“I was at the meet,” Robin said. “I’d finished my match and went into the girls’ locker room. It was totally empty because I’m the only girl on the team. I was going to shower, but I got really dizzy all of a sudden. And the next thing I know, I’m here. I think I got dosed.”
Panic soared through Abby, and she was trying hard not to let it show on her face. She needed to stay calm, for Robin’s sake. She was the adult here. The last thing the poor girl needed was an adult freaking out just as much as she was.
They needed to work together to get out of here. They both needed to stay calm and collected.
And strong.
“Do you remember drinking or eating anything different?” Abby asked. “Did someone you didn’t know give you a drink?”
Robin shook her head. “I’m really anal about my water bottle,” she said. “I do these thirst-quencher mixes of grapefruit juice, water, and Gatorade.”
He could’ve slipped anything in her drink and she probably wouldn’t have noticed the taste. Crap.
“I didn’t have my bottle on me the whole time,” Robin admitted. “I didn’t think I needed to watch it. That was stupid of me.”
“No, it wasn’t, sweetie,” Abby said, reaching out and hugging her. “This isn’t your fault,” she said, looking around the shed, trying to see if there was any way out. It was maybe ten feet across, and about the same wide. There was nothing in the shed but the mattress and the bucket, but Abby could see marks along the far wall.
Someone clawing at the wood, trying to get out.
She wanted to shake and cry and scream. But she couldn’t. She steeled herself, she pushed it down, the terror, the rising fear, the question of what the hell will become of us?
She wasn’t going to let what happened to Cass, what happened to Keira Rice, what happened to all the other lost girls, happen to Robin.
She was putting an end to this. An end to him.
Starting now.
“Robin,” she said, pulling away from her, looking at her seriously. Robin’s lip trembled, her eyes filling with tears. “We’re going to get out of this,” she told her, believing every word. “We are going to get home. Both of us. I want you to tell me everything about the last two days. And then we’re going to make a plan.”
Chapter 33
As one of the sheriff’s deputies drove him off the mountain and raced toward town, Paul did the thing he should have done from the start: he called Agent Grace Sinclair.
“I just came in from my trafficking case,” she said, in lieu of a hello. “I got an illuminating email from Zooey. It seems you’ve been taking a working vacation. What’s the news on your niece?”
“No sign,” Paul said. “And now he’s taken Abby.”
“Your journalist friend?” Grace asked. “Shit. He’s spiraling. Tell me everything,” she directed.
“I think it started out a typical teacher/student dynamic,” Paul said. “Somehow, Howard Wells found a protégé . . . someone he felt he could mold into the perfect killer. And then that perfect killer rebelled.”
“The student outpaced the master,” Grace said. “That’s not a submissive personality. It means he was dominant from the start, Dr. X just didn’t recognize it, or he was hiding it.”
“He seems to have a talent for hiding in plain sight,” Paul said.
“Highly intelligent and highly manipulative is not a good combination, Paul.”
“I know, Grace,” he said. “I’ve found his burial ground. Zooey’s digging up seven girls’ bodies right now.”
He could practically hear her gritting her teeth through the phone. “Zooey’s email said you went to see Dr. X at the prison,” Grace said. “What did he say?”
“He seems to be under the impression he created me,” Paul snorted. “Typical delusions of grandeur. Thinks he set me on my path. Wants to take credit for me. Talked a bunch about some Greek myth.”
“Which myth?”
“Um, some guy who fought Hercules and lost,” Paul said.
“Antaeus the giant?” Grace asked.
“Yeah, that was it.”
“Hmm,” Grace said.
“What?” Paul asked.
“It’s just kind of an obscure myth,” Grace said. “It’s part of Hercules’s larger story, but it’s just kind of a small part of it. Was he comparing himself to Hercules?”
“No, he said I was Antaeus. That my weakness . . .” It hit him all at once. “He said my weakness was Abby.”
“Why would he . . . oh!” Grace said, in realization.
“I can’t talk about it right now,” Paul said. Not when Abby was missing, locked up somewhere with Robin. God, he hoped the two of them were together. Abby would protect Robin with her life, and he was so damned grateful for that, grateful that she was that person.
Grateful that he loved someone like that.
She would die fighting for Robin if she had to. He just had to make sure it didn’t come to that.
“Okay, but how would X’s apprentice know to go after Abby?” Grace asked.
“She visited Wells in prison last week,” Paul said. “She’s been trying to get him to see her for months. That’s how this all got started. He finally agreed to see her. She went in there and told him she knew he hadn’t killed Cassandra Martin. And he messed up—he said something that confirmed her suspicions.”
“But in Zooey’s email, she says that you initially thought the unsub was the deputy,” Grace said. “Ryan. And it turned out he wasn’t. Your unsub killed him before Abby could get to him. So my question is: How did the unsub know Abby was looking into Ryan? Or anyone for that matter? How did he even know she was onto him?”
Paul blinked, thinking. How had the unsub known to kill Ryan Clay?
“Wells,” he breathed in realization. “Wells and the unsub are still communicating somehow.”
“I’d bet my art collection on it,” Grace said grimly. “Get Zooey on how they’re communicating. Gavin and I will work with our people in DC to get the prison warden in line.”
“Thank you, Grace.” Sometimes he needed to talk things out to really see the full picture, and she was always the best at that.
“Find out how they’re communicating,” Grace said. “You’ll find him. And your niece. And Abby. You can do this, Paul.”
He knew she was right.
She had to be.
When he called Zooey with the news, she’d been furious that she hadn’t made the leap herself. “What is wrong with me?!” she had demanded over the phone, something Paul wisely didn’t answer. After leaving Cyrus with strict orders to “watch those techs like a hawk, don’t let them damage my evidence!” she’d hopped on the helicopter and had almost beaten Paul to the tiny office in the sheriff’s station that she’d set up as her lab.
Now she had four computers set up next to each other on a steel table and two more laptops rigged up behind her, running a complicated code that Paul had no clue about.
“God, the prison’s security grid is like Silly Putty,” Zooey muttered, tapping frantically on the keyboard. “Okay, searching through every email sent on their network now.”
“Hey, do a search,” Paul said. “For Antaeus and Hercules.”
“From the myth?” Zooey asked, frowning.
“Wells brought it up when I saw him,” Paul explained. “Grace thought it might be important.”
Zooey typed the names in, hitting the enter button, but nothing came up. “Nada,” she said. Then her eyes lit up. “But wait a second.” She pushed her chair down the table, to the last of the computers, beginning to type. “I wonder . . .” she muttered to herself. “Oh, my God!” She jerked in her seat. “Boss! You’re a genius! Well, you and Abby!”
“What?” Paul said, hurrying over to her.
“One of Abby’s theories was that maybe Dr. X and his apprentice met online. Apparently Wells liked Craigslist, so that was one of the possibilities she floated. Look what happens when I run a special search algorithm I created for past and present Craigslist postings and add word Antaeus to the search terms . . .”
Posts began to appear on the screen, one after another.
“This one looks like the first one, dated right after Cass was killed and Wells was caught.” Zooey pointed at the screen.