Page 22 of A Simple Mistake (Deadly Mistakes #1)

TWENTY-TWO

Gabriel

Present

“Liam, dammit! Stop!” I yell as Jeffers’ weight slams into me. My heart is still pounding out of control after my foot had hit whatever it was. If Liam had been a fraction of a second slower, would I be dead right now?

Suddenly, I see what Liam’s noticed. He’s being irrational. He’s rushing forward without hesitation, putting himself at risk and leaving me behind.

“Can you cut it?” I ask anxiously, needing her to get down. I need my hands free so I can get back to Liam.

In response, her weight falls down into my arms, and I nearly drop her since I’d been holding her lower half up and hadn’t expected her top half to slump backward. I set her on the ground, but my eyes are on Liam. “Stay right here,” I tell her.

She tries to grab on to me to keep me with her, but I can’t stop. “I’ll be right back. I’ll be right back,” I assure her before I see a flashlight bobbing from the way we’d come. “Here! Here!”

I see Hector, Chris’s brother, rush onto the scene. “Don’t go near the tree. I think there’s a bomb here. Get her away.”

“Got it,” he says. “Where the hell are you going?”

“I have to help Liam,” I reply as I scoop up my flashlight and dash after Liam. Thorny brush tugs at my clothes and branches smack my arms and face while I run as fast as I can. I don’t know where the fuck he’s gone, but I know he ran this way.

Panic tears through me as I question if I can be quick enough to reach him. I need to find him… but now I’m all alone. What if that’s what the killer wanted? What if he needed to separate us? What if…

I see the shadow of a person and my stomach twists in on itself as I see the white mask in place. The white mask that peered down at me, hovered over me when I’d lain defenselessly in the cellar. The mask that haunts my dreams and causes fear to creep around every fucking corner.

My hand tightens on my gun as Liam’s words blaze through me.

Kill him.

If you see him, kill him.

I see Liam and realize that I don’t have to kill him. Liam will. Liam will destroy him for me.

And that’s when I see the man take a step, pants lifting enough to show a bare ankle as Liam lifts his gun.

“NO!” I yell, rushing toward Liam as the gun fires.

Liam’s a phenomenal shot. He never misses a target.

And I’m too terrified to turn around to look. “No, no, no,” I cry as I slam into Liam, driving him back.

I can’t even get other words to reach my lips. I can’t tell him that this is wrong. That he can’t pull that trigger…

But he already did.

“No…” I repeat.

Liam’s hand is still out, gun tightly held in it as I try to shove it down.

“Fuck,” he says as I tell myself I have to turn around. I have to turn around and look at what he’s done.

“It’s not him,” I whisper. “Liam, that’s not him.”

His arm tightens around me as I question if he’s just killed an innocent person. If he’s let his anger and desire to kill get the best of him, and an innocent life was taken because of it.

“It’s okay,” Liam says, voice soft. “You snapped me out of it. It’s fine. It’s fine.”

I turn my head to look and nearly drop to my knees when I see that the person is leaning against a tree.

Liam gently pulls away from me before he rushes forward and takes the mask off, revealing that the person beneath it is O’Brian. Her pupils are huge and blood is running from a head wound as she looks around, clearly confused. She makes a noise as I realize she can’t talk because her mouth seems to be forced shut. Did he glue her lips closed? She doesn’t seem to even realize what’s going on as she tries to stagger away from the light I’m shining on her. Seeing that there’s a gun taped to her hand, Liam starts working it free.

“We need to get back to Jeffers,” I say.

“He’s out here.” Liam looks around, evidently obsessed with the idea of hunting this man. It seems to be a fixation, but obviously, we’re just being played with.

“Liam… please. She needs medical help, and I can’t be left alone. Please.”

“I didn’t mean to leave you alone,” Liam says as he wraps an arm around me and pulls me close. He kisses the side of my head, and I know I should pull away, but it relaxes me for some reason. All the while, he seems to be examining the world around him, looking for the monster waiting in the woods… the monster that haunts my every move.

Though we’re aware that with the wounds O’Brian has, she probably shouldn’t be moved, it seems like out here where the monster is watching is the worst place. If we could at least get her over to where Jeffers and Hector are, she’d be safer.

Liam picks her up and she grabs on to him like a child. I notice he refuses to drop the gun even when holding her.

“Chris’s brother, Hector, reached the tree and is waiting with Jeffers.”

“He was alone?” Liam asks.

“Yeah… I think.”

Liam seems uncertain about that, but at least we’re not far from the tree. Yet as we get near it, I don’t see Hector or Jeffers. Did he start escorting her back? I round the tree, and my anxiety rises as I see Hector unmoving on the ground. I rush over as blood glistens on his forehead.

“Hector!” I yell as I reach for him.

He groans but doesn’t respond.

“Hector. Wake up,” I beg. “Liam, Jeffers is gone. Hector, please.” But no amount of gentle shakes seems to stir him.

Liam kicks Hector, whose eyes snap open. “Where the fuck is Jeffers?”

Hector flinches back from the light Liam picked up and is aiming at his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“What the fuck do you mean you don’t know? This is an open area. You didn’t hear someone coming up?”

“She hit me and ran.”

“ She hit you?” Liam asks. “The concussed, choked, and half-dead woman hit you and just ran off?”

“I don’t fucking know,” he responds.

“Get your ass up. We need to move,” Liam says coldly. “If he’s taken her, I’m going to be fucking pissed.”

“She fucking hit me! And ran! How’s that my fault?” Hector yells, but Liam’s not having it. He’s on edge. He wants to hunt. He wants to kill. And instead, he’s left caring for two people who are hurt, one of which he seems to have no tolerance for.

I hear a noise and recognize the person coming into view as an officer I’ve seen on occasion. “Here! We need help over here!” I call out. “We have two wounded and a third in the vicinity that we need to find.”

He has backup with him, and they quickly rush forward to help.

I warn them about the possible land mine before looking over at Liam who is staring off into the trees.

“Do you see something?”

“It was all just a fun plan for him,” he says. “He set up a recording of a woman crying to distract us. Once there, I bet something would have directed us over here, but we skipped that part. He needed that time to set up his plan, so maybe we rushed him, which is likely why he cut the call. When we arrived, he wanted you to grab the woman, and he wanted me to go for the rope. He knew you were the kind one who would rush forward to help without hesitation. He was planning on blowing my legs off so I would have to wallow there as he dragged you off. Then we have O’Brian. Maybe she was there if his first plan failed, or maybe she was there for someone else to find. But he was clearly hoping someone wouldn’t check who was beneath the mask and would kill her like I nearly did.”

Liam turns to face me before continuing. “The gun was taped to her hand so she couldn’t drop it, and her lips were sealed shut so she couldn’t call for help. She was confused, disoriented, and just wandering around. Hell, maybe he was holding her and planned to let her loose if his first plan went south. I think that’s it. Yeah… he let her go. She made a noise, drawing my attention to her, and I ran off because he knows I’m fucking irrational when it comes to you and him. He used the darkness to circle back around, and he went for you. I didn’t stay with you because my mind was so fixated on the idea that I was tracking him, which meant you couldn’t be at risk if I was herding him away from you . O’Brian was disoriented but was cognizant enough that when she saw a man in the dark running at her, she fled. She didn’t know it was me and I didn’t have a light on me, having dropped it to help Jeffers because I wasn’t going to drop my gun.

“He didn’t expect you to run after me, but that doesn’t matter because he went for Jeffers instead. And all I’ve fucking done is play his fucking game,” Liam yells before throwing his flashlight at the tree. The light flickers and then goes out.

“Stop,” I snap. “He set up a game, you’re right. We played it, but we figured it out. You figured out the mine. You got her down. And you didn’t shoot O’Brian. There were so many instances where more people could have died or gotten hurt.”

“Jeffers is gone.”

“I don’t know why she ran.”

“If I hadn’t fucked up, we might have caught him.”

“I don’t think we would have. This is all set up in his favor. We don’t know these woods, but we know that he’s still in them right now. The entire unit will be here shortly. We’ll scour these woods. We’ll block the roads surrounding it. We’ll find Jeffers.” I don’t know whether we will or not, but there’s little hope if we don’t fight for it.

“There was a voice,” Hector says.

I turn to look at him. “A woman crying for help?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I heard it, but it all happened so fast. She was just suddenly trying to bolt. I told her not to go, that we had to wait for backup, and I grabbed her. She fought against me, nailed me in the head with her elbow, and when I fell back, I smacked my head on the rock. That’s all I remember.”

“Did she think it was O’Brian?” I ask. “But if she did, would she have been that panicked to the point of hurting Hector? Like… if it was O’Brian, she would have wanted to work with Hector to get to her, right? It sounds like Hector tried to stop her, and she broke away from him.”

“It had to have been the voice of someone she knows. Why else wouldn’t she have gotten Hector’s help to follow the voice?” Liam says.

“But if he set it up for her… I thought he wanted us?”

“Maybe he was prepared for everything to go wrong. If he was prepared for the worst, he would still win out in the end. If we fucked up every single one of his plans, he still needed to walk away with something or else we’d win. And what better way to get someone than to make them run to him? He wouldn’t have even needed to be in the area to get her to come to him.”

As others join us, we move out, searching the woods while others investigate all traffic moving through the surrounding area, which isn’t much at this time of night. But it becomes apparent quite quickly that we’ve lost this game. Liam tries calling the phone number again, but it goes right to voicemail.

He’s on edge, clearly irritated, and won’t slow down. He’s determined to find something and is prepared to stay out here for days if that’s what it takes. Around dawn someone finds a second speaker, this one hooked up to a device that’s using a young girl’s voice, and it doesn’t take long for Jeffers’ husband to confirm that it’s the voice of their little girl who is currently safely at home in bed.

“Liam, I’m going to go with Donna to speak to Jeffers’ daughter. What do you want to do?” I ask, positive that if I don’t get him out of these woods, he’s going to live here.

He’s standing there, fixated on the trees stretched out before him as the sunlight peeks over the horizon and works its way up. It’s obvious the killer and Jeffers are gone—they’ve been gone for hours—but he’s determined that the killer made a mistake somewhere, and he’s going to figure it out.

“Liam,” I say, hoping to gain his attention.

“Let’s go.”

“We can come back.”

“I will.”

The two of us head back to our vehicle where Donna catches up with us. Liam is so off in his head that he makes no comment when she gets into the car with us and directs me where to go. He doesn’t even say anything the entire drive. I think he’s convinced he fucked up. Of course he’s wearing all the weight of this on his shoulders. He knows that if he hadn’t run after O’Brian, we could have stopped Jeffers, but I explained to him again and again that someone else could have shot O’Brian if we hadn’t found her first. And if not, the killer would have just grabbed her instead of Jeffers. It was a one or the other kind of situation. Also, Jeffers had been warned, along with the whole department, that he could be using a loved one to gain someone’s attention. And even knowing that, she still believed it.

“I guess they’re trying to sort out the timeline of what happened,” Donna says. “The car registered that it wrecked at 7:45. You were called at 8:03.”

“They weren’t suspended in the car for that long,” Liam responds.

“Right… so… you were called immediately after Jeffers radioed the station. You were promptly alerted as the closest officer to the scene. Interestingly, those two were responding to a disturbance that they were sent to check out at 7:20. It was the second time they were sent to the same area this week. Dispatch knew they were familiar with the issue and sent them again.”

“What was the disturbance?” I ask.

“A domestic dispute at a house at the far end of this road. The couple who live there claimed there was nothing going on when the officers first went out three days ago. Michaels said that the neighbors were questioned this morning and state that they never heard anything either time. But the house they live in is almost out of our jurisdiction. It’s so far out that only one road gets you there,” Donna says.

“He had this whole thing set up well in advance. Do we know yet what made them wreck?” I ask.

“O’Brian doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember anything about the crash or afterward. She said the last thing she remembers is leaving the department,” Donna replies.

“Jeffers was upside down significantly longer than O’Brian,” Liam says. “The pool of blood shows that she didn’t move for an extended period of time. I was under the assumption that she called from within the car, but now I’m wondering if she didn’t. Did she call from the discarded radio we came across? He possibly waited until everything was set before contacting us… or better yet, forcing her to contact us.”

“But how would he know I’d be at your house tonight?” I ask.

“He could have been following you… this whole thing could have been set up for days while he patiently waited. I mean, you were at my house, what? An hour and a half or more? That would have been enough time for him to get where he needed to be if everything else was already set. The location was an area he knew it’d only take us minutes to get to, but the police several minutes beyond that.”

“How would he know you’d be called?” Donna asks.

“He didn’t, but it’s a chance he was willing to take. I guess at the end of the day, whether he fucked with Gabriel and me doesn’t matter. What matters is he’s proven again that we are merely pawns in his game.”

“Hopefully Jeffers’ daughters can help us. Her husband said the only time the youngest wasn’t at school or home would have been when the teenage daughter took her to the park. We still don’t know for sure that she wasn’t stopped at school or somewhere else, but it’s something to start with,” Donna explains.

I pull up to the house and put the car in park as Liam hops out and wastes no time strutting up to the door.

“Oh dear god, don’t let him deal with the child,” Donna says. “She’ll be crying and claiming he’s the bad guy before we can get anything out of her.”

I rush out and slip in front of Liam just after he beats on the door like he’s planning a siege.

“Let me do the talking,” I tell him.

Liam just grunts and steps back as the door opens and a very distraught-looking woman looks out. “Any news? My son is heading out. He wants to help find her,” the woman says, telling me she must be Jeffers’ mother-in-law.

I smile reassuringly at her. “We are searching the vicinity but would like to talk to… it was Amelia, right?”

“Yes, right this way.”

The three of us enter and my eyes catch on the lovely family photo of Jeffers and her husband hugging their young daughter of about four as a teenager hangs over their backs.

“Right this way,” the mother-in-law says as she leads us into the living room. The younger daughter seems confused and a little overwhelmed as we come in and disrupt her coloring.

“Hi there, Amelia. Do you think we could talk?” I ask as I kneel down next to the coloring book she’d been scribbling in on the floor.

She’s just staring at me, and then when she gets a look at Liam, she appears even more wary.

“I work with your mommy,” I explain.

“You do?” she asks.

“I do! I’m Gabriel. And grumpy face over there is Liam… or you can just call him grumpy face.”

Liam just grunts and starts wandering around the room.

“And that’s Donna. I heard you went to the playground the other day. Did a man come and talk to you?”

“Yeah… but I don’t remember.”

“You remember him coming up to you?”

“Yeah…”

“Do you remember why he came up to you?”

Amelia shakes her head.

“That’s okay. So when he walked up to you, did he introduce himself?”

“I don’t know.”

Someone steps into the room and I realize it must be Brandy, the teenage daughter who’d taken her to the park.

Once I’m done with introductions, I ask, “Do you remember seeing any adult men there?”

Brandy hesitates. “I don’t know. I mean… there were men there, yeah. The park is super busy. But I guarantee you I never saw any men talking to Amelia. I would have stopped that. And she was never out of my sight. My friend stopped to say hi, but I was watching her. It wasn’t like I wasn’t watching her.” Her voice quivers and she looks close to tears.

“It’s okay,” I assure her.

“I really do watch her well. I wasn’t distracted. She was right there,” Brandy says as she rubs her eyes. “She knows she’s not allowed past the boards that line the play area. I just…”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. This guy is manipulative.”

Liam walks over to the younger girl. “Do you talk to strangers?”

She shakes her head.

Brandy anxiously fiddles with her shirt. “She’s really good at listening. She never engages with them.”

“‘No, stop, please come back,’” Liam says, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s reciting what had been on the recording we’d been shown an hour or so earlier. “What if you drop something and it rolls away from where your sister said you could play. Would you go get it?”

“No, I’m not allowed to.”

“But if you drop something and someone hands it to you, would you take it?” Liam asks.

Amelia quickly looks up as if remembering something. “My ball, it rolled… and a man gave it to me.”

“You took the ball?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“I don’t know.”

So… the man didn’t make her say anything… she was yelling those words at a ball that’d rolled out of the area she was allowed to go.

“Do you know what ball it was?” I ask.

“It was this ball. We were playing with it before she went to play on the swings,” Brandy says as she rushes over to a toy box and retrieves it.

I’m not sure what answers the ball could give us, but at this moment it might be our only hope.