“Forget it. Figure I know my way around these woods better than anybody, and I couldn’t let you go out there alone. It’d be suicide. Besides, got to keep track of my snowmobile. My bread and butter, you know.” He winked.

“We’ve got to be careful. This guy’s a trained killer.”

“I brought a few surprises for him. They’re out in the Cherokee. Don’t worry, we’ll get him.”

If he doesn’t get us first. But if he did, Helen and Jessica would die. David would not, could not let that happen.

They bundled back up as best they could and stepped out into the storm.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was so very, very cold.

It ate into her fingertips, her bare shoulders, numbing them until the feeling turned into a bone-deep ache that made her moan with the pain. She kept her eyes closed for a long while, hoping that everything would just float away and leave her in peace. But it only got stronger, more vivid, until she could feel the hard floor beneath her and smell the heady bite of oil and gasoline (from where? She didn’t know) surrounding her in this prison.

Helen Pierce opened her eyes to a nightmare. She lay in almost complete blackness, clothed only in a pair of white lace underpants and bra, her arms aching from the cold and the hard floor. For a long moment she was disoriented, dizzy, and then she raised a hand to her head and felt the sticky warm blood and it all came flooding back. She had to choke back a scream of terror at the memory that forced itself down upon her like a wave.

She remembered bits and pieces of the attack: the sound of breaking glass from downstairs, and Jessie’s unnerving calm, trancelike state; the mad rush for the closet, trying to barricade the door against someone or something that threw itself against it with brute force; the sound of cracking, snapping wood; and finally, a glimpse of his eyes as she swung the broom handle with all her strength at his shape in the doorframe. Those eyes were empty, glazed, the eyes of a madman. She remembered nothing else.

Jessica.

What had happened to her daughter?

Helen sat up, fighting back a wave of nausea and ignoring the pain in her shoulders. She reached around blindly, searching for Jessie’s form in the blackness, but found nothing but bare floor. She fought herself to keep calm, fought the urge to leap up and run screaming through the dark until she found something, anything that could tell her where she had been taken to and how she could get out.

He could be right next to her.