Wake to Darkness Read online

  “Easy, Rache. Easy now. We need to go slow. I need to get everything. This person was in your car with you?”

  She nodded, and he noticed her pupils were dilated. She was still shaken up.

  “Did he get out?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see into the backseat and the hatch got ripped open, so I don’t know.”

  “Hold on. Okay?”

  He backed out of the ambulance, put his fingers to his lips and whistled. Two uniforms and Rosie gathered around him. “All right, we have a murder suspect who was inside the car before it went over. Fan out. Rosie, call it in, get a couple of roadblocks in place.”

  “We have a description, Mace?” Rosie asked. The other cops paused in what they were doing, awaiting his answer.

  He looked in at Rachel. She shook her head. “Dressed in black and wearing a ski mask.”

  He nodded. “Ski mask, that’s all we’ve got. Go.” He nodded at the two uniforms. “Check the car, but be careful. The suspect is armed and dangerous. And the car’s a crime scene, so don’t contaminate it. Check for the suspect, then tape it off.”

  The two men nodded and started down the slope.

  He moved back into the ambulance with Rachel. “I need to know how this person got into your car. Where were you?”

  “I was at the mall. But I locked it. I was careful.”

  He nodded. “Did you stop anywhere else before you headed up this road?”

  “Yeah. Subway. In the village.”

  “Did you lock the car then?”

  She thought back, lowered her head, then shook it slowly. “No. No, I was in a hurry to get up to Sandra’s to pick up Misty and—” Her head came up, eyes widening. “Misty! She’s alone, her and Myrt, at Sandra’s house.”

  “I already called her, the minute I saw where your text came from,” he said. “Figured she should know you’d been in an accident. She was fine. I sent a uniform up to keep her posted, and I stayed on the phone with her until he arrived, just to make sure she wouldn’t panic. She’s safe. Worried about you, though.”

  She nodded. “I should call her.”

  “Yeah, we’ll get to that. So you stopped at Subway. And then what?”

  She swallowed hard, her eyes meeting his. He felt her fear. Hated it, but felt every ounce of it. And that was a lot. She didn’t scare easily. She hadn’t been this scared even the last time a killer had stalked her.

  “I glimpsed this masked face rising up behind me in the rearview. It was a split second before he grabbed me, and that gave me time to lurch to one side. I jerked the wheel. He jabbed me with a needle, and then the car was rolling. I hit my head and blacked out.”

  “You keep saying he. Are you sure it was a man?”

  She frowned hard at him. “It happened so fast I...I don’t know. I’m assuming.” She touched the cut on her forehead and winced. “How bad is it?”

  “Not bad. You’re gonna be okay. What about the needle? Are you feeling any side effects?”

  “I don’t think anything went into me. It barely broke the skin, and he never had the chance to depress the plunger. When I came around I pulled it out, and the plunger was still fully extended. I left it in the car. I managed to drop it into one of my shopping bags. I didn’t stick around long, though. I was afraid he was still in the car, so I climbed out the window and got up the hill as fast as I could.”

  He knew that much. Had seen the bloody smears in the snow all the way down. “I don’t know if I could have made that climb without a head injury.”

  “Sure you could.”

  Another cruiser pulled to a stop, and Misty dove out, sprinting for the ambulance. “Aunt Rache!”

  Rachel gripped his arm. “I don’t want her knowing what really happened. Tell the officers—”

  “Aunt Rachel!” Misty climbed into the ambulance opposite Mason and hugged her aunt.

  Mason gave her a nod and left the two of them arguing over whether or not Rachel was going to the hospital. He turned back. “I want you to go, Rache. Please.”

  “It’ll take up my entire afternoon,” she said.

  “You know what can happen with a blow to the head. Better than it taking up your entire life, right?”

  * * *

  I wanted out of that curtain-draped E.R. cubicle even more than I wanted the chocolate bar Misty brought me from the machine in the waiting room. But I took the chocolate anyway. I’d been in here for over an hour and apparently was now just waiting for someone to look at my CT scan before I could get the hell out of there.

  “Mason went out to check on Myrtle,” Misty said as I bit into the Kit Kat bar and let it improve my mood. Slightly. It was after 2:00 p.m. The day was all but shot, and...okay, might as well admit it. I was afraid to go home. And I was afraid if I was here too long, it would be too late to hit the road out of town. And how was I going to do that, anyway, with my new car currently lying on its side at the bottom of a ravine?

  I was scared, I’ll admit it. And it pissed me off to be scared. “Myrt’s been cooped up in Mason’s car for entirely too long,” I said, because it was better than giving voice to my darker thoughts.

  Misty started to say something just as my curtain whipped open, and a bald guy with glasses stepped in, carrying a clipboard and looking at it, not at me. “Ms. de Luca?”

  “Present.”

  That brought his eyeballs off the chart. “Okay, it looks like you’re going to be fine. You’ve got a mild concussion. That means—”

  “I know what that means. Bruise on the brain. Could swell or bleed. I need to limit my activity for the next forty-eight hours and come back immediately if I have any odd symptoms, like a headache that doesn’t get better with Ibuprofen, dizziness, passing out, change in sleep patterns or sex drive, or—”

  “Are you in the medical field, Ms. de Luca?”

  “No, but my friend Siri’s a freakin’ genius.” I held up my smartphone. “Web MD,” I clarified.

  He sighed and handed me the chart. “Read it, sign it and you’re out of here.”

  “Thanks. How seriously do I need to take the ‘no strenuous activity’ thing? I’m about to leave on a ski trip.”

  “I wouldn’t do any skiing for the first twenty-four hours. After that, if you feel all right, you should be fine.”

  Nodding, I scratched my official signature, not the one I used for autographs—every author knew those two should be as different as possible unless you used a pseudonym. Then I said, “Sorry if I was bitchy. This really messed up my day.”

  “I understand that. You’ll be happy to know that your blood work didn’t show—”

  “Hold up a second, Doc.” I glanced at Misty. “Would you go see what’s taking Mason so long? I’m worried about Myrtle.”

  She looked at me, then at the doctor, then at me again, and compressed her lips. “Okay.”

  Once I was sure she was gone, I said, “She doesn’t know about the attacker in the backseat.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “My mistake. Anyway, we checked your blood for sedatives, tranquilizers and the more common poisons. It doesn’t look like anything got into your system.”

  “But can you be sure?”

  “No, not completely. We’re not going to find things we don’t test for. But if you’re not feeling any symptoms of anything...”

  I got that. “Yeah, okay.” The syringe was at the police lab, no doubt. This doctor wouldn’t have had the chance to see it or analyze it. He would only have been told the bare minimum he needed to know.

  “Doc, is there a drug that would paralyze a person so completely that they could barely even breathe, while leaving them completely awake and lucid?”

  He blinked at me like I’d turned into a brain-munching demon and took an actual step back. “Well, yes.”

  “Would you have found that if I’d been injected with it?”

  “No. It leaves the system so quickly it barely leaves a trace. We could test for the metabolites it breaks down into. But
there’s no point, because you couldn’t have been given that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you had, you’d be dead by now. Succinylcholine is what we use in the O.R. to keep the patient perfectly still during surgery. It paralyzes every muscle, including the lungs and, in large enough doses, the heart. It’s why you always need an airway during surgery. You can’t breathe on your own when your lungs are paralyzed.”

  “Is this—what did you call it? Sux-sin—”

  “Succinylcholine.”

  “Yeah, that. Is it easy to obtain?”

  “Almost impossible,” he said. “And like I said, if he’d injected you with that, you’d be dead.”

  “Yeah.” But not before he’d gouged out my eyes, I bet.

  He took back his chart, peeled off a copy of what I’d signed and handed it to me. Ah, yes, my release instructions. As he exited the curtained-off area, Mason and Misty came in. I was already sitting up, long since dressed and ready to go.

  “I got the all-clear, so let’s blow this pop stand.”

  Mason asked for the paper by holding out his hand, and I gave it over. He read every word, which was more than I had done, nodded and said, “Okay. We’re going to my place for the time being, if that’s okay with everyone.”

  “It’s not,” I said, sliding off the bed to my feet.

  Mason shoved the paper into Misty’s hands and came quick to my side, sliding an arm around my waist like I might fall down without him. Once I would have resented it, but I liked being close to him. Up against him. I liked it a lot.

  Down, girl. Finish your thought, before you lose it entirely.

  “I still have to pack, pick up Misty’s stuff and get myself a rental car so we can go on our trip.”

  “We could always take my car,” Misty said. “And grab my bags while we’re picking it up.”

  “That doesn’t cover the part where I still have to pack,” I told her. I looked at Mason. And oddly, I knew that he knew exactly what I was thinking. I have to pack, but I’m afraid if I go home a killer will be waiting for me.

  “I have a suggestion,” Mason said.

  I nodded at him to go on.

  “Come to my place tonight, rest, and let me worry about getting Misty’s stuff from her house and getting you a rental car. You can head up north in the morning. I’ll even take you home to pack your stuff first, and then out to breakfast. What do you think?”

  What did I think? I thought he was too good to be true. Fortunately I’d known him long enough by now to know that he was just what he seemed. I knew all of Mason Brown’s secrets. Okay, maybe not all of them, but certainly his deepest, darkest ones. None of them revealed him as anything other than perfect. Okay, so he liked to play video games, and he’d covered up the fact that his brother was a serial killer. Was still covering it up. But he had good reasons. And really, how could he have known his insane brother would keep coming back to haunt our lives the way he seemed determined to do?

  Not that it was his brother doing this. No ghost was going around injecting people with suxsy-fuck-acholine and reclaiming its lost organs. That hadn’t been a ghost in the back of my car, it had been a real flesh-and-blood person. I’d felt it.

  Thinking of that gave me a shiver.

  I rubbed my arms until the feeling went away. “I think that’s a great idea. Thanks, Mason.”

  “De nada. Let’s get a move on, Myrt’s getting impatient.”

  * * *

  Mason could see that Misty was starting to wonder what the hell was going on between him and her aunt, but she hadn’t asked. Yet. She probably would as soon as he left them alone at his place, which he had no choice but to do. Every Monday evening he picked the boys up from basketball practice and drove them home. It wasn’t far out of his way, and he enjoyed the extra time with them. Jeremy had opted not to play this year, but he still hung out at the school gym doing homework while his brother practiced.

  So he left the women at his place with Myrtle and drove to the school, pulling into the half-circle drive in front, taking his place in a long line of minivans and SUVs, and waited for the boys to come out.

  Joshua emerged a few minutes later, dragging his backpack, still in his shorts and sweaty T-shirt, with a hoodie slung over his shoulder, even though it was thirty freezing degrees.

  Mason cranked up the heat a little and reached across to open the door. Josh tossed his backpack into the backseat and got in.

  Mason resisted the urge to tell the kid to wear his jacket so he wouldn’t catch his death. He had no desire to sound like a nagging mother. If Josh got cold enough, he would put the hoodie on. All the nagging in the world wouldn’t make him do it any sooner.

  “You lucked out, got here before Jer and landed shotgun,” he said as Josh buckled up. “What’s taking him so long, anyway?”

  “He didn’t come. Said he’d catch a ride home with ‘one of the guys who actually has a car’ later on.”

  Mason got that the sarcasm-loaded part of the sentence had been Jeremy’s, not Josh’s.

  A car blew its horn from behind them, and when Mason checked the mirror, a woman in a minivan sent him an apologetic shrug. He didn’t like this and figured Marie was going to like it even less, but he didn’t have any choice but to get going. He wasn’t comfortable leaving Rachel and Misty alone, even at his place, right now.

  He pulled into traffic and headed for Marie’s, Josh talking a mile a minute as they went. Basketball practice, the coach, the holiday tournament being cancelled because of a flu outbreak at the hosting school, and about fifty other topics over the fifteen-minute ride.

  God, that enthusiasm. He could use a dose of it right now.

  He and Josh got out, and Josh ran ahead to the front door. Mason followed at a slower pace, until Joshua turned and said, “Huh. Door’s open.” Then he hollered, “Mom?”

  Mason reacted automatically, catching Josh before he went in, pulling him back a little and pushing the door open himself. He peered inside, and saw the place in shambles. “Josh, get back in the car. Get back in the car right now and—”

  But the kid shoved past him and darted into the house before Mason could finish, so he had no choice but to pull his piece and follow.

  Marie was on the floor near the sofa. The coffee table was on its side, a lamp smashed on the floor near her head and the back door was standing wide open.

  He lunged forward, dropping to one knee beside Marie. She was banged up to hell and gone, a huge lump, already purple, on her forehead, a bruise on one cheekbone, and more all up and down one arm and shoulder. Her eyes were closed. She was breathing, though, and had a solid, steady pulse.

  He turned. “Josh, stay close to me.”

  Josh came to him, phone in hand, already mid-conversation with a 911 dispatcher. He put his hand over the phone. “She wants to know if the bad guy’s still here,” he said, and from the look in his wide eyes, he did, too.

  Mason took the phone from him. “Your mom is okay, pal. I want you to pat her face a little, talk to her, try to wake her up.”

  “Okay.” Josh began doing as he was told while Mason got to his feet again, checking the surroundings as he brought the phone to his ear. “This is Detective Mason Brown. I’m on the scene. I need backup and an ambulance. Looks like the attacker ran out the back door, but I can’t leave the victim and her son to give chase.”

  “We have help on the way, Detective.”

  “Good.” He set the phone down, put it on speaker, and said, “I’m going to take a look out the back door.” Then, louder, “Josh, if you see anyone, yell.”

  “I will. Come on, Mom. Come on, wake up.”

  Mason went through the kitchen, which was empty, one chair knocked over but nothing else out of place. He looked through the open back door. No one out there. And the sidewalk that led around the house to the front was snow-free and dry. Not a track to be seen.

  He closed the door, being careful not to touch the knob and obscure any prints, and he
aded back into the living room, grabbing the phone on the way. “I hear sirens now. I’m going to hang up.”

  Marie was sitting up, holding one hand to her head, crying softly and hugging Joshua. He went over to them. “Josh, go wait by the door and let the cops in, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  As soon as the kid was a few feet away, Mason leaned close to Marie’s face. “What happened?”

  “He...just walked in the front door and started hitting me.”

  “He?”

  She nodded. “Had to be. He was tall. Thin, but tall. And strong. He had a ski mask on. I couldn’t see anything, no skin, nothing.” She lifted her bruised face to stare straight into his eyes.

  God in heaven, why? Why would this killer go after Marie?

  “Did he say anything? Could you recognize the voice?”

  She closed her eyes, shaking her head. “He was trying to jab me with a needle. I thought he was going to kill me. He must have heard you pull in and run off.”

  “All right, all right, it’s all right now.” He hugged her, and then Josh was leading the uniforms inside. Rosie showed up on their heels.

  The paramedics arrived next, and Mason backed off to let them have a look at Marie. He had the uniforms scouring the neighborhood, and everything in him was itching to go help, but he didn’t dare leave Josh and Marie alone. While the medics were with Marie, he took Rosie into the kitchen, out of earshot. “It’s the same guy. The organ thief.”

  Rosie’s brows shot up. “The one that attacked Rachel earlier today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Dressed in black, ski mask, too similar to be coincidental. She said he had a needle.”

  Rosie leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Damn. Why would this guy want to bother with Marie?”

  “I don’t know, but if he’d come after her, he might come after the boys, too, and—” He broke off there. “Shit, the boys. I don’t know where Jeremy is.”

  He lunged back into the living room just in time to see his teenage nephew burst through the front door, his face etched in panic, no doubt from seeing the ambulance and police cars out front. “Mom?”

  “I’m okay, Jer. I’m okay,” Marie said as he rushed to her. She was on the sofa now, with two paramedics attending to her.