CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Matt
A thousand hammering men decided to excavate the insides of his skull. Matt groaned and rolled on his side, cursing the noise of the creaking bed. When did his bed ever creak? His eyes flew open and took in the unfamiliar surroundings. He was in a cell. And the events that led him in here came crashing back as he sprang to his feet.
Grace.
The garage.
He’d been in the patrol car when the call came of shots fired at his place. He lost it and almost kicked the barrier in the police vehicle down. The deputies were probably regretting not slapping the cuffs on him.
“We need to go back!” he roared at the same time punching the wired partition between them.
“Another unit is on its way,” the deputy who was driving told him.
Everything blurred after that. All he knew was Grace was in danger and the deputies were preventing him from getting to her, from protecting her. He heard the deputy calling for backup. Matt had retreated into the horror in his head. He hadn’t realized the backup was for him until he saw the cruiser surrounded by police officers when they pulled into the county offices.
They tried to subdue him, but he was so far gone, he didn’t feel anything until an electrical jolt shot through him. He didn’t go down. They didn’t get the memo that it took a higher setting on the Taser to suppress one of his kind even under reduced strength. After throwing a few more bodies off him, he blanked out.
They’d hit him on the back of his head with a baton. He touched the lump on the back of his head and winced. Jesus, did they use a battering ram?
“Hey, assholes!” Matt shouted. “Let me the fuck out!” They didn’t even leave him his damned watch. He didn’t know how long he’d been down. Fear, unlike any other, clenched his gut. The worst thing was the not knowing. And he refused to speculate what had happened to Grace. He’d be useless if he’d let his mind go there. He rattled the bars of his cell. If someone didn’t let him out soon, it was possible he’d tear this place apart when he did get out. Damn the consequences and damn Trent for not being here when it mattered.
The door to the cell block opened. Frank Briggs, a deputy for the court and a long time friend of Matt’s, appeared.
“Frank, thank Christ,” he muttered in relief. “Please tell me you’re going to let me out.”
The man’s face looked grim.
“Millie and Cassie are on their way.”
“Why?”
“To post bail.”
“For what? For Kyra’s death? I thought I wasn’t charged.”
Briggs sighed. “For multiple counts of assaulting several sheriff’s deputies.”
“They were keeping me from Grace,” Matt growled. At the mention of his wife, his friend flinched and a look of sorrow crossed his face. Matt felt his stomach drop to the soles of his feet. He couldn’t breathe and found himself sinking to his knees.
“Oh, God,” he looked up at Briggs in anguish. “Tell me Grace is okay.”
“Foster …” the deputy began.
His chest grew so fucking tight. “Is she … Jesus.” He couldn’t say the word. “Fuck … is she—”
“No!” Briggs said in horror realizing what Matt had concluded.
The force of his friend’s denial was like a fresh influx of oxygen. “Then what are you not telling me?” Matt rose to his full height and glared at his friend.
“You have to promise me you’re not going ape-shit again—”
“I swear to God, Briggs, if you don’t fucking tell me now—”
“Roger is dead.”
Matt froze. “And Grace?”
“It was Cristiano. Troy is badly hurt, but he’ll survive.”
“Briggs, Goddammit!—”
“We can’t find Grace,” Briggs blurted out, rubbing his face in frustration. “Cristiano was ambushed and she’s gone.”
“The Reaper,” Matt whispered. He looked blindly around his cell, looking for something to tear apart, to smash, but there was nothing. Instead he shrank away from the bars and dug his fingers into his hair to quell the rising panic. Undiluted fear coursed through every vein and marrow.
He needed to cling to the hope that Grace was alive.
She needed him.
He couldn’t leave this cell and help her if he lost his shit.
He expelled several deep breaths and straightened his body.
“Let me out so we can go get my woman,” he told Briggs with a dead calm.
*****
“I could lose my badge for this.”
Briggs raised the yellow tape and let Millie and Cassie cross the threshold of Kyra’s home. Matt followed them inside. Despite their numerous hookups, Matt had never seen the inside of Kyra’s house. He always kept it as impersonal as possible, preferring to use a motel. He had, on a few occasions, taken Kyra home, but that was about it. After sex he was done. No cuddling, no sleeping together, and definitely no breakfast together.
Seeing all the drug paraphernalia scattered on the coffee table, he regretted that he didn’t treat Kyra better. He was so afraid of giving mixed signals, he forgot how to be a friend. If he’d tried to be a friend then maybe he would have recognized that she wasn’t acting like herself.
The Reaper wouldn’t have gotten to Kyra.
Even without hard evidence, Matt was operating under the assumption that The Reaper was behind Grace’s abduction, and he’d orchestrated the whole scheme starting with manipulating Kyra through to Cristiano’s ambush.
If Kyra hadn’t been murdered, Matt would never have been taken into custody, and he could have protected his wife. Grace would still be here.
Or would she though?
Did things happen for a reason? Would he have been killed, too, by Cristiano’s sneak attack?
“How long did they say she’s been dead?” Matt asked, staring at the chalk outline on the carpet.
“Forty-eight hours,” Briggs replied.
“No fingerprint results yet?” Millie asked, rounding back to them after inspecting the kitchen.
“No. They found the body yesterday afternoon from an anonymous tip. She had strangulation marks on her neck and needle marks on both arms. They have not established cause of death,” the deputy replied. Matt was thankful to Frank Briggs for getting him out of the detention cell. All assault charges had been dropped given the extenuating circumstances or some macho bullshit they didn’t want publicized because it had been eight deputies against Matt. But nothing was for free, and he was sure there’d be some free vehicle repair work coming his way since he’d beaten the shit out of six of them.
Briggs had to cut his camping trip short because the deputy-in-charge didn’t know what to do what with having the sheriff’s brother-in-law arrested. Not to mention what appeared to be another biker war erupting in front of Matt’s garage. He’d worry about the repercussions later.
His first objective was to find Grace.
“One of the investigators mentioned that Kyra was driving a car other than her own. A blue Toyota Corolla,” Briggs said. “I’m having someone look into stolen and rented vehicles in the past month.”
“You might have to go back further than that,” Matt said. “Back to the day of the airport bombing almost six weeks ago.”
Cassie came down from the second floor. “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t see evidence that Kyra had stayed here for a while. The bed looks slept in, but the trashcan in the bathroom is empty, and there are water lines in the toilet bowl.”
“Kyra’s OCD about her bathroom and kitchen is legendary,” Millie said, walking to the fridge and opening the door. “All the food that looks like it can crawl in there? Not her style.”
“Drugs can change a person,” Briggs shrugged.
“But even so, that’s not Kyra,” Cassie said. “She wouldn’t resort to drugs because she’s hung up on a guy.” His sister glared at him.
“When will the toxicology report come back?” Matt asked.
“This afternoon—I expedited it,” Briggs replied. “We should be hearing about the exact cause of death later this evening.”
“Trent’s coming back this afternoon,” Cassie said. “Colt and Lucas too. They’re not attending the Homeland Security dinner and heading straight home.”
Matt nodded. “I think we should go door to door and ask if the neighbors have seen anything.”
“Now, Foster, I can’t have you doing that,” Briggs said. “If anyone finds out I let you guys in here, I’d get into a lot of trouble.”
“It’s been eight hours, Frank,” Matt said tersely. “Every hour we don’t find her, is another hour she could be getting tortured.” Or worse. Even as he tried to block out the thoughts of that madman violating Grace’s body, he couldn’t. It had been at the forefront of his mind, and he’d been a powder keg with a short fuse since he’d found out she’d been taken.
“Go back to the garage, Foster,” Briggs advised. “Let my men do their jobs. Axe and the rest of your men need you there. You lost one of your own.”
“You think Roger would want me to sit on my ass and not look for Grace?” Matt snapped. “You’re forgetting who we are.”
“Matt,” Millie broke in gently. “Let’s go back to Misty Grove and gather all the help we need. Grace is one of our own, and we’re not abandoning her.”
“Shit,” Briggs muttered, looking at Cassie. “Your husband better come back soon. I’m too old for this shit. Keeping your town out of trouble is his problem now.”
“I’m going to close the diner and we’ll establish home base there,” Millie said. “Frank, do you know if your CSI techs are done processing the scene of Cristiano’s ambush by The Reaper?”
“Suspected ambush by The Reaper,” Briggs corrected.
“It’s him. Why can’t you just establish that as a fact?” Matt growled.
“Listen, Foster,” Briggs said. “You guys keep all the shit that’s happening in your town to yourselves and then shit explodes and the sheriff’s department catches the flak. We’re doing this by the book, and we’re starting from scratch because we know nothing about The Reaper, and there ain’t no file on him in our office.”
“Trent should have one. He was at the hospital after Grace was first attacked by The Reaper,” Cassie chirped.
Briggs sighed. “It’s probably one he hasn’t entered as a department case file. To be honest, what’s happening with The Reaper right now appears bigger than a county problem. The reason the sheriff probably kept it off radar was because he didn’t want the Feds taking an interest in it and taking the case away from him, especially with many of our own people involved.”
“Then maybe you should call your investigators off and set us loose,” Matt suggested.
“I’d rather that be the sheriff’s call.”
“We’re wasting time worrying about jurisdiction,” Millie said. “We need people doing the footwork finding out what the neighbors have seen.”
“I agree,” Matt concurred. He couldn’t wait to go a’hunting.
The Reaper had just become the hunted.