Читать книгу The Stronghold - Lisa Carter - Страница 17

Chapter 9

9

The shrill ringing of his cell woke Alex before six a.m. Praying another girl hadn’t been taken last night, he half-fell out of bed in his haste to answer the call. But it wasn’t Charles or Sidd or the tribal detective he’d yet to meet.

It was Manny To-Clanny.

“You gave me your card yesterday and said if I ever needed you . . .” The boy’s voice sounded muffled. “I need you now. Actually, it’s Auntie who needs you now.”

“What’s wrong, Manny?” Alex’s tone sharpened. “Are you alright? Is Pilar—?”

“She’s not alright. I can’t get her to unlock the bathroom door. When she screamed, I found her on the bathroom floor, surrounded by broken glass. She . . .” Manny took a deep breath. “She’s cutting herself. I-I don’t know what to do.” The boy’s voice rose and ended with a whispered sob. “She yelled at me to get out. Then she slammed the door and locked it.”

Alex squeezed his eyes shut. Oh, God.

“Please, Mr. Torres.”

“Call me Alex.”

“I never told anybody about what she does after one of her nightmares. I never told Abuela, though I think she knows. I shouldn’t have left Auntie alone when she woke up. But she’s been better for so long, I didn’t think—”

“This isn’t your fault, Manny.”

“Something bad—really bad—happened to my auntie before, didn’t it, Alex?”

“Yeah,” Alex whispered into the phone.

He, Alejandro Roberto Torres, happened to Pilar.

“I think maybe only you can fix her, Alex.”

Alex sank onto the bed, his head in his hand. “I’ll come right away. But it’s God, not me, who’ll help her, Manny.”

Help me to help her, God.

“You plus God, I’m sure of it.” Manny sighed. “ ’Cause it’s your name, Alex, she calls for in the dark.”

***

A fist pounded the door. The wood rattled against the frame. “Open the door, Pilar. It’s Alex.”

Curled into a ball on the bathroom floor, her eyes widened.

Not him. Anybody but him.

How had—? Manny must’ve called him. The look on Manny’s face when he spotted the jagged shard of glass in her hand . . .

Oh, God. Pilar shuddered. She was so broken.

Lines of blood flowed down her arm.

More fist pounding. “Pilar? Answer me.”

She had no business raising Manny. No wonder he was getting into fights and about to join a gang. She was so messed up. Too messed up to be playing mother.

And now for Alex to see her like this?

She pressed a towel against the cut to staunch the bleeding.

“Pilar, if you don’t open this door right now, I’m going to break it down.”

“Leave me alone,” she shouted, her heart thundering.

“Good,” he yelled. “Glad to see you’re still in the land of the living. You’ve got until the count of three and then—”

“Just go away, Torres.”

“One . . .”

A soft thud against the door panel as if his shoulder tested its strength.

She scowled. “Manny shouldn’t have called you. There’s no reason for you to be all up in my business.”

“Two . . . Might be a good idea to climb into the bathtub so the door doesn’t land on your head.”

“I hate-hate-hate you, Alex Torres!” she screamed.

“So you’ve said before,” his voice thickened. “Three . . . I warned you, Pia.”

“And I told you,” she scrambled to her feet, unlocked and jerked open the door. “To stop calling me—”

Caught off-guard in the middle of ramming the door, Alex’s momentum carried him over the threshold. He barreled into her. She shrieked.

The both of them reeled backward in the grip of gravity.

Wrapping his arms around her, Alex pivoted, and turned. He—they—landed. His back took the brunt of their fall.

The breath knocked from her lungs, her head collided with his. Alex’s lips brushed across her cheek. Her nerve endings jolted from more than the force of the impact.

She pushed at his shoulder. “Get off me, Alex.”

Manny poked his head inside. “You two okay?”

“He’s got a hard head,” she grunted. “He’ll be fine.”

Alex massaged his forehead. “I’m not the only one.”

“You can let go of me now, Alex,” she huffed.

His gaze flitted from her eyes to her mouth and back again. “I could . . .” He tightened his one-armed hold around her waist. “Letting go works both ways, Pia.”

Both arms locked around his neck, she reddened.

She planted a hand on his stomach to leverage herself and shoved. He let out a whoosh of air, groaning. Rolling off him, she stumbled to her feet.

Using the tub for support, Alex hoisted himself upright. His eyes flicked to the bloody towel, and then his gaze fastened onto the mirror. He went rigid.

Manny frowned. “Mia. Did you write that, Auntie?”

Her attention fixed on Alex’s reflection. “No,” she whispered. “I didn’t.”

Alex’s face underwent a kaleidoscope of transformation. From thin-lipped shock to lip-curled rage.

Manny’s eyes enlarged. “Somebody broke in?” His head rotated as if an intruder lurked in the corners of the bathroom. “Who, Auntie? What does ‘Mia’ mean?”

“It means . . .” Her eyes dropped to the floor. She couldn’t bear to see Alex’s expression. “That the Wicked One has found me. Again.”

***

This couldn’t be happening.

She sounded so resigned. Beyond fear. As if somehow she’d known all along, the beast from whom she’d barely escaped would find her again. As if deep inside she’d always known she’d never truly outrun him.

Alex scrubbed his hand over his face as he made the call for the team to do a forensic sweep of the break-in at Pilar’s. Perhaps the serial killer had for once left traces of his identity. Justice was long overdue in this case. He’d been hunting this particular monster for three years.

He checked the rest of the house. “Let me know if you think anything appears missing.”

With careful instructions to disturb as little as possible, he herded Manny to his bedroom while Pilar got dressed. She emerged, head down, eyes on the tips of her regulation shoes and headed for the kitchen. “Okay, if I make coffee?”

It gutted Alex to see how she wouldn’t—couldn’t—meet his gaze. As if her admission of what happened so long ago shamed her so completely.

“The team would appreciate it, I’m sure. But Pilar, this invasion wasn’t your fault. Nothing that happened was your fault.”

He stuffed his hands inside his trouser pockets. What he wanted was to take her into his arms and soothe every hurt she’d ever suffered.

But he knew better. Comfort wasn’t something she’d accept from him. Least of all from him. She hated him and rightly so. What happened to her—the reason she fell into this devil’s hands—had been his fault entirely.

The long sleeves of her uniform shirt hid the telltale scars on her arms. From his brief glance in the bathroom, old scars except for the recent cut.

She removed the coffee grounds from the refrigerator and scooped several tablespoons into the coffeemaker. “Excuse me . . .” She edged past him in the tiny galley kitchen to fill the carafe with water.

He backed against the countertop. His hand went to the silver chain he always wore underneath his shirt. His fingers rubbed the black volcanic rock against his flesh.

“You already knew it was the same perpetrator, didn’t you, Alex.”

Not a question, a statement.

She shut off the water. “How did you know?”

Alex folded his arms. “By the marks he leaves.”

She sagged against the sink. “You knew about—?” Her shoulders slumped. “I thought—I hoped—no one else knew what he did to me.”

“We believe you were his first victim, Pilar.”

“I’m nobody’s victim.”

She poured the water into the coffeemaker. “You think he was still perfecting his MO and that’s why I managed to escape.” She started the coffeemaker.

“Manny told me about the nightmares. Probably your mind’s attempt to deal with the trauma.”

Pilar’s mouth hardened. “I believe psychiatrists call it ‘delayed onset post-traumatic stress.’ ” Her lip curled. “Not that I’ve spent much time with them. Talking about what happened is the last thing I want to do.”

“I thank God every day you escaped.”

“God?” She whirled, the familiar defiance in her eyes. “What’s God ever done for me?”

The chip-on-her-shoulder Pilar Alex knew and loved. The broken Pilar undid him.

She jutted her hip. “That’s why you came home, isn’t it? You think if I remember everything you’ll catch this monster.”

“He’s left a trail of bodies from New Mexico to Arizona. And the ones he didn’t kill outright . . .” Alex swallowed. “Once he gets them over the border, they simply disappear.”

She glared at him. “You banked on the fact he’d come looking for me.”

Alex blew out a breath. “Fact is, Pilar, we suspect he’s never stopped looking for you. The others—his sick attempts to replicate you. Finding you, I fear, has been his obsession.”

Her mouth twisted. “The one who got away?”

“The only one who ever got away until this wild girl stumbled north across the border last month.”

“So you bided your time.” She balled her fist. “Allowing his web to tighten around Manny and me. Using me as bait.”

Alex shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. I’d never—”

“Well, news flash.” She got in his face. “I don’t remember anything more than what I told the detective in the ER all those years ago.”

Alex jabbed his finger in the air. “You shut down. You don’t want to remember anything more.”

“I went catatonic, you mean.” She threw him a hard look. “Surely you got enough semen from the evidence kit for a match.”

Alex flushed. “He’s somehow managed to fly under the radar. With nothing in the system to match it to, we haven’t been able to link the-the . . .” He’d never been able to actually verbalize what had been done to Pilar. “. . . the DNA to anyone.”

The aroma of strong coffee wafted through the kitchen. She opened a cabinet and removed several mugs. “I can’t believe even you would want me to relive those four days of hell.”

Her words flayed him. “Even me?” Alex crushed the stone against his heart.

At the movement of his hand, her brow knotted.

“Healing may only come in the remembering and in the catharsis of telling, Pilar.”

She banged the cabinet door shut. “Thanks, but no thanks, Dr. Torres. I’m doing okay.”

“Are you?” He gestured at her arm. “Doesn’t look like you’re doing okay, Pia. Not from where I stand.”

She hugged her arm to her chest. “Then maybe you should stand away from me.”

“They’re here,” Manny bellowed at the sound of tires on the gravel.

“Shouldn’t be too hard, Alex, to stay away.” She headed toward the living room. “An art form you’ve perfected in the dozen years since I last saw you.”

Not by choice. If only she knew what forcing himself to stay away had cost him. . . . He followed her out of the kitchen.

“What’re you doing with the file?” She snatched the folder from Manny’s hand. “This is official police business.”

Manny gulped. “Is that what the Wicked One did to you, Auntie? Like the dead girls in the photos? I’m not a little kid anymore. I need to know these things. I will protect you.”

The boy pounded his chest. “On my life. My word of honor.”

“Oh, honey.” Pilar placed her palm on his cheek. “I don’t want you anywhere near this monster.”

She bit her lip. “Maybe you should stay with Fiona in North Carolina until Byron returns from his deployment.”

“No, Auntie, please.” Manny wilted into the little boy Alex supposed he’d been not so long ago. “We take care of each other.”

Her mouth trembled. “I should’ve realized he’d come back for me. I should’ve never kept you—”

“Don’t send me away, Auntie.” Manny’s arms engulfed Pilar. “I don’t want to live with Fiona and Dad after they get married.” He buried his head into her shoulder. “I want to stay with you.”

“You know about their upcoming wedding?” She lifted his face with her hands. “You never said anything. You’d have two parents to love you. Normalcy. Security.”

“But I wouldn’t have you.”

Outside, car doors slammed.

She sighed, but a smile licked at the corners of her full lips. “I love you, Manny.”

The boy brought out a tenderness in Pilar Alex hadn’t seen since they were teenagers.

Manny tilted his head. “I love you, too, Auntie.” He also possessed considerable charm when he put his mind to it. “Can I stay?”

Her hand stroked his hair. “For now. But I can’t let anything happen to you, Manny.” Her voice went ragged. “I-I wouldn’t survive that.”

Alex cleared his throat and opened the door to his team. “Neither of you will be staying here. I’m relocating you both to Abuela’s where you’ll be safe.”

“Good idea for Manny. But me?” She straightened. “No way I’m letting you track this psycho without me. You need me, Torres. You won’t catch him without me and you know it.”

Of all the stubborn, hardheaded . . .

But with a sinking feeling, Alex feared she might be right.