Night Terrors (21 page)

“Everything will be okay. Just promise me you’ll stay in the hotel room. Order room service. Just don’t go outside.”

“I’ll be fine. I love you.”

“Love you, too,” Tara told her.

Aunt Katie hung up her phone and set it on the small writing table beside her. She leaned her head back and let out a long sigh. She’d finished off the wine this afternoon and she sure could use some more right now. Maybe she would go down to the hotel bar in a few hours for a bite to eat and a few drinks. Tara didn’t have to know.

Just then there was a noise outside her hotel room door. It sounded like a slight scratching at the bottom of the door.

Katie sat up straight and stared at the door. It automatically locked when it was shut, but she didn’t have the security lock engaged on the inside. If someone had a key card, they could swipe it and open the door.

She imagined Jeremy killing one of the hotel staff and taking the card up to the third floor and standing in front of her door with the blood-splattered key card. She didn’t know what Jeremy looked like now. She remembered him as a small child. He’d had dark hair, and dark brown eyes. But she imagined him now as a tall man with wiry muscles and a lean body. She imagined his dark hair was long, hanging down in front of his face. She imagined grimy skin covered with tattoos. She imagined baggy clothes and heavy biker boots. She imagined an assortment of cutting instruments hidden away on his body underneath his clothing, maybe even wrapped up in a cloth and tucked down into the waistband of his pants.

There was a loud pounding at the door.

Katie jumped to her feet, her heart in her throat. She grabbed her cell phone from the table, ready to dial 911. But even if she did, the police would never get up here in time.

“Housekeeping,” a female voice said from behind the door.

Katie felt like she could breathe again. She jumped up and ran to the door and peeked through the little peephole. She saw the distorted view of a maid standing beside a cart full of cleaning supplies, extra clean towels, and bagged-up garbage.

She opened the door and let the maid in, and then she thought that she was definitely going to go down to the bar in a few hours and get those drinks. Yes, she’d made up her mind – she needed something to take the edge off of this constant tension.

Agent Woods finished his fast food meal and took it to the garbage can (rather than throw it down on the passenger floorboard) while Tara talked to her aunt as she paced back and forth beside his car. Agent Woods used this opportunity to collect the trash on the passenger floorboard and throw it away so he could give Tara more legroom.

When Tara hung up the phone with her aunt, Woods was already sitting in the driver’s seat with the photo of Steve in his hands. He studied the picture: Steve in the chair, the tape over his mouth, the fear in his wide eyes.

Tara looked out the window at the long afternoon shadows. It was getting a little cooler with a nice breeze blowing through the palm trees that surrounded the fast food restaurant.

“Look at this?” Agent Woods said.

Tara turned to look at him. He was picking at the corner of the photograph like the backing on it was coming loose. He picked at it with his short fingernails. Tara almost offered to help pull the backing off – but her fingernails were just as short as Woods’ nails.

He’d peeled it away enough to pull the backing off, which looked to have been carefully glued to the back of the photograph. He pulled at it slowly, careful not to rip it. After he pulled it free from the photo, he just stared at the other side of the white backing for a moment in the dwindling light.

“What is it?” Tara asked him.

“Looks like a map.”

Woods handed the backing to Tara. The backing was a little flimsy and sticky from whatever kind of glue had been used to seal it to the back of the photo, but the crude drawing done in black pen was easily seen – it showed Highway 60, which led out of Tampa towards Polk County. And near the county border, a line was drawn from Highway 60, running north, and the name of the road was written down in tiny, neat handwriting. And off of this road was a smaller road with a small star drawn at the end of it.

She looked at Woods.

“The killer drew us a map,” he said and started the car.

Tara had saved photos of her drawings on her phone, and she pulled up the sketch of the house she’d drawn last night in her sleep. This was the house Steve was in, she was sure of it. But why would Jeremy draw a map for her? To get her there? How could he have been so sure she would find it?

As Woods sped down the road, heading towards Highway 60, Tara began to have her first feelings of doubt about Agent Woods.

“Are you going to call for some kind of backup?” Tara asked as they turned west onto Highway 60, heading for the more remote area of Hillsborough County.

“Not yet,” Woods answered. “Not until I’m sure I have him. If he’s there, then I’ll have every cop in the county there.”

Woods drove down a narrow road crowded on both sides with brush and trees. The road had ruts and holes, and his car felt like it was going to shake apart. A cloud of dust followed the car, the dust glowing red from the tail lights. The sun dropped slowly towards the horizon and the shadows grew longer.

Tara looked down at the photo of Steve tied to the chair. She could feel that they were very close to him now.

Woods slowed his car down to a crawl after passing a stand of woods that stretched on for half a mile. They saw a house among a sea of weeds and brush, set back from the road beyond a sagging chain link fence. The house looked just like the one in Tara’s drawing.

The whole acreage of property around the house was fenced in and the gates in front were closed and chained shut. Beyond the gates there was no discernable driveway, and there were no vehicles parked among the overgrown shrubs and grass that they could see.

Woods continued down the road another half mile. He drove past three empty lots until he came to a piece of land with a rusted doublewide trailer sitting in the middle of it. There were two old pickup trucks parked in the front. He turned around in that driveway and then idled back down the road with his headlights off. He pulled into the empty lot next to the house and his car crunched slowly over the brush and weeds until he parked next to the chain link fence that surrounded the house. The brush and shrubs were so high against the chain link fence that it concealed their car from the house.

Agent Woods shut his car off.

They sat there for a long moment. They listened to the sounds of dusk; the insects buzzing, a dog barking in the distance, someone using a chain saw a mile away, but they didn’t hear any noises coming from the house beyond the fence. They didn’t see any movement in the brush around them.

Woods took the keys out of the ignition and then he popped off the plastic cover from the dome light in the ceiling and yanked out the little light bulb. He got out and pocketed the car keys, trying to be as quiet as possible. He leaned back into the car and stared at Tara.

“Stay here for a minute. I’m going to see if I can find an opening in the fence.”

Tara nodded.

Agent Woods closed the door almost all the way and then he was off and running through the knee-high weeds and grasses. A moment later he was just a shadow moving among the gloom, and then she didn’t see him anymore.

Tara made herself wait in the passenger seat a moment longer, watching out the windshield, before she turned around and looked in the back seat. There was a small suitcase on the rear floorboard behind the driver’s seat and a full garbage bag behind her seat. She glanced back to make sure Woods wasn’t coming back and then she crawled halfway into the back to inspect the garbage bag. It wasn’t tied and she pulled it open a little bit. The garbage bag was full of clothes that looked like they needed to be washed.

And then she saw something among the dirty clothing, a small plastic baggie with an item inside that she recognized. She reached her hand into the pile of dirty clothes and plucked the little baggie out carefully with two fingers of her hand like she was touching something disgusting.

Inside the baggie was a smashed light bulb – it was the same light bulb from her house. The same light bulb that Agent Woods said he was going to try and get a fingerprint from. But he hadn’t turned it in for analysis – he’d left it here in this garbage bag of dirty clothes. He had lied to her.

Tara jumped when her cell phone rang and vibrated. She nearly screamed.

She plopped back down into the passenger seat and checked her phone.

It was Lorie calling.

“Hello,” Tara breathed into the phone as she scanned the brush in the evening gloom, looking for Woods.

“Tara,” Lorie nearly squealed into her ear. “Listen to me very carefully. Where are you right now?”

A gigantic hand of fear began to tighten around Tara’s heart, squeezing her lungs. Her skin felt tingly and her mouth went dry in an instant. Something was wrong. She was used to Lorie’s melodramatics, but this was way beyond that. Lorie was scared.

“I’m with Agent Woods,” Tara told her. “In his car. The killer took Steve out of his apartment and -”

“None of that’s important. Is Agent Woods with you right now? Is he in the car with you?”

Tara looked out at the early evening murk, searching for Woods, but there was no sign of him.

“No, not right now,” she told Lorie. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“You need to get out of that car right now. Wherever you are, you need to run. You need to get away from Woods as fast as you can.”

“What?” Tara asked. She could feel the breath leaving her lungs in a rush. But she’d already known something was very wrong a few seconds before Lorie called. The crushed light bulb in the back of Woods’ car had been the evidence that she’d needed.

“Agent Woods is not who he says he is,” Lorie said.

Tara felt like she’d been slapped. A shock ran through her body and she was instantly tense, her skin tingling even more now. She gripped her cell phone tighter.

“I called my uncle,” Lorie continued quickly. “I asked him to check Agent David Woods out. He looked him up and there is no Agent David Woods. At least not anymore. He’s been dead for two years now.”

“Dead?” Tara said and her voice sounded so far away to her own ears.

“He was murdered in Pennsylvania.”

A small burst of static interrupted Lorie’s voice.

“Where are … right now?” Lorie asked as the static blurred some of her words.

Tara was about to answer but a loud knocking on the passenger window startled her and she nearly screamed. She clicked the hang-up button on her cell phone without thinking about it.

Woods opened the passenger door and stared down at her with his dark eyes.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked as he stood in between the open car door and the night, like he was blocking her from getting out of the car.

“It … it was just … Lorie. Nothing important really.”

“I found a way inside the fence.”

Woods backed up to let Tara get out of the car and he stood in the knee-high grass waiting for her.

Tara wondered for a moment if she should tell him she wanted to wait in the car. She wondered why he wasn’t
demanding
that she stay in the car. Wouldn’t a real FBI agent tell her to stay here where it was safe? But he was patiently waiting for her to get out and follow him.

And she couldn’t demand to stay in the car now. It would look too suspicious to him.

“Maybe we should wait for some backup,” Tara said to him in a low voice. “Maybe you should call this in now.”

For a moment Woods stared at her like he might suspect something.

“No,” Woods finally whispered. “We don’t have the time. I don’t want to wait and take a chance on Steve getting hurt. And I need to know they are in that house before I call it in.”

Tara thought of Steve.

Steve had been the bait all along. Tara could see it all now. Jeremy had found out about the dead agent – the real David Woods, maybe even murdered him two years ago, and then he took his identity. What better way to get close to her, to worm his way into her life. He must’ve recruited the Reverend, forced him to spy on her, and found out she’d been to the café with Steve. And then he killed the poor Reverend once he didn’t need him anymore. He had taken Steve and lured her out here to this house in the middle of nowhere.

How come she hadn’t seen it coming?

Because he was too powerful. Even now, this close to him, she could feel his dark power practically crushing her. And now that they were alone in this isolated place, he would have time to do anything he wanted.

Was Steve already dead now because his purpose had been served? If he was still alive she couldn’t abandon him now. She had to find out if he was still alive and then she had to find a way to hurt Woods.

She thought about the gun tucked away in Woods’ holster inside his suit coat. If she could just get to that …

She forced the idea out of her mind – she had to be careful with her thoughts around him.

Tara got out of the car and stood on legs that were a little unsteady at first, but they were getting stronger by the second. She was very scared, but there was another feeling building inside of her, a feeling so alien to her that she almost didn’t recognize it at first.

Anger.

Jeremy was standing right in front of her, a half-brother who had tried to kill her when she was a baby, the same person who had murdered her parents, butchered them and took them away from her. He had set all of this up to get her out here. And she’d gone along with all of it. And now she suddenly wanted revenge, and she didn’t want another person to die because of her.

She couldn’t let Jeremy kill her. What would he do next? Who would he go after next? What was he going to do after his ritual was complete? She had to try and stop his killing spree now.

Tara grabbed her cell phone and her purse, about to take it with her, but Woods stopped her.