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Uh-oh, she was really nervous now, but she followed him, meek as a lamb, as he kicked his way through the dust to the van, head rotating in every direction, on the alert.
“Right, tell me,” she demanded, once she was sitting on the edge of the bed inside the van. It was already heating up in here, even though it was under the partial shade of the scraggly stand of trees.
“So, you know we’ve had our private detective, Nikolay, looking into finding out as much as he can about this Travis guy?”
Julie nodded for him to continue.
“Nicolay has some contacts in the police force in Brisbane, and so he’s been hitting them up to see if there’s any record of this guy at all, but so far, they haven’t managed to find anything suspicious.”
“Okay.” None of that sounded bad. Not serious enough to make Aaron stare at her as if he was about to impart the worst news ever. “And…?” she said impatiently. What the hell was he not telling her?
“He also asked his contacts to look into other reported stalker cases, whether they were solved or unsolved, to see if there was any similarity between yours and others. See if they could link other cases to a pattern.” Aaron sat on the bed next to her, a move that momentarily distracted her. Up until now, he’d been keeping his distance, her barbed words from earlier clearly making an impact on him. “Nicolay needs to look more deeply into this, but it seems that he’s found…some disturbing cases that could well be related.”
Julie froze beside him. What was he saying? Had this stalker done this before? Wasn’t that a good thing, though? Because if he had, wouldn’t it make it easier to find him? “Define what you mean by disturbing,” she said quietly.
“Over the past eighteen months, since you left Brisbane, there’ve been four reported cases of women being stalked, all connected to the fact that they’d recently had an abortion.”
Julie’s skin began to crawl, and Aaron lay a comforting hand on her knee. Jesus, this was her worst nightmare. But at the same time, a sort of twisted relief also flowed through her; she wasn’t the only one. In a strange way, it was a kind of vindication; she wasn’t going completely mad.
“Before that time, there’s been nothing that seemed to fit this same profile, so if the stalker was active back then, he was flying under the radar,” Aaron continued. “Perhaps learning his trade, so to speak. You seem to be his first victim, but then you disappeared, and he had to concentrate on others.”
She didn’t like that more women had been targeted by this psycho. It hadn’t been her intention when she left that he pick on someone else. All she knew was she needed to get away. “What happened to the women? Can any of them identify the man?” she asked, half-hopeful.
Aaron shook his head. “I’ll get to the identity part in a moment. The first two women reported similar things to what you’ve been experiencing, notes in their mailboxes, texts and phone calls, but when they told him they’d involved the police, the harassment stopped. But the third woman…” He squeezed her leg tightly. “…she was taken hostage and tortured for over an hour, before she managed to get away.”
“What?” Julie covered her mouth, shocked beyond belief. “What do you mean by tortured?” she asked from behind her hand.
Aaron winced. “I’m not sure you want to know—”
“Yes, I do,” she said, dropping her hand. “Tell me, Aaron.” She needed to know. She was no shrinking violet that needed to be protected from life’s atrocities, and he more than anyone should understand that.
He looked directly into her eyes. “He beat her quite badly and also drugged her. But then…” Again, Aaron hesitated, and she ground her teeth together impatiently. “This guy had a large cross, and it seemed he was going to nail her to it, like some sort of fanatical religious nut.”
Which sounded exactly like something the guy who’d been stalking her would do. “What happened then?” she asked, unable to look away from his face, seeing his eyes full of loathing at the appalling deed this man was prepared to commit.
“It seems he wasn’t very good at hammering in the nails, and after a few aborted attempts, even though she was drugged, the pain must’ve been enough to get her up and moving, and she took him by surprise, kneeing him in the crotch and then making a dash for it. A good Samaritan found her wandering down the street an hour later that night.”
Julie expelled a loud breath. Thank God the woman had escaped. But this was bad. Julie was finding it hard to assimilate everything Aaron was telling her. He moved closer, letting his leg rest up against hers, and draped an arm around her shoulder. The comforting touch helped center her a little. “So, they never caught the guy?” she asked in a whisper.
Aaron shook his head. “No. He was wearing a balaclava and clothing that completely covered his skin. And the street where she was found was in an industrial area of Brisbane, with lots of warehouses and abandoned buildings. They never found the place she’d been held, and all the DNA evidence they collected gave them nothing. That was about eight months ago.”
Call it fate, or whatever you liked, but Julie was so glad her father had called when he did, and she’d left Brisbane. She shuddered to think that it might’ve been her they found wandering, dazed, and beaten down the street.
“That’s terrible. Horrible.” Julie didn’t know what to think, her mind was numb. But then she remembered Aaron’s words from earlier. “Hang on, you said there were four women. What happened to the last one?”
“Ah…” Aaron looked stricken, and his hand clenched tightly on her shoulder.
“What, Aaron? Tell me, please,” she pleaded, but a sick feeling rose up in her stomach.
“Around a month ago, a woman was found nailed to a cross in an abandoned warehouse. She was dead, Julie.”
No. The caravan seemed to swirl around her, and her vision narrowed to a pinpoint, the room going dark.
