Page 141 of The Morning After (Savannah 2)

He must’ve been waiting for her in the next alley, his lights dimmed, and rolled quietly behind her while she walked into her parent’s house.

She reached for the cell. Maybe there was a little life in the battery.

Crash!

Glass splintered everywhere as the driver’s-side window smashed.

Nikki screamed and jumped, but it was too late; she saw the deadly needle a split second before it jabbed hard into her shoulder. “You can’t get away,” he said with chilling calm. An evil smile slid from one side of his bloodied face to the other. His eyes glittered maliciously.

She screamed at the top of her lungs.

Tried to fight through the shards of shattered glass.

But it was useless.

She could barely move. The door to the car opened and he was there, looming in the night, the bloody knife a testament to his killing. Fleetingly, she thought of her mother, of her father, her family and Pierce Reed before the darkness dragged her under.

CHAPTER 29

With each passing minute, Reed’s panic increased. He’d stopped by Nikki’s apartment and found no sign of her, even after coercing that lame-brained manager Fred Cooper to let him inside. Everything looked pretty much the same as it had when he’d left this morning. The cat regarded them suspiciously from the top of the bookcase and the little dog danced around his feet.

“She has another pet, you know.” Cooper said. “She knows better. There are no dogs allowed in this building. I told her the cat was even iffy when she moved in.”

“It’s a friend’s dog,” Reed said, then listened to the messages on her answering machine. Messages, Cooper told him, the other officers had already heard.

There were two. “Hey, it’s Sean. Come on, Nik, cut me a break, would ya? Give me a call. You know the number.” Reed’s jaw clenched at the sound of the guy. There was a pause before the next message played. “Nikki?” a frail woman whispered. “Nikki, it’s…it’s Mom…call me…it’s, um, it’s urgent.” Another long pause. “It’s about Dad.”

The message on the phone was timed at four-seventeen. A couple of hours earlier.

He called the number listed on Caller ID for Ronald Gillette. The phone rang until an answering machine picked up and Judge Gillette’s voice boomed through the wires, instructing the caller to leave name, number and message.

Reed complied. “This is Detective Pierce Reed of the Savannah Police Department. I’m looking for Nicole Gillette. If you hear from her, please have her call me.” He left his number and hung up.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do about this dog,” Fred Cooper said, his lips pursed as he stared at the little mutt. “I already said as much to the other officers who were here a little while ago.”

“I do. You’re going to leave him right here for now. Until you hear from Nikki.”

“But, I have a legal obligation to…” He sighed and backed down. “All right. For now, he stays. But the minute she gets back, the minute, I want to speak to her.”

Reed only hoped Cooper got the chance to ream Nikki out, but as he drove through the rain and gathering darkness to the Sentinel’s offices, he couldn’t shake the sensation that something was very wrong. No one had called him, even though Morrisette had promised that if the units she’d sent to Nikki’s apartment and the newspaper offices had found anything out, she would call. Reed couldn’t sit around and wait. He decided to check things out for himself.

He didn’t feel much better once he was at the newspaper. Nikki had been there, but had cleaned out her desk and no one, not even her friend Trina, had heard from her since.

Not that it was all that odd, he supposed, and yet as he stood at her empty workstation, looking at the crime scene wallpaper of her computer monitor, he experienced and ever increasing sense of anxiety.

However, Tom Fink, the aptly named editor, wasn’t worried. “Look, as I told the other cops, she got her knickers in a knot, cleaned out her desk and stormed out.” A pompous ass if ever there was one, Fink leaned a hip against what had been Nikki’s desk and folded his arms over his chest. “She’s a hothead.”

“Why’d she leave?”

“Didn’t want to do a story I assigned her.”

“And what was that?” Reed asked.

“Another installment on the Grave Robber.”

“And she objected?” Reed knew what was coming. “Let me guess…it was a story around the latest victim, right?”

Fink shrugged. “We heard that he got Simone Everly. She was a friend of Nikki’s. It seemed like a natural.”

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