A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(83)

She looks over and grins. “You brought me a bear cub.”

“Thought you might like that,” I say as she bends to greet Storm. I walk over to finish making the tea. When she rises with a quick “I can do that,” I pretend not to hear her. Once it’s ready, I carry it into the living room.

“I can carry a teapot,” she says. “I’ve been working out.”

“That better be a joke.”

“Kind of.” She takes a dumbbell from the coffee table. “Just picked these up.” She does a biceps curl. “One whole pound. In a month, I get to move up to two.”

“Impressive.”

“I wanted to start with the fives, but Dr. Atelier made me take these. Something about muscle damage. He showed me a few exercises I can do with them, too.” She puts the weight down and sits. “I remember when I was here before, I stayed away from the butcher shop. He just seemed…”

“Weird?”

She laughs. “To put it bluntly. He’s definitely different, but he’s been kind to me.” She sips her tea. “So, before we get down to business. I’d like to discuss business. I want a job.” She lifts a hand. “Don’t tell me my job is getting better. I’ve heard it from Diana.”

“Who is correct.”

Nicole shakes her head and pats the sofa to get Storm over. The puppy looks at me, making sure I don’t want to claim petting rights. When I motion, she bounds to Nicole and jumps up, front paws on her knees.

“Down,” I say to Storm, and then to Nicole, “Push her down firmly, please. That won’t be nearly so adorable when she’s over a hundred pounds.”

Nicole nudges the puppy down, mock-whispering, “I know. People trying to rein in our enthusiasm. Spoilsports.”

I roll my eyes.

“I’d like a job,” Nicole says. “There must be something I can do, even if it’s just taking inventory at one of the shops. Makes me feel like I’m pulling my weight.”

“I understand—”

“Yes, you do,” she says. “You totally get it because it’s the same thing you’d want. Which doesn’t mean you think it’s healthy.”

“I don’t think it’s unhealthy. I just…” I shake my head. “I will find something for you. But it will be a part-time job and probably boring as hell.”

“I spent a year in a hole. Anything is more interesting than that. Now let’s drop the subject of Nicole needing to slow down and switch to Casey trying to solve an impossible case, finding a killer in a thousand square miles of wilderness. You have questions.”

“One, and I’m going to preface it by acknowledging that it’s going to sound like the dumbest question ever. But bear with me.”

“Shoot.”

“Your captor. Was there anything odd about his behavior?”

She sputters a laugh, startling Storm, who zooms back to me and leaps onto my lap. I give the puppy a hug and put her down as I say, “Yes, beyond the part about holding you captive, and everything that went with that. Like I said, it sounds like a dumb question. Clearly that’s not normal behavior. And yes, it’s not like I can ask if his behavior seemed typical for psychos who keep women in caves—”

“Yeah, he’s my first kidnapper. Hopefully my last, too. But I think I understand what you’re asking. Were there any signs of mental impairment or pathology beyond the obvious.”

“Right. Did he speak proper English? Accented? Any indication of education level? Anything odd in word choice?”

She thinks and then says, “He disguised his voice enough that I couldn’t tell if he had an accent. His speech didn’t strike me as particularly uneducated or well educated—it didn’t stand out either way. I never heard him use dialect I didn’t recognize. Or words that just weren’t right, like you sometimes get in mental illness. He didn’t talk a lot. But it was normal. Well, as normal as you can get under the circumstances.”

“When he spoke about women, his requirements, how they tricked him. What was his tone? His affect?”

“Were they crazy rants? No.” She pauses. “Have you ever gone out with a guy who complains about his ex? Who’s still bitter about the whole thing? That’s what it was like.”

“You said he burned pages of your books. That seems like a very deliberate punishment.”

“Oh, it was. Trust me. He wasn’t going into a frenzy, ripping out pages. He’d slowly burn one page in front of me, then warn that next time, he’d do ten. Honestly, Casey, while I can laugh about the question, in every possible way, he was as normal as you could expect. Creepily normal. Which is why, in the beginning, I thought I could reason with him. But I couldn’t, and it wasn’t because he was too crazy to be reasoned with. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn’t give a damn. That was the scariest part. That someone who seemed sane could do that to another person. That he could fully understand his actions … and just didn’t care.”

*

I’m woken that night by a pounding at the door. I lift my head and see Dalton propped on his elbows.

“Fuck,” he says. “You hear that, too?”

“I’m telling myself I’m dreaming.”