A Necessary Evil(21)

The shout snapped Frankie back to the present, and he looked around the room for the source of the interruption. It only took a second to realize it came from Lynx. She was waving at Frankie and smiling, which was a rarity for her.

Frankie shot up out of his seat and walked over to her table. “Did you find her?”

“Well,” she said, biting her bottom lip which was pierced with a silver hoop. “Not her, necessarily. But I found her phone’s last location. It’s right there.” She pointed a ring-clad finger at the screen. All Frankie saw was a map with a red dot in the middle and a large red circle around it.

“Where is that?” Frankie asked, his excitement mounting.

“It’s an abandoned grocery store out on Delong Road. About five miles outside the city proper. Just on the edge of the county.”

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s where she is. I’ve got to go find her. I’ve got to—”

“Hold on, boss,” Lynx said cautiously. “Remember…her phone stopped pinging last night about half an hour after she was taken. I highly doubt this is where she is now. If the kidnapper had any sense at all, he ditched or destroyed her phone somewhere near that red dot. But I’d say he kept moving on from there.”

“Still,” he said, clinging to hope, “it gives us a general direction, at least. Right?”

“It should. It’s definitely worth looking into.”

Frankie grabbed his winter coat from the back of his chair and headed for the swinging door.

“Where are you going, boss?” Lynx asked.

“I’m going to get my granddaughter.”

With a curt nod, he turned and pushed through the door. He felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation at what he might find when he reached the isolated location, but his desire to find Mollie and make Julian McAllister’s son disappear, just like his father, spurred him forward.





Chapter 11




Collin



Collin McAllister sat on the edge of the bed, staring at Mollie, who sat shivering in the corner of The Vault. He’d feel sorry for her if he had a conscience. Unfortunately for this young girl, Collin was born without one. Whether it was genetics or environment was anybody’s guess. It was the age-old debate of nature versus nurture. If nature was the determining factor, a lot could be explained about his lack of empathy for other people. He knew what his father had been, that he was a ruthless, vicious man with no moral compass and no capacity for human emotions. Julian McAllister had been the worst of the worst. He’d been a collector of girls and a killer. It wasn’t such a leap to say the apple didn’t fall far from the proverbial tree.

But if it was nurture, well, then the explanation was more elusive. His mother, God rest her soul, had been a saint. Saint Martha McAllister. A strict Catholic, his mother had done her best to raise Collin in the church and instill in him the morals and values of her faith. Perhaps she overcompensated because she knew what Julian was. Perhaps she even saw a flicker of Julian in her son’s eyes at an early age. Either way, she’d done her best with curfews, chores, and rules, but it was all for naught. Her son had turned out to be just like her late husband. She’d prayed and prayed for him all the way up until the bitter end when she’d died of cancer in her bed. In fact, her last words to her son were, “It’s never too late, son.”

It was too late for Collin, of course. Even if Collin had been less resistant to his mother’s efforts to reform him, he still had to honor his posthumous promise to Julian that he would find a way to avenge his death and punish Franklin Cartwright for stealing his father away from him. He’d dreamed of ways to get back at Franklin since he was thirty years old and his mother had finally told him the truth about his father’s last days. Back then, when he’d figured out who had killed his father, the fantasies always centered around Franklin’s death. Collin had conceived of every way possible to kill him, but it wasn’t until around the age of thirty-five he realized the best way to get revenge on his father’s killer was not to take his life. No, that would be too quick and too easy. He deserved a fate worse than death. And what could be worse for a man than death itself than to lose a child?

At first, Collin had planned to kill one of Franklin’s sons, or better yet, his only daughter, Katherine. But by the time he’d come up with this plan, the boys were grown men bigger than himself, and Katherine was a woman with a small child. He’d been watching Franklin one day at the park and saw the love the old man had for the little girl, and that was when it hit him. It would destroy Franklin to lose his granddaughter as much or more than if he lost his daughter, so, he formulated a plan to snatch Mollie right out from under the old man’s nose.

It wouldn’t be easy, he knew, so he decided to practice first. It took six tries to get it right. Collin had some fun with the first six girls. Why not? He already had them right there in The Vault, and they were so pretty. No girls had ever given him the time of day growing up, despite his striking good looks, probably because he was admittedly shy and a bit reclusive. So, when he had these girls’ undivided attention, well, he thought there would be no harm in satisfying his male needs and his fantasies all at the same time. Besides, he was going to kill them either way. It seemed like a complete waste to just keep them for a few days then dispose of them without getting what he wanted—no, needed—from them.