Page 54 of Girl, Reborn

This wasn’t just a well or a pool or a vatof water.

It was an execution chamber.

This was real. Too real. The kind ofnightmare you can't wake up from because you're already awake and living it.The icy water lapped at his thighs, each ripple a caress from death itself. Theconcrete blocks gripped his legs like the hands of corpses, dragging him downinto a watery grave.

‘Help! For the love of God, somebody helpme!’

His cries bounced back at him, mocking,distorted. A chorus of the damned in this chamber of horrors. No one wascoming. No one could hear him in this drowning machine, this monument to somepsychopath's twisted imagination.

Frank's eyes bulged, darting wildly likethose of a trapped animal. The walls seemed to pulse and writhe in the dimlight, alive with shadows that danced and leered. Faces formed in the patternsof damp stone – sneering, laughing, reveling in his terror. He knew theyweren't real, couldn't be real, but that knowledge did nothing to quell theprimal fear that gripped him.

He thrashed against his bonds, heedless ofthe way the concrete tore at his flesh. Blood clouded the water around hislegs, and some dark part of his mind whispered that he was just making iteasier for whatever might be lurking in the depths. Sharks. Piranhas. Monsterswith too many teeth and an appetite for fear.

‘Why?’ he screamed. ‘What do you want fromme?’

Silence answered him. Just the steadydrip, drip, drip of water from above. Chinese water torture with a drowningchaser. Each drop was a ticking clock, counting down the seconds until thewater closed over his head and the world went dark.

Who could have built this nightmare? Itwas like no water system he'd ever encountered, and he'd seen them all.Reservoirs, dams, underground cisterns – none of them came close to thishellish contraption.

The dam. The thought hit him like asledgehammer to the sternum, driving what little air remained from his lungs.This had to be connected to the deaths he’d read about. Toledo. Ayers. Now him.Both of them worked on the dam project, both of them.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he wheezed. ‘This is aboutthe dam. The drought.’

He tried to focus, to think logicallyabout his predicament, but terror clouded his mind like murky water. Thiscouldn't be happening. Things like this didn't happen in real life. Theyhappened in movies, in nightmares, not to middle-aged dam operators fromBristol.

And yet, here he was.

Frank thought of his family. His wife,Sarah, probably wondering why he was late for dinner. His daughter, excitedabout her upcoming college graduation. Would they ever know what happened tohim? Or would he simply disappear, another missing person file gathering dustin some police station?

The idea of never seeing them again, ofleaving them with nothing but questions and grief, was almost worse than theprospect of drowning. Almost.

‘I'm sorry,’ he whispered, though he knewthey couldn't hear him. ‘I'm so damn sorry.’

But sorry wouldn't save him now. Not fromthe water slowly creeping up his neck. Not from the fate that had been sealedthe moment he'd taken that job at the dam.

Frank Hollister, dam operator, husband,father, began to weep. And still, the water rose.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Ella Dark stared at the evidence boardlike it was a winning lottery ticket written in hieroglyphics. Her eyes burned,gritty as sandpaper from too many hours of staring at crime scene photos andchicken-scratch notes. The precinct coffee, a brew that could strip paint attwenty paces, had long since lost its punch. Now, it just sat in her gut likebattery acid, eating away at what little remained of her patience.

The board was a nightmare collage of deathand drought. Victim photos, map pins, red string connecting the dots like ademented spider's web. It should've made sense by now. Should've revealed itssecrets like a cheap stripper at last call. But the pieces refused to fit,mocking her with their stubborn resistance to logic.

Faces stared back at her. Toledo, smug asa cat in the cream. Ayers, all pocket protector and nervous smile. Clancy,rough-hewn and weathered as old leather. Three dead men with a dam and a waterygrave in common.

Luca materialized at her elbow and put ahand on her shoulder. Under other circumstances, such contact might get herheart fluttering, but right now it did nothing.

‘Anything new?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, I cracked the whole case wide open.Turns out it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe. We can allgo home now.’

‘Cute.’ Luca rolled his eyes. They wererunning on fumes now, and gallows humor was the only thing keeping Ella fromscreaming into the void. ‘I’ve got guys looking into people who worked on thedam. Any name that crops up, we’ll get a squad car outside their house. Tuckersaid we might have to call in help from some other districts.’

‘Good job,’ Ella said. ‘What if we’redealing with someone who’s never interacted with the victims until the last twodays? What if there is no personal connection?’

‘Then we’re at the mercy of forensics.Maybe we should run it down one more time, see if we missed anything?’

‘Or maybe we'll drive ourselves evencrazier than we already are.’

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