Free The Dead Room by Chris Mooney Page B

final push and let go. She stood hunched forward with her hands on her knees, sweating and sucking in the muggy night air as the car disappeared from her view.
    For a moment the only sounds she heard were the crickets chirping from the woods. Then a loud splash that sounded far away, as though it was happening in another place, at another time. Standing at the cliff’s edge, she watched the car being swallowed inside a cyclone of silver moonlit bubbles. Growing up in Belham, she remembered the time some drunk had fallen over in the water. For days divers searched for the man’s body. It was never found.
    Her muscles tensed and her skin grew cold. What if the car didn’t sink? What if the water was too shallow? In the evening’s chaos she hadn’t thought through that possibility.
    All her worrying, it turned out, was for nothing. The car sank below the black water shivering with moonlight. The surface grew calm again.
    She headed towards the path, hot and uncomfortable underneath the bloody windbreaker. She wished she could take it off but it covered the shoulder holster and Ben’s Glock, which was wedged in the back of her jeans. The extended magazine kept digging into her lower back.
    She had a long walk ahead of her. She had parked on Kale, a busy neighbourhood off Blakely full of other suburban homes with minivans much like her own. She knew she couldn’t watch him from the neighbourhood – too risky, too exposed; plus Ben or his partner had started drawing the front shades of the house. Fortunately, she knew Belham and knew where to park.
    Jamie hoped the teenager was okay.
    She hadn’t known he was inside, not at first. Standing in the hot, dark woods behind the house, she had debated about moving to the back fence for a closer view, then ruled it out. The homes were too close together. Someone might be watching from a window, see her and call the police. Safer to watch from inside the woods.
    In addition to the Magnum, she’d brought the small pair of binoculars she kept in the back of the minivan. (Michael liked to use them; Dan had bought them for sporting events and those rare times he went hunting. She kept them in the glovebox.) From her vantage point she could see only part of the kitchen. She had an excellent view of the sliding glass door leading into the living room and for a long time watched Ben search every inch of the room, even going so far as to cut the chair and sofa cushions. Not once did she see the teenager tied down to the chair.
    That changed later, when she heard a car pull into the driveway, and the mechanical chug as the motor hauled up the garage door.
    Jamie remembered trying to find a new vantage point. The tree limbs kept obstructing her view. Walking through woods in the dark, in a hurry and without the aid of a flashlight, wasn’t desirable. She kept tripping and bumping into things. It was slow, tedious work.
    By the time she’d found a new spot, the blonde-haired woman in the blue T-shirt was taped down to a chair seated across from her son, their eyes covered with duct tape. The boy’s mouth was taped shut but not the woman’s; Jamie could see her screaming as the man with the suit started breaking her fingers. Ben stood behind him holding a barber’s straight-edged razor.
    Jamie reached for her phone, then remembered she’d left it in the minivan. It didn’t matter. Even if she had brought it, by the time she stammered through the 911 call the woman and boy would be dead. Ben had just cut off one of the woman’s fingers.
    Jamie’s first thought – and it shamed her to admit this – was evidence. As a former cop, her fingerprints were stored on a database. She couldn’t leave her prints or any other evidence for the police to find; she had to protect her children. She fumbled at her zippered pocket for the latex gloves.
    What happened next came back to her in a series of flashes: running down the incline, slipping and falling. Getting up and tripping again. Finally