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She’s been different ever since I brought Tamara here. She’s losing weight. Last week I ordered her to eat more, but since then, she looks even thinner. Is it possible she’s disobeying me? I cannot imagine such a thing—it goes against her very nature—and yet her clothes are getting looser.
I’ll talk to her about it later.
My main focus these days is Tamara, my struggling, squirming little captive.
It’s deliciously frightening how much pleasure I draw from punishing her. It’s the giddiness of a skier on the top of Mount Everest, looking down, down, down.
Feeling floods back into me again.
Food tastes delicious.
Little porn movies featuring me and Tamara flash through my mind throughout the day, as I fantasize about what I’ll do to her once she begs me to fuck her.
There are flies in the ointment, however. There’s the mysterious text message. I haven’t heard anything else from the texter, but I don’t believe for a second that whoever texted me is done with me. I haven’t been able to find any security breaches at my company, and I am still at a loss as to who could be behind this.
It’s making me more watchful all the time, but that’s probably a good thing. A whiff of danger keeps the senses sharp. I can never be complacent.
I debated getting rid of this new burner phone, then decided not to. If I bought yet another burner, and he or she found out that number and texted me on that phone, it would hand over a win, a sensation of victory, that he or she didn’t deserve.
And there’s the Morton Media issue.
I haven’t heard from Morton Media. The deadline has passed, and not a peep. No more pleading, no more attempts at negotiating. Not only that, but all my surveillance devices have gone dead, and the janitorial company was abruptly fired two days ago.
These events can’t be a coincidence.
I ponder whether this could somehow be connected with the text message. There’s no logical reason to think so, but these are two anomalies that are happening at the same time. My Spidey-sense is tingling.
Tapping my fingers on my desk, I start thinking about anything else that’s been happening recently that’s an anomaly. The only thing that I can think of is the oddness of Heather, Tamara’s neighbor, not reporting her missing.
I quickly hack into the police department to check up on Tamara’s case, and I’m annoyed to see that Jessica Brown, the director of the homeless shelter, has filed a complaint saying that they’re not taking the disappearance seriously enough.
Should I kill Ms. Brown? I’d have to find a way to make it look as if she died of natural causes—a little challenging, because she’s only forty. Or I could make it appear to be a mugging gone bad. She’s prominent in the local community; her death would attract a lot more attention than Tamara’s disappearance.
I’ll have to start checking the police reports daily.
I call up my private investigator. He’s not allowed to leave me messages, and I haven’t checked in with him for too long. That isn’t like me.
His report unsettles me. Heather, Tamara’s neighbor, has deliberately dropped off the grid. She quit the bagel shop job, she paid her landlord in advance through the end of her lease and told him she wouldn’t be renewing, and she hasn’t been seen since. The PI broke into her house and found nothing but furniture. The closet is empty, the fridge is empty, the bathroom cabinets are empty. There’s no laptop or phone or chargers.
Where did she get the money to pay off several months of rent? Why did she fail to report her friend missing, then promptly vanish? Why did she disappear, and where did she go? I’m going to have to dig into everything. Her bank account, looking for any suspicious deposits, her past known associates, whether she’s used her cell phone or bank cards recently so I can get a clue as to where she is now.
I’m about to ask my PI more questions about this strange new development when three of my perimeter alarms go off. Three of them—from different sides of the property. But when I look at the video monitors, they show nothing but dense green forest.
I hang up on him as he’s speaking to me. Ice-cold calm descends on me, the way it always does during emergencies. I quickly open my top drawer by pressing my fingerprint on the lock, and pull out my Glock, tucking it into my waistband.
Tamara is in the library. Elizabeth is in the kitchen. I run down the hall and tell her to return Tamara to her cell and chain her up immediately.
Then I run to the front door and press the right eye of the lion head plaque that adorns it. It slides up to reveal the retina scanner, which scans my eye. I press a code into the keypad beneath the scanner. Then the door unlocks. That’s the disadvantage of living in such a secure home. I can’t get in and out quickly.
I rush out the front door and into the small fail-safe room, what I call my “airlock room”, and repeat the procedure on the door that leads outside.
It’s close to noon. A white-hot sun burns overhead, and for some reason, in the midst of this crisis, I flash back to Tamara and how wistfully she glanced at the windows, longing to see the sun. The cruel way I refused to open the window to let her get even a glimpse of outside.
Sometimes I’m an asshole just for the sheer joy of it. That time though, it didn’t give me pleasure the way it should have. I felt something odd and unpleasant inside me. I hope it isn’t what people refer to as “guilt”, because I’ve always thought guilt must be the most useless of all emotions. I don’t think it could be, though, any more than I think I could grow wings.
As these thoughts run through my mind, I’m climbing onto the ATV in the carport and racing toward the areas where the perimeter alarms were tripped.
How the hell did Tamara wriggle her way into my head now, of all moments?
