Page 21 of A Simple Mistake (Deadly Mistakes #1)

TWENTY-ONE

Liam

Present

I jump to my feet and rush out the door with Gabriel right beside me. He doesn’t hesitate as he runs out to my car. “You have your gun, don’t you?” I ask.

“Sure as fuck do. After what happened to me… I’m not leaving that behind.”

“I don’t blame you,” I say. “If you see him, kill him.”

“We have to make sure it’s him. We don’t know what his face looks like or anything else about him.”

I grab his arm before he gets into the vehicle. “Gabriel, you have a really fucking good heart. But right now, I need you to be ruthless. If you see him, you kill him.”

He nods, and I don’t know if he does it just to appease me or if he really does agree to it. I get into the driver’s seat and quickly back out onto the street, following the directions Michaels had messaged me. I’m quite displeased by how close it is to my home. Could the killer have been following Gabriel and when he found Gabriel was safe with me, he went after a patrolling officer he happened to run into?

“You don’t…” Gabriel starts. “Never mind.”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “He could have been following you.”

“Fuck,” he says. “I wanted you to lie and explain why it doesn’t make sense for him to be following me or some other bullshit. I wanted you to convince me that I was safe.”

“You just got done making me promise to never lie to you.”

“Maybe that was a stupid idea.”

“It wasn’t. Do you want to take my car and go back to the station when we get there?” I ask.

“No, I want to stay with you.”

I do my best to try not to feel elated by that declaration. I would love for him to stay with me as well. “I’ll protect you.”

“What if you get hurt?”

“I would have to be dead to not protect you, Gabriel. That fucker could chop my arms and legs off, and I would still do everything I could to protect you,” I assure him.

Gabriel doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. Honestly, I feel like it’s the highest form of flattery, but he doesn’t appear to think so. “Liam… I know things are a bit tense between us right now… more so for me since you seem to have overcome all obstacles with flying colors. But don’t forget to take care of yourself as well. You know? I can’t have you over there putting yourself in danger to protect me. How happy do you think I’d be if you were dead?”

“I don’t know. I kind of feel like all of your stress and worry would be gone if someone offed me. Do you want me to put you in my will? I actually have a substantial amount of money. My parents were rich, and material things never interested me. So you wouldn’t even have to work.”

“What? Goddammit, Liam. This isn’t a fucking joke,” he says, sounding upset. I’m struggling to understand why.

“What did I say wrong now?” I ask as I slow to take a turn.

“I want you to fucking care for yourself. You’d burn this damn world down for me, but what would you do for yourself?”

“I don’t know. That’s a stupid question.”

“It’s not. What if I need you in it? Would you care about yourself more then?”

“I guess.”

“Try to do more than guess,” he says as I see the flashing lights in the dark. The flashing lights are close to the ground, telling me that the car isn’t right side up.

“Did the car flip?”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” I ask as I near the car. I don’t see another vehicle that caused the wreck, and I can’t tell yet why the car crashed, so I quickly pull over before we reach the area where the tire marks start. Hitting the button for the hazard lights, I exit the car, wishing it wasn’t so damn dark. The issue with winter not too far around the corner is the nights get darker so much sooner.

I call over to Gabriel, “I don’t care what you see, do not step more than a foot away from me.”

“I would be stepping on your heels at a foot away.”

“I don’t care. Step on them, ride on my back, I don’t give a shit as long as you’re close to me,” I demand.

“I’m a detective too.”

I grumble, not pleased with that declaration. That’s not enough. “Dodge behind me if you see anyone pointing their gun at you so I get hit first.”

“Ah, definitely,” he says with too much sarcasm, like he could possibly believe I’m joking.

I shine my light down the road, highlighting the black tire marks that lead to the flipped vehicle, but there’s no clear reason why. There’s a spot where the marks jerk hard to the right.

“Who is training Jeffers?” I ask.

“Her name is Sheila O’Brian. She’s that real bubbly woman who asked if you wanted a coffee the other day while her partner gawked at you.”

“I remember,” I say. “Chris was walking by, so I made sure to ask if she cried into it like Chris cried into the coffee he got me.”

“Yes, that’s her.”

“She didn’t laugh at my joke.”

“You can’t be offended by a woman who could be hurt or…” Gabriel trails off as he looks at the car with the roof caved in.

“I don’t believe in treating people differently. I’m offended by them all,” I assure him as I cross the road. The flashing blue and red lights are blinding since they’re so bright in the dark. It makes it hard to see and makes me feel like the killer could be waiting around the corner and I could miss him. We quickly make our way over to the vehicle but as I scan around, swinging my flashlight with my gun at the ready, I don’t see anyone in the darkness. It doesn’t mean he’s not out there watching us… waiting for us to make a mistake.

“There’s no one in the vehicle.”

“Gabriel, I want you aware that this could have happened close to my house to get us out here,” I say. “This could be a setup to get to you.”

Gabriel stands up, taking over my position of scanning the area, so I kneel down to see what I can determine from the situation. The airbags have gone off. There’s blood inside the vehicle but not a copious amount. Hopefully neither of the officers were fatally wounded.

I use the tip of my gun to push up the seat belt and see that it’s been cut. “O’Brian was probably driving?”

“Last I saw the two of them together, she was.”

“The pool of blood on the roof of the passenger seat is larger. It looks like maybe Jeffers was unconscious and bleeding for a longer period of time and was upside down as the blood dripped. If O’Brian was the driver, her blood is scattered. She likely didn’t lose consciousness and was moving around, distributing the blood. It really doesn’t appear like she was in the vehicle very long. The seat belt has been cut, even though the seat belt clip looks fine, telling me that the driver likely didn’t cut it herself.”

“The glass of the window was busted here,” Gabriel says. “You can see it in the web of cracks in the glass.”

“Good. I agree.”

“You think she was dragged through the window? That’s why the blood runs along the broken glass and there’s fabric snagged on it?”

“I do.”

“The killer cut her seat belt and dragged her out through the window while Jeffers was unconscious. When Jeffers woke, she saw O’Brian being dragged out and made the call,” Gabriel states.

“Right.”

“But where did they go?”

We back up and shine our lights along the ground. It’s so damn dark that I have to squat and angle the flashlight just right to catch on the way the leaves have been brushed to the side, like something had been dragged through here and into the woods.

Gabriel points his flashlight off into the dense trees. “Fucking hell. These woods go on for miles.”

“Sure do.”

“Is he baiting us?”

“Probably.”

“Are we going to bite?”

“I always bite,” I say. “But we’re going to wait until the police are here and you’re going to stay with them.”

Gabriel lets out a laugh, but it’s not a happy sound. “You have to be fucking kidding me. You really fucking think I’m just going to watch you go out there alone?”

“I can take Robinson or someone else.”

“What would make them more disposable than me? Liam, no one is disposable. Their lives could depend on how quickly we find them.”

And that’s the moment I hear someone screaming for help.

“Fuck,” Gabriel hisses before rushing toward the noise, forgetting all of my previous demands to stay attached to my ass.

“Gabriel, please,” I call, feeling weirdly anxious. I’m never anxious, but right now I am.

He hesitates and looks back at me. “Liam, I’m fucking terrified, but I can’t hesitate. Please trust in my ability. Please trust me.”

I bite back my worries and nod. “Right. Right. Okay. It’s pretty windy—the sound of her voice has likely changed direction a little—so let’s angle this way and hope she’s not moving or we might never find her.”

“Okay, I’m going to update Michaels on what’s happening,” he says, following close behind me while I listen intently. Since the first cry for help, I haven’t heard another, but we move carefully. I know time is of the essence, but rushing headfirst into a situation like this one could result in someone dead. The killer’s playing with us. I’m confident he has control of the situation and wants us to play his fucked-up game.

Gabriel’s update is quick and to the point as we head deeper into the trees. We both have our guns out, but I’m torn on what to do about our flashlights. Without them, we can see very little, and it’s clear this guy enjoys his traps, but with them on, we’re practically highlighting our position.

Away from the flashing lights of the upside-down police car, my eyes are able to better adjust to the darkness as we keep moving through the trees.

“Help!” someone screams again.

“This way,” Gabriel says, but my attention is on the ground where I see signs of something being dragged. The marks go away from the person screaming for help, telling me we’re going to have to leave the trail behind. It doesn’t mean the person who’d been dragged didn’t get away and run. Or one person was dragged this way, and the other ran that way… but if Jeffers saw O’Brian being dragged, why would she choose to run into the woods and not follow O’Brian? Or stay with the vehicle and wait for help?

“Help! Please!” she screams again, but Gabriel puts a hand on my chest.

“There’s something wrong,” he says.

“You see something?”

“No… the voice is wrong. It doesn’t sound like either of them.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You can tell in just a couple of words?”

“O’Brian has an accent, and Jeffers… I mean, I haven’t spoken to her much, but it doesn’t sound like her voice. I know it’s short and someone panicked might sound different, but my gut is telling me it’s wrong. Is it a recording? Or someone else?”

I swing my flashlight over to the other trail. “It looks like someone was dragged this way. What do you want to do?”

I hear the cry for help again, but maybe I just don’t care about others enough to pick out the intricacies of the voice because I can’t remember if it sounds anything like either woman.

Gabriel looks agitated. “What if I’m wrong? What if it’s not a trap and someone really needs help? What if we end up going the opposite way, and she dies because I fucked up?”

“Then I’ll make the decision. You can hate me if I’m wrong. But my way of thinking is that if either of the officers was aware that there’s a killer in these woods hunting them down, the last thing they’d be doing is drawing attention to their location. That’s not to say they wouldn’t. Panicked people make horrible choices, but they have absolutely no idea that we’re out here and there are no houses in the area. I’m voting this way. If I’m wrong, then you can’t be mad at me.”

“I wouldn’t. I would feel guilty because it was my idea to go away.”

“No, it’s mine,” I say as I hurry in the direction the body had been dragged in. The man must have picked her up because the dried-up weeds are no longer snapped over and the leaves aren’t shuffled to the side.

“I texted Michaels to warn him about our possible theory on the cries for help. Fuck, what if I’m wrong?”

“The police will be here shortly. They can investigate it. My bet is it’s a distraction. It’s to give him time to set up whatever fucked-up plan he’s putting in motion or possibly time to take the officers and get them away from here.”

The leaves rustle as we walk, steadily getting farther and farther from the crash site. It hasn’t been that many days since I stabbed the killer, so how far would he be able to carry a grown woman? Clearly, I didn’t stab him hard enough.

“What’s that?” Gabriel asks as his flashlight highlights something. Carefully, we move toward it, only to see that it’s a radio one of the officers would have been carrying on their body. Honestly, it just makes me more confident that we’re heading in the right direction as we continue into the darkness.

At this point, there have to be other officers sweeping the trees. The police station isn’t close, but it shouldn’t have taken them more than seven minutes to reach here after we did. If they’re spread out enough, one of us should come across something, unless he’s already packed them up in a vehicle and driven off. But if he was going to do that… why drag one of them into the trees?

“Gabriel, I am convinced this is a setup. If he was going to take one of the officers with him, he wouldn’t have taken her into the trees. He wants us in here.”

“I was afraid of that,” he admits. “But we have to save them.”

My little hero, always prepared to make sacrifices to save those around him. And here I am, just wanting to slaughter the killer for looking at Gabriel.

The terrain is starting to get harder to traverse. We’ve been working our way downhill since we left the car, which means that if we keep going the way we are, we’ll find ourselves moving uphill where it evens out before coming to an area that overlooks the river.

I know this because I’d been out here back when I’d been looking for the body of William, Jon Davies’ son. While this section of the river is miles downstream from where Eleanor’s body was found, I’d still set out one day and traveled a good distance of it with a group of people, in case the body broke free and floated downstream. Or in case they missed something I might see.

Would this killer have lugged a body up the hill? Gone the easy way around? Or maybe thrown her in the river for a quick and easy fix?

No… he likes the thrill of it. There’s no thrill to tossing a body in the river and watching it get stuck on the shore half a mile down.

“I’m afraid we’re going to end up off path. Should we have followed the voice and possibly played his little game?” Gabriel asks.

I see no sign of where he’s gone. Maybe if it was daylight, I could see footprints in the leaves or something else that could highlight a path, but it’s like we’re in the middle of a maze he’s set up for us.

I turn to Gabriel. “Do you have either of their numbers?”

“You don’t think he discarded her phone?”

“I don’t know. You don’t have her number? Don’t you love everyone?”

“I can get it. Give me a second,” he says. And while he does that, I scout the ground, the trees, the leaves… looking for anything that could give their location away. “Liam, here are the numbers, but I was told the phone rings then goes to voicemail for every call.”

I put the numbers into my phone and open a message which I send to both of them.

Me: It’s Liam. Call me.

“What… are you doing?” Gabriel asks.

The phone almost immediately starts ringing, and I see that it’s Jeffers’ number. I accept the call and put it on speaker.

“This is Liam.”

“Liam… are you having fun?” a man asks, and I see the way Gabriel’s entire body tenses at the sound of the killer’s voice. Feeling guilty that I’d made my precious Gabriel upset, I reach to turn it off speaker, but his hand stills me.

“A blast. You’ve been busy,” I say as I point up the hill. Gabriel seems uncertain why the call would tell me which direction to go, but it’s simple, really. If I went left, I’d run into the riverbank, which is an area with no reception, but if I continue up the hill or turn slightly to go northeast, the phone should have reception. When I was searching the river for Jon Davies’ son William, there was a huge area with no reception where I and the others struggled to communicate with each other without using a radio.

“I have been quite busy! See, when I started down this path, I thought I would just paint the city with the blood of every single person in law enforcement. But when you came waltzing onto the scene, I realized that I needed to get a bit more… creative. You’re pushing me to show you my best side. Have you been enjoying your time with Gabriel? You better live every moment like it’s your last. It very well might be.”

“You’re awfully cocky on the other end of a phone. Yet when we played before, I sure feel like you were the one running with your tail between your legs.” Anger is eating through me. The desire to hunt is raging out of control as I tightly clutch the phone in my hand hard enough that it’s digging into my palm. I want to rush forward and rip him apart until there’s nothing left.

Gabriel reaches out and sets his hand on my shoulder, squeezing it gently, and it’s like the tension in my body melts away.

“You can try to intimidate me all you want, but at the end of the day, you’re down two more officers. I’m going to keep taking… and taking… until there’s nothing left. And you’re going to keep running after me, unable to save anything. But don’t worry too much, I’ll save your precious Gabriel till the very end so you can live every moment wondering when I’m going to collect him. And when I get him, I’m going to cut him apart… piece by piece. I’m going to take what is most precious to you and make you understand what it feels like to have the one thing you cared about most ripped away from you.”

I hear a noise and break into a run, heading up the hill with Gabriel by my side. The line goes dead, and I can’t tell if he hung up, having heard us getting close, or he’s now out of reach. As we crest the top of the slope, I see the scene he’s laid out before us. A giant tree rises above the rest with a long rope hanging from it. The rope is jerking this way and that as Jeffers hangs from a noose mere feet above the ground.

Her hands are free, so she’s desperately holding on to the rope, trying to get it off her neck as Gabriel bolts toward her.

I grab him hard, yanking him back, but the momentum he had sends me careening forward and tripping over his legs before we nearly fall.

“What the hell, Liam?” Gabriel demands.

“Something’s not right. It’s a trick,” I respond, but I’m not sure what the trick is. I just know that he set this up specially for us. He wants us to fall for it. Why else would he have set this up? Why else would he have tried to lead us away… to give him time… he needed time… He picked this tree. He picked this spot… none of this is simple. It wasn’t like he whipped this out last minute… no, this was planned.

“Liam, she’s going to die,” Gabriel yells as he slips out of my hands.

“I’ll get her,” I say, knowing nothing else will keep him from running to her. The trap has to deal with her, right? The first reaction to seeing her would be to run up and grab her by the legs, then push her up so she could get a breath while either she pulled the rope off herself or someone else untied it. The area where the rope is tied to the tree is down low with a simple release knot. I pull the knot, she falls… is there something beneath her? Release the knot and she falls… does she fall on something that kills her? Another bomb? He sure loves his fucking bombs. Or something like a land mine hidden in the thick leaves? Something we need to step on or put pressure on to release? I don’t know the answer, but I know that I can’t let Gabriel chance it.

“Gabriel, I think there’s something beneath her that could kill her or us. I need you to tuck your body behind the tree and pull the rope free when I catch her ankle.”

“What? Liam?—”

Her arms are getting weak. She can’t get the rope off; it’s too tight around her neck and might not have a way to release it even with pressure off it. Her hands slide down the rope and it tightens around her neck.

“Don’t fight me on this, she’s going to die if you don’t do as I say,” I order as I rush forward.

How close can I get to her? If she stops struggling, she’ll be dangling straight down, but with the way she’s flailing, there’s a chance I could grab an ankle. When Gabriel releases the rope, she’ll be a deadweight. Can I swing her back hard enough to get her away from it? If I don’t, instead of her feet hitting first, it’ll be her head.

Land mines aren’t made to kill, they’re meant to maim… if he were to maim me or Gabriel, he could walk right in and collect Gabriel… take him from me.

Is he watching? Is he so fucking close he could lift up a gun and shoot us? No… he wants to play his game. He wants to watch us maim this woman or ourselves.

In order to have a free hand, I drop the flashlight but hang on to the gun, refusing to put that down. When I reach her, my eyes are on the ground, but the leaves are too thick. I can’t even see the spots where he’d stepped in order to place her here. He couldn’t have left her too long ago or she’d be dead by now.

Jeffers flails, gasping for breath every time she manages to pull herself up to loosen the noose before slipping back down, the air immediately cutting out of her. I reach out to grab her, but her body is swinging away from me. Carefully, I shift around the area and catch just the hem of her pants, fingers digging into them as I pull. I draw her legs into my arms before pushing her up enough to help her catch her breath. Gabriel steps toward the knot as something in my mind tells me I’m wrong.

I’ve made a mistake.

“WAIT!” I yell. This is wrong, all wrong. If the killer is busy learning about us, he’d know that Gabriel is the savior. He’d know that Gabriel would risk his life for someone. He’d run forward and grab her legs. Push her up, help her get air.

I would be the one to untie her.

“What?” Gabriel asks, freezing, but it’s not quick enough as I hear his foot hit something metal.

Gabriel looks down before jerking back. “Fuck,” he mutters, backing away as fast as he can.

He didn’t step on it. He didn’t step on it… of course the killer would want me to blow my fucking leg off and be forced to watch as he dragged Gabriel away from me. Which means he’s in the area, watching. He wants to see Gabriel watch my legs get blown off. He wants to see him have to decide between holding the officer up or running to my mangled body. He wants to take him from me, forcing Gabriel to know that the woman hanging from the tree would die and I would bleed out.

“He’s here,” I say, incapable of letting go. Jeffers is struggling, making her hard to hold on to.

“K-Knife,” she whispers, throat hoarse from the rope putting strain on it.

Where the fuck is he? Where is he?

Gabriel hands her the knife just as I see a flash of movement in the trees. I shove Jeffers toward Gabriel and run, anger ripping through me as I lift my gun, prepared to destroy this man who fucking makes a mockery of me.

He will never touch my Gabriel.