Only a brutal stalker and the woman and her little girl he had sworn to protect.
Chapter Twelve
Lisa curled up naked beneath a scratchy wool blanket on the mattress in the corner. Her wrists were bound in front of her with nylon ties, her ankles also bound. She had been locked in the basement since Damon had broken into her Phoenix home, tased her, and taken her to a log cabin somewhere in the Arizona mountains.
At least the gag was gone. There was no reason to scream for help when there was no one around to hear her. She had tried, yelled until her throat was raw, but it hadn’t done any good. As Damon had known it wouldn’t.
Just thinking of him brought a rush of tears and sent a shiver of revulsion over her skin. He was an animal. A monster. The night he had brought her to the cabin, he had tied her up, beaten her, and raped her. Her ribs ached and her lip was split and swollen.
She had tried to fight him, twisted her ankle trying to get away from him, but he was strong and he was brutal, and he clearly got pleasure out of her resistance.
How had he fooled her and Tory so completely?
She thought of killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, guys people had thought were really nice. Just like Damon.
She shivered. Would he go as far as murder? Maybe he already had. She knew his identity. How could he let her go?
The thought made her stomach roll with nausea.
Forcing the grim thought away, she glanced at her surroundings as she had done a thousand times, looking for something she’d missed, some way to escape.
All she saw were rough cement walls, the cold cement floor, and a set of wooden stairs leading to a door into the main part of the cabin.
From the more than two hours it had taken to drive there, she figured the place was somewhere on the way to Flagstaff or Williams. She had skied Snowbowl. She knew there were dozens of remote cabins all through the mountains north of Phoenix.
She shifted on the mattress, her wrists pulling against the thin band of white nylon biting into her flesh. She sucked in a breath at the pain and eased into a more comfortable position.
Though she was securely bound, she was free to move around the basement, to access the small refrigerator Damon had stocked with food, the bottles of water stacked beside it, to reach the portable toilet behind the curtain in the corner.
Before and after he’d raped her, he had forced her to shower in the tiny bathroom upstairs. As she thought back, Damon had always been overly fastidious, his shoes polished to a glossy sheen, his black hair perfectly groomed, his expensive suits impeccably tailored.
Both she and Tory had been impressed with his good looks and charm when they had first met him. Lisa had even been a little envious that Damon had been attracted to Tory instead of her.
What a joke that was. A joke definitely on her.
She surveyed her surroundings. It was late. Moonlight streamed into the basement through narrow windows on two sides at the top of the cement walls. The windows tilted out, opening enough for ventilation but too small for her to fit through. It was agony to be so close to freedom and not be able to escape.
She lay back on the mattress, which appeared to be brand-new. She thought that Damon had recently outfitted the basement with her kidnapping in mind. Or more likely he had prepared the basement for Tory. She wondered where her friend was now, prayed she was okay, desperately needed her to call.
Sooner or later, Tory would phone. The two of them had been friends since they had met in junior college, the kind of friends who stood by each other through an ugly divorce, a difficult pregnancy, the death of a husband. The kind of friends who could count on each other no matter what.
Now Damon had Lisa’s phone and there was no way to know what would happen when Tory called. It had been Friday night when Damon had abducted her. Two sunny days had passed outside the narrow windows. She could see stars again. It had to be late Sunday or sometime after midnight early Monday morning.
When she didn’t show up at work, someone would call the house. Would they start looking for her? Probably not the first day, but if she didn’t show up on Tuesday and didn’t answer her cell phone, one of the girls would go to her house to check on her.
If she didn’t answer the door, whoever it was might call the police, but if the cops went inside, they wouldn’t find much: the bed mussed but no real sign of a struggle. The stun gun had been efficient and Damon had been wearing gloves.
How long before they started really searching for her? And how would they have any idea where to look?
Her stomach twisted into a cold, hard knot. Unless Tory called on Lisa’s phone and Damon answered.
If Damon picked up, Tory would know something bad had happened. As soon as she found out Lisa hadn’t shown up for work, she would know Damon had done something terrible to her. She would call the police and they would arrest him, force him to tell them where he had taken her.
But what if he convinced them he knew nothing about her disappearance? The man was an amazingly good actor. She and Tory could both attest to that. She prayed the police would figure out the truth before Damon came back to the cabin.
Before he forced her to submit to him the way he had before. If he did, she would do it. She wanted to live. She would do whatever it took to survive until she could escape.
She fisted the hands bound in front of her. She would find a way out of the cabin and once she was free, she would make Damon Bridger pay.
