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  “But Todd and Ray are still worried that Simon has information about the faulty wiring, it’s just information that he doesn’t know the significance of. So they want to get rid of him but they don’t want to raise alarm bells. They reduce his territory and fire him.”

  Bennie got it. “But Simon senses it’s a pretext. He knows they’re lying to him and he thinks the real reason they fired him was because of Rachel’s medical expenses.”

  “He’s half-right.” Mary smiled, understanding. “He’s right that they’re not telling him the real reason they’re firing him, but the real reason for firing him is that they don’t want him to stay at OpenSpace. They don’t want him to keep raising questions about the wiring issues. They don’t want him around if or when there’s another electrical fire. They don’t want him to find out about the fire in Manassas.”

  “Right, but then he sues them, and we kick up a fuss, so they’ve got to improvise. At the same time Todd is making noises like he’s going to come forward, so Ray kills him and frames Simon for the murder, and meanwhile—”

  “Meanwhile, Simon is so preoccupied with Rachel and her need for a transplant, which happens just at the same time, that he’s forgotten completely about this wiring thing. It gets lost in the shuffle.”

  “Oh my God, it’s a perfect murder.” Bennie shook her head.

  “They just didn’t count on us.”

  “Teamwork makes the dream work,” Bennie wisecracked, ignoring the twinge she felt inside. It really was fun working with Mary, but this wasn’t the time to say so, and the moment passed.

  “I’m calling Detective Lindenhurst right now.” Mary dug in her purse for her phone. “We need to tell him to pick up Ray for questioning.”

  “He’s going to say it’s speculation, so we need to collect all this information and bring it to him. Get our ducks in a row.”

  “Right.” Mary pressed the number to call Detective Lindenhurst. “Can you make a separate file for this information, so we can email it to him in some understandable form? I want to have it in his hands right away. We don’t have any time to lose.”

  “Understood.” Bennie turned to her computer laptop and started organizing the file. “Can you put him on speaker?”

  “Sure,” Mary said, hitting a button. “Detective Lindenhurst, this is Mary DiNunzio.”

  “Yes, Mary,” Detective Lindenhurst, his tone tense. “I was just about to call you. We just arrested Simon Pensiera for the murder of Todd Eddington.”

  Bennie recoiled, saying nothing. It felt like a body blow.

  Mary had gone white in the face. “No, you can’t, you have the wrong man, we were just about to call you, you need to get Ray Matewicz in for questioning. He’s the killer and we know why—”

  “Mary, we have the right man. We have the autopsy. Todd Eddington’s body has been released. Your client’s hair, fiber, DNA, and fingerprints were found on the body and in Todd Eddington’s car. And we found the murder weapon in your client’s home—”

  “But Ray must have planted it here!” Mary interrupted, frantic. “They know where Simon lives. It couldn’t have been that hard to get in there, and Simon’s away all the time at the hospital. Plus the street is practically deserted, since everybody’s away on vacation.”

  Bennie could see Mary getting upset, but she didn’t interrupt.

  “Mary, your client is about to be booked. If you’re smart, you’ll advise him to make a deal. I can probably get him twenty years.”

  “But he didn’t do it!” Mary shouted, then seemed to catch herself. “And he can’t go to jail. He has a sick child who needs him. And his father—”

  “I have to go. I’ll be at the Roundhouse all night. Good-bye.” Detective Lindenhurst ended the call.

  “Wait, hold on!” Mary said anyway.

  Bennie put a hand on her arm. “Mary, keep it together.”

  “I can’t!” Mary hung up the phone, letting out an agonized groan. “Simon was arrested at the hospital! What if Rachel saw? What’s going to happen when word gets back to Feet? I can’t believe this! We were so close!”

  “I know, and we still are.” Bennie tried to calm Mary down, but she felt the same way. “The fact that Simon was arrested doesn’t mean it’s the end. It’s just the beginning.”

  “But Bennie, this time he’s going to jail!” Mary’s eyes widened with fear. “What happens to Rachel now? To Feet? This is a disaster!”

  “We can deal with this. We’ve been through worse.”

  “Not worse than this!” Mary began to tear up, and Bennie knew it was time to get her into motion.

  “Pack up your laptop. Get your things. We need to get down to the Roundhouse.” Bennie put her laptop away.

  “But I need to call everybody, my parents, Anthony, the cousins. I have to tell them, and they have to go sit with Rachel.”

  “You do it on the way. I’ll drive.” Bennie pointed at Mary’s laptop. “Get your stuff. Let’s get going. The best way to help Simon is to be down there for him. Not up here whining.”

  “I’m not whining!” Mary knelt down, closed her laptop, and shoved it in the messenger bag. “Okay, maybe I am, but this is awful!”

  “Let’s go.” Bennie turned out the light and headed out of the office, but the house had gone dark.

  “Right behind you,” Mary said, as they hustled into the kitchen, then into the living room.

  They had reached the front door when Bennie heard an odd muffled sound behind her. Bennie turned around just in time to see a masked shadow in the darkness, clamping a gloved hand over Mary’s mouth and dragging her backwards.

  Bennie was about to scream when a blow to the head stunned her. She cried out in pain and felt herself falling.

  The last sound she heard was a horrible guttural sound, barely human.

  It must have been Mary.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Mary heard a man’s voice yelling at her. The noise crashed through her skull. Her head exploded in pain. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. Her head hurt so much. All she felt was pain. It paralyzed her. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t focus. She couldn’t stay awake.

  “Are you alive or not?”

  Mary heard the question louder. The man was right at her ear. Her head hurt so much. Everything was dark. She couldn’t see anything. She tried to open her eyes but something covered them.

  She tried to speak but she couldn’t talk. Something filled her mouth like a gag. She bit down. It was wet cloth. It tasted like blood. She realized that it was her own.

  “Wake up!”

  Mary tried to say something but her mouth was so dry. The words stuck in the back of her throat. She almost gagged and ended up coughing. She tried to pull the cloth out of her mouth but she couldn’t move her arms. They felt wrenched behind her back. She felt pressure against her left side. She was lying down.

  “Shut the hell up!”

  A rough hand grabbed Mary’s arm, shaking her. Agony arced through her skull. Her head throbbed like a solid ball of pain. Reflexively she tried to talk. Only a weird ah-ah-ah came out.

  She heard heavy footsteps on the floor. She felt the vibration with each tread. A door slammed close. The deadbolt was thrown. She was locked inside a room of some kind. Somewhere.

  Mary didn’t know what was going on. She couldn’t think through the pain. She had never felt anything like it before. She tried to remember what had happened. She tried to shout but only the weird sound came out again.

  She felt afraid but it was veiled. She was in a mental fog. It muffled everything. Feelings. Thoughts. She could barely put a sentence together in her head. There was too much pain to feel anything. So much pain that it numbed her. All she wanted to do was sleep to get away from it.

  She closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep. Lose consciousness. Then she heard voices, not far away. Something told her it was in another room. Not far away. It sounded echoey. She tried to listen.

  “She still alive?” a ma
n asked.

  “Yes,” another man answered.

  “How’s her head?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Is she conscious?”

  “No.”

  “So she’s still bleeding.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “What am I, a doctor? Go in and look for yourself.”

  “I’m doing something here. Can’t you see? I asked you if she’s bleeding.”

  Mary tried to stay awake. To listen. To understand. They were talking about her. She was bleeding. She couldn’t remember how she got here. She couldn’t remember why she was here. She didn’t know what was going on. She could barely stay awake. She wanted to go back to sleep but she didn’t. Something inside her told her to stay awake and listen. Something was telling her to survive. Whatever was happening to her, it was something she had to survive.

  “What’s the difference? She bleeds now or she bleeds later? Who cares?”

  “It’s called evidence. I told you to put the tarp down.”

  “It wouldn’t have helped.”

  “It would too. Now we gotta clean it up. It’s not my cabin.”

  Mary struggled to stay awake. To try and understand. They were in a cabin. The two men had brought her there.

  “It’s not my fault. It’s because her head hit the floor.”

  “You hit her too hard! Why didn’t you tell me you had brass knuckles? Who the hell has brass knuckles?”

  “How many times you gonna say that? I told you, I didn’t want to take any chances. What if she screamed? Those houses are close together.”

  “That’s why I told you to cover her mouth. No one saw us anyway. I was able to drive up the damn driveway and there wasn’t anybody around.”

  “I did cover her mouth!”

  “Then what were you worried about? She wasn’t going to scream if you had your hand over her mouth.”

  “Get off my case, Ray.”

  Mary heard the name. Ray. It didn’t mean anything to her. She couldn’t even remember who she remembered. She didn’t know who was in her life. Then she started to remember something. A driveway. A house. She had been in a house for some reason. She hadn’t been alone. She had been with someone.

  “We had a plan. I gave you the little one. How could you screw that up?”

  Mary heard what he said. The little one. She must be the little one. She was little. She couldn’t remember her height exactly. She knew she was little. That meant there was a bigger one. She didn’t know who the bigger one was. She must’ve been with somebody bigger. She tried to remember who was bigger. The answer was everybody.

  “You and your plans! Your plans got us into this mess! Now what are we going to do?”

  “I told you I’ll figure it out.”

  “You better figure it out fast. Somebody is going to be looking for them. She’s half-dead already.”

  Mary realized he meant her. She was half-dead. She felt half-dead. She felt warm and wet. She knew there was blood on her and it was hers. It was hard to breathe through her nose. She couldn’t smell anything. She realized there was blood in her nose. She was congested with blood. She couldn’t breathe through her mouth because of the cloth. She realized she was panting a little, trying to get air.

  “We can’t kill them until we figure out what they know and what they told the cops.”

  “You want me to go ask her? I have a way with the ladies.” The man chuckled.

  Mary shuddered, involuntarily. She realized what he meant. She didn’t want to think about it. She felt a bolt of fear, less muffled. She was a little one. This was very bad. They were going to kill her. She didn’t know why. She couldn’t remember anything. Except that there was a big one. She remembered that she had been with somebody bigger when something had happened. She had been grabbed from behind. It was coming back to her now, in bits and pieces. It was a memory just out of reach.

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  “Lighten up.”

  “Help me get into this laptop. They have everything under password. The phones too. I took the batteries out of their phones.”

  “Why do you wanna get in the laptops?”

  “I wanna see if they sent that email they were talking about.”

  “How did you even get wireless up here? My cell gets no reception.”

  “You don’t need wireless to check sent emails. Plus if we got wireless, then anybody could track these laptops. Without wireless, they can’t.”

  Mary lost track of which man was speaking, Ray or not-Ray. But what they said made her remember something. A laptop. A phone. She had those things. She could almost visualize them but not quite. And there was an email. Something about an email. It was so hard to think. She couldn’t summon up a single image in her head. She couldn’t form a sentence. Maybe the bigger one was another woman. They had been together. Mary felt the answer just out of her grasp. She could almost see her hands reaching for it, her fingers trying to pull it from thin air.

  “You heard ’em. They’re onto us. We can’t finish ’em until we know what they told the cops.”

  “Who’s doing the honors?”

  “You are, like before.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why not you?”

  “She’s a woman. Two women.”

  “Oh please. They’re not women. They’re lawyers.”

  Mary could hear what they said but couldn’t react. She was terrified but back in the fog. She couldn’t feel her own fear. She started falling asleep again. The pain took over, obliterating everything. She wasn’t strong enough to resist it. She tried to breathe, but her nose bubbled blood. She was losing consciousness.

  She let it go. If the men were going to kill her, she couldn’t stop them.

  She was half-dead already.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Bennie figured out where she was, by smell. She’d been put in a small building that had to be a smokehouse. It reeked of smoked meat. She sensed it was primitive or very old. The floor was dirt, which felt cool against her cheek. The air was filtered with ashes from a dormant fire that smelled close by. She was alone and she didn’t know where Mary was.

  She lay on her side, blindfolded and gagged. Her hands were duct-taped behind her back, but her legs were not. She’d been too big to be carried like deadweight. They’d made her walk from the car to the smokehouse. She’d been beaten on the head and arms, but the pain was tolerable. She was keeping her emotions and her terror at bay. She had to be on top of her game to stay alive.

  Bennie sensed she was in the country, not only because it was a smokehouse but because it was so quiet. She assumed there was a house or a cabin near the smokehouse, some distance apart. She knew there was a lot of deer hunting in central Pennsylvania. It would make sense to have a smokehouse to smoke venison near a hunting cabin. So either it was a cabin or house, but Bennie was praying that Mary was safe and alive.

  Bennie swallowed hard, worried. She had been driven here alone in the trunk of a car, filled with tools that jangled, so it wasn’t Mary’s car. There had to be at least two men since she and Mary had both been abducted at the same time. She had no idea if there was a third man here. Her working theory was that Ray and Ernie had taken her and Mary. Mo was an outside possibility. Either way, it was proof that she and Mary had been right. The conspiracy had killed Todd.

  Bennie tried not to panic. She figured that they had driven Mary separately. She didn’t know if Mary was here or in a different location. They couldn’t risk leaving Mary’s car in front of Simon’s house. Sooner or later somebody would notice and call the cops.

  Bennie prayed that Mary was still alive. That last horrifying cry echoed in Bennie’s brain. Mary must’ve been struck hard on the head, with what Bennie didn’t know. If they had taken Mary where Bennie was, they were in the middle of nowhere. She doubted Mary was getting medical help. It would take time to reach a hospital once this was all over. And it had to be over. They wo
uld survive. Bennie would make certain. She just didn’t know how. Yet.

  Bennie returned to her mental inventory. It was useful to review what she knew so she could figure out her next step. She estimated that the car trip here took about three hours. She had even managed to hear the directions coming through the car’s interior, even though she’d been in the trunk. The driver had used GPS, which told her that he was unsure of the route. So it must not have been his place.

  They had taken the expressway out of the city, then the northeast extension, but after that left the highway. The terrain had turned from smooth asphalt to bumpy back roads. The ambient traffic noise had lessened. She’d heard a horse neighing at one point. The elevation had gone from flat to hilly. The air in the trunk was close, but grew cooler.

  She drew a mental circle in her mind that intersected towns three hours away from Simon’s. It would’ve encompassed farmlands, and even parts of the Poconos or the forest. She tried to remember the street names that she heard as they got closer to their destination. It was easy because they were all bird names. Bluebird Lane. Mockingbird Road. The destination had been Eagles Drive.

  Bennie tried to estimate what time it was. She was going to say about eleven o’clock at night. It wasn’t late enough for anyone to start worrying yet. Detective Lindenhurst might be surprised, but he wouldn’t be alarmed. Nobody from the office would know. Declan would have no idea. Anthony might start to wonder, but he was at the hospital with Feet. There would be no cavalry coming. She and Mary were on their own. And it was all up to her. Which, oddly, felt familiar.

  She reminded herself that she’d been in dire straits before. She had been buried underground, for God’s sake. Left for dead. She had gotten out of that alive. She had stayed calm and cool and found a way out. She would have to do the same today. Tonight. Whenever. Now.

  She rocked back and forth, trying to get enough momentum to start rolling. She wanted to see what the walls were made of and where the door was. She’d never been in a smokehouse but she knew it was a small building, usually of wood or stone. It smelled old and dusty. So there had to be a loose board she could break with her foot or a stone she could dislodge somehow. Something. Some way. She had to get out. She rolled over once and was about to roll over again, but froze.