ding of the microwave, she scurried back to the laptop and sat in front of it…waiting…hoping that it would be another good day with him.

             
She figured about ten minutes passed and then she heard the familiar sound of a key unlocking the door.  He walked in with his folding chair, the legal pad and an apple.  He set the chair against the wall, closed the door and relocked it.

             
Since he’d taken the chain off her ankle he never left the door unlocked even when he was inside with her.  It was as if he didn’t want to take a chance that she might somehow overwhelm him and escape out the unlocked door.  Like that was going to happen, she thought dryly. 

He was giving her just enough food to keep her alive, but not enough to keep her strong.  He tossed her the apple. She caught it in her hands, noticing that it was soft and bruised on one side.

She would eat it all anyway.  The past couple of nights her dreams had been filled with visions of food.  Pizza, sweet and sour chicken, chocolate cake, her stomach apparently spent her sleeping hours talking to her brain.

The food dreams were far better than her dreams of Jake.  When she awakened after a dream about him and Rufus, she was nearly incapacitated with grief and despair.

As Anthony set up his chair in his usual position, she ate the apple.  When she got to the core she looked at him questioningly.

“Just leave it.  I’ll grab it when we’re finished for the day.  I don’t like to throw out things with seeds.”

Edie nodded, not expecting anything less and not wanting to imagine where he kept pieces of fruit and vegetables that contained seeds.  “What day is it?” she asked.

“Saturday.
  Why?  You have a plane to catch?” He laughed but the laughter quickly died. A hardness crept into his eyes.  “You want to get on a plane and fly right out of here?”

The smell of danger filled the room, a smell like sulfur, of danger barely leashed and ready to explode out of control at any moment.

“Of course not,” Edie said with a forced lightness.  “We have a book to finish.”  She held her breath and then slowly breathed as he remained in his chair.

Danger passed, at least for the moment, but Edie couldn’t fully relax.  There was an edge to him today, a tension that made him appear bigger than usual.  She would have to tread softly.

“Right,” he said with over enthusiasm.  “We have a book to finish.”  He tore off several pages from the legal pad he carried and handed them to her.  “I spent the morning writing notes about things I want you to include in my story, things that remind people that I’m the victim.  I’ve always been the victim.”

He might have been a victim once, she thought, but the choices he’d made as an adult had been his alone, just like she had to own the choices she’d made.

The only difference between them was that he’d turned his rage outward, killing women in an attempt to ease his pain. She’d turned her rage inward, keeping herself from knowing any true happiness and love.

He got up from the chair and handed her the papers, then began to pace, his steps short, the heels of his shoes making staccato snaps against the wood floor.

Was today the day she would die?  He was wound so tight. One of his hands slapped against his leg as he took each step.  The sound reminded her of how that hand had felt against her cheek. A simmering fear iced her fingers, making it difficult to type.

He stopped suddenly and she felt his gaze on her.  She looked up at him, tensed for whatever might come.  “When your sister died, did you feel sad?” he asked.

“Her death devastated me and my parents.”

He frowned thoughtfully. 
“The killer, Greg Bernard. Did you feel any pity toward him?  I read some of the accounts of his trial and he said he’d been beaten and sexually abused by his father when he was a kid.”

Edie felt it was somehow a trick question.  She knew Anthony identified with victims. Just from the question alone, it was obvious he saw Greg Bernard as a victim.

“I felt bad for what he’d suffered as a child,” she finally said carefully. The words made her feel sick to her stomach.  No matter what had happened to Greg Bernard as a child, he’d been a monster. The man before her was a monster, too.

“What’s your favorite rose color?”

She blinked at the swift change of topic.  “White.  I’ve always loved white roses.”  A jagged pain pierced her heart as she remembered the last time she’d received a dozen white roses from Jake.  He’d surprised her with them on their two-year anniversary of dating.

“I have a rose garden, but I don’t have any white roses there yet.”  He began to pace again. The tension in the room suffocated her.  “There were six before you. 
My projects.  They were supposed to fix me, to help me deal with my rage and finally make me whole.”

Six.
  Six innocent women.  Edie’s horror made her fingers pause on the keyboard. Her insides went colder than they’d ever been.

And then there were seven.

She stared up at him, trying desperately to keep her features schooled to not display her internal emotions. If he saw any judgment on her face she’d pay the consequences. 

“I knew in my heart they weren’t the right ones.  The first one did nothing but scream.”  He clapped his hands over his ears as if tortured by the memory.  “She lasted only a day and then I had to shut her up.”  He dropped his hands to his sides.    

“As much as I knew they were the wrong ones, I knew you were the right one the minute I saw your picture in the bookstore window.”  He closed his eyes for a moment. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself grab the laptop and slam him over the head, she saw herself kicking him to the ground and beating him, poking her fingers in his eyes and then grabbing the keys to freedom from his pocket.

Before her thoughts had taken a heartbeat, his eyes snapped open once again.  “Like her.  You look so much like her.”  His hands balled into fists at his sides. 

“I should get back to typing your story,” she said hurriedly, trying to diffuse the situation she knew was quickly escalating.

“I just wanted you to tell me that I mattered.  I just needed you to tell me that you cared about me at least as much as you’d care about a dog who wandered in cold and hungry off the streets.”  The cords in the sides of his neck had begun to stick out and pulse.

“Anthony.”  She waved the sheets of paper he’d given her back and forth.  “We have work to do here.” 

“Work?”
  His hands slowly unballed. He raised a hand to rake it through his neatly cut dark hair.  “Of course, work.” 

Edie breathed a shuddery sigh as he returned to his chair.  “Go on, get busy,” he said.  “Time is wasting.”

As he sank back down in the chair, Edie gazed at the notes he had given her.  Her nerves jumped inside her as she tried to decipher his handwriting and type while he watched her like a hawk eyeing prey.

The notes were rambling, a stream of consciousness kind of writing that often made little sense to her. Still, she did her best to create the story he wanted to tell.  It was really quite simple.  His mother was the wicked witch and he was the
innocent, powerless child who had to live in her cold, unwelcoming castle.

Occasionally he would stop her and stand behind her to read over her shoulder.  Sometimes as he read he absently stroked her hair, forcing her to willfully stanch the shiver of revulsion that begged to be released.

The constant vigilance, the super caution and awareness she had to maintain while he was in the room was exhausting.  She knew the lack of real food, the restless sleep she endured had slowed her reflexes, made it more difficult to think with the same kind of clarity she’d had when she’d awakened in the paper room.

She tried to remember her conversations with Colette, hoping to gain strength by the things she’d learned from the woman who had survived.  But there were moments when she couldn’t even remember the sound of Colette’s voice.

He was still standing behind her when she came to a place in his notes where she couldn’t read his handwriting.  She typed what she thought he’d written and he boxed her ear.

Excruciating pain accompanied a ringing noise as she fell to the floor.  He was on her like an animal, kicking and punching, slapping and yanking her hair.  She knew she was screaming but it sounded as if it came from someplace far away.

Pain.  It was everywhere, outside her, inside her.  It became her world, stealing any thought, any rational emotion from her.  She was nothing but an animal, trapped by a killer intent on beating her to death.

She tried crawling away from him but he caught her ankle and pulled her back to beat her some more.  And still her screams rose, coming from a different place. A spinning sensation in her head made it impossible to defend
herself.

As always, as quickly as the attack began, it ended.  She lay on the floor, unable to move, broken almost beyond repair.

He laughed.  A sound of triumph, of unbridled pleasure.  “Whew, that almost spun out of control.”  He leaned down and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her head up from the floor. “Don’t just make shit up.  If you can’t read my writing, ask me.”  He let go of her hair and her head fell back, smacking the floor like a basketball on a polished court.

She remained there, unmoving, long after he’d left the room.  There was no place that she wasn’t hurting, but the pain in her ear was unbearable.  Slowly, as if in a trance, she raised her hand to touch her ear and realized it was leaking blood.