Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10)(27)

“It’s on fire.”





CHAPTER 9


    FLORA


THIS IS WHAT I KNOW about Jacob Ness:

He was old and ugly and disgusting, the kind of guy that a pretty blond college girl like me never would’ve given the time of day. His hair hung in greasy hanks. He had a mouth full of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. He was built like a scarecrow, all massive belly and four scrawny limbs.

He wasn’t partial to showering or any other kind of hygiene. He not only looked repulsive, but smelled that way, too. Every smell that ever made you want to vomit, that was his personal cologne.

He was strong. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, with his flabby gut and flaccid limbs. But he had that skinny-guy thing going on—arms like bands of steel. I tried to fight him. As he dragged me back to the coffin-shaped box, as he forced me into various acts of depravity. I’d been a strong, athletic girl in the beginning. But I never won. Not once.

Jacob had a family. Those details are sketchier for me. A father he referred to only as Dickhead or Asshole. The father had been a trucker as well, but Jacob implied that he only came home long enough to smack his kid around. Is he still alive? Did he ever read about what his son did? Mourn his death? Shake his head that Jacob had been stupid enough to get caught? I have no idea.

Jacob was raised by a chain-smoking mother who worked two jobs. When he was little, he talked about a grandmother who helped watch him during the day. According to Jacob, when he was five or six, he found his father’s stash of porn, and that’s when his obsession with sex began.

Jacob was a sex addict. He was very honest on that subject. He also made it clear he had no intention of reform.

I don’t know what happened to the mom. The police or Samuel once mentioned to me that Jacob had been using his mother’s address in Florida as his permanent address. That’s one of the things that helped them make the connection between him and my disappearance. In the beginning, however, he hadn’t kept me in Florida, but in some cabin in the mountains of Georgia. The kind of place with no neighbors and few witnesses.

He was married once. He told me about that. He tried to do the traditional thing. Have a wife, spend night after night in the missionary position. That went so well he beat the crap out of the woman and ended up arrested for domestic abuse after the docs in the ER called it in. He went to jail for a year; he told me about that, too. How prison was no place for a man with his appetites. How when he got out, he vowed he’d never go back. On that, he kept his word.

Jacob raped a girl. That girl had a daughter. The girl died. The daughter, too. This bit of the family tree I know better. Which leaves us with? A father? A mother? Aunts, uncles, cousins? Did any of them care about him, or blame me for what happened?

I have no idea.

What about friends? I considered Jacob to be a loner, and not just because his job was to trawl the highways of the southern United States, but because I never saw him talk to anyone. Except, of course, that one night in the bar. Conrad.

Jacob spent a lot of time on his laptop. I assumed he was looking up porn, but knowing what I know now, it’s also possible he was hanging out with other predators, comparing notes, even bragging. Many perverts do. Is that how he met Conrad? Were there others? I was never granted access to the computer. Maybe Jacob had a whole online community, even a fan club.

I wasn’t allowed secrets, but Jacob kept plenty from me. Especially during his benders, the days, entire weeks, he’d disappear, only to return, high, wasted, whatever. He never talked about where he went, what he did. I never bothered to consider, how did he score the drugs? Surely that implies some kind of community right there, a dealer, other addicts, a means of contacting such people. He never mentioned names—and whatever the FBI recovered from his laptop, they never shared with me.

To the best of our knowledge, Jacob never posted my picture online. For that, I’m grateful, as once those images are out, you can’t get them back again. Jacob e-mailed some videos and images to my mother; he wasn’t beyond taunting. But he seemed to understand that sharing too much might get him caught. Or maybe, in his own Jacob-like way, he didn’t want to share.

For the first year we were together, Jacob forced me to call him by my dead father’s name, Everett. He referred to me as Molly. We were like characters in a play. Or maybe short-timers in a relationship we both knew would never last. Except one month, two months, twelve months later, Jacob still hadn’t gotten around to killing me. And whether I meant it to happen or not, we turned a corner. I stopped fighting. I stopped running. I made myself Jacob’s friend and confidante.

A man that lonely certainly wasn’t immune to a little female charm.

The last day, SWAT pouring through the door, tear gas exploding everywhere, Jacob crawled to me. Jacob draped the water-soaked towels around my mouth to block the stinging smoke. Jacob handed me the gun.

No one wants to be a monster, Jacob used to tell me. None of this was his fault. Abduction, rape, assault. Four hundred and seventy-two days of hell.

No one wants to be a monster.

It didn’t stop him from being my monster. But now I wonder, did my monster know others? Did my monster leave behind other living victims besides me?

I can’t ask Jacob these questions anymore. That final day, after he gave me the gun, I did exactly what both of us wanted me to do. At the time I had no doubts.