Night Terrors (28 page)

Tara’s heart sank. “Did she pay her tab?”

“No, the bartender said she never returned. He said they’ll just put the bill on the credit card she used for the room.”

Tara stared at the front doors of the hotel – fancy glass doors framed in fake gold. The doors opened out to the parking area.

“She went out for a smoke,” Tara said, still staring at the doors like she could see it happening before her eyes, a ghostly reanimation.

Woods nodded. “Yeah,” he answered. “That’s what the bartender thought; they went out for a cigarette. No smoking in the bar.”

“She smokes sometimes,” Tara said slowly, still staring at the front doors of the hotel. “She’s tried to quit hundreds of times, and she does stop for a while. But every once in a while, especially when she’s nervous or upset, she caves in.”

“And that’s when he got her,” Woods finished.

“When she got outside with him, she finally recognized him. But it was too late.”

Woods just stood beside Tara for a moment like he didn’t know what to say. He could only nod.

“And then he took her,” Tara whispered. “But where?”

Woods shook his head no. He wished he had an answer for her.

Tara looked at Woods like something had suddenly clicked in her mind, like pieces of a puzzle had just locked into place revealing a picture. “The drawings I did in my sleep …”

“Yeah?”

“I think I might know what those numbers and words mean now.”

Just then Tara’s cell phone rang. She looked at the screen to see who it was, hoping to see her aunt’s name calling from her room. But it wasn’t her aunt – it was Lorie.

Tara answered the phone, breathing out her friend’s name in relief: “Lorie …”

And then Tara’s face fell in horror.

“What’s wrong?” Woods asked.

“It’s Jeremy,” Tara whispered. “He’s got Lorie’s phone.”

Lorie snapped awake in Mike’s bedroom. He wasn’t in bed beside her. She glanced at the alarm clock. It was almost ten o’clock. Mike had let her sleep in too long.

She looked around the bedroom. Mike had slipped out of bed without waking her. He didn’t want to disturb her. She smiled. Mike was the most considerate man she’d ever met.
And
he had the body of a Greek god.
And
he was filthy rich.

A dream man.
Her
dream man.

She sat up as a strange feeling tingled over her skin. She heard a low thump from somewhere downstairs.

“Mike?” Lorie called out as she sat very still in bed.

No answer from Mike. She looked across the large bedroom to the bathroom door; it was slightly ajar with the light turned off. Maybe he was in the bathroom, but she didn’t think so, the noise had come from downstairs – she was sure of it.

She got out of bed and stood there for a moment. She wore only a flimsy satin night gown that hugged the curves of her body. And for the first time in a long time she felt a little exposed and she had a sudden urge to cover up.

It’s a little chilly this morning, she said to herself, justifying this compulsion to get dressed.

Lorie grabbed her jeans and sweater from the back of the chair near the bed and she slipped into them. She even shoved her bare feet into her sneakers. And she
did
feel a little better now, not as vulnerable, not as afraid.

Afraid?

What was wrong with her? She wasn’t afraid of anything. She was starting to act like Tara with her foreboding feelings of doom. Maybe Tara was rubbing off on her a little. But perhaps that made sense after everything that had happened in the last week.

But it was more than that. Something felt strange in this house.

Lorie hugged her arms as a shiver wormed its way through her body.

She marched across the room and checked the master bathroom which was so large it was almost the size of the bedroom. Mike wasn’t in there.

She left the bathroom and walked across the bedroom. She stood at the top of the stairs that led down to the second floor. She hesitated for a moment.

“Mike?” she called down the stairs.

He didn’t answer her.

“Mike, if you’re down there, then answer me. This isn’t funny.”

Still no answer. But she thought she heard another noise. So faint, she wondered if it was just her imagination. She exhaled a breath and went down the stairs, her sneakers thumping down the carpeted steps.

She entered the kitchen and looked at the sliding glass doors that led out to the wraparound porch. The door was shut, but the vertical blinds were all the way open, letting the early morning sunlight into the room.

She went to the sliding glass door and slid it open.

“Mike? You out here?”

No answer.

She went into the kitchen and then stopped cold. There were breakfast preparations laid out on the countertop and a frying pan on the stovetop. Something had been fried in the pan; there was an odor in the air of fried meat that turned her stomach.

On the counter next to the stove was a carton of eggs, a bag of shredded cheese, a package of bacon that hadn’t been opened yet, an onion, a green pepper, and a carton of fresh mushrooms. Right next to a plastic cutting board was a large kitchen knife coated in blood.

Lorie’s heart jumped and she rushed to the counter. She saw splashes of blood on the vegetables.

It looked like there might have been an accident.

Maybe Mike had cut his finger while chopping vegetables.

She looked at the frying pan and stifled a scream. There was a human finger in the pan; it had been fried in oil.

A noise came from somewhere else in the house – but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly where it was coming from. It sounded like someone was moaning, maybe trying to cry out, but the sound was muffled, any words indiscernible, like someone had a hand over someone’s mouth, or a piece of tape or a gag.

Lorie turned and ran in a blind panic towards the kitchen door that led outside to the wraparound porch.

She heard a noise right behind her and turned to see …

…a man standing a few feet away from her. He was dressed in motorcycle boots, old jeans, and a flannel shirt stained with blood. His shirt was wide open, revealing a muscular torso. Covering his entire head was some kind of mask made of patches of skin – human skin. The mask was adorned with body parts taken from victims over the last few months: ears, fingers, teeth. A leather string hung around his neck with even more body parts dangling from it.

The masked man grabbed the blood-stained kitchen knife from the cutting board.

Lorie screamed again.

After an hour and a half of searching both apartments, Detective Jackson drove Perry back to the station house. Perry had his cell phone up to his ear, listening to the ringing, and then to his niece’s voicemail message. He had called her four times already and she wasn’t calling him back.

“Lorie,” he said into the phone after it beeped. “This is your uncle Ronald. I need to get a hold of you. Where are you? Where’s Tara? You need to call me as soon as you get this.”

Perry hung the phone up and tossed it into the center console.

“Shit. She’s in trouble, I know it. She said she was going up to her boyfriend’s house for the weekend.”

“You got his number?” Jackson asked.

“No. I don’t know anything about him except that his name’s Mike and that Lorie sold him a house somewhere up in Pasco County. I don’t even know his address.”

Perry picked up Tara’s drawings again and leafed through them. He stared at the sketches of Jen, the first victim they’d found. He could see the fear in her eyes. And each drawing seemed to be from the killer’s point-of-view, almost like Tara had been looking through his eyes.

Steve’s eyes. Steve was the killer, that’s what Tara had said.

Perry played it over and over in his mind. Steve comes to Tampa and murders several people, collecting things: blood, skin, and whatever he took from Miss Helen’s – all for a ritual in which Tara is obviously the integral part. But why move in next door to her? Why not kill her right away? Why wait?

And Tara saw the killer coming, she saw him kill the first four people in her dreams, she even drew what she’d seen. But she never came to him for help.

Perry felt a twinge of guilt.

Of course she wouldn’t have come to him after the way he had treated her the last time she tried to help.

He hadn’t believed in her ability, and he’d dismissed it before he even gave her a chance to talk. But now he was beginning to believe that Tara’s psychic ability was real.

Perry studied the words and numbers at the edges of each drawing and he was beginning to see their connection now.

One of the words on the drawings jumped out at Perry: Trinity.

Pasco County.

Wasn’t there a town or a place in Pasco County called Trinity? A rural place, he thought; a place where wealthy people lived.

And Lorie had mentioned how wealthy Mike was quite a few times.

Jackson glanced at Perry who held one of the drawings in his hand. Perry’s body was motionless as he stared out the windshield like he was in a trance, staring at something only he could see in his mind.

“Perry?”

“Trinity,” Perry whispered and he looked at Jackson. Perry was back now. He’d made some kind of connection in his mind, Jackson could tell.

“What about it?”

“I think I know what it means. I think Trinity is a place and these numbers and words add up to an address. We need to put them into the computer, see what kind of address we come up with.”

“I’ll get Dale on it when we get to the station,” Jackson said. “He’s the best with computers.”

Jackson stomped his foot down on the gas pedal and the unmarked cop car roared with power. He hoped he was scaring Perry a little like Perry had scared him with his driving.

But he wasn’t.

Perry wasn’t even paying attention. He had his small notebook out and he was already beginning to write down combinations of addresses.

It took Woods and Tara over an hour to drive from Tampa up to Pasco County, and now they drove down a narrow back road shaded by a canopy of ancient oaks – only minutes away from Mike’s house.

They had made a few stops on the way so Woods could complete the instructions on the paper that Tara had scribbled down in her sleep.

They stopped at a Wal-Mart and Woods went into the store with the crumpled-up paper in his hand.

While Woods was inside, Tara looked at her drawings stored on her cell phone. How come she hadn’t seen it before? The words and numbers added up to an address and all she had to do was dig through her purse and find one of Lorie’s real estate business cards – the one that she’d written Mike’s address down on.

38259 Pine Woods Run. Trinity, Florida.

How had she missed that?

And why had she written Mike’s address down a little at a time during her night terrors? She’d written some of the words and numbers down before Lorie had even given her the business card with Mike’s address on it.

She had glimpsed the future. She used to only be able to see flashes of murders as they were happening, but now, in the last few days, her power had gotten stronger or changed somehow. First she saw the gun that was going to kill Miss Helen before Jeremy killed her. And then she’d written down pieces of Mike’s address because she couldn’t see the whole picture in her dreams yet.

But there it was – Mike’s address. Jeremy was there right now. He had taken her Aunt Katie and he was there with Lorie and Mike. He was at Mike’s house with all of the people she loved in the world.

And Woods was going to be there, too.

Mike’s house. The final showdown. Jeremy hadn’t been able to sacrifice her at the abandoned house where he’d set it up, so he was going to complete the ritual at Mike’s house.

Tara wanted so badly to call the police, but she couldn’t; Jeremy had told her to come alone – no police or Lorie, Mike, and her Aunt Katie were dead. And even if she could call Detective Perry, he wouldn’t believe her. He never believed her. And she had no proof that anything was wrong at Mike’s house. Jeremy had promised that they were still alive, he even let her speak to Aunt Katie for a few seconds, and he promised that he wouldn’t butcher them if she did exactly what he wanted. He didn’t want them, he didn’t need them. He only needed her.

Her life for their lives.

Woods found most of the stuff on the list Tara had drawn in her sleep inside Wal-Mart. There was one other crucial item they needed on the list, but they would have to stop somewhere else for that. He waited in the checkout line with the odd assortment of items.

He couldn’t really believe he was doing this, that he was trusting Tara’s psychic abilities this much. But he knew they were real. He had believed in her from the very beginning.

He paid for the items with cash and left the store. He walked back to his car and put them in the trunk.

His handcuffs were stuffed down inside his pants pocket and Tara had asked him to hide the key to the handcuffs on his body somewhere and not tell her where it was. It was a strange request, but he went along with it. He knew the request must have something to do with this plan of hers, this plan that included these items he’d bought at the store, a plan he couldn’t see fully yet.

He got in the car and started it. He backed out of the parking spot. They still had two more stops to make before they went up to Trinity, before they faced the monster.

Woods hoped to hell that these crazy things Tara had written down were going to work. He would go along with her plan as long as he needed to, but when the time came, he was going to kill Jeremy for murdering his brother. And for murdering Tara’s parents. And for all of the other people who’d had their family members ripped away from them by this killer.

Their next stop was a Catholic Church.

Woods got out of the car without a word and he took out one of the items from the Wal-Mart bag in the trunk – a plastic squeeze bottle, the kind of bottle a bicyclist would use to squeeze water into his mouth as he rode; Woods had found it in the sports section of Wal-Mart. He got back in the car and sat down in the driver’s seat and closed the door. He handed Tara the plastic squeeze bottle.