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  “Fine, Lucas, I’m not going to argue with you.” She left to round up the other detectives.

  * * *

  Sarah rode in the ambulance with Charlotte gripping her hand. The concern for both her daughters became a vice around her heart.

  “Oh God, Chelsea,” Charlotte cried. “Mum, we can’t lose her. If that man does anything to her, I’ll kill him.”

  “Please don’t talk like that, Charlotte. Just you get better. Chelsea will be fine. Lucas will find her,” she assured her and prayed she was right.

  * * *

  Something heavy was pressed down on her chest and Chelsea opened her eyes. She yelped when she realised the killer was sitting astride her.

  “Time to scream,” he said to her as he held the knife aloft.

  He knelt up and began to cut an S with slow precision into her chest. The sharp, searing pain took her breath away and she bit her lip to stop from crying out. Chelsea didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. She hoped it would end swiftly. She clenched her jaw and went somewhere else. Lucas. She thought about his hazel eyes and his gorgeous little giggle ... Oh God it hurts! She screamed out in pain and he offered her a disturbing smile.

  “Finally, a full-on scream. I was hoping for that. You’re quite tough for a rich bitch.” He stopped and she could feel the blood flowing in rivers down her chest towards her stomach.

  “I wanted you to feel what it's like to have something done to you, something you didn’t want. I want to hear you beg me to stop but there’s plenty of time for that later.”

  “Please, untie me. We can sort this out.”

  “I don’t think so, sweetheart.”

  His face is vaguely familiar. I have seen him before ….

  He hit her again and this time everything went black.

  * * *

  Sarah sat anxiously waiting for Charlotte to be brought from recovery. The doctors informed her they had removed the bullet, repaired the damage and that she was going to be alright. Charlotte’s shoulder would be stiff and sore for quite a while and she may have trouble with it from time to time but overall she would come through it alright. When they wheeled Charlotte in, she was sleeping. Sarah stroked her hair waiting for her to wake. Relief over Charlotte surged through her as her desolation over Chelsea consumed her. Sarah’s hands shook and tears saturated her cheeks. Her baby, her Chelsea.

  “Have they found her yet?” Charlotte asked the moment she opened her eyes.

  Sarah discreetly wiped her tears.

  “No, honey but I’m sure it will be soon. Please don’t worry about that now, just rest.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes. She was just so tired. She was afraid of life without her sister.

  As Charlotte lost consciousness, Sarah heard someone enter the room. She turned to see a tall blonde approaching her.

  “Mrs Summerville, I’m Maggie, Lucas’ partner. How is she?” She said, indicating towards Charlotte.

  “Please call me Sarah. She’ll be sore but she’ll be fine, thanks, Maggie. How is Lucas?” She furrowed her brow.

  “About the same as you.”

  Sarah smiled slightly.

  “I told him to go and see his sister and let us try to find Chelsea.”

  Sarah nodded once before speaking. “What can I do to help, Maggie?”

  Maggie sat in the seat beside her. “I need to show you something.” She handed her the sketch of Chad Wilson. “Do you recognise this man?”

  Sarah frowned. “He looks a little like the kidnapper.” She studied it a moment. “He looks a bit like Wes too, not really like either of them. Who is he?”

  “He’s a man we are trying to locate called Chad Wilson. He’s a suspect.”

  “Well, it could be the kidnapper. It’s hard to say. These sketches can look like lots of people really, can’t they?”

  “So you think it could be either of them?”

  “Yes. I really can’t say for sure. I don’t suppose that helps ….”

  “Could Wesley Robinson have changed his appearance? Could it have been him that kidnapped Chelsea?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think it was Wes, and Chelsea didn’t appear to think so either, and she would have known. Charlotte didn’t recognise him either. It all happened so fast ...” Her voice faltered and she clasped her hands together tight in her lap.

  “From what you know of Wesley Robinson, was he capable of doing anything like this?”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. I suppose anybody is capable of almost anything when they put their mind to it. When he just disappeared on Chelsea we were all surprised and couldn’t understand it. Something must have happened or perhaps he held some kind of grudge. It was all very strange.” She paused. “Please find my baby.”

  “We’ll do everything we can, Sarah. I promise.”

  * * *

  Carrie located Lucas at his desk, head in hands. She couldn’t recall seeing him this distraught, not since that fateful night. She walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Lucas, come home with me for a while, get some rest. You can come back in the morning, when you’re fresh.”

  “How can I sleep, Carrie?” He lifted his head and his expression broke her heart.

  “Lucas, please just come home with me.”

  “I can’t lose her, she is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he said with such anguish that he worried Carrie further.

  She grabbed his hand, guided him out to her car and took him to her house. The children were asleep and Nathan was waiting when they arrived.

  “Can I get you anything?” Nathan asked.

  Lucas shook his head. Nathan said he would go and check on the children and catch up on some work in the study. Carrie sat him down beside her on the couch. He rested his elbows on his knees, his hands dropped despondently between his legs and his eyes on the floor.

  “Lucas,” she paused and waited for him to look at her. “She’s still alive and can be found.”

  “Carrie, what he did to those girls …”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “I can’t help it. For the first time since becoming a cop, I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  Lucas shook his head and returned to his eyes to their scrutiny of the floor. “Not for certain. He could be Chad Wilson, he could be Wesley Robinson. He could be anybody. Maggie showed the sketch to Sarah and she couldn’t be sure. I still think Robinson is behind this. Chad could be Wesley’s accomplice. There could be two of them doing unspeakable things to Chelsea, unimaginable things … we have no idea who has her or where she is ...”

  “Oh, honey.” She pulled him into a hug.

  They both sat for hours, holding onto each other.

  Chapter 28

  Anna

  Friday

  Maggie decided to get an early start and found Lucas already at his desk.

  “You haven’t been here all night have you?”

  “No, I was at my sister's for a while. I’ve been here about an hour.”

  “Well, I’m glad Carrie came and got you.”

  “Ah, so you rang her then?”

  “Yes, Lucas, I’m worried about you.”

  “It’s okay, I’m better this morning and determined to find this son of a bitch and my girl. How did you go last night, Maggie? Any witnesses?”

  “No, as usual, no-one saw much. One witness said she’d seen them leave the house but assumed they were going on a date because his arm was around her, which probably just indicates he had the gun on her. She said the car was a dark colour sedan but she didn’t know the make.”

  “We can’t trace a car to either Wesley Robinson or Chad Wilson, so the vehicle is probably stolen or in another name entirely. We could look up all dark stolen cars, which would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. We don’t even know how long he’s had the car, if it’s even stolen.”

  He shook his head, frustrated again. Why
wasn’t anything falling into place when they had so little time?

  “There would also be a lot of dark coloured sedans to go through. It could be black, blue or green, who knows - it was dark.”

  “The results came back on the hair from Lindsay’s autopsy, and the DNA matches the one found on Kate. It doesn’t really help us much we have nothing to compare it to.”

  Maggie’s phone rang and as Lucas listened to the one-sided conversation the realisation hit him hard. A body had been found. Chelsea!

  “Maggie?” he asked when she’d hung up.

  “It could be Anna.”

  “What if it’s not?”

  “His MO suggests it is. It’s too soon for Chelsea.”

  Lucas drove to occupy his mind. Every moment of the past week passed through his mind and his heart set up a permanent residence in his throat. He told himself it wouldn’t be Chelsea. Maggie was right, it was too soon. He couldn’t even comprehend or consider the idea of a life without Chelsea, a world where she wasn’t in it. He’d given his heart and soul to her. If she was dead, his life would be over too.

  Lucas pulled up at the warehouse but couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car.

  “I’ll go and check,” Maggie said.

  His hands gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white and the pain helped divert the torment in his heart. He closed his eyes, lent his head against the seat and waited for the long excruciating minutes until Maggie returned. He didn’t want to allow the images of her into his mind but they came regardless. A flash of her laughter and the thought of her kiss caused his chest to tighten and panic to surge through his body. What type of cruel world would take away someone else he loved, especially someone as lovely as Chelsea? He clenched his jaw against the pain threatening to consume him.

  The last image of Chelsea saturated his mind - her engaging smile as he dropped her at her door the previous morning. As he’d driven away she’d blown him a kiss. Would that be his last moment with her?

  He nearly leapt out of his skin when Maggie tapped on his window. He lowered the window and stared at her. She shook her head.

  “It’s Anna Jones.”

  Relief filled his chest, which instantly turned to guilt when he realised he was happy that it was Anna. This only intensified his fury towards the kidnapper, whoever it was.

  “It’s perfectly normal to be relieved, Lucas.”

  “Doesn’t make it right, though.”

  “I asked Dave to do a preliminary ASAP so, if he finds anything, we can move on it straightaway.

  When they got back to the station, Wesley Robinson’s file was waiting on Lucas’ desk.

  “Anything in the file we can use?”

  “Probably not, but his record is for manslaughter.”

  “Who’d he kill?’

  “His father when he was sixteen. After years of physical and emotional abuse, he slit his father’s throat one night after another particularly nasty bashing. The court went easy on him because of the abuse and he was released when he was eighteen after serving nearly two years. He grew up with nothing. His mother left and his father was an alcoholic who drank his wages.”

  “It looks like it could be Wesley Robinson after all. Same MO. He grew up poor and probably resents Chelsea because she didn’t. They were getting married weren’t they?” Maggie said.

  “Yes,” he said with a clenched jaw.

  “So he could have just married into the wealth. Why leave her and then plan to kill her?”

  “I guess that is only something he can answer. I haven’t been able to work that out either. Years of abuse obviously affected him. He also worked in the kitchen as a baker’s assistant while inside.”

  “There’s our flour. He must have been working somewhere, but where?”

  “If we could find that out, maybe we could get his address. I already checked and haven’t found any employment records,” Lucas said.

  “Perhaps we could show his photo around at the café, see if he ate there. Maybe someone knows something about him. If he didn’t go there, maybe there is another way he knows all the girls. This could be a way to lead us to him. We can read over the files with Robinson in mind now, particularly the calls. Maybe we’ll be able to link something up.”

  “It’s worth a try, I suppose. What else do we have?”

  Maggie’s phone rang as they were leaving. “The ME has finished his preliminary report on Anna and wants to see us,” she told him after hanging up.

  They made their way down to the lower level to David’s office and lab.

  “Good afternoon, Detectives.”

  “What have we got, Dave?” Maggie asked him.

  “Well, cause of death is consistent with the other four girls. The wounds again have different levels of clotting.”

  “Did you find any trace substances?”

  “Not this time. No trace of flour at all that I can find. This girl has either been cleaned or he didn’t transfer any this time. No seminal fluid or hairs from the rape kit but signs of trauma, so once again he may have used a condom or didn’t ejaculate. I would be more inclined to go with the latter as there were no traces of a condom having been used, same as before.”

  “Any other differences, besides the flour?” Lucas asked him.

  “Yes. With regard to the wounds, this time the cuts were inflicted over a shorter period of time, as though he rushed, or there was less time between each cut.”

  “So, he’s either escalating or he was in a hurry to move on,” said Lucas with a grim expression. “This means we could have less time.”

  “He could have been in a rush to reach his real target in Chelsea. He might take his time again with her.”

  Lucas glared at her.

  “This is a good thing, Lucas. It means we have more time to find her. The quicker we do, the lesser the injuries.”

  “I hope you're right. Anything else?” Lucas asked the ME.

  “Not at this stage. I have only done the preliminary. I’ll let you know if I find anything else inconsistent.”

  “Thanks, Dave.”

  “Was he working somewhere? Where was the flour coming from? Why isn’t there any this time?” Maggie now sounded as aggravated as Lucas felt.

  They were waiting impatiently for the lift to take them back to their floor.

  “He must have been working somewhere using an alias.” He paused. Lucas turned to Maggie as a thought entered his mind. “Wesley Robinson and Chad Wilson are the same person.”

  Chapter 29

  Chad Wilson

  Friday

  “Of course, this is why there was no flour on Anna’s body, because he kidnapped her after he stopped going to work. Wait, the sketch doesn’t look like the photo and they didn’t recognise him,” said Maggie. “

  “It’s an old photo. I wouldn’t have guessed they were the same person.” He held up the photo and the sketch. “See the nose is wrong. Different face shapes. Maybe he’s had his face altered.”

  “Didn’t Jenkins say that the manager and girl couldn’t agree when they described him?”

  “Yeah, that could explain the differences. Maybe if I’d shown Chelsea...”

  “Don’t beat yourself up.”

  “We should go back to the bakery to find out about a vehicle and show them a photo,” Maggie suggested. “We should check at the café too.”

  “If only I’d thought of this yesterday. We could have been onto this sooner. It should have clicked when we were going over the notes, but with everything going on .... I have to be more focused than this.”

  “I missed it too, partner. Even if we could have been sure they were the same person, we have no clue where he lives. They still may not be the same guy.”

  “After we’ve been to the bakery and café, if our suspicions are correct, I’ll call Peterson and Stewart to let them know that Wesley is Chad, just in case they come across him while doing their door-to-door, and they can ask the neighbours about both names.”


  “Good idea. We haven’t briefed them on our updates yet.

  The same assistant was at Ben’s Bakery when they arrived.

  “Hello Detectives,” she said after they walked in. “How can I help you?”

  “We just need to ask you a couple of questions about Chad Wilson,” Maggie began.

  “Sure go ahead.”

  “Do you recognise this man?” she asked showing her a photo of Wesley.

  “It looks a little like Chad, I think.” She looked closely at the photo for a moment. “He looks younger there but it could be him.”

  “Did you ever hear him referred to as, or use the name, Wesley Robinson?” Maggie said.

  “Not that I remember.”

  “I assume no employment records have turned up?” Lucas asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you know what type of car he drove?”

  “Yeah, a dark blue sedan, um, a Ford, I think.”

  “Are there any other details about the car that you can recall?” Maggie said.

  “No, I don’t remember the registration number or anything. I just remember the car because I’d seen him arrive in it and thought it was a nice car.”

  “Don’t you remember anything else about him?” Lucas demanded impatiently.

  “No, I don’t.” She glared at him.

  “That’s okay. If you think of anything else give us a call. Thank you for your time,” Maggie said.

  “Sure thing.”

  “Take it easy, Lucas,” Maggie said once they were outside. “We need all the information we can get and being rude is not going to get us anywhere. I know you’re worried about Chelsea but you have to stay cool.”

  He nodded. “I know, I’ll try and keep my emotions in check.”

  “Good”

  They went into the café and were fortunate enough to find the waitress who informed Maggie about Chad. She had the same ‘could be him’ recognition as the bakery assistant towards Wesley’s photo but didn’t know what type of car he drove. She thought he’d always walked to the cafe and couldn’t recall ever seeing him in a car.