CHAPTER
ONE
Kassidy
It
was a blitz attack. Cowardly. He hit me over the head with the
baseball bat I kept next to my bedroom door. I was asleep. I never
even heard him. The next thing I knew, I was tied to a chair in my
dimly lit dining room. I woke suddenly to a high-pitched keening. He
was shooting me up with something. My left forearm pricked and
burned. My head felt heavy, achy. My eyelids weighed a ton each, but
I lifted them and looked at him.
He
smiled. A cranked-out, toothy smile, his wide lips peeling back from
his teeth. He held up an empty syringe.
“Crank,
bitch,” he sneered.
I
thought, where was that needle before tonight? That was my
first thought. Whether or not he just infected me with HIV or
hepatitis. I didn’t wonder how he got in, if I had a concussion,
how long I’d been unconscious, or if he had raped me while I was
out.
I
wiggled in my seat, but there was not much give. My hands were bound
to the armrests of the chair. My feet were tied in the same fashion
to the front legs of the chair. I glanced at my dining room table and
saw a knife, a ball of twine and my standard issue Glock nine
millimeter.
He
paced back and forth in front of me. He was waiting for the crank to
kick in. Waiting for me to become fully awake. He wanted me to be
fully cognizant during the torture he was about to inflict. My head
lolled. I don’t know how long it was before he got impatient and
slapped me hard across the face. White hot pain streaked through my
jaw.
“Wake
the fuck up,” he growled.
I
swallowed. “I’m awake.”
He
picked up the knife, flipped it open and used the tip of it beneath
my chin to hold my head up. I looked into his eyes. Wild eyes. Green
and brown. I’d seen them before.
“You
thought you had me, didn’t you?” he said.
He
needled the knife until I felt a small puncture. A drop of blood slid
down, pooling in the hollow of my throat. As I became more alert, the
blurred edges of the room turned sharp one by one. My heart thumped
furiously in my chest, rattling my rib cage. Soon I’d be fully
awake, conscious of every last detail of my death.
It
wasn’t how I thought I’d go. I thought—okay, I’d hoped—I’d
be shot in the line of duty or killed in a car wreck. Maybe even
cancer or simple old age. Too much to hope for.
It
had to be this. Torture, rape, death and probably dismemberment at
the hands of a violent criminal. I knew I was going to die. It was
just a matter of how fast or how slow.
I
thought of my parents. Well, mostly I thought of my dad. This would
kill him. He’d always been so worried about this sort of thing. I
always assured him that these things never happened. Never. They only
happened in books, movies or on TV. Real life wasn’t like this.
Real FBI agents didn’t have to worry about collars coming after
them.
He
pulled the knife away with a sound of disgust. He continued to pace.
My head felt full. The crank made my spine ramrod straight. I held my
head up and looked at him. He wore khakis, loafers and a muted green
shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, revealing muscular forearms. His
greasy black hair was in disarray. Even so, he didn’t look like a
killer.
They
never do, Kass.
That’s
what my SAC at the Baltimore field office said when I closed my first
string of homicides. The FBI didn’t normally handle homicides, but
several state and city police departments had asked for our help
tracking a particularly malicious serial killer whose work spanned
three states. Again, I thought of Ted Bundy. He had been handsome and
a charmer from all I heard.
The
man before me was a charmer, but he had the blackened heart of a
demon. As if sensing my thoughts, he looked right at me. A sneer
slithered across his face. I wondered if this was how he’d looked
to his previous eighteen victims.
“Remember
me, bitch?”
“Nico
Sala,” I said. “I wish I didn’t remember you.”
For
that, I caught a wild punch to the face. His fist landed close to my
left eye. Again I felt sharp pain. This time it seared across my
forehead. I could practically hear my eye swelling.
“I
told you, you stupid bitch. I told you I’d find you. I’m gonna
gut you alive.”
I
believed him. I’d talked to lots of victims of violent crime during
my career, and many of them said the same thing: there comes a point
where you know your attacker is going to kill you.
Well,
here I was. Nico Sala had broken into my home. He’d shot me up,
bound me to a chair, hit me. Fear crept along my body with thin, icy
fingertips. I moved my arms and legs, trying to figure out how much
room I had to work with to free a hand or foot. There wasn’t any.
“Don’t
bother,” Nico said. “You’re not going anywhere.”
I
rested and watched him with my good eye. I tried to tamp down the
fear bubbling up inside, making my already thundering heart race
faster. My ears filled with the sound of it, like a train roaring
down the tracks. My whole body vibrated. I wondered fleetingly if it
was possible for my heart to actually burst right out of my chest. It
felt like it might. I drew a deep breath.
He
gave me a few more slaps for good measure, grunting as he did so.
Stay
calm. The fear will only escalate his violent tendencies.
It
was the FBI agent in me, a ridiculously calm voice in my head. I
tried to hold onto that part of me. In that moment I wanted to be the
clinical behavioral analyst, not the terrified woman I was in
reality.
“Aren’t
you gonna scream?” he asked.
It
wouldn’t do any good, I realized, tears gathering behind my eyes.
People in this neighborhood screamed all the time. Everyone heard,
but nobody listened.
Calm,
the voice urged again. Your life depends on it. I managed
to force some bravado. “What?” I said. “And forego hours of
torture? Nah.”
Nico
grinned and pulled a chair out from the dining room table. He faced
it toward him, straddling it so he could fold his arms over its back.
“I’m not going to kill you fast,” he said.
Oh
great.
“I
hate bitches like you. You think you’re so superior. So much better
than me.”
There
it was—inadequacy. The hallmark of violent criminals.
“Well,
I’m not a raping murderer, if that’s what you mean,” I said.
The
chair flew. His fists rained down on me. He struck me everywhere with
thirty-five years of pent-up rage. I tucked my chin against my chest
to avoid more blows to my face. Reflexively, my hands tried to fly
upward to block his attack.
Finally
he pulled away, breathing heavily. Sweating. “You’re trying to
make me do it fast,” he said. “But I won’t.”
Nico
picked up the chair and resumed his seat. I recovered from his flying
fists as best I could. My head and chest stung. I pushed my feet
against the floor to see if there was any slack.
“What’s
the point of this again?” I asked, trying to make my tone casual.
If I was going down, acting as scared as I felt wouldn’t change
that. Blood trickled out of the side of my mouth. I felt like I just
got back from the dentist. The left side of my mouth was huge and
numb. Soon the slobbering would start.
“The
point is you’re a stupid cunt,” he said, the petulance in his
voice incongruous with his maniacal appearance.
“I
just don’t see the point in killing me,” I said. “You got off.”
He
grinned then, his pearly whites as big as the moon. He rubbed his
crotch, raised an eyebrow. “Yeah,” he drawled. “I sure did.”
I
ignored him. If he had in fact raped me, I was glad I didn’t
remember it. Though I doubted he had. Nico Sala had made his criminal
career as a serial rapist in two states. He had started out in
Wilmington, Delaware preying on single women between eighteen and
fifty. Neither their age nor their features were particularly
important to Sala. Fat, short, tall, thin, brunette, blonde, black,
white, Asian—it didn’t matter. He just looked for women who lived
alone in first-floor apartments. In Wilmington, he had raped seven
women. Then he moved on to Baltimore. He raped eleven women there.
Since
local police in both Baltimore and Wilmington believed they were
dealing with the same rapist, they had asked for FBI assistance,
which my field office gladly lent. I came onto the case after the
fifth Baltimore victim. Eventually, I was put undercover, living in a
shitty first-floor apartment for almost a month before Sala broke in
with the intention of raping me, only to be swarmed and arrested by
most of the task force assigned to catch him.
I’d
worked the case, seen the files, talked to the victims. Nico Sala was
what investigators referred to as a sadistic rapist. He couldn’t
get it up unless his victims were visibly overcome by fear. Fear that
made their eyes wide, their cries strangled. Fear forming a beaded
tiara across their foreheads. He liked them fully conscious and very
afraid.
My
reckoning would come when I was wide awake. “They let you go,” I
said.
After
months of investigative work and a hard-won arrest, Nico was set free
on a legal technicality. The night of the arrest, two of my Bureau
coworkers had been on scene, as well as two Baltimore sex crimes
detectives and four uniformed Baltimore PD officers. Somehow, in
spite of all that law enforcement, no one had read Sala his rights.
No one had Mirandized him, which meant that the arrest was illegal.
There was nothing the district attorney could do. We had to watch him
go free and try to pick up the pieces while our superiors passed
blame around like an office memo no one wanted to read. That was two
months ago.
Nico
spit on the floor. “Yeah, that’s right. They let me go so I could
come find you.”
I
shook off a fresh wave of pain. My whole body felt like an angry,
throbbing vein. “Why?” I asked, my voice the sound of a creaking
chair. I had to keep him talking. The more talking he did, the less
hitting or possibly stabbing would occur. He obviously had quite a
few complaints to lodge against me.
“Because
you fucked me,” he said, his face screwing up in twisted lines of
indignation.
“Hardly,”
I said.
He
threw the knife at me. I turned my head and tucked my chin. My amber
hair fell across my neck, my only meager defense. The blade punctured
the skin just above my right breast but not with enough force to
stick. It clattered to the floor. The noise seemed to reverberate
through the entire house. It must have been the crank. Again, tears
stung my eyes. I blinked them back and swallowed hard, willing my
composure to remain intact.
“Yeah,
well I’ll fuck you tonight before I gut you, bitch.”
“You’ve
never killed anyone before, Nico,” I pointed out.
“You
don’t know I never killed anyone before,” Nico challenged.
With
the patience a mother shows her child I said, “Yes, Nico, I do
know.”
He
was already on his feet again.
“I
profiled you, jerk-off. You’re just an angry little boy whose
mother was too overbearing”—he drew closer—“you just want to
be in control. You get off on making women feel afraid, on
overpowering them, humiliating them.”
My
jaw broke with a loud crack. Another fist followed. “Shut the fuck
up,” he screamed.
Another
punch. Skin cracking skin. Lips splitting against teeth. Eyes
watering, nose crumpling. His voice was unnaturally high. “You
thought you were so clever, you worthless whore. Moving into my
territory, leaving your window open. Waiting for me. Yeah, well I got
off.”
The
room tipped, descending out of sight like two halves of a broken ship
sliding into the ocean.
“You
fucked me,” he said. “Now I’m gonna fuck you.”
I
tried to speak, but my jaw didn’t work. I couldn’t see him
anymore. I felt his hands close around my throat. I tried to tuck my
chin, but I was too late. The darkness came from the inside out.
I
don’t know how long it was. Each time I went out, I thought it was
the last time. But I kept floating back up to consciousness. It was
always dark. Both my eyes swelled shut. I don’t remember much of
it. He tore at my hair, stabbed me in the thighs, struck me again and
again. Then he groped me, licked me, tried to kiss my broken mouth.
The
pain was a dull undercurrent. I had gone to another place. A stone
fortress in my head. My twin sister, Lexie, was there, hand
outstretched, ten years younger as she had been at the time of her
death. She smiled at me. A mirror image.
I
reached out to take her hand, but I never made it. There was a chime,
a familiar ding-dong that brought me back. My doorbell. Silence. I
must have been alone then. I felt my hands come loose. They were
heavy and weakened by hours of restraint.
I
thought I was hallucinating. Maybe this was it. Death. Precious
death. I wanted to go to it, rise up to it, and I did, legs suddenly
free. I staggered, sinking back onto the chair. Death had a male
voice. “You have to stand,” it said. I could feel death’s
hushed breath on my ear as it pulled me up.
My
gun was in my hands then, as familiar as a hot bath. Death lifted my
arms. They trembled with the weight of the firearm. “There’s a
round in the chamber,” death whispered. I stumbled backward until
my skin touched the chair for feeble support.
“He’s
coming,” death said. “You have to do this. Listen for him.”
And
I did.
Death
was gone. When Nico Sala came back for me, I brought the gun up level
with my shoulders and aimed straight in front of me. I fired. I heard
three footfalls, the crash of wood against wood. I squeezed off two
more shots before I heard the thud of his body on the floor.
I
sank with him, until the back of my head rested against the chair. I
breathed.
In
the movies, after the villain is destroyed and the heroine lies
battered and spent, the sirens are already sounding in the distance.
It doesn’t work that way in real life. The sirens come later, much
later.
They
told me that a pizza boy called the police. He’d been sent to the
wrong address. He rang my doorbell and Nico Sala answered, wild-eyed,
looking pretty frightening covered in my blood. Nico told the kid in
no uncertain terms to get lost.
My
face, before it underwent reconstructive surgery to repair the damage
Nico Sala had done, was splashed all over the media. I was
interviewed and interrogated. I met the President. I received a
special commendation from the Bureau. After my recovery, I was
offered a position as a Criminal Investigative Analyst in the
Behavior Analysis Unit at the National Center for the Analysis of
Violent Crime, which I accepted.
I
know what they told me. I know what I remember from that night. I
know that someone saved my life that night.
But
it wasn’t me.
