Cut & Run (Cut & Run #1)

Again, Ty was silent, and the odd sounds started up again. It was a slow, squishing sound, like a shoe stuck in the mud, and then a long scrape followed by several shorter ones. Ty couldn’t quite identify it, but as he listened, he accepted with a sinking sensation that he was going to die.

SEARS brought Zane another glass of juice while he sat and flipped through the pages of the leather Poe anthology Ross had found. Ross sat with a pen and paper, making notes as Zane searched for similarities between the cases and the stories he read.

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he said softly.

“The ME,” Sears provided with a wince.

“Right. In the story, one woman’s head is practically cut off. The other was stuffed into the chimney.” Frowning, Zane shook his head.

“The location is what’s important there, right?” Ross asked as he made a note.

Zane nodded and moved onto the next. “Ligeia,” he announced. “First thing, the wife in the story dies,” he said woodenly. He grimaced and kept reading. “The man in the story remarries, but he’s convinced that his new wife is the old one, reincarnated or something, and he slowly poisons the second wife, who then dies as well. The second wife was described as raven-haired.

The first wife was blonde,” he stated in clipped tones.

“The dye-job roommates,” Ross said with a nod without looking up from his paper. “That wasn’t location; it was body positioning.”

“And the wife thing explains the plastic wedding rings,” Zane supplied tiredly. “Hooked together to symbolize they were really one person, no doubt.”

“Jesus,” Sears murmured with a shake of her head. She was thumbing through the files that sat nearby, making notes. Henninger had pulled only the files of anyone who had lived in or around the Baltimore area in 2001, which included large areas like Washington, DC. The stack was huge.

An odd feeling of dread settled into Zane as he looked at the files. It was like searching for one particular needle in a fucking needle factory. How would they know which file was relevant? Even Ty’s file was in that stack, and Zane’s fingers itched to search for it. Instead, he paged through the book and found another story, one he’d read over and over while in school. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he announced.

Both agents looked up from their notes. Zane didn’t need to explain that one.

“YOU’VE been a fine conversationalist, but it’s almost time for me to leave.”

The distorted voice was more muffled, and the light had grown very dim.

It took a while, but Ty had finally decided that he knew what the sound was. In hindsight, it bothered him that it took him so long to figure it out. He had spent one summer when he was thirteen years old helping his father build a small outbuilding on their property. It had been nothing but cinderblock and beam, but they had still needed mortar and a trowel. He had grown to love the sound of laying the mortar that summer. He was trying to come to terms with the fact that that sound would be one of the last ones he heard.

The fucker was bricking him in. He recognized The Cask of Amontillado now that his head had cleared and he knew what was happening.

This had been the only Poe story Ty had read and actually enjoyed. Ironic that it would be what killed him.

He turned his head in the darkness. He could see the outline of the man at the top of the wall he was building. When he spoke, his voice echoed off the cavernous walls of the catacomb and came back too distorted to even decipher an accent, much less if it was familiar.

Again, Ty felt the cold dread creep over him. It was his worst nightmare, one he had never actually dreamed; knowing his lover was in danger and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. His wrists and ankles were bloody from his silent struggles with the shackles. He was shivering from the damp and cold. But he hadn’t yet given up. He couldn’t, not while knowing that the killer’s next stop would be Zane.

“He’ll kill you,” he told the man who was in the process of murdering him. “He’ll make it hurt.”

“I’ll be disappointed if he doesn’t try,” the man answered sincerely.

“Well, three bricks left, Special Agent Grady. Time to say goodbye, if you like.”

Ty was silent as the man made some rustling sounds, as if he were crumpling a trash bag. Soon, a handful of white plastic was stuffed through the hole left in the brick wall. It was a plastic suit that had obviously been protecting the man’s clothing from the mud and mortar. It fluttered to the ground and the candle flickered threateningly. As soon as it landed, the plastic caught the flame and flared, bathing the little room in a burst of light. It illuminated the tiny space, making the water dripping down the old brick walls shimmer.

Ty could see the heavy drilled brackets that bound him to the bricks with thick chains, and the solid wall of brick a couple feet in front of him that closed in the tiny alcove. He knew instantly that no one would find him here.

Not in time.

He glanced up at the face in the hole in the brick wall and swallowed past his shock as he finally saw the man’s face.

“Congratulations,” he managed to utter to the face looking down at him.

“Why, thank you, Ty. That’s very kind of you. By the way, don’t worry about the kid. He needs to be alive enough to pass on the news about you disappearing. But I’m afraid I can’t make the same promise about your partner.”

Three bricks left.

Ty fought back the panic that bubbled up. Even the glimpse of the man’s face didn’t make a dent in the cold curtain of fear that had fallen. What good did it do to finally know who they had been hunting if he was going to die here?

Two bricks.

The candle flickered as the wall was nearly finished. A soft gust of cool, damp air flushed through the small hole remaining. Then there was a thump, a wet plop, a long scrape, and a quiet slide of sticky mortar.

The last brick.

Ty swallowed as the outside world was shut out. He looked down at the candle, the flame unwavering but weak. When it ran out, so would he.

“WE have five more victims to explain,” Ross told Zane as he scribbled quickly.

“Berenice,” Zane answered as his entire right side burned with throbbing, incessant pain. “The woman whose teeth were all yanked and she was wrapped up in a shroud and dumped at the cemetery. Then we have The Oval Portrait, the woman who was painted with her own blood and stuck up on a canvas.”

“God, it’s so easy to see now,” Sears groaned.

“A few more and we have them all. All except the agents who got too close.” Zane was shaking as he continued to turn through the book.

“Jesus, it was right there all this time,” Ross whispered.

“You told the Assistant Director about this, right?” Sears asked suddenly.

“Henninger was supposed to relay it,” Zane answered with a sigh.

“Better make sure,” Ross mumbled as he pulled out his cell phone and started punching buttons while Sears took his notepad from him.

Zane turned to the front of the book to look at the index as Ross swore at the phone and moved to the window. “Let’s see,” he murmured as he scanned over the names of the stories he remembered reading years ago. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he announced to Sears as she wrote quickly.

“The character is suffering from extreme hypersensitivity. That’s got to be the first guy, the meth overdose.”

Sears nodded without looking up from her writing.

Zane paged through some more with his good hand. “There’s one.

William Wilson,” he said. “A man kills his double. That explains the twins.”

He continued to scan and passed on story after story. “There’s a classic,” he murmured to himself. “The Raven,” he mused. He made to turn the page to go to the next page of the index.

“Wait,” Sears said as she reached out and took Zane’s hand. “Bird flu,” she whispered.

Ross paused in his pacing, still messing with his phone, and he looked over at them sardonically. “Well, that’s sort of clever,” he commented before tossing his phone onto the couch and pulling Sears’ off the strap of her purse.

Zane’s face was grim. “That’s all of them. There’s got to be twenty more stories in here that he can play with.”

“Now what? So we’ve figured out the pattern, but it doesn’t get us closer to him,” Sears protested in disgust.

“It helps us understand how he thinks,” Zane pointed out.

“Until your profiling buddy comes back, that doesn’t do us much good,” Ross pointed out as he paced and waited for the call to go through.

“We still know next to nothing about him,” Sears pointed out. “Even if we did, we can’t leave you alone here to go do anything about it.”

“Yes, you most certainly fucking can,” Zane insisted. “I don’t need a babysitter, and Grady and Henninger are going to need backup. Call for someone.”

“We can’t call anyone from here. Something in the building’s blocking cell service,” Ross informed them in frustration as he waved the useless cell phone.

“Use Henninger’s phone,” Sears suggested logically.

Except Henninger didn’t have a landline.

“I’m going down to the garage and then up to the front of the building, okay? I’ll be back,” Ross declared, and he was out the door.

Zane nodded and pushed himself out of the chair to grab one of the personnel files. “Christ. There’s got to be some way to find this asshole,” he muttered.

SPECIAL Agent Gary Ross hadn’t gone far into the darkened parking deck when he stumbled over something on the ground as he jogged with his phone held out in front of him, and he almost went sprawling. He righted himself and turned to look, cursing creatively when he realized that it was a man on the ground. He knelt beside him and felt his pulse.

“Fuck,” he hissed, recognizing Henninger’s dark, curly hair, now matted down with blood. “Tim?” he murmured as the man groaned. “Why the hell don’t you have a fucking phone?” he asked in annoyance as he began to gather the man off the ground. He glanced toward the exit signs attached to the ceilings of the parking deck, knowing that just a few more steps would give him a signal, but he needed to get Henninger inside and safe before he could go call for help.

“Phone?” Henninger mumbled weakly as he stirred.

“Come on,” Ross grunted, hefting Henninger up and dragging him back toward the elevators.

Sears was pacing and Zane would have been as well had he been able to walk, waiting for Ross to return. “How do we find him?” Zane muttered from where he leaned awkwardly to one side, trying to keep the pressure off his broken ribs. “We need another murder, another city he lived in. Some dots to connect.”

“He’s got to slip up sometime, especially since we know what to look for now,” Sears assured. “The net’s closing on him.”

“Which only makes him more dangerous,” Zane gritted out through the pain.

A thump on the door interrupted them. Zane glanced to Sears, who pulled her gun out from under her jacket and nodded toward the door. She carefully walked to the side of the door until she was right up against it before looking through the peephole. “Shit!” she yelled, throwing the door open.

Ross was panting as Henninger tried and failed to stand. They staggered through the door together. Ross dumped the man on the couch with a gasp, and Sears kicked the door closed as she rushed to help them.

“What happened?” she demanded as she knelt next to Henninger on the couch, trying to check the head wound.

“We got jumped,” Henninger croaked in answer as he winced away from her touch. It looked as if someone had hit him in the side of the head with something nice and blunt. There was enough blood that it had caked down the side of his face, and it would probably hurt like hell, but he was in no mortal danger. “I saw him take Grady down with a cloth or something and then the lights went out. There must have been two of them.”

“Cloth?” Zane breathed. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly.

“Chloroform,” he groaned. They had been right about that aspect, anyway.

“Henninger,” he said thickly. “We need to call the Bureau.”

“What?” Henninger asked dazedly.

“He’s so out of it, he won’t have a clue what you’re talking about,”

Ross muttered, walking over to the window to peer out as if someone might be out there now, looking guilty. Sears sniffed and went to the kitchen for ice.

“Focus, Henninger,” Zane tried desperately, not even able to think about Ty being at the hands of this monster.

“Okay,” Henninger mumbled as he sat up and held his head, squinting at them all. He seemed to be having difficulty comprehending the urgency of a phone. Their need was even more urgent now; they needed every unit in the city on the lookout for Ty and his captor.

“We need to call out. How the hell do you get any of your messages?”

Ross asked him testily as he jabbed at his phone again.

Henninger swallowed and rubbed at his ribs gingerly as he looked up at the other agent. “I turn off the signal blocker on the window,” he answered flatly.

Ross turned to him, confusion flitting over his features, and Sears stepped back into the room to look at them oddly. Henninger shrugged apologetically to them both before pulling a silenced gun from under his jacket. With two quick, quiet pops the gun sent both agents to the hardwood floor. He stood quickly and turned to Zane, who’d only had time to scramble out of the chair and get a few steps away.