As Olivia stood imprisoned in the cage, gently rocking with the boat, fear slithered through her like a nest of tiny worms. She stared at the photo album left only a few feet from her cell. Opened to the page with the twenty-odd-year-old Christmas picture, the leather-bound volume was thick. Its plastic-coated pages had been filled with snapshots and clippings and cards, the work of an obsessed, sick mind.

Why?

Who was she?

Why was she so intent on Bentz?

Not that it mattered; the important thing was that Olivia had to escape. And soon. How, she didn’t know, but she had to find a way because she was certain that she was scheduled to die.

She just didn’t know when.

She noticed something else on the pages. Red smudges like…drops of blood? Crimson drips staining the photographs and smeared over the plastic. Oh, God. Whose blood? This maniac who held her? Or someone else’s?

Jennifer’s.

This woman is consumed with her.

No way! Jennifer was long dead.

Olivia was suddenly and violently nauseous. In an instant, she knew she was going to throw up. She scrambled across her cell and barely made it to the bucket before she retched though there was little in her stomach but acid and bile.

Again!

Her insides protested and she felt weak.

It couldn’t be morning sickness. Not like this.

No, she was certain, this had nothing to do with her pregnancy. She was reacting to the horror that had become her life.

CHAPTER 34

Bentz felt as if he hadn’t slept a wink. He’d spent most of the night trying to find a clue as to what had happened to Olivia. Where she was. If she were still alive.

He’d pulled up Olivia’s cell phone records online and seen that the last call she’d taken was right after he’d spoken with her after she’d landed at the airport. No doubt the brief call was from Sherry Petrocelli’s number. He’d dialed that number just in case he was wrong, but a taped recording threw him into Petrocelli’s voice mail.

According to phone records, after the call from Petrocelli, Olivia hadn’t spoken to anyone; there were only short, one-minute calls from a couple of numbers: his and Hayes’s. “Shit,” he’d said, frustrated as hell. He’d called Hayes, given him the info, then reminded the detective that there was a G.P.S. locator in his wife’s phone.

Bentz had gotten nowhere with the cell phone company on that one; Hayes would have to use his police department influence to pry out any information he could from them.