Once Lured. Blake Pierce

will be a good time?” Ryan asked.

      “I don’t know,” Riley said. “I’ll let you know. Bye.”

      She ended the call. She’d been pacing since she’d started talking to Ryan. She sat down and took a few deep breaths to calm herself.

      Then she sent a text message to April.

      U’d better get home right now.

      It only took a few seconds before she got a reply.

      OK. I’m on my way. I’m sorry, Mom.

      Riley sighed. April sounded fine now. She would probably be all right for a little while. But something was off.

      What was going on with her?

      CHAPTER FIVE

      In his dimly lit lair, Scratch dashed frantically back and forth among the hundreds of clocks, trying to get everything ready. It was just a few minutes before midnight.

      “Fix the one with the horse on it!” Grandpa yelled. “It’s a whole minute behind!”

      “I’ll get to it,” Scratch said.

      Scratch knew he’d be punished anyway, but it would be especially bad if he didn’t get everything ready on time. Right now he had his hands full with other clocks.

      He fixed the clock with the curling metal flowers, which had fallen a full five minutes behind. Then he opened a grandfather clock and moved the minute hand just a little to the right.

      He checked the big clock with deer antlers on top. It often fell behind, but it looked okay right now. Finally he was able to fix the one with the rearing horse on it. It was a good thing, too. It was all of seven minutes behind.

      “That’ll have to do,” Grandpa grumbled. “You know what to do next.”

      Scratch obediently went to the table and picked up the whip. It was a cat o’ nine tails, and Grandpa had started beating him with it when he was too young to remember.

      He walked toward the end of the lair that was separated by a chain-link fence. Behind the fence were the four female captives, with no furnishings except wooden bunks without mattresses. There was a closet behind them where they went to relieve themselves. The stench had stopped bothering Scratch quite a while back.

      The Irish woman he had fetched a couple of nights back was watching him carefully. After their long diet of crumbs and water, the others were wasted and weary. Two of them seldom did anything more than weep and moan. The fourth was just sitting on the floor near the fence, shrunken and cadaverous. She made no noise at all. She barely looked alive.

      Scratch opened the door to the cage. The Irish woman leaped forward, trying to escape. Scratch lashed fiercely at her face with the whip. She cringed back, turning away. He whipped her back over and over again. He knew from experience that it would hurt plenty even through her tattered blouse, especially over the welts and cuts he’d given her already.

      Then an uproar of noise filled the air as all the clocks began to strike the midnight hour. Scratch knew what he was supposed to do now.

      As the racket continued, he hurried back to the weakest and skinniest girl, the one who seemed barely alive. She looked up at him with a strange expression. She was the only one who had been here long enough to know what he was about to do next. She looked almost as if she were ready for it, maybe even welcomed it.

      Scratch had no choice.

      He crouched beside her and snapped her neck.

      As life ebbed out of her body, he stared up at an ornate antique clock just on the other side of the fence. A hand-carved Death was marching back and forth across the front of it, clad in a black robe, his grinning skull face peering out from beneath his cowl. He was cutting down knights and kings and queens and paupers alike. It was Scratch’s favorite of all the clocks.

      The surrounding noise slowly died away. Soon there was no sound at all except the chorus of ticking clocks and the whimpering of the women who still survived.

      Scratch slung the dead girl over his shoulder. She was so feather-light that it took no effort at all. He opened the cage, stepped outside, and locked it behind him.

      The time, he knew, had come.

      CHAPTER SIX

      A pretty good act, Riley thought.

      Larry Mullins’s voice was shaking a little. As he finished up his prepared statement to the parole board and the families of his victims, he sounded like he was on the verge of tears.

      “I’ve had fifteen years to look back,” Mullins said. “Not a day goes by when I’m not filled with regret. I can’t go back and change what happened. I can’t bring Nathan Betts and Ian Harter back to life. But I still have years to make a meaningful contribution to society. Please give me a chance to do that.”

      Mullins sat down. His lawyer handed him a handkerchief, and he wiped his eyes – although Riley didn’t see any actual tears.

      The hearing officer and case manager conferred with each other in whispers. So did the members of the parole board.

      Riley knew it would soon be her turn to testify. Meanwhile, she studied Mullins’s face.

      She remembered him well and thought that he hadn’t changed much. Even back then, he had been well-scrubbed and well-spoken with an earnest air of innocence about him. If he was more hardened now, he hid it behind his expressions of abject sorrow. Back then he had been working as a nanny – or a “manny,” as his lawyer preferred to say.

      What struck Riley most was how little he’d aged. He’d been twenty-five when he’d gone to prison. He still had the same amiable, boyish expression that he’d had back then.

      The same wasn’t true of the victims’ parents. The two couples looked prematurely old and broken in spirit. Riley’s heart ached for all their years of grief and sorrow.

      She wished she’d been able to do right by them from the beginning. So had her first FBI partner, Jake Crivaro. It had been one of Riley’s first cases as an agent, and Jake had been a fine mentor.

      Larry Mullins had been arrested on a charge of the death of one child on a playground. During their investigation, Riley and Jake found that another child had died under almost identical circumstances while in Mullins’s care in a different city. Both children had been suffocated.

      When Riley had apprehended Mullins, read him his rights, and cuffed him, his smirking, gloating expression had all but admitted his guilt to her.

      “Good luck,” he had said to her sarcastically.

      Indeed, luck turned against Riley and Jake as soon as Mullins was in custody. He had firmly denied committing the murders. And despite Riley’s and Jake’s best efforts, the evidence against him remained dangerously thin. It had been impossible to determine just how the boys had been suffocated, and no murder weapon had been found. Mullins himself only admitted to letting them out of his sight. He’d denied murdering either of them.

      Riley remembered what the chief prosecutor had said to her and Jake.

      “We’ve got to be careful, or the bastard will walk. If we try to prosecute him on all possible charges, we’ll lose the whole thing. We can’t prove that Mullins was the only person who had access to the children when they were killed.”

      Then came the plea-bargaining. Riley hated plea bargains. Her hatred for them had started with that case. Mullins’s lawyer offered the deal. Mullins would plead guilty to both murders, but not as premeditated killings, and his sentences would run simultaneously.

      It was a lousy deal. It didn’t even make sense. If Mullins had really killed the children, how could he have also been merely negligent? The two conclusions were completely contradictory. But the prosecutor saw no choice but to accept the deal. Mullins finally faced thirty years in prison with the possibility of parole or early release for good behavior.

      The families had been crushed and horrified.