The detectives, there were at least two different voices that asked questions as he relayed information, supposedly took everything down and said they’d look back over photos from the scene and any video they could find from the area. Doug felt better about hopefully giving them something to use. As his eyes got too heavy to keep open, he prayed Lizzie was still okay and they’d find her quickly.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lizzie had thought being zip-tied was bad, but after a failed attempt to dive out of the car while it was moving, Tommy had tethered the zip tie to the steering wheel. The escape attempt came after they’d been driving for an hour straight. They were heading away from town to the north, and Lizzie hadn’t been sure whether Tommy had a specific location in mind, but she knew she was tired of sitting in a car with him.

  Just being in his presence brought back every ounce of hurt and pain she’d tried to hide over the years. Even knowing he was around hadn’t made the debilitating emotions descend. She’d been afraid, but she hadn’t really started reliving what life was like with him.

  He’d slowed down a little on the highway, like he considered taking the next exit, and she took the moment to reach over and open her door. Before she could move to roll out of the car or take her seatbelt off, he punched her in the side, directly in her ribs, which knocked the wind out of her. How he’d been able to come up with that much force in a small space had her scratching her head.

  He proceeded to pull off the road to make things more difficult for Lizzie to escape with the tether to the wheel and a rope around her ankles, but then they’d returned to the seemingly endless driving, stopping only once for gas. Sadly, she wasn’t let out of the car and he picked a station with no other cars around.

  Eventually her bladder was going to explode if he didn’t get to wherever he was taking her soon. She could hold things for a while, but she’d been on the edge of her seat, ready to pee, for about two hours.

  “Where are we going, Tommy? This is getting ridiculous. We’ve passed plenty of quiet areas for you to pull off and kill me.”

  Giving him ideas wasn’t smart, but he had to already have the thoughts going through his head. There were times she thought they’d doubled back and were heading towards the city again. The only thing she knew for sure was they hadn’t crossed a border into another state, which seemed impossible after being in the car for five hours. Five hours of doing absolutely nothing but staring out at the never-ending road.

  “We’re going wherever I feel like going.” Tommy’s blue eyes glared at her for a second before turning back to the road. His eyes were the same, but he’d dyed his hair black and cut it shorter than she remembered. He also looked like he’d lost a little weight, but she’d been more concerned about finding a way to escape than what he looked like.

  It was hard to escape the fact that he smelled the exact same. She never understood why he carried the scent of vanilla with him everywhere he went. They’d lived together for years, so she knew he didn’t have some kind of cologne helping add the scent. That was probably one of the reasons she liked Doug’s cologne so much. There was something manly about it and it was so different from what she’d been used to.

  “Are we ever going to get there? I have to pee.”

  Lizzie wasn’t sure if the lack of a response to her claim of him killing her was a good or bad thing. She was still worried about Doug and Ben, particularly Doug because the little talking Tommy did was only taunting her about seeing metal sticking through his body. She wished she would’ve verified his injuries with her own eyes, instead of freezing at the site of Tommy.

  “We’ll need to stop for gas again soon, so you can go then.”

  “Really?” Lizzie was surprised he conceded.

  “It’s not like you’ll be able to go anywhere. I’ll find somewhere that has bathrooms outside and pull up to the door. We can’t have you soiling that pretty dress. It looks great on you, by the way.”

  She ignored the compliment. She’d worn the dress for Doug, not Tommy. Lizzie hadn’t let herself hope for anything as far as her request to use the bathroom, so she wasn’t devastated to hear his plan. It was the first of any plan he actually shared, so she was just happy to have something to look forward to.

  Everything Tommy did was calculated, even if she couldn’t see the methods behind his madness. She figured there was some grand plot to all the driving, possibly nothing more than driving her insane.

  “And after we get gas? You said you had things you wanted to talk about, and yet you haven’t said much of anything in hours.”

  “Yeah, well, I decided talking would just irritate me while I drove, so I decided it’s better to wait until I decide to stop. Things have changed a lot in two years, Elizabeth. You’ve turned me into a killer more than once, and for that alone you owe me. I could’ve killed everyone you came in contact with, but I restrained myself and only killed people who deserved it.”

  Lizzie’s heart sank. “Who else did you kill?” There was no question in her mind whether the definition of deserved was different for the two of them. She couldn’t think of a single reason Maddie deserved to be murdered.

  Annie and Casey immediately came to mind as other possibilities. Maybe not Casey so much, because she was a scary woman, but Annie was kind of tiny and Tommy could’ve easily overpowered her.

  “I guess that would depend on who you’re aware of. I took care of that nurse the other day after she practically raped me at the hospital. I just wanted to ask her what she’d heard about you quitting and she started stripping in the locker room.” He stayed focused on the road, but Lizzie saw him shiver as he talked about Maddie stripping.

  “What were you doing in the locker room?”

  Only employees were allowed in the back. She supposed the inspectors who were called in were free to go wherever they wanted, but that still made it a short list of people allowed to wander around.

  “Like I said, I was seeing what people knew about you. Obviously she wasn’t very helpful, and I needed someone to use as an example, so she came in handy. Can you believe she actually asked if she could whip me?” Tommy shook his head like it was the stupidest thing he ever heard.

  Lizzie wasn’t surprised, since Maddie pretty much asked every male she met the same question. That didn’t mean she deserved to die for it.

  “What I meant was how in the world did you get to the locker room. Visitors and patients aren’t allowed back there and there’s a keypad you have to enter a code in to get to that hallway.”

  “Yeah, and since I worked there for over a month, they were nice enough to give me the code. We’re getting off track from answering your original question, though. Do you still want a list of all the people I’ve killed for you?”

  She really didn’t want a final tally. The thought of how close he’d been to her without her realizing it was bad enough. He didn’t work there during to the day, or she would’ve noticed him, so he must have worked as a night guard, or maybe a janitor. She couldn’t see him as a janitor, though, so she settled on him being a guard. Obviously he’d been going by a different name, but that was irrelevant at that point.

  She looked out the window, hoping to recognize something in the scenery around them, so she had an inkling of where they were. Whatever twists and turns Tommy had taken led them to roads with little other traffic. Every once in a while there was a house, but rarely did they drive through a town or city after they’d cleared the city. If Lizzie wasn’t scared for her life, she would’ve fallen asleep.

  “Come on. You’re the one who decided it was time to talk. Let’s go back to when you first told me you wanted a divorce. You wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to tell you I wasn’t screwing around with Stacy. She just wanted to cause problems because I ignored her, and obviously it worked. Before you even had the papers drawn up, she was found floating in a hotel pool. Poor thing shouldn’t have mixed all that ecstasy with vodka.”

  “You can stop talking now. I really don’t want to hear your killing exploits.”

  Lizzie hadn’t known the woman’s name, but she still believed her own eyes as far as what she’d walked in on. The woman was naked on top of the desk in his office and he was standing on the opposite side. Sure, his shirt was still on, but that didn’t mean he had anything on from the waist down. His face had been flushed and just before she walked in she’d heard skin being slapped, which was a pretty big indicator to her what was going on.

  “No, I won’t stop talking. You need to know everything, so you can realize how much I really love you.” He reached over and ran the back of his hand down her face. She had to fight not to show how disgusted the move made her feel. “I could have contested the divorce, but your trip to the hospital the day you filled didn’t play well in my favor, and I thought giving you a little taste of what life was like without me would send you running back.”

  His words just proved how little he knew about her. The restraining order should’ve told him she wasn’t afraid of being alone. She went through the effort of getting it extended to years instead of just months.

  She tried to get lost in her own thoughts, but he wasn’t done telling her all the things she’d missed. He was up to two deaths he was involved in, and she had a feeling there were more to come.

  “When you didn’t come back within a week and disappeared from all the places I could think to look for you, I tracked down your lawyer. I have to say that guy was a total sleaze. You could’ve done so much better, even if you didn’t want to use the money in our joint bank account.”

  Lizzie would’ve begged to differ. She had a little money set aside from selling some of the heirlooms her mother had sent her as wedding gifts, but that didn’t buy her much for a lawyer if she wanted some money left over to relocate. She and Ben were at least a state away within a day of her having evidence that she had sole custody of Ben.

  “Anyway,” Tommy said as he waved his right hand above the wheel for a second. “He didn’t know where you were. By the time I was done with him, I was positive of that. As far as I know, they still haven’t found his body. Or the body of that prick judge. You’d swear I killed her kids or something by the way she glared at me in the courtroom every time I got stuck with her. I should have killed her long before that, but I hadn’t realized how easy it was until you showed me the light.”

  “You’ve killed four people?” One and the fear of more to come was bad enough, but hearing the lengths he’d gone to over the years made the chances of her living to see the next day limited. She was still trying to decide where she landed on whether that was good or bad.

  “No, I’ve killed seven people for you. The most recent was that twerp of a guard who asked you out and had the nerve to tell me about it. Since the nurse didn’t know anything, I thought going back and asking others what they knew about you quitting. I didn’t have a lot of interactions with the day staff, since I didn’t want you knowing I was around. Listening to him go on and on about how great a rack you have was a little too much to bear.”

  Seven. Lizzie heard Tommy continue talking, but the number kept repeating in her head. She’d been the cause of seven deaths. She had to stop herself from thinking of all the devastation she’d caused, and how many loved ones would never see those people again.

  “I almost killed that slut who called in the guy you’ve been playing house with. It wasn’t like I ever suggested we do anything when I snuck in her room at night. I just wanted to relieve a little stress after smelling you everywhere around the building. I figure she only got pissed because I wouldn’t let her help me out. I don’t know of another guy in the place that wasn’t boning her. That quack of a doctor actually told guys to have at it, so I know she was filled daily with semen up to her eyeballs, and I’m pretty sure they even doubled up her birth control because they thought one dose a day wasn’t good enough.”

  “You’re a monster,” Lizzie whispered, still stuck on the fact that he’d admitted to killing seven people. There was no other word to describe him. After speaking to Steph, she didn’t doubt the claims he made, but she hated hearing all that was going on around her without her noticing.

  “No, I’m a man in love, whose wife blew things out of proportion, making me have to do drastic things to find her. Then, even when you knew I was here and I told you to go home and wait for me, you ran to that goon and wouldn’t leave. If that wasn’t bad enough, you guys threw a party to rub it in my face.”

  “That’s so like you, thinking that everything has to do with you. Doug forgot he invited his teammates over until they started showing up. There was no taunting about it. They came, set up the party, and we pretended for a few hours you weren’t out there waiting to strike.”

  Tommy unexpectedly swerved to the side of the road and stopped the car. The palm of his hand burned her face as it came in contact. Lizzie knew she said something that in his mind deserved the slap, but she was a little worried about the fact that it often ended up as foreplay for him.

  “Don’t you dare say his name in my presence. If he lives through the mangled mess I left him in, you can bet he’s next on the list. I should’ve finished things already, but it will be fun going back to twist the screws a little more. I heard a rumor that my son was referring to the oaf as his father. I can only imagine the helplessness in his dying eyes when he sees me take you and Ben back to where you rightly belong.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Lizzie should’ve immediately denied it, but there were very few people who knew about it. She held her hand to her face, trying to cool down the mild swelling she felt. It didn’t take much to cause a reaction with her skin. The reaction was usually quick and somewhat painful, but just a slap wouldn’t leave a lasting mark.

  Tommy reached over and forcefully grabbed her chin to make her look in his direction. “You actually let him call him that? I heard someone leaving the party mention it was cute that he had, but I would’ve thought you’d correct him. You didn’t, did you?”

  Lizzie had to decide whether to placate him or add a little something more to fill the anger in his eyes. The anger seemed to lighten what were normally icy blue eyes to a pale blue. After hearing him talk about what he’d been up to since she’d last seen him, she had to wonder if that was the look he got right before he killed someone.

  “I agreed to marry him yesterday, so I thought it was appropriate for Ben to get used to calling him that. We’ve already started talking about Doug adopting him.”

  There was a split second of calm before a fist flew towards Lizzie’s head. Since his left hand was holding her face in place, she couldn’t turn to lessen the blow. A cracking that maybe only Lizzie could hear echoed in her ears for a few seconds.

  “Obviously that isn’t going to happen. I’m sure once we swing back to get Ben, I can undo the brainwashing you’ve done.” Tommy didn’t say anything else while he put the car back in drive and sped away. He took deep breaths as he tried to calm himself down.

  Lizzie was happy for the quiet as she tried to get the ringing she heard to quiet, after the cracking noise dissipated, bells started going off. She didn’t remember a time he’d assaulted her in a way it would leave a mark that couldn’t be covered by clothing. It felt like she was going to be lucky if her whole face didn’t turn into a giant bruise. Her left eye was swollen enough she was having trouble seeing out of it. That could’ve just been the tears welling up in her eyes, but her right eye didn’t seem to be as blurry.

  The short talk with Tommy told her everything she needed to know about her current situation. She could egg him on, and yes, she’d be punished for saying something that irritated him, but he wasn’t going to kill her. He was a bit of a loose cannon, but he was in total control. If she could say she was planning on moving on by marrying someone else without him killing her, he wasn’t going to. That realization was probably the scariest she’d had since being pushed into the car.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Doug didn’t have to sit through a strange hockey dream the second time he woke up after the accident, but he found it just as tough to get his eyes opened. Consciousness was slow because of that, although, a strong smell of peppermint seemed to try to coax things along.

  When Doug finally opened his eyes, a pair of green ones looked back at him. They weren’t the right color of green, they were a little duller as far as he was concerned, and the red bangs falling into them made it clear it wasn’t Lizzie.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Casey?” His words were still a little raspy, but they didn’t hurt as much to say.

  “Your mom told me to keep a close eye on you, so I’m following instructions.”

  “Well stop it. It’s creepy.” Doug tried to take stock of his injuries, but as far as he could tell, he still didn’t feel anything. That remained unimportant to him as long as Lizzie wasn’t there.

  She laughed at him and moved away. He listened for anyone else in the room, but things seemed quiet other than the machines.

  “I do what I can. I also wanted to make sure you were still breathing. It’s hard to tell if you’re alive when there’s no response to me poking you.”

  “What are you doing here anyway? I thought my mother was going to fight the doctor to the death to make sure she stayed in the room.” Doug attempted to move his head, trying to see anything other than the ceiling. If it did any good, he couldn’t tell. There was no pain and he was stuck looking at the same white ceiling.

  “You should’ve seen them when they first showed up. They only knew you’d been in an accident and they were rightfully freaked, because clearly it wasn’t a fender bender if they were called. Then they heard Ben calling for his daddy and I thought your mom’s head was going to explode.”

  Doug wasn’t really tracking where she was going. He’d just been curious why he had a babysitter, but Casey wasn’t explaining things. Unless of course his brain had turned to mush like the rest of his body. Since she’d paused in whatever story she was trying to get across, Doug had to prompt her to see if there was more to say.