CHAPTER ELEVEN: SuspicionSheriff Hammett looked up at the knock at his office door. One of the newer deputies, Sanchez, stuck his head in. The man looked vaguely ill and a little nervous. “Um, Chief?”Hammett forced himself not to roll his eyes. He hated the moniker “Chief.” It made him feel like he was one of the Village People. Still, it was what most of his officers called him and he had come to tolerate it, if not accept it. “What is it, Sanchez?”After a slight hesitation, Sanchez said, “They’re back.”Now Hammett did roll his eyes. He didn’t even have to ask who they were. Over the past few months, there had become only one they referred to in the office. They are holding on line one. They have been blasting the sheriff’s department on Facebook. They published another Letter to the Editor in the Greenville News accusing the police of ignoring leads. They have sent twelve emails in four hours.They are here. Again.Mr. and Mrs.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:Dinner TimePatrick stood with his back against the door, watching as Clare bent over, weeping hysterically. What are we going to do now? she’d asked, but he had no response to that one. He could feel the vibrations in the wood as the Doberman launched itself at the door as if trying to use its head as a battering ram, much as Patrick had used the two-by-four as one on the cell door.The two-by-four!He dashed down the stairs, moving so suddenly and quickly that it startled a gasp out of Clare. At the bottom of the stairs, he snatched up the beam from where it had fallen once punching its way through the hole where the doorknob had once been. He held it near one end and gave it a few test swings, as if it were a baseball bat. The thing was lighter than he would have liked, lacking substantial heft, but it did have the wicked nails sticking out of either end.“What do you plan to do with that?” Clare asked. She’d come down the stairs and taken a seat on

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:Venturing OutPatrick awoke suddenly, his head snapping up. There was no moment of blissful disorientation when he thought he was in his bed in the dorm, his biggest worry being that he might be late for class. He knew instantly where he was and how dire his circumstances were.Clare slept next to him, her head still on his shoulder. His entire body felt like one big cramp, though the worst of the stiffness and pain resided in his neck and lower back. He gently pushed the girl to the side so that she slumped against door, her chin touching her chest. He rose slowly, his muscles feeling atrophied, as if he’d been immobile in a coma for months or years, his joints creaking like rusty hinges. His left arm was partially numb, beginning to buzz with the pinprick sensation as blood returned to the limb. He turned his head far to one side then the other, trying to work out the soreness. His spine felt compacted, an accordion that had been squeezed in. He walked down two st

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:Mommy Dearest“I think I know her,” Patrick said.Clare glanced back at him. “Really? You do?”“Not personally or anything, but she looks so familiar. I think I remember seeing news stories about her disappearance.”Turning her gaze to the woman once again, she scanned her features to see if they sparked any memory, but there was nothing. Not surprising. Clare didn’t pay much attention to the news, local or global, and that had become even truer since she started dating Hank. She could admit that she had turned into one of those girls who thought of nothing but her relationship, doodling hearts with arrows through them and writing her first name with his last name. Silly high school stuff from a girl who claimed not to believe in fairytales but still expected her life to turn out like one.Even after she’d been abducted, such fantasies persisted. After all, most fairytales had a dark period before the happily ever after. Cinderella had to flee the ball, Snow Wh

CHAPTER NINETEEN:The Attic“I killed her,” Patrick said again, dropping to his knees. Distantly, he heard Clare saying his name, but it was small and tinny, as if coming through a radio with a bad connection. Or as if he were at the bottom of a deep well and she were calling down to him from the top.All he could think about at the moment was the fact that in a matter of a few hours, he had killed first a dog then graduated to killing another human being. Acts of which he would have thought himself incapable of a mere week ago.While Patrick didn’t go so far as to actually call himself a practicing Buddhist, he did have great respect for their philosophies and had spent some time visiting with a Buddhist monk at the Cambodian wat in Wellford. One of the things that resonated the most with Patrick was the Buddhist belief that all life was precious. Not just human life, but all life. Buddhists tended to be vegetarians and didn’t wear leather, but it went even deeper than that.