But the caller had already disconnected.
Gabe lowered the phone and looked bleakly at Blake. “He’s got her.”
Blake was watching him intently, visibly poised for action. “What did he say?”
Gabe briefly summed up the call, including the directions of where they could supposedly find Page. “He gave us an hour. We’ll have to go in alone. If he sees any sign of police, he’ll kill her.”
“For all we know, he’s already killed her,” Blake said quietly.
Gabe’s jaw tightened. “No,” he said. “He wants her to witness whatever he plans to do to me.”
He could only hope his words were true. He refused to believe that there was nothing he could do to save Page.
“You know it’s a trap, Gabe. He has no intention of handing her over to you.”
“I know. But I have to go. You, of course, have no obligation to go with me.”
Blake ran a h
and through his hair, wincing when his fingers brushed the bandage on his bruised forehead. He then took a deep breath, shifted his wounded shoulder beneath his borrowed shirt and said, “Come on, Conroy. Let’s go get your wife.”
“WHAT ARE YOU going to do with me?” Page studied Phillip Wingate as she asked the question, trying to understand his bizarre behavior.
He was pacing the length of the dirty, badly abused motor home he’d brought her to, muttering beneath his breath, scratching at his straggly hair and beard. He seemed to be carrying on a muttered conversation with someone she couldn’t see, though she knew he was fully aware of her every movement as she huddled on a filthy built-in couch, watching him.
He looked at her with a scowl. “Shut up. I’m not in the mood for conversation.”
He should have been a nice-looking young man. In his early twenties, he was sandy-haired and blueeyed—as his father had been, Page remembered. But Phillip’s eyes glittered with a feverish intensity that didn’t require a psychiatric degree to diagnose.
He’d allowed his hair to grow long and shaggy, and it needed washing. His rather pathetic attempt at a beard was patchy and tangled. It didn’t hide the thick scar that marred one side of his face.
He walked with a limp. His shuffling gait made Page remember where she’d recently seen him—in the parking lot of the rundown shopping center where she and Gabe had found Blake.
Two teenagers had been smoking outside the comic book store, she remembered. A third young man had approached them as if to bum a cigarette, just as Page and Gabe had helped Blake to his feet and across the parking lot. It had been Phillip Wingate. And he’d approached the smoking pair from the direction of Gabe’s pickup.
Page and Gabe had been too concerned with Blake’s injuries to watch Gabe’s truck. Wingate had been keeping Blake under surveillance, knowing he would call for help. And when they’d arrived, he’d attached some sort of transmitter to Gabe’s truck, allowing him to locate the cabin. He’d told her that on the way here, after he’d made the call to Gabe. Wingate had seemed quite proud of his skills—in fact, he’d called himself “a genius.”
Eyeing the complicated-looking electronic equipment that took up most of the otherwise-impoverished interior of the motor home, Page mused that Phillip Wingate probably did have a genius-level IQ—as his father had. She couldn’t help but be saddened that Wingate, Senior, had also passed down his emotional instability.
“I didn’t ask Gabe to find me,” she tried to explain again. “He searched for me on his own. I begged him to go away and leave me alone, but he wouldn’t If you let me go now, I’ll disappear again. I’ll hide so well that he’ll never find me. That’s what you want, isn’t it? For me to be alone?”
“You’ve already been there,” Wingate snapped, patting the gun he’d stuck into the waistband of his dirty jeans. “Now I think it’s time for you to find out how it feels to watch someone you love die.”
Her stomach clenched in fear. “I won’t let you hurt him,” she whispered. “You’ll have to kill me first.”
“You know, Page, I really don’t care,” Wingate said with a shrug. “You first, or him. Either way, you’re both dead. Your friend, as well. It comes full circle tonight, doesn’t it? A husband, a wife, and an innocent bystander. All shot because of you.”
He was insane. And he was fully prepared to kill—and to die.
There would be no reasoning with him, Page thought sickly. Nothing she could say would change his mind now. He was trapped in the horror of his own past, intent on reliving the nightmare of his parents’ deaths. And he planned to end it tonight
She’d heard the call Wingate had made to Gabe, using the cellular phone he’d stolen from Blake. And she knew Gabe would come for her, regardless of the danger.
She drew more tightly into herself, desperately searching her mind for a plan. She would do whatever it took to guarantee Gabe’s safety—even if it meant sacrificing her own.
WINGATE HAD THE GUN in his hand when he opened the side door to the motor home in response to Gabe’s knock. He looked from Gabe to Blake, who stood close by.
“You made good time,” he commented. “Fifteen minutes to spare. Come in. Oh, and I suppose I should add the usual warning for you both to keep your hands where I can see them, and to make no sudden moves.”