"Shoot."
"Your captor. Was there anything odd about his behavior?"
She sputters a laugh, startling Storm, who zooms back to me and leaps onto my lap. I give the puppy a hug and put her down as I say, "Yes, beyond the part about holding you captive, and everything that went with that. Like I said, it sounds like a dumb question. Clearly that's not normal behavior. And yes, it's not like I can ask if his behavior seemed typical for psychos who keep women in caves--"
"Yeah, he's my first kidnapper. Hopefully my last, too. But I think I understand what you're asking. Were there any signs of mental impairment or pathology beyond the obvious."
"Right. Did he speak proper English? Accented? Any indication of education level? Anything odd in word choice?"
She thinks and then says, "He disguised his voice enough that I couldn't tell if he had an accent. His speech didn't strike me as particularly uneducated or well educated--it didn't stand out either way. I never heard him use dialect I didn't recognize. Or words that just weren't right, like you sometimes get in mental illness. He didn't talk a lot. But it was normal. Well, as normal as you can get under the circumstances."
"When he spoke about women, his requirements, how they tricked him. What was his tone? His affect?"
"Were they crazy rants? No." She pauses. "Have you ever gone out with a guy who complains about his ex? Who's still bitter about the whole thing? That's what it was like."
"You said he burned pages of your books. That seems like a very deliberate punishment."
"Oh, it was. Trust me. He wasn't going into a frenzy, ripping out pages. He'd slowly burn one page in front of me, then warn that next time, he'd do ten. Honestly, Casey, while I can laugh about the question, in every possible way, he was as normal as you could expect. Creepily normal. Which is why, in the beginning, I thought I could reason with him. But I couldn't, and it wasn't because he was too crazy to be reasoned with. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn't give a damn. That was the scariest part. That someone who seemed sane could do that to another person. That he could fully understand his actions ... and just didn't care."
*
I'm woken that night by a pounding at the door. I lift my head and see Dalton propped on his elbows.
"Fuck," he says. "You hear that, too?"
"I'm telling myself I'm dreaming."
More pounding. Storm whines, nails clicking as she gets out of her bed.
"You're dreaming, too," I say.
She whines again. Dalton grumbles under his breath and swings his legs out of bed, saying, "If it's Val again--"
"If it's about Val, we'd better go down together, prove we're both here."
I follow Dalton down the stairs and pick up Storm as he opens the door. There, on the porch, is Shawn Sutherland, dressed only in his sweatpants.
"Shawn?" I say.
His mouth works, but he's breathing too hard to form words.
"Come inside," I say, and I take his arm and pull him in as Dalton flicks on the hall light. That's when I see the bruises. A ring of them around Sutherland's throat.
FORTY-EIGHT
Someone has tried to strangle Shawn Sutherland. We get him to the couch and try to ask what happened, but he's in shock and just keeps saying, "I thought I was safe. I thought I was safe."
I tend to Sutherland while Dalton pages Sam, the militia he'd left on guard. After last night with Val, we've pulled out the radios. There's no answer, which could only mean the damn thing isn't working. I tell Dalton to go. Then I call Anders. It's 2:00 A.M., and it takes a lot of punches on the call button, but he finally wakes. I've just hung up from that when Dalton calls from Sam's radio.
"He's out cold," he says. "Someone hit him from behind."
"Is he okay?"
"Yeah, I'm--" His voice cuts out. "--Kenny at Nicole's--not answering--once I wake Sam up."
"I'm on my way as soon as Will's here."
I lock Storm in the bedroom. Then I get out onto the porch, and I'm still zipping my jacket when I see Anders coming at a run. I jog to meet him. We pass without pausing, me calling, "I'm going to check on Nicole. Kenny's not picking up."