When she got to the living room, despite her efforts not to look, Jordan saw the bodies of her father and brother tossed like broken toys discarded by an evil child. She managed to swallow the wail of despair that wanted as desperately to escape as she did.
“Over there,” the intruder said, pointing with the knife. “In front of the couch.”
Jordan dragged her mother over to the sofa and rested her on the floor there.
“No. Sit her up.”
Jordan glanced back at the intruder, who lifted an eyebrow and the knife.
She did as she’d been told, and when her mother was seated on the floor with her back to the sofa, Jordan instinctively reached up to brush her mother’s hair into place.
“Now him,” the intruder said, pointing the knife toward her father, over by the fireplace.
Darker-skinned than her mother, Jordan’s father had been a successful insurance executive until this terrible night. Now, white shirt stained scarlet, vicious cut running from his left ear down across his cheek, Peter Rivera was the broken husk of a man.
Dad proved more difficult to move — half again as heavy as Mom. The living room’s white carpeting had patchy blotches of crimson and pink, and the tooth of the carpet made it even harder to move her father’s deadweight than on the wooden floor upstairs. At least her father’s eyes were closed, peacefully unaware of these posthumous indignities.
As Jordan struggled with her task, she heard the intruder stride over and she expected him to grab her by the hair again; but instead he grabbed a lifeless arm and helped her drag her father over next to Mom. She successfully arranged Dad into a sitting position against the sofa, as well. Her parents’ heads tilted toward each other, touching, a parody of a loving posture.
She knew what was coming next. Without a word from her taskmaster, she turned and faced her fallen brother, Jimmy, over by Dad’s recliner. Taller than her, Jimmy shared Jordan’s same delicate bone structure. He’d always been a skinny kid who got picked on for his gangly clumsiness, let alone his sexual orientation.
Only a year ago, right before his high school graduation, Jimmy’s biggest concern had been coming out to their parents. Jordan had known her brother was gay for years, but their folks seemed clueless.
But when Jimmy had finally screwed up the courage to tell them, Mom’s only response had been “Of course you are, sweetheart. We’ve known that for years.” Not a trace of judgment, much less sarcasm in her voice.
Then Jimmy had said, “Please pass the potatoes,” and the moment brother and sister had been dreading came and went without incident.
“Come on!” the intruder said. “Get moving.”
Now he was in a hurry?
As she dragged her dear dead brother across the room, the enormity of what she was facing — the last few minutes of her life — finally settled in on her, and like even the bravest prisoner ever ushered to execution, she found herself shaking again.
The intruder helped her prop her brother up next to her mother and she thought about trying to fight back again, but her face stung with the mirror-shard wounds, her neck ached from his jarring slap, and she decided he had heaped enough pain on her already. All she wanted now was for this to be over. Someone someday would catch this monster, and stop him. But not her. Not tonight.
“All right,” he said, almost smiling, nodding, obviously pleased. He gestured with the knife again. “Now sit down next to your brother.”
“What?”
“Sit with him.”
She did it.
She joined her family, knowing she would soon be joining them in a more profound way and they would all be in Heaven together. Oddly, her sudden sense of calm was accompanied by an accelerated shivering.
She never would kiss Mark Pryor, though, would she?
The intruder leaned down over her, and Jordan’s eyes fixed upon the knife. Then she decided she didn’t want to see it coming, and closed her eyes.
But instead of the blade slashing across her throat or driving deep into her chest, she felt the intruder’s touch, almost gentle as he lightly brushed her hair away from her bloody forehead. His fingertips were warm, soft, not rough as she’d anticipated. She kept her eyes closed tight even as she braced against the blow that would be coming any second now.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to kill you.”
Her eyes sprang open, and a sudden fury rose up through her fear and resignation. “I should believe you? You murdered my family!”
He shrugged. “That doesn’t make me a liar.”
As if to demonstrate his goodwill, he moved away from her, settling on his haunches. But the knife was still firmly grasped in a gloved hand.
“Why would you kill them,” she asked, tears struggling to get out, “and not me?”
“I need you alive,” he said. “Now, quiet.”
From a pocket, he produced a small digital camera, much like the one Jordan had pestered her parents for last Christmas. Which she hadn’t gotten.
Holding the tiny camera up, he grinned, full of himself, and said, “Say cheese.”
She lurched as the flash went off. This couldn’t be real, the killer of her family taking snapshots!
“Sit still,” he commanded.
This time she faced the flash blankly frozen.
He stuffed the camera into a pants pocket.
Then, from another pocket, he withdrew a small square foil packet. From sex ed class she knew instantly what it was... and what awaited her...
Death was the better option. She had barely kissed any boys. She hadn’t come anywhere near what this creature obviously had planned for her.
She tried to get up, but he slapped her back to the floor and crawled on top of her. He pushed up her nightshirt even as she fought to keep it down. Her sightless parents, propped against the couch, looked on.
“You’re going to help me,” he said, his voice as cool as a cemetery breeze.
“Why don’t you just kill me, too?” she asked, wanting that, wanting that so bad.
“I told you. I need you. You’re going to help me.”
“Help you?”
He smiled at her, even as he fumbled with his pants. “You’re going to tell my story.”
“What... what...”
He ripped open the foil pack, his grin goofy. “You will bear witness to what happens to families who don’t follow God’s natural order.”
Then he was heavy on top of her and Jordan couldn’t struggle anymore. He was too strong.
“Please just kill me,” she begged.
“No, no, no... just lay back and enjoy. You’ll live to tell my story. You’ll live to... to... tell... the world...”
And even as the terrible thing happened, as Jordan Rivera retreated to a private corner of herself and distanced herself from this violation, she made herself a solemn promise.
Tell his story?
Like hell I will.
Chapter Two
Today
Dr. Donna Hurst stood in the nurses’ station sporking dainty dips from a cup of peach yogurt, savoring each bite as if they were worthy of the effort. Not Donna’s favorite breakfast, but with only three weeks left before her Cozumel vacation, the tall green-eyed redhead — a youthful forty-something in white lab coat over a black silk blouse and matching slacks — was still fighting off that last tenacious ten pounds, especially around her hips.
Getting on staff at St. Dimpna’s Center — possibly Ohio’s premier mental health facility — had been Donna’s goal since she’d become a psychologist, twenty years ago. Achieving that goal had taken twelve years of moving from one facility to another, building a reputation, losing a husband, and alienating her two kids. But here she finally was on staff at St. Dimpna’s, and that still mattered to her.