Nowhere to Hide Read online

  OBSESSED

  Getting up, he walked to the locked door at the back of the room, which led to a stairway and his special room. He took a key from around his neck and unsnapped the hasp, pulling open the door. There was a cot inside and a shelf above it with a box. Ignoring the cot, he pulled down the box and reverently lifted the lid, which was only locked when he brought his prey back from the hunt and tied them to the cot.

  Inside the box, the red-brown tress of hair was delicate within its tiny plastic bag. He touched it gently. The other items nestled in the box he would only touch with gloves, but his eye ran over them. Her things . . . drawings and chewed Crayolas and the All About Me book. Pictures of her childhood. A bounty that he’d discovered after much searching.

  He’d waited so long . . . had fretted during long nights that it might never happen . . . had sometimes managed to forget for a while.

  But now he knew they would be together. He knew where she worked and he knew where she lived.

  Soon, very soon. She would be his last . . . and they would spend eternity together. But not yet. The hunt was on. The beast was in his prime.

  There was much more to do before he allowed her to catch him.

  Nine . . .

  Books by Nancy Bush

  CANDY APPLE RED

  ELECTRIC BLUE

  ULTRAVIOLET

  WICKED GAME

  UNSEEN

  BLIND SPOT

  WICKED LIES

  HUSH

  NOWHERE TO RUN

  NOWHERE TO HIDE

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Nowhere To Hide

  NANCY

  BUSH

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  OBSESSED

  Books by Nancy Bush

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  A hawk circled overhead. Something dead down below in the field. He watched its lazy circles and figured it was one of Avery Boonster’s dead sheep. Shadows were creeping over the fields as he forged his way through the waving hay, trespassing without a qualm, at home in wide spaces.

  Not a sheep, a large raccoon. No visible signs of struggle but he guessed the rodent was old enough to be at the end of its life. Probably just up and died. That’s how things went, sometimes.

  But sometimes you had to help them along.

  . . . in fields where they lay . . .

  He’d chosen fields as his staging arena. He’d read of others with his same affliction . . . same deviant sexual needs . . . same dangerous, aberrant behavior . . . same need to dispose of used-up bodies when they were finished with them. He’d molded himself accordingly and likewise had chosen fields where they would lie.

  Closing his eyes, he tried to put himself into his other skin. His outer layer. The one the public saw. Beneath the skin lay a beast that answered to a hungry, sexual beat, a living thing within his skull and body. It was always there, lying in wait, especially when he thought about her. He tried very, very hard not to think about her, the one he’d believed in once, but she could not be denied. It had started long ago. He’d reached out to her, but she’d pulled back, repulsed. He’d been embarrassed and he could still hear them all laughing and laughing.

  He’d managed to forget about her for a while . . . until he’d followed her . . . believed that she was laughing again . . . and the bad thing happened. He’d been scared, afterward. And when he’d been sent away he was certain they knew.

  But they didn’t.

  He never stopped thinking of her. All those years in between . . . it had always been his unformed plan to have her. And then she started playing a game with him! He learned she’d joined the Laurelton Police Department as a homicide detective and he knew it was because of him. He could feel it inside, like a vibrating nerve. And suddenly he wanted to take her. Take her right now. But the time wasn’t right. There was much to do before the final moment. And she was too clever, too sensitive by far. Like a skittish sea creature, an anemone, with little fibers always testing the surroundings. Upon the slightest whiff of danger they collapsed in on themselves, scurried away, disappeared. Gone.

  His mind flooded with images and he awoke to the fact that he was on his knees, his blind-eyed face turned up to the circling hawk. He wanted to pleasure himself, but the time for that had passed. He was changing . . . morphing . . . becoming someone else over this long summer. His need could ultimately only be satisfied by her, but in the meantime he would take the surrogates. He’d taken three of them already. Ones who knew too much. He’d taken them while he thought of her.

  He hated her.

  He loved her.

  They called her Nine but he’d known her as September.

  “September,” he whispered to the dead raccoon and the soaring bird of prey. He would bring her to this field and let her feel his power. No more laughing at him. No more turning away . . . no more playing games.

  They would be together. That was the way of it. Soon he would be tight within her sea anemone grip. Blood red, bright orange, and sunflower yellow. A kaleidoscope of heated sexual colors.

  But not yet. Not yet . . . not till the right moment.

  In the meantime he would find the surrogates.

  “Do Unto Others As She Did To Me,” he whispered into the shimmering heat of the day, staring up to the sky, into God’s face.

  Chapter 1

  Her cell phone rang at four minutes after midnight. September Rafferty, asleep on her living room couch, half rose and thrashed around for the switch to the floor lamp, squinting across the room to her cable box, which showed the time in glowing white numerals: 12:03.

  She smiled as she turned the switch and flooded the room with illumination. She knew who it was and why they’d called now. Blinking, she punched the cell’s green ON button and said, “You couldn’t wait till morning?”

  “Twelve-oh-three,” her twin brother said. “That’s when you came into this world. That’s when I’m gonna call. Happy Birthday.”

  “I should’ve called you six minutes ago instead of earlier in the day. Happy Birthday to you, too.”

  “But I called you at the exact time of your birth,” he said with a touch of pride. “That was all me.”

  “You just like the idea of waking me out of a sound sleep.”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  Her brother, August “Auggie” Rafferty, was her twin but they’d been born on either side of midnight on August 31, making it different days and even different months. His birthday was August 31 and hers was September 1, hence their parents had named them August and September respectively—a strange decision that went along with how they’d named their three older children: March, May, and July. Which said a lot about their parents, September thought, specifically their father, as their mother had died years earlier and had once alluded to the fact that she was sorry for manacling them with names after the months of the year. />
  “Did you field any other birthday wishes from the family?” September asked him, fighting a yawn.

  “March called. And July.”

  “July’s good about that stuff. I’m generally horrible about remembering birthdays.”

  “Yours and mine are the only two I’m really certain about,” Auggie admitted.

  “Yeah . . . well . . .” September thought briefly about her older sister, May, who’d died in a botched robbery at a fast-food restaurant when she was in high school, but that only brought on more melancholia than she was already feeling this birthday. “No word from Dad, huh,” she said.

  “Like there would be,” he said.

  Braden Rafferty had disowned his two youngest children when they both chose law enforcement as a career. He had firm ideas about family, though he’d been an unfaithful husband and an absent parent, and this naming of his children undoubtedly stemmed from his own desire for control and order. At least that’s how September saw it. Had she and Auggie both been born in August, she wouldn’t put it past him to have named them August and Augusta. That’s just who he was, and was indicative of why she generally steered clear of him and most of the other Raffertys as well, except her twin. Luckily, the whims of fate had stepped in, delivering her and her brother on different days and different months, so he was August and she was September.

  Or, maybe that was less about luck and more about Braden being able to bend the universe to his will. She wouldn’t put it past him.

  “So . . . have you done anything about your artwork?” he asked.

  He meant her second grade artwork, if you could really call it that: the artwork with the phrase Do Unto Others As She Did To Me scrawled across its face in what looked like blood that had come to September at the station about a week earlier. She and her partner were the detectives on the Do Unto Others case where a killer was strangling victims, carving words and markings into their flesh, then discarding the bodies in fields around the city of Laurelton and in Winslow County. At least that was the prevailing theory at work, though they hadn’t made that connection public yet.

  “Still working on it,” she told Auggie.

  “Work faster.”

  “Hey,” she protested.

  “I’m just sayin’. I don’t like you in harm’s way.”

  When the “bloody” artwork had first arrived at the station, she’d told her brother about it, and Auggie had nearly come unglued. Not a big surprise, as he was known for his penchant of saving damsels in distress, and having a killer threaten his sister had sent him into overprotective mode, toute suite. He’d gone straight to their superior, Lieutenant Aubry D’Annibal, and insisted that he be put on the case. Hell no, September had told him flatly. It was her case, and she was bound and determined to hang on to it, especially now that it had become personal. She and her partner, Detective Gretchen Sandler, had been assigned the case and her interfering brother wasn’t going to take it from her, no way, no how.

  She’d pointed this all out to D’Annibal, adding that Auggie was still deeply involved in the Zuma Software case, where a masked intruder had stormed into the front offices of the software company and opened fire on the employees. That case was just wrapping up but there was still a helluva lot of work to do. Plus, she’d reminded him that he’d already yanked her off that case to put her on this one, and she really didn’t want to be pulled again. Yes, her artwork had been sent to her. This killer knew her; there was something there. And that was exactly why she wanted to stay on the case.

  So far the lieutenant had kept her on, with the caveat that September might be reassigned if things got too hot. She had then told her brother to leave it alone and get back on Zuma. He could damn well finish with that.

  “But the two cases have overlapped,” Auggie had argued at the time.

  “And when we figure out how, maybe you can jump on this one, too,” September stated firmly, holding her ground. As long as she and Sandler were the lead detectives, September didn’t want her brother mucking things up.

  But, all that said, she knew Auggie wasn’t wrong. The third suspected victim of Do Unto Others, Glenda Tripp, had turned out to be related to one of the prime suspects in the Zuma case, so there had to be some connection between the two. It was too improbable, impossible really, that it was mere coincidence. Was Do Unto Others some kind of copycat of the Zuma killer? Maybe following that case and grabbing victims peripherally involved for the notoriety . . . or something? That had yet to be determined. It was early days still, and until they had more evidence connecting the three homicides to the Zuma killings and even to each other, they were treading lightly.

  “Now,” she said to her brother, “I’ve decided to go to Dad’s house and dig through the attic or basement or both, looking for more of my grade school stuff. I want to see if I can find the rest of it. Wanna join?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You keep saying you want in on this case.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near dear old Dad.” He and Braden didn’t talk, didn’t get along, didn’t much like each other.

  “Thought I’d ask,” September said.

  “But keep me in the loop,” he ordered her.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Auggie hadn’t exactly acquiesced to having September and Gretchen handle Do Unto Others, but he was too busy to really protest much, and though, in reality, September wouldn’t have minded working with him, regardless of what she said to him, Gretchen Sandler was her partner and they were in this together, for better or worse.

  “I’m off till after Labor Day . . . kind of a forced vacation,” she admitted now. “D’Annibal wanted me to think about things and decide whether I really wanted to stay on the case.”

  “You thinking of quitting?”

  “Don’t sound so eager. No. But when I get back to work I’ll give you a call. Maybe we can talk over some stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I don’t know. About grade school . . . I’ll let you know after I find the rest of my work,” she said, then added, “If I find it.”

  “You know I’m always here for you.”

  “Oh, bullshit. You just want the case for yourself.”

  “I don’t want my little sister involved with a psycho.”

  “Six minutes younger does not make me your little sister.”

  “Yes it does. Look it up.”

  “Bullshit again. Goodnight, Auggie,” she said, switching off the light.

  “Goodnight, Nine,” he responded, calling her by her nickname. She was Nine, for the month she was born, a name that had stuck all through her school years and into her adult life.

  The following Thursday she hurried past Guy Urlacher at the Laurelton Police Department’s front desk, flashing him a look at her ID. He couldn’t stop himself from asking everyone for identification no matter how many times they passed his desk. It was protocol, and Guy was all about it.

  “Hey!” he called after her, wanting her to stop, but she was having none of it today.

  In the squad room, she dropped her purse on her desk

  and walked over to stand in front of the bulletin board that held her piece of artwork. Beside it were pictures of Do Unto Others’s suspected three victims: Sheila Dempsey, Emmy Decatur, and Glenda Tripp. They’d been reluctant to confirm they had a serial killer on their hands as they didn’t want the FBI swarming on them until they were sure.

  Detective George Thompkins, heavyset and squeaking his swivel chair, and her partner, Gretchen Sandler, who was seated at a desk, a phone at her ear, in the act of making a call, both stopped what they were doing as September plucked the artwork from the board and carried it to her desk. It was something she’d made in her second grade homeroom class. Now, she said to the room at large, “I don’t care if it’s ketchup or red paint or salsa or pomegranate juice, when I first saw it, I thought it was blood.” She held it up for Thompkins and Sandler to see again. It had been tested for prints when it a
rrived but all they found were smudges, and she felt now, since it was hers, it didn’t have to be tacked on the board. “This message came to me. The killer sent it to me.”

  “It’s ketchup and something else,” Thompkins responded.

  Sandler skewered him with a scorching look. “We know, George. Jesus. Stay on point. It was meant to look like blood. It was meant to scare the shit out of her.” To September, she said, “I still can’t believe you can remember what grade you were in when you did that.”

  Sandler was slim and dark-skinned, half-Brazilian, with curly dark hair and slanted blue eyes. She was attractive in a cat-like, predatory way, and she was known by all and sundry as a bitch on wheels. No one wanted to partner with her, but September, being the newest detective at the Laurelton PD, didn’t really have a choice. So far, it had been fine. Gretchen was a good detective, no matter what others thought of her. September had been watching and learning her style over the last four to five months.

  Now September gazed down at the artwork, memorizing it yet again. It was made of light blue construction paper with glued-on, cut-out pictures of brown-, orange-, and mustard-colored leaves falling from the sky into a pile that was drawn in at the bottom of the page. An ink-stamped happy face and several gold stars ran across the top of the piece, with a teacher’s handwritten note: Your birthday cupcakes were terrific! Way to start the school year!

  But underneath the teacher’s words, new ones had been added in a bloody scrawl: DO UNTO OTHERS AS SHE DID TO ME.

  “Mrs. Walsh was my teacher, and I really liked her,” September said aloud. “The falling leaves were the first art project of the year, and my mom hung it up on the wall in our kitchen next to the refrigerator for a long time.”

  “So, the killer got it from your house,” Gretchen said. Again. They’d been over this territory so many times since the envelope had arrived at the station it was like they were rehearsing for a play.