The Hunted Girls by Jenna Kernan (best book club books for discussion txt) 📕

She closed her eyes and hunched. And quickly discovered she had a new problem. Already there was over an inch of rain in her plastic prison. The downpour continued to beat on the lid in a deafening drum and the water slowly dripped in.

She could drown in here. Nadine began to kick and wiggle. Now if she rested her cheek on the container floor, her nose was underwater.

Nadine screamed into the gag, craning her neck to keep her nose from the rising water.

The rain that had once been a sweet respite from the heat and humidity now soaked her clothing and drenched her hair. The violent shivering began. Only the gag kept her teeth from chattering.

She managed to roll to her back and inch her head up the side of the container enough that only her jaw was submerged. She blinked against the bite of the rain stinging her closed lids, trying to steady her breathing as the panic tore at her throat.

Meanwhile, the voice in her head screeched.

They’ll never find me in time.

She was going to drown right here in this plastic tub.

Twenty-Seven

Tina tapped on the door to Nadine’s room. Her boss’s alarm had been sounding for twenty minutes. She tapped again, louder this time.

“Dr. Finch? It’s past seven a.m.” She listened, ear pressed to the door, and thought she heard a scratching. “Nadine?”

Tina eased open the door. Muffin slipped out of the crack and wove her way around her owner’s legs, making a racket.

“Muffin!” She stooped to scoop up the cat. “How did you get in there?” Tina lifted the boneless feline and looked into her bright green eyes. The last time she had seen her cat was when she had let her out at 5 p.m. “You had me worried sick. I thought you were out all night.”

Tina had called for Muffin from the front and back doors several times last evening. But Muffin did not reappear. It was the first occasion that her cat had gone missing and Tina was certain a coyote had gotten her.

She eased Muffin to the floor and the cat trotted off toward the kitchen, sending an urgent meow back at her pet parent.

“Muffin, if you could work that can opener, you’d have no use for me at all.” Tina peered back into the room and found Nadine’s bed empty and the covers dragged partially onto the floor. The first inklings of alarm sounded in her mind as she stepped into the room.

“Dr. Finch?”

She charged to the empty seating area, reversed course and ran to the master bath. The door lay open and the room vacant. Running now, she charged to the walk-in closet and then searched under the bed. Scrambling to her feet, she shouted.

“Dr. Finch!”

The pounding of footsteps preceded the arrival of the FBI security agent assigned to the morning detail.

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s gone! Dr. Finch. I can’t find her.” Tina pressed a hand to her chest, gasping now for air as the panic gripped her heart.

“Is she in the kitchen?”

Tina locked her fists in her hair and shouted at the agent. “She’s gone! Do something!”

The agent left her to search the bathroom, walk-in closet, and returned to look under the bed. Meanwhile, Tina had her phone out and was texting Demko, who was out walking Molly.

The agent moved to the window and pulled back the venetian blind. His hand went to his service pistol.

“Call Director Carter now.”

As Tina placed the call, he yanked up the blind revealing a large square cut from the lower glass of the window, which now stood open. The matching pieces of the contact alarm, now detached from the wall, sat on the marble sill.

“Director Carter? This is Tina Ruz. Nadine is missing. Someone broke into her room.”

The front door banged open and Demko charged down the hall, pistol held out and down as he raced toward her. Tina had never seen this wide-eyed look of panic.

“Where’s Nadine?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Special Agent Coleman as she stood in the backyard with Agent Wynns staring at the metal cable threading from the neighbor’s ancient oak to the roof of the safe house.

“I’m not. He sailed right to the roof, over our perimeter alarm, on a zipline and used that second one to slip right back over. His cable is three feet above line of sight for the cameras.”

“How’d he get from the roof to her window?”

“Looks like he dropped down from the eave.”

“I thought we had motion sensors.”

“Inside, yes. Outside cameras, one agent on duty and motion on the top of the walls.”

“Which he never touched.”

“Correct,” said Wynns.

“Entry sensors?”

“Were off to let the dog out at ten-thirty p.m. and again at shift change. Looks like he cut a hole in the glass big enough to climb through, removed the contact alarm and then took her out the open window.”

“One a.m.,” said Coleman. “How’d he find the safe house?”

“We are working on that. Possibly he followed the ME back from one of the autopsies, or one of the agents from the press conference to the field office and from there back to this location.”

“Or Skogen told him.”

“Also a possibility.”

“So she’s been missing for seven hours,” said Wynns.

“Yes.”

Nadine’s mouth barely breached the waterline as the rain now poured off something above her and cascaded into the container, trapping her under a waterfall. She’d finished thrashing but rejected her imminent end, focusing on her next breath. She was surviving this because each minute she kept her head above water was another minute they had to find her.

He’d stop soon because he’d need to get to a safe location and buckle down while the FBI’s search ramped up. His only chance was to be off the roads before she was discovered missing.

She had no idea what time it was. But she did know morning was closer with each breath. She had managed to work her hands from behind her back to behind her knees. This allowed her to roll to her back. She