Page 18 of Devil's Riches

5

Nate

I saton the couch with my head in my hands, trying to ignore the ticking clock on the other side of the room. Every minute that passed—no, every fucking second—made me feel like a useless moron.

It was already after nine o’clock, which meant that over seventeen hours had passed since I woke up on that bunker floor, and I was still yet to figure out anything that would help me find my uncle and Alexis.

After I watched that horrifying ‘Sarah - 2006’ tape this morning and realized just how much danger Alexis was in, I sprang into action to find my car, hoping it would be that simple. It wasn’t, of course. The company that installed the GPS unit when I bought it was able to track its movements after I reported it stolen, but when they contacted me a couple of hours later and informed me that they’d located it at a coastal lookout thirty minutes south of the estate, I didn’t hold out much hope.

I was right not to.

The company contacted the police after I told them my car was stolen—I didn’t tell them that I knew who took it, though—and a couple of officers were at the lookout when I showed up to get the car. They told me it had been left in the small parking lot with the keys in the front seat, and no one in the area had seen a thing. There was no sign of Greg or Alexis, and the stash of cash I kept in the glove compartment in case of emergencies was gone.

I also learned from the police at the scene that a young couple who’d gone for an early morning swim near the lookout had reported their vehicle stolen as well. They’d left it parked next to mine before trekking down the steep path to the beach to take their dip. An hour later, they returned to the lot to find their car gone.

Their keys were with them down at the beach, which meant Greg would’ve needed to hotwire it in order to steal it. He’d chosen that particular car for a good reason, too. It was a shitty old beater with no GPS unit, which made it a hell of a lot harder for the cops to track down. It could be days or weeks until it was found.

With an exasperated sigh, I got off the couch and started pacing around the room, needing to burn off the frustrated energy coursing through me. The feeling of fear and powerlessness that came with not knowing what was happening to Alexis right now crawled beneath my skin, invisible and unscratchable.

I had to find her. Fucking had to.

My gaze fell on the boxes of DVDs and videotapes, packed with evidence of my uncle’s sickening crimes. I’d carefully counted the tapes earlier and arrived at a figure of 520. The earliest date on any of the labels was September 1999.

That was 520 people murdered over a period of ten years, making Greg the worst serial killer in the history of the country by a huge margin. Maybe even the world.

I had no idea where he found that many people to abduct and kill, because Avalon wasn’t a place where people regularly went missing. It didn’t have the population to sustain such an inordinate number of disappearances, either. At least not without anyone noticing.

I could only assume that Greg found his victims on the mainland and brought them over here to the island, but that didn’t help me figure out who any of them were. The tapes only had their first names on the labels, and I wasn’t able to locate any articles about them when I went online and searched for things like ‘Sarah 2006 missing woman West Coast’.

Whoever the victims were, they’d clearly fallen through the cracks of society. No one had ever reported them missing, and it was likely that no one even knew any of them were dead.

Judging by how thin some of them were, I figured it was likely that they were homeless people or drug addicts. Maybe even both. That could explain why none of their families or friends reported them missing. They might not even know they were missing. They might’ve just assumed they ran off somewhere and never bothered coming back.

My stomach lurched at the thought. All those people, and no one even knew they were gone. All that human potential, stripped away and mutilated until there was nothing left but skin and bones. No eyes, no organs, no blood.

I knew they were all killed in the same way as Sarah from the first tape I watched, because I’d spent the last several hours watching every other tape, hoping that one of them would be shot in a different location which might reveal a clue about Greg’s current location. I couldn’t stand to watch them properly, so I’d tripled the video speed and raced through each one, trying to spot anything different on the screen each time.

No dice.

Each video had been shot in the exact same room down in the Blackthorne tunnels, and there was no way my uncle would be stupid enough to return there right now. Not when the place was still crawling with cops after the recent copycat murders, along with my alleged mugging.

Unless…

A sudden idea froze me to the spot. All the shock and horror of the day—along with the throbbing head injury—had turned me into an automaton, incapable of critical thinking. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the cops might be gone by now. They could’ve searched the Blackthorne tunnels days ago, found no one down there, and left, leaving it available for Greg to return to with Alexis in tow.

I grabbed my phone and called my frat brother Jasper. He answered on the fifth ring, practically hacking up a lung. “Hey, man. How you doin’?” he asked before lapsing into another coughing fit.

He was smoking weed with his friends. I could tell by the watery sound of the bong in the background as someone else inhaled.

“I’m good. Just wanted to ask you something,” I said.

Either Jasper didn’t hear me or he was too stoned to register my words. “How’s your stomach?” he asked. “I still can’t believe you got fucking stabbed.”

“It’s fine,” I said impatiently. “You’re still at Blackthorne, right?”

“Yup.”

“You know how the cops think the guy who mugged me might be the same one who killed those girls and left them in the quad?”

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