Fatal Burn (West Coast 2)

He’d been kneeling, staring at the fire, but now his head whipped around fast, as if he’d forgotten she was there, forgotten she was close enough to the pictures to make them out. He scowled. “You ask too many questions.”

“Who are they?” she asked again.

“Shut up.” He rose quickly and reached onto the mantel. For a second Dani thought he was going to burn the pictures, frames and all, but instead he merely replaced his small torch, then from his pocket he pulled out a miniature recorder and a piece of folded, lined paper. The paper’s edge was frayed as if it had come from a tiny spiral notebook. A message was scrawled upon the single sheet.

He squatted next to her and placed the recorder close enough to her mouth that it would certainly pick up anything she might say. “Read,” he instructed.

Dani looked at the words written in bold block letters:

MOMMY, HELP ME. PLEASE, MOMMY. I’M SCARED. COME AND GET ME. I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM AND I THINK HE’S GOING TO HURT ME. PLEASE, MOMMY. HURRY.

Instead of saying the words, she turned her head to look at him. She could smell the scents of smoke and body odor upon him. “My mother is dead,” she whispered. She felt a deep ache within her as she thought of Ella Settler, the mother who had been so overprotective, who had made her suffer through Sunday school, who had worked with her doing math and history nearly every night before bed, who had abided no sass. Dani bit the insides of her cheeks to keep her lips from shaking as she remembered how she’d fought her mother’s strict sense of right and wrong. Maybe that’s why the God Ella had so firmly believed in had taken her mother away. To punish her. Maybe the reason that she had ended up in the hands of this sicko was because she’d been such an ungrateful daughter. She swallowed back the urge to sob and blinked against the hot tears that were touching the back of her eyelids. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, break down in front of this creep.

“Just do it,” he growled.

Dani met his gaze. “What’re you going to do with this?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I told you, she’s dead,” Dani said, her voice catching.

“But your birth mother isn’t,” he snarled and Dani felt as if her heart had just dropped through the rotten floorboards of this forgotten shanty. “Remember, the one you were so hell-bent to find? She’s still alive.”

“You know where she is?” Dani asked, incredulous. Then she warned herself that this could be another one of the perv’s tricks. He couldn’t be trusted. Hadn’t she found that out about a jillion times over?

All of a sudden she understood. Her gaze flew to the mantel where the picture of the pretty young woman with auburn hair was staring down.

“Figure it out?” he taunted.

Dani shot to her feet. Scooped up the picture and stared down at the woman who, in the shot, couldn’t have been much more than twenty. “This is her, isn’t it?” Her heart was pounding and she glared down at him. “Where is she? What are you doing to her? Who are all these other pictures of?”

“Just make the recording. That way no one gets hurt.”

Dani’s fingers gripped the edge of the cheap frame so tightly, the metal cut into her flesh. But she was tired of taking orders, sick of his bullying her around. Her birth mother was nearby! She had to be! That’s why Dani had been dragged down here. She stared at the picture of the beautiful woman who had given her life, then given her up. Why? Who was she?

This creep knew.

He’d known all along.

That’s how he’d lured her into trusting him, with just enough knowledge to entice her.

“I said make the fuckin’ recording and you won’t get hurt!”

“Are you threatening me?” she demanded as he ripped the frame from her hands.

“Take it anyway you like. Make the damned recording and you don’t get hurt, your mom doesn’t get hurt and your dad doesn’t get hurt, either.”

“My dad? You know where he is?” she demanded.

He didn’t respond but the smug smile that pulled at the corners of his thin lips told her all she needed to know.

“Where?”

“Don’t even worry about it.”

“Where is he?” Then it hit her. “You mean my biological father. Right? I’m talking about my adoptive dad, he’s my real dad. Travis Settler. That other guy…He doesn’t count.”

Something in his eyes flashed for an instant and his nostrils seemed to flare just a bit. “I don’t care who does or doesn’t ‘count.’ Make the recording. You’ve got five minutes.” He looked at his watch, then pulled a big hunting knife from the back of the mantel. Slowly he unsheathed the blade and Dani thought of the big garbage bag that had dripped blood in the dirty white van with the out-of-state plates, the van that he’d first dragged her into and was now parked with the bag and its grotesque contents rotting in the garage somewhere in Idaho.