Criminal

fifteen

Present Day

SUZANNA FORD

Zanna woke with a start. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t see. Her throat ached. She could barely swallow. She turned her head back and forth. A pillow cupped her head. She was lying down. She was in bed.

She tried to say “help,” but her lips would not move. The word got trapped in her mouth. She tried again.

“Help …”

She coughed. Her throat was bone dry. Her eyes throbbed in her head. Every movement sent pain shooting through her body. She was blindfolded. She didn’t know where she was. All she remembered was the man.

The man.

His weight shifted on the bed as he stood up. They weren’t in the hotel room anymore. The low rumble of traffic weaving through downtown had been replaced by two noises. The first one was a hum, like the white-noise machine they bought her grandmother for Christmas one year. It kept up a steady hushing sound.

Hush, little baby … don’t say a word …

The other noise was harder to place. It was so familiar, but every time she thought she had it pinned down, it would change. A whistling sound. Not like a train. Like air sucking through a tunnel. An underwater tunnel. A pneumatic tube.

There was no regularity to it. It only served to make her feel more out of body. More out of place. She didn’t even know if she was still in Atlanta. Or Georgia. Or America. She had no idea how long she’d been out. She had no sense of time or place. She knew nothing but the fear of anticipation.

The man started mumbling again. There was the sound of a faucet turning on. The splash of water in a metal bowl.

Zanna’s teeth started chattering. She wanted meth. She needed meth. Her body was starting to convulse. She was going to lose it. She was going to start screaming. Maybe she should scream. Maybe she should shout so loud that he had to kill her, because she had no doubt that’s what this man was going to do. It was only a matter of the hell he would put her through first.

Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer. The Night Stalker. The Green River Killer.

Zanna had read every book Ann Rule had ever written, and when there wasn’t a book, there was a TV movie or an Internet site or a Dateline or a 20/20 or a 48 Hours, and she remembered every lurid detail about every sadistic freak who had ever kidnapped a woman for his own demonic pleasure.

And this man was a demon. There was no arguing with that. Zanna’s parents had given up on church when she was a kid, but she had lived in Roswell long enough to recognize a stray verse, the cadence of scripture. The man mumbled prayers and he beseeched God for His forgiveness, but Zanna knew that no one was listening except the Devil himself.

The water turned off. Two footsteps, and he was back on the bed. She felt the weight of him as he sat down beside her. More water dripping. Loud drops into the bowl.

Suzanna flinched as the warm, wet rag washed along her skin.