Once Lured by Blake Pierce

Author:Blake Pierce [Pierce, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blake Pierce
Published: 2016-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Riley napped fitfully while rain fell outside her hotel room. She was exhausted from having gotten no sleep at all the night before. Even so, she was too worried to fall into a deeply refreshing doze. Whenever she did drift off, she saw clock faces with times on them …

Five o’clock … six o’clock … seven o’clock … eight o’clock …

But instead of regular clock hands, she saw emaciated arms pointed at the numbers on the clock faces.

What can it mean? she kept asking herself. What kind of message is he trying to send?

And how soon was another corpse going to turn up somewhere, pointing to yet another hour? Chelsea McClure girl had been found on Monday and Elise Davey just this morning, Wednesday. The killer was moving much faster now, and her experience had been that he wasn’t likely to slow down.

What could possibly seem so urgent to him?

Just when she finally felt herself slipping off to sleep, her phone buzzed. She saw that it was a call from April. When she answered, her daughter’s voice sounded agitated.

“What’s wrong?” Riley asked.

“I didn’t see Joel today,” April said.

For a groggy moment, Riley couldn’t remember who Joel was. Then it came back to her. Joel was April’s boyfriend. The one that Crystal, Blaine’s daughter, didn’t like. The one that Riley had never met.

“Well, lots of kids miss school sometimes,” Riley said, stifling a yawn.

April sounded almost frantic now.

“But he said he’d be there today,” she said. “He definitely said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’”

“When did he say this?” Riley asked.

“After school yesterday. We were … we had a snack together after school.”

Riley could hear a note of evasion in April’s voice. Somehow, she felt pretty sure that “a snack” wasn’t all that had happened after school yesterday. Her longstanding feeling that this boy was going to be trouble suddenly got a whole lot stronger.

“Have you tried to reach him?” Riley asked.

“Yeah, but he doesn’t answer my texts or messages,” April said.

Riley couldn’t restrain a note of dry irony.

“I know what that’s like,” she said. Maybe now April had a better idea of how it felt to be deliberately ignored.

“This isn’t funny, Mom,” Riley said. “This isn’t like him. Joel texts me all the time. I mean, like, constantly.”

Riley didn’t like the sound of that. Texting “all the time”—did that mean even during classes at school? Maybe Joel’s absence meant that he was finally losing interest in April. If so, Riley was glad of it. Still, April really sounded upset.

“It hasn’t been all that long,” Riley said. “I’m sure you’ll hear from him soon.”

“But what if something’s happened to him?”

“Like what?” Riley said.

April was almost crying now. “I don’t know. Something really bad. Mom, I need your help. Can’t you have somebody, some agent, check to see if he’s all right?”

“You know I can’t do that,” Riley said.

“Why not?”

Before Riley could reply, she heard knocking on her hotel room door. She was sure that it was Bill, and that he had some news.

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