Stop Me (Last Stand #2)(94)
Author: Brenda Novak

As Jasmine stared in that blotchy mirror, trying to figure out how to take advantage of the few minutes she had before Ambrose ushered her out, her eyes landed on the reflection of Coen’s closet. There was nothing in particular to draw her attention. Except…it was closed.

Even Gruber’s drawers had been left hanging open, the clothes spilling out.

Why would he bother to shut his closet door?

Moving toward it, Jasmine used a finger to slide the door to one side. At first she saw nothing unusual. A few pairs of pants hanging sloppily on hangers. Some dirty clothes and several shoes on the floor. She almost headed back to the living room to see what Ambrose was doing. But then she noticed something that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. There were drops of a dark substance, so dark it was almost black, on a pair of tennis shoes.

Holding her breath, she knelt to take a better look.

It was blood. She was sure of it.

She was about to call out to Ambrose when she saw something else. There was more blood on the floor, and the floor had a line in it, a line that…

Carefully, her heart racing, she shoved the shoes and clothes into one corner and discovered a trapdoor.

“Officer Ambrose?”

There was no response. She couldn’t hear him anymore, either. Not over the noise of that leaf blower.

Determined to show him what she’d found, she started for the door. But someone blocked her path just as she stepped into the hallway.

“I’m afraid the police officer you brought here is…indisposed,” Gruber Coen said. Then he laughed and the light pouring through the windows of the spare bedroom revealed the barrel of a gun pointed at her chest.

Jasmine wasn’t answering. Romain had tried her at least ten times. So he left Huff at the coffee shop to go out and search for her. But when he took a quick drive through the neighborhood she’d been planning to visit, he saw no sign of her car.

And when he canvassed the neighbors, one lady sent him down to the corner to another woman, who directed him across the street from where the Moreaus had once lived. But the owner of that house, someone named Charmaine, wasn’t home.

Where had Jasmine disappeared? Had she learned the name she’d been looking for and gone searching for the man who’d taken her sister?

Surely, she wouldn’t do that on her own! But the feeling in the pit of Romain’s stomach told him otherwise. She was so obsessed with tracking down her sister he wasn’t convinced she’d be as cautious as she should be.

He remembered coming out of the Moreau house to find the truck empty….

“Son of a bitch!” His hands curled into fists, but there was nothing he could do to fight the fear slamming into him. He should never have allowed her to come here alone. Like letting Adele ride her bike around the block, it hadn’t seemed dangerous at the time. The Moreaus weren’t even living here anymore! But the sense of déjà vu that crept over him was terrifying.

Climbing into his truck, Romain called Huff. The ex-detective had lent Romain a cell phone paid for by the marshals’ office in Colorado, since he had a personal one, as well.

“You got her?” Huff said.

“No. She’s gone.”

Silence. Then Huff barked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean a few people saw her here earlier, but they don’t know where she went.”

“Have you notified the police?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll do it. I have some friends down there who’ll get on it right away.”

But if Romain couldn’t tell them where to look, how were they going to find her? When Adele went missing, they’d chased one lead after another—leads generated by Romain’s own media appeals—but found nothing until that picnicker stumbled upon her body at the park. Too late. Far too late.

“You don’t think she’d contact Black, do you?” Huff asked.

Romain kicked a pebble off the drive and into the street. “She might’ve gone to him with that picture.”

“A dangerous idea.”

“We don’t know he’s Peccavi,” Romain said, trying to bolster his flagging hope.

“Yes, we do.”

Romain’s hand tightened on the phone. “What? How—”

“Like I said, I have friends down at the station. Beverly Moreau just called in.

She fingered Black. She has proof, and she’s ready to talk.”

“You’re kidding! So…we were right?”

“About everything. Black used to live across the street from the Moreaus. He grew up with Francis, Dustin and Phillip. Makes sense that they’d go into business together, doesn’t it?”

It did. It also made sense that Jasmine would go to Black to help her determine the identity of the youth in that picture. She’d probably figured out that he used to live in the neighborhood—but she didn’t know he was Peccavi.

“I can’t lose another one,” Romain muttered.

“What was that?” Huff asked.

“Nothing.” Romain walked to the mailbox, then reached in and pulled out a stack of bills that had been delivered that day. Sure enough, they were addressed to a Mr. Doug Black. This was the home of Pearson Black’s parents. This was where Jasmine had last been seen. “Where does Pearson live now?”

“Don’t go there, Romain. Don’t risk it. You know what happened last time, what you did to Moreau. Let me do the job I should’ve done in the first place,” he said. Then he hung up and he wouldn’t answer again.

The six-foot-by-nine-foot cement cell was freezing. Jasmine couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering. But the low temperature was actually a good thing, or the dead woman on the couch beside her would be in a more advanced stage of decomposition. As it was, she made a gruesome sight. Stiff with rigor mortis, she didn’t sag onto the couch as Hollywood might’ve depicted. Her face was contorted, her hands curled in on themselves and her arms were bent like a Barbie doll’s. Her red blood cells had already settled at maximum lividity, which meant she’d been dead for eight to twelve hours, and the putrefaction of her internal organs gave off the worst odor Jasmine had ever smelled. She would’ve scrambled to the far reaches of her dungeon—anything to get away from her couch partner—except that Gruber Coen had chained one of her feet to a metal ring in the floor and tied her hand to the corpse’s so tightly Jasmine’s fingers were tingling for want of blood. “Meet my sister,” he’d said with a laugh.