“Did you get it? Did you get the phone?”
“Yes. You have to get it for me. I shoved it in my pocket.” Serena shifted her arms as far as she could, and Claire’s hands explored around the front of her jeans until her fingers pressed into the hard shell of the wafer-thin cell phone.
“Can you slide down a bit?” Claire asked.
Serena pushed herself down, bending her knees to get more room when her feet bumped the side of the car. She felt Claire’s fingers at her waist, slipping inside the tight pocket. It was strangely intimate, to be doing this in the dark, in the hot interior of the car. Claire’s breasts were almost in her face. Her T-shirt clung to her skin like glue.
“Normally, I’d enjoy this,” Claire whispered.
“Hush.”
Claire found the cell phone and slid it between her palms. As she tried to pass it into Serena’s hands, she dropped it somewhere between them.
“Shit!” she hissed. “My hands are slippery.”
The car went through a sharp turn at that moment, and they found themselves sliding and rolling in the narrow space. The phone slid, too. Serena lost her sense of direction in the dark and didn’t know which way she was facing or which way was front and back. She was disoriented. “Claire?”
“Here.”
Serena tried to roll back next to her. “We have to find the phone.”
They performed an awkward dance as both of them tried to flip over and scour the black interior of the trunk. Serena brushed her legs along the carpeted floor, trying to feel the slim rectangle of the phone. Claire did the same. Serena began to feel the pressure of time, wondering how long it would take for Blake to reach where he was going. The phone had seemingly vanished from the trunk.
“Anything?” Serena whispered.
“No.”
The car turned again, and their bodies shifted. Serena wasn’t sure why, but she had an intuition that they were almost there, and she had learned to trust her sixth sense over the years. The road beneath them was bumpier, as if there were loose gravel on the pavement. The noise outside had quieted. They weren’t on a busy street anymore.
“We need to hurry,” Serena said.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Claire replied. “It’s near my face. It slid over here on the last turn.”
“Try to get your hands on it before we turn again.”
Serena maneuvered herself in the direction of Claire’s voice. She bent her elbows again, bringing her hands near her face. She pushed herself closer and felt her fingers touch Claire’s forearm immediately in front of her. She followed the soft skin up to Claire’s hands and was relieved to feel the cell phone nestled between her fingers. Claire was holding it tightly.
“Okay, loosen up just a bit” Serena said.
She worked her own fingers into Claire’s hands and curled them around the phone. It was small and familiar. “I’ve got it.”
Claire breathed a sigh of relief.
The car swung through another turn, and Serena clutched the phone and tried to brace herself to keep from sliding. Claire bumped up against her. Serena almost lost her grip and bobbled the phone in her fingers, but then felt it sink back into her hands. She ran her fingertips over the keypad and tried to imagine the numbers laid out on the phone. The keys were almost flat, and she could barely feel them.
She pressed what she thought was the number two. The speed dial code for Jonny’s cell phone.
Nothing happened.
Serena tried another key with the same result. Finally, she realized that she had turned the phone off as she grabbed it from the floor in her bedroom, to make sure that an incoming call didn’t give away what she was hiding in her pocket.
“Shit, it’s off,” she said.
She hunted for the key that turned the phone back on and held it down. As she did, she felt the car turn onto a rutted stretch of pavement that rocked the vehicle up and down. The brakes squealed, and the car lurched to a stop.
The phone lit up. It began hunting for a signal. “Come on, come on,” Serena urged.
She heard the driver’s door open and Blake get out. His footsteps crunched on gravel.
“Hurry,” Claire said.
Serena punched the number two button again and held her breath. Blake was almost to the trunk. The phone began ringing.
FORTY-SIX
Stride swung into the gated driveway of the town-home complex and knew something was wrong. The gate was wide open. He hesitated and felt his horror grow as he heard sirens drawing closer through the surrounding streets.
He tried Serena’s cell phone again, as he had been doing constantly on the drive west from downtown. There was no answer. He tried their home number again, too, and heard Serena’s voice as the answering machine picked up. The hollow feeling in his stomach became an awful pounding in his head. He accelerated into the winding streets past the maze of homes.
When he reached their street, he saw a body lying under the glow of a streetlight. A big man, slumped like a beached whale. Stride got out of the car, the engine still running. The man was facedown, half off the curb, with blood dripping in the gutter. Recently dead. The burnt smell of powder was still fresh in the air. Stride bent down and saw the hole in the man’s forehead, and despite the red trails on his face, he knew it was Leo Rucci.
He had held out a faint hope that it might be Blake.
Stride ran for the house with an awful vision of what he would find inside. The front door was open. He drew his gun and leveled it as he crept through the doorway. He listened for voices or movement upstairs but didn’t hear a thing. When he glanced automatically at the alarm box on the wall, he saw that it had been disconnected. His heart turned to lead and seemed to plummet to the floor.
He was about to scream her name, but he stopped himself. Blake might still be here.
Stride silentiy followed the wall to the stairs and waited, listening again. He scoped out the empty hallway and took the steps to the second floor. The three bedroom doors upstairs were all ajar. The first, their office, hadn’t been touched. The second was the spare bedroom, and he saw Claire’s clothes on the floor. He checked the bathroom and the closet inside and didn’t find anything amiss.
That left their own bedroom at the end of the hall.
He stared at it and didn’t want to go through the doorway. Reluctantly, he sniffed the air, and he was relieved that he didn’t catch the mineral scent of blood. He could see part of the bed ahead of him, its blankets rumpled.
Anyone who was there would already have heard him coming. “Serena?” he called, not expecting an answer.
Stride used the toe of his shoe to push the door open slowly. He led the way inside with his gun. His eyes swept the room in an instant, and his heart started beating again when he realized there were no bodies on the floor. But something had happened here. The nightstand lamp was on the carpet, and the nightstand itself was tipped against the wall. Debris littered the floor-a hairbrush, a hardcover book, lipstick.
A fight?
It didn’t matter. They were gone.
Stride went back downstairs and tried to figure it out. If Blake hadn’t killed them here, what had he done with them? His MO was murder, not kidnapping. If he had taken them, why? Where was he going?
Stride went out into the night air again. The sirens were closer. The police would find him soon, and he didn’t want to be here. Every second put Serena and Claire at greater risk.
He went back to his Bronco. As he turned it around and headed for the street, he heard his cell phone ringing. He grabbed it from his pocket and saw Serena’s number on the caller ID.
“Where are you?”
Serena froze. She heard Jonny’s desperate voice in her ear as he answered. Blake was at the trunk, and she expected to feel a rush of air as he swung it open and see him looming above them.
“Wait, Jonny,” she hissed into the phone.