Page 75 of Deathtoll
He looked back at her over his shoulder. “No worries. I’ll be coming back. But right now…” He smiled at her. “Time to pay a visit to your sister.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Murph
Murph jumped from rock to rock as he crossed Broslin Creek, careful not to drop his gun. The town hadn’t seen any rain in the past couple of days, so the water ran low. And since the creek wasn’t shaded on both sides—woods to the east, but fields to the west—enough sun reached the protruding stones so they weren’t covered in moss and weren’t slippery. A nice piece of luck. The last thing Murph wanted was to face-plant in the water.
He climbed up the crumbling bank on the other side, then kept in the cover of scattered bushes as he approached the building. Ed Gannon had parked the broken old plow out there. It probably didn’t fit inside anymore with the big new plow and the salter.
Murph ducked as he dashed behind the salt storage shed. Adrenaline sharpened his focus and his senses. His main target, the old firehouse, stood thirty feet ahead.
He ran forward silently, in a straight line, over to the firehouse’s nearest dirty window. Then he flattened himself against the wall, waiting for any sound that might indicate that he’d been spotted.
No sound came from the inside.
He inched up and looked through the glass.
No movement either. The interior appeared just as deserted as the outside, nothing but snow-management equipment.
Murph waited and watched for another minute. Then he was on the move again, carefully rounding the building.
A fine dusting of dirt covered the driveway, along with a drift of dead leaves. No tire marks. The front door was padlocked from the outside. Not a single window open anywhere. None broken either. Each time he came to another pane of glass, he looked inside, going around in a complete circle.
No sign of life. No sign of recent occupation. Nothing remotely suspicious.
He rolled his shoulders to release some of the pent-up tension in his muscles.Dammit. It would have been too easy.
He called the captain on his way back to the creek. “Old firehouse all clear. Doesn’t look like anyone’s been out here in weeks.”
“Nobody’s had any luck so far,” the captain told him.
Murph hated the thought that Emma might not be in Broslin. Their best chance for recovery was there. Outside of Broslin…he didn’t even have a guess.
When he didn’t say anything, the captain added, “She might not have been taken. She could be just mad as hell, focusing on her road trip, and making a point with her silence.”
“Maybe for an hour or two. But not this long. Emma wouldn’t do that to Kate, and definitely not to their mother and father. She’s in trouble.”
“Then we’re going to find her.”
After they hung up, Murph made his way across the babbling water, then drove to the next possible location on his list, then the next, then the next. No sign of Asael or Emma anywhere.
Then only one address remained, an out-of-business printshop. They used to print the two local papers there, but one of the papers had folded, and the other one had gone to a bigger printer for a better price in West Chester. Murph wouldn’t have been surprised if theBroslin Chroniclefolded too and soon, or went completely online. People read the news on their phones these days.
The printshop was next to a razed strip mall right on the edge of town. Murph found a broken window and climbed in, searched every inch of the building, but found nothing.
He was walking to his truck, his mood as dark as the cracked blacktop under his feet, when he happened to glance up at the water tower across the road, and it jiggled something loose in his brain. He knew another place connected to Asael, didn’t he? Connected, like the apartment, through Mordocai aka Fred Kazincky.
Years ago, when Mordocai had kidnapped Kate, Murph had caught up with them an hour north of Broslin, on the edge of another small town, in the woods. Mordocai had tied Kate out as bait, then climbed a tree to hide behind the leaves and have high-ground advantage over Murph.
It hadn’t worked.
There’d been an old water tower behind the guy, which Murph had used to line up his shot.
Who the hell knew why Asael wanted Emma, what his twisted mind was thinking? Maybe the assassin meant to sacrifice her on the spot where his lover had died, to honor Mordocai’s memory.
Murph slammed on the gas, flying down the road as fast in the approaching twilight as his rattling pickup could take it.
He had no doubt that Asael’s end game was Kate. But killing her didn’t seem to be enough for the bastard. He wanted to punish her first, for having escaped him for so long, and for being the cause of Mordocai’s death.
