A Deadly Influence (Abby Mullen Thrillers #1)(113)

Besides, Otis wasn’t so keen on the plan anymore. He was excited about the steady income from the gun trafficking. Didn’t want to draw the attention of the police by picking up Nathan.

Luther was almost content to let it drop. But then she asked for it. That was what made him act. She was the one who pushed him over the edge.

She hadn’t even told him what to do. She’d just said what she needed.

And Luther had figured out how.

And now she had lied and said—

Something was beeping. An electronic, shrill sound. It had been beeping for a while, but he’d ignored it, too caught up with memories and anger. Where was that sound coming from?

His phone. He took it out of his pocket and glanced at it. It was a notification from the alarm app he’d installed. The app that notified him when any of the doors in his cabin had been opened.

Had the boy escaped again?

He pulled to the side of the road and opened the app, checked the security footage of the boy’s room. His heart nearly stopped. There were strangers in the room. A man and a woman. Their backs were to the cameras, but the guns were easy to spot.

Cops.

They’d somehow found his cabin. He was finished.

No, not yet. He still had some time.

He would get what he deserved.





CHAPTER 77


Abby stood in the doorway of the cabin watching the ambulance drive off, apprehension gnawing at her. Nathan’s fever had been high, and he hadn’t woken up, not even when they’d put him on the stretcher and carried him to the ambulance.

Were they too late?

She stepped back inside the cabin, trying to push the anxiety away. She’d already called Eden and told her they’d found Nathan and that he was being transported to St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany. There was nothing more she could do for Nathan now.

Carver was in the room Nathan had been kept in. He’d slipped on a pair of gloves and was going through one of the drawers. He turned to face her when she walked in.

“How is he?”

“He was still unconscious when they drove off.”

Carver nodded and turned back to the desk. “Why do you think Luther went to all that effort? Re-creating Nathan’s room from scratch like that. What’s the point of it all?”

“I’m not sure yet.” She looked around the room, flinching as her eyes skimmed over the bloody bed. Then she noticed the tiny magnetic panel above the door. “There’s some sort of alarm mechanism over the door.”

“Yup. The front door too.”

“In that case, Luther might know we found Nathan.”

Carver shut the drawer and opened the next one. “Nothing we can do about that.”

Abby went to the bedroom. It was small, most of the space taken by the double bed. The room smelled . . . sticky. Above the bed, a page was taped to the wall, the words Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you printed in a large font.

She went over to the nightstand. A framed picture stood on it, a selfie of Gabrielle smiling seductively. A sentence adorned the bottom of the photo, typed in one of those obnoxious generic cursive fonts—You’ll have my undying gratitude. Abby inspected the picture closely. Luther had woken up every morning to this photo. What did it mean to him?

She searched through the drawers in the room, finding nothing much. Clothing, a handful of coins, sunglasses, a box of tissues, a flashlight.

She returned to the living room and inspected the enlarged photo of Gabrielle on the wall. Not a photo at all but a collage, hundreds of tiny images of Gabrielle creating a mosaic of Gabrielle’s face. This picture, the room Nathan had been caged in, the photo on the nightstand—it all spoke of an obsessive mind. An obsessive mind focused on Gabrielle.

She imagined Luther, a man who’d spent years in the Tillman cult. Years following Otis, treating him like a king, a messiah. And then, for some reason, Luther had left the cult. Or perhaps he had been kicked out. She knew from experience that the mind didn’t let go that easily. Eden still had a photo of Moses in her bathroom. And Abby herself had taken years to get over the sudden vacuum in her life, and that was thanks to her loving, patient parents.

Luther had filled the emptiness with a different obsession. A different person to follow. To idolize.

She inspected the photos closely. They mostly looked like images from Gabrielle’s Instagram account. She even recognized a few. There were several nudes that caught Abby by surprise until she realized what they were—manipulated images. Luther had used freely available photos from Gabrielle’s Instagram account, editing them to create his own private porn stash of the one girl he was interested in.

She spotted the image that had made Gabrielle famous. The photo in the mist. Then she saw the same image in a different section of the mosaic. And there was a third. Apparently Luther had used some duplicates.

Strange, that someone so obsessive wouldn’t go the extra mile to make sure each photo was used only once.

No, it wasn’t the same image. They were from slightly different angles. In one of them Gabrielle’s eyes were shut. Luther had somehow laid his hands on the other photos from that occasion.

She scrutinized one of the images closely. It was from the time just before Gabrielle’s popularity blew up. At the start of it all.

I’ve been following you from the start. Wasn’t that what he’d told her?