Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

‘Or Denver, Colorado,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah. Exactly. They just disappear. Order fulfilled. Huge payday for the smugglers. And once they’ve outlived their usefulness, the girls wind up like this woman in Amsterdam.’

Stride got up and went to the window in Troy’s office. He could see train cars covered with graffiti. Silos. Pyramids of taconite. The sheer volume of everything that passed through the port made a single human being seem like a needle in a haystack. Easy to hide.

‘I’m not saying that’s what happened to Kelly Hauswirth,’ Troy went on, ‘but I think we have to consider the possibility. She was lured here, and somebody did that for a reason. Plus, I don’t like the fact that the meeting place was a bar where a lot of the overseas sailors hang out.’

Stride nodded. ‘We’ll need a list of the salties that were in port when the murder took place. And when each of them is expected back in Duluth.’

‘You got it.’

‘I want to talk to your contacts at Interpol, too.’

‘Sure.’ Troy stood up, and he shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Listen, I hope I’m wrong about this, but if someone is smuggling girls through here, they didn’t start with Kelly, and they’re not going to stop there. It’s peak shipping season. For all we know, they’ve already got other girls hidden in the city, and they’re just waiting to get them out on a boat.’

Her name was Erin. She was from Grand Forks.

She knew who she was, but when she awoke, she found that her other senses had been stripped. Her mind swam, making her dizzy. She couldn’t tell the difference anymore between consciousness and dreams. She opened her eyes, but the world was black. A blindfold. When she tried to speak, to shout, to scream, she couldn’t make a sound. Something filled her mouth, muffling her cries. Her wrists pressed against each other behind her back, and she couldn’t move them. Her ankles were tied, too.

Panic rippled over her, like a wave so tall and strong it would cover her up and drown her. She squirmed and struggled in a fit of despair, but she was frozen in place. Blind. Mute. Bound.

This was a nightmare.

No.

Erin knew she was awake. She lay on a wooden floor on her side. Her blond hair spilled across her face. Dirt and splinters pressed into her skull like sharp fingernails. Her neck spasmed with pain. This was real. She could hear things. Somewhere close by, she recognized the trill of a cardinal in the trees, penetrating the walls around her. It sang to her, but she couldn’t sing back. Even so, it made her realize that the world was still out there.

She rolled onto her back, where her knuckles dug into the small of her spine. The weight of the gag stuffed into her mouth made her choke. She was afraid she would vomit. With a thrust of her body, she rolled again, all the way onto her face, where dust blew into her nose. It became difficult to breathe, and the stricture in her throat made her suck in each breath faster. She hyperventilated. Her heart raced.

Erin heaved herself onto her side. She had no sense of the space around her. How big. How small. She was inside, somewhere, but the room was hot. Damp sweat covered her skin. When she tried to bring her knees toward her chest, her ankles resisted. They were tethered on a short leash to something heavy and solid. A steel table, immovable. She kicked at it and realized her feet were bare. Her shoes had been taken. She wriggled around and sat up.

She knew who she was but not where she was or how she’d gotten here or how long she’d been in this place. Time had no meaning. My name is Erin. I am a dental hygienist in Grand Forks. I am on vacation to see...

That was it. Matt. Mattie_1987. Matt the paralegal. Funny, sweet, athletic, such a shy, sexy face. Most men didn’t understand her, but Matt did. He seemed to know what it was like to be her, all the insecurities, all the nervousness when she looked in the mirror, all the doubts about where she was going in life. She’d never believed she could fall in love with someone online, but that was before she found Matt in the chat room. It was easier to talk to him than to anyone in her real life. There was something about the anonymity of the darkness and the screen that made her tell him secrets. She shared things with him that she’d never shared with her family or friends. Not that she had many friends. Or family, other than a distant sibling and parents who didn’t really understand her.

That’s me, too, he said . I know how you feel.

He was like her soul mate.

But her soul mate never showed up. She felt as if she’d lost hours in her brain. Lost days that were gray in her memory. She had a cloudy memory of a bar. Drinking. Waiting. Growing sad and anxious as time passed and the evening waned. More drinking. Where was he? She’d driven to Duluth to meet him. He’d said he would be there for her.

Texting over and over. No response. I’m here, Mattie, where are you?

Then the blackness descended. And now the terror. Not knowing where she was or how she’d gotten to this place or why she’d been imprisoned. It was an empty road between there and here.

Outside, she heard the scratch of footsteps on dirt. The cardinal, alarmed, stopped singing. Her first thought was of rescue, but she knew that no one was coming to release her. She listened, hearing the footsteps pause. There was a stretch of silence and then the metallic rattle of a lock being undone.

The hinges of a door squealed. Light stabbed the blindfold, but only for a moment as the door was closed again. She felt herself shivering. He was inside with her, coming closer. She thought she heard breathing, but her own breathing reverberated inside her head, like the panting of a trapped animal. She couldn’t run. She couldn’t cry for help.

He was near her. Inches away.

Fingers touched her hair, almost seductively, and she jumped. The gag loosened, but it still filled her mouth. Something cold and sharp pricked her neck, deep enough to make her gasp at the sting. The breathing came back, right beside her, warm and measured in her ear.

A disembodied voice filled her head.

‘If you scream, I’ll cut your throat.’

‘She’s never been in my bar,’ Fred Sissel told Serena.

The bar owner folded up the photograph of the dead woman in Amsterdam and slid it back to her with one finger, as if the paper carried a communicable disease. He took a towel from his sleeve and ran it over the varnished counter. It was mid-afternoon on Wednesday. The place was mostly empty.

‘You sound pretty sure,’ Serena said. ‘It’s not a great photograph. I don’t think I could answer one way or another.’

‘Then why show it to me?’ Sissel asked.

‘Sometimes we get lucky. We got this photo two days ago, and we’re canvassing the area to see if anyone remembers her.’

‘Well, I don’t.’

Sissel tweaked his mustache and smoothed his slicked-back, graying hair. He didn’t hide the fact that he wanted Serena to leave. The murder of Kelly Hauswirth had brought a lot of cops and news cameras to his bar. His customers didn’t like it, and they’d voted with their feet.

‘What about others?’ Serena asked him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Other young women who didn’t fit in with the crowd here. Women like Kelly Hauswirth.’

‘It’s a bar,’ Sissel said. ‘People come and go. I look at the credit cards, not the faces.’

‘You took a pretty good look at my face,’ Serena pointed out.

Sissel’s mouth flickered into a smile. ‘Well, you’ve got a face worth looking at.’

‘Come on, Fred. Kelly Hauswirth had a suitcase with her. She stuck out in your crowd like a church lady at a biker rally. All I’m asking is whether you’ve spotted any other girls who match the same profile.’