Left To Die

Porter Schmidt. Such a German name. Nothing in that name suggested he’d killed six people, and yet, though she still had yet to meet him, Adele could practically smell the murderer, like a bloodhound with a sixth sense. She knew he was the killer as surely as she knew her father’s life was in danger.

Her gun tapped gently against the window as she peered through a slat in one of the shutters—an old trick she’d adopted as a child when she’d returned home from school to make sure her parents weren’t shouting at each other before entering the house.

Many afternoons had been spent sitting on the front porch for hours, reading schoolbooks or sketching in a journal, waiting for the shouting to stop.

Now, curling up her spine with tooth and claw, came a desperate, cloying, frigid sensation that set her teeth on edge more than the yelling ever had. Briefly, she thought fondly of the shouting, wishing that some noise would echo from the quiet, darkened house.

But no sound arose.

Adele abandoned her position by the slat in the window—all she’d managed to spot was darkness. She hurried to the door, reached out, and gripped the handle.

It twisted. The door remained locked.

For the faintest moment, she thought she heard a muffled groaning sound from within the house. Was someone in pain? She eyed the door up and down, her head movements frantic. She couldn’t kick this door down, no matter how hard she tried. Her father had reinforced the front and the back door following a slew of robberies the town over.

With a snarl, Adele cast about, and her eyes settled on the porch furniture. Holstering her weapon, she hurried over, grabbed one of the hefty wooden chairs, and slammed it into the nearest slatted window. Glass shattered and spilled like fragments of starlight, twinkling as the pieces of glass scattered the porch and tumbled into the living room. She slammed the chair a second time, breaking the wooden shutters.

She would apologize later. Now, all she needed was to enter the house.

She used the chair to clear the worst of the jutting pieces of glass left in the sill. The silent alarm would have been tripped now—a call was already reaching the police station from the security system. Her father was nothing if not safety conscious. But they wouldn’t reach her in time.

It was up to her. A foreign agent in a foreign country. At stake: the only family she had left.

She scraped the last of the glass away and shouted into the house, “Dad, it’s me! Are you okay?”

This time, she was certain she heard a muffled groaning sound. She’d heard torture victims on a recording once that sounded like that.

She flung the chair aside and pushed through the window, ignoring the glass scraping at her side and against her forearm as she delicately tried to maneuver through the awkward opening.

With less grace than she would have liked, Adele tumbled into her father’s living room, avoiding most the glass and splinters of wood. Still, she could feel a trickle of warmth down her arm and a sharp, pulsing throb in her right side along her ribs.

Injuries would have to wait.

Gun met sweaty palm; iron sights surveyed darkness.

Adele, foot over foot, in a shooter’s crouch, stepped through the living room. Her feet made small crunching sounds against a few pieces of glass that had made it further along the carpet. For a moment, all she could think was where her father kept the vacuum. She needed to clean up before he saw it, or he’d let her have it for a week.

She gritted her teeth, staving off the thoughts brought on by the influence of the Sergeant’s house. The crunching sound of her footsteps gave way to quiet padding as boots met carpet. The sharp pain in her ribs still pulsed, but ignoring it, Adele stepped from the living room, swinging her gun into the kitchen.

Nothing.

Except.

The water was running.

Adele frowned at the faucet. She reached out with a trembling hand, turning the knob, shutting off the stream of hot water, which had now gone cold.

Her father would never have left a faucet running.

She struggled, desperately wondering if she should call out again. For all her father knew, someone had just broken into his house, and he was now crouched with a shotgun upstairs waiting to blow her head off the moment she popped into view.

Or, someone else was in the house.

Someone else waiting for her to make a noise, lying in wait, preparing to jab her with a needle.

If she called out in the first case, it might save her life, and save her father the trauma of blasting his only daughter in two. In the second case, though, any noise might alert the predator to her presence.

Adele maintained her quiet, moving along the cupboards, her body turned, presenting as small a target as possible toward the doorway, just as they’d been trained to do. This was her least favorite part of an investigation, but she’d drilled with weapons the same as everyone else.