AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Crack!
Pain scorched through Kristi’s hand.
The gun went flying. It clattered against the glass bins of flour and sugar and fell to the floor.
“I wondered if you’d show up here,” Aldo said, and she noticed the knife in his hand. A short-bladed weapon used for shucking oysters. Sharp. Deadly. Smeared in blood. “Good. Saves me the trouble of hunting you down!”
She was crouching, ready to spring. Her eyes on the knife, her hand throbbing.
“Nine-one-one,” the voice squawked from her phone, and quick as a cat striking, he swiped the phone from her and smashed it on the floor.
“Now that I have your full attention,” he said.
“We need to get help,” she argued.
“Too late.”
“But—” She wanted to tell him that Reggie was still alive, that there was a slim chance that she could be saved, but she knew it would fall on deaf ears. In fact, he might finish the job. Instead he was focused on her.
“You sent me the notes,” she charged, stunned, not realizing the depths of his depravity, his humiliation. “And the snake.”
“Gifts.”
“Not gifts. Warnings. And no thanks.” She had to figure out how to get past him. He filled the doorway to the pantry and there was no other way out that she could see. But if she could get to her gun. It was somewhere in the back of this closet, but she’d have to trip over Hamilton Cooke’s body to retrieve it—that was if she could find it. She didn’t dare take her eyes off Aldo, couldn’t see the pistol in her peripheral vision.
Think, Kristi, think.
You’ve been in tight spots before! You have to save yourself. More than that, you have to save the baby! Think of the innocent child you’re carrying!
“I don’t understand,” she said, hoping to keep him talking, trying and failing to keep her panic level.
The gun! Where was it?Where!?
“Oh, sure you do. Don’t play dumb with me. You know why. You profited from my pain,” he said. “You and your damned book were everywhere besmirching my family’s name, making money for the shame that I suffered! It wasn’t bad enough that she,” he spat out, glancing at his dying ex-wife, “she flaunted her affair, having it play out on national TV, that she left me for a convicted murderer, but then you had to keep it going. Publishing a book. Agreeing to a made-for-TV deal, getting rich off my family’s disgrace!”
Kristi couldn’t believe it.
He was this disturbed? He’d harbored a grudge, letting it fester and grow until it became an obsession, a need for revenge. Recalling the horrid notes he’d left, the deadly snake, she felt a new rage. He had no right to terrorize her, no right to take her husband’s life. For the first time she noticed the wound on his face, remembered attacking him with the umbrella, felt the rage that he with his damned knife had destroyed her future.
“But why now?”
“Because it was all happening again!” he exploded as if she were an imbecile. “You were just on television! And that cheap piece of . . . that made-for-television movie where I’m played as if I’m a damned idiot? On over and over again. Do you know what that does to my reputation! I’m a proud, upstanding citizen. I own a company. I’m on the board of charities and all of you”—he waved his knife to include his dying wife, her dead husband, and Kristi—“you need to pay.”
She couldn’t let him get away with it.
She shifted slightly, onto the balls of her feet, still crouched, protecting her belly, and swallowed back her fear. All the while, she fastened her gaze to his knife. “So you killed—?”
“My cheating wife? And her lover?” he said, as if she should understand. “Of course I did! We were married in the church and she defiled her vows, took up with a known killer,” he spat out the words. “And as I said, you opened my life, my pain, my suffering to the world. You destroyed my privacy and my life!” His face was twisted brutally. “So, you too, Kristi Bentz, must pay for your sins. Tonight.”
CHAPTER 39
Bentz’s skin crawled. He stared at what had obviously been Father John’s lair, but the little cabin in the tree had been stripped bare, only a sleeping bag lying on a bed built into the wall and a small table and stool in the middle of the small, rough-hewn space.
And on the table was a phone.
Dr. Samantha Wheeler’s cell phone.
Left here purposely to taunt and tease, to let Detective Rick Bentz know he’d failed.
