Benny was conscious for a minute or two before she opened her eyes. The attack was coming back to her in flashes.
She had gotten out of her car, and was fumbling with her keys at the door of the building when someone had come up behind her. He smiled of body odour and cigarettes.
"Move, and I'll kill you." It had been a man's voice.
Man, my back hurts. What happened next? Oh, right…
He had pressed her body into the door, but Benny was not about to go down easily. An accomplished Tae Kwon Do martial artist, she had used his weight against him by transferring the energy he was exerting onto her to push him against the door and twist his arm behind his back. She had pushed him, hard. His face and slammed against the metal door with the force of sledgehammer, his nose breaking in the act. He cried out, and then reached back with his free hand, and managed to plunge a homemade knife into her side. The wound hadn't been deep, but it was enough to surprise her into decreasing her force against him. She had reached back toward her stab wound, and that was when he pushed her down. Once again, her training came in useful, because she had long ago learned how to safely brace herself in a fall. She put her hands out to her sides to support the brunt of the punishment of her fall. But then he was on top of her, his hands around her neck, and then…she was waking up in this hot, foul-smelling room.
Her eyes fluttered open to reveal a small, dimly lit room. Maybe a storage space. The room was lit by a few flashlights in the corners. A tattered couch sat against one wall, with a man sleeping on it. That's the guy. I wonder how long it took for his nose to stop bleeding, she thought with some degree of satisfaction. The obsessive-compulsive part of her squirmed at the stacks of magazines, movies, and boxed heaped haphazardly around the room. The cop part of her thought of oil refineries in the area that also had storage spaces nearby. The part of her that was observant and always unaffected by external circumstances noticed with irritation the house fly that had just landed in her hair. She moved to swat it away, and found that her hands were bound with duct tape to the arms of the wooden chair she sat in, and her torso fastened to the back of the chair with a thick leather belt.
The idiot didn't even think to restrain my legs.
> > > > >
"Wolfe." Ryan picked up his cell phone after the first ring, eager and desperate for the slightest bit of insight on Benny's case. Please let it be good news.
"Hey, it's Dan. I ran the plates of the car in the pictures, and the R.O. is a Neil Fulton? D.O.B. is March 4th, 1975. Moved to Miami five months ago from Boston, current address is on Madison Row. Works at an Italian Restaurant downtown. La Paradiso."
An alarm went off in Ryan's head. Fulton moved to Miami only three months after Benny. He works at our favourite restaurant. He lives five blocks from her building.
"Give me the address. I'm finding this bastard today." Ryan's voice was shaky with anger and fear. This wasn't a random attack; it was starting to look like this guy had stalked Benny for a while before making his move.
> > > > >
"Mr. Fulton! MDPD, open up!" Frank Tripp yelled through the door of the small suburban house, his firearm drawn. No answer. Nodding to the SWAT officer, Frank moved back so that they could knock down the door. The house seemed ordinary when they first walked in; Ryan was taken aback by the normalcy of the place. He was soon corrected, however. The walls of the living room were covered--covered as in wallpaper--by pictures of Benny. Benny collecting evidence. Benny brushing her teeth. Benny getting into her car. Benny reading at the library. Benny running in the park. What's more, an entire wall was devoted to pictures of Benny and Ryan. Kissing, eating lunch, driving, going for walks, paying for movie tickets, shopping. The last five months of his life lay on a wall in front of him. It took a minute to absorb the gravity of the situation.
The freak followed her from Boston. He's been watching her for five months.
He stepped into the bedroom, to find an even greater shock.
He's been dumpster diving. Band-aid's, magazines, mail, old clothes, a face-cloth she threw out.
"Horatio!" Ryan's voice rang out through the still house.
"I'm here, Mr. Wol--" He was cut off mid-sentence by the sight he beheld. Several dozen--close to a hundred--items Ben had discarded lay on tables and desks in the bedroom, dated and labelled on yellow cards. "Well, it seems Mr. Fulton has taken on some voyeurism."
"Horatio, those pictures in there--"
"That's not important right now. Something in this house will tell us where he's keeping her. And we have to find it."
> > > > >
Just as she realized that her feet had not been bound to the chair, Benny's captor roused himself to consciousness on the couch. Sitting up, it took him a moment to notice her on the chair. He raised a hand to his nose and prodded it gently. It must still be tender from the break. I really slammed his face into that door.
After a moment, he looked up at her and smiled. "You're up! I was worried there for a while. I didn't really want to put you out, but you were just fighting back so much--I didn't have a choice."
He was walking towards her--striding, really--as if he was on top of the world. He was actually enjoying himself!
"That's one thing that people like about you, though, Benny. You're a strong person. Decisive. You make the rules, right?"
Does he want me to answer?
"You decided to reject me all those years ago. You decided to drop the one class we had together. You decided to move hundreds of miles away, to Miami, of all places!"
A sick feeling crept up Benny's throat. She knew who he was now. She had been sixteen at the time, starting her second year at Harvard. He had asked her out, and she had politely declined. Due to a scheduling conflict, she had been forced to drop the class she had with him. They hadn't spoken since, and she realized that she hadn't even thought of him once until he had stabbed her. And even then, she didn't realize it was him. Nick, was it? No, that wasn't it. Kyle? No, that was the other creep who had asked her out around then. Neil! His name was Neil!
"But I stuck with you. I knew you were just being your regular, headstrong self. Always looking out for number one, right, Benny? Always watching your own back? Most people would have given up, but I hung in there. Sold my place, quit my job--I took a $9000 pay cut for you, Ben!--moved to Miami! And when I got here, what did I see?"
Benny never took her eyes off of him. Let him talk. Let him say all the things he's wanted to tell me since I was sixteen, and in the meantime figure out a way to get out of here. What can I do in this position with just my legs? I need him to move in closer. Just a matter of time.
"In the three months we lived apart, you took a lover! That…Neanderthal you work with!" He laughed wryly. "I'm actually insulted, Ben, that you could go from me" He gesticulated wildly. "To that in only three months." He wrinkled his broken nose in disgust, as if he was personally offended by her romantic choice. "And not only that, but you completely cold shoulder me, even when I wait your table at your romantic anniversary dinner. In the four years we spent together in Boston, you never once let me take you out to a nice restaurant, but you, you," He seemed to be at a loss for words to express his frustration. "You whore, you stay over at this guy's house, and you've only known him six damn months!" He was practically spitting the words out in contempt, moving in on Benny, slowly approaching her where she sat, immobile but for her legs.
Alright. Just another few feet. Benny was surprisingly calm, now that it got down to it. It was do or die, and she had only herself to rely on. She knew what she had to do, and how she had to do it. It was just a matter of time.
The idiot didn't even think to restrain my legs.
> > > > >
"Damn it!" Ryan Wolfe scrubbed at his knuckles with the brush, hot water pouring down from the tap and scalding him. But it was a good pain. One step closer to clean.
She's out there. With him. He's been following us for five damn months and neither of us ever noticed! He fought back tears. She's been gone ten hours, and I'm stuck here waiting for an IAB investigation to tell me I'm fired, and she's fired if she's alive.
"Hey, Ryan." It was Alexx. The beautiful medical examiner could be a little over-maternal at times, but she always meant the best. When Ryan had been having eye problems after taking a nail to the head, she had seen him and prescribed him antibiotics. They had come a long way since his first year at CSI, when she had cold shouldered him as he adopted one of Speed's old cases.
She walked over to the sink, looked at his hands, raw and bleeding slightly, and suppressed a gasp.
"It's going to be alright, baby. The Benny I know can take care of herself. We should be more worried about the safety of the guy who took her." She may have been right, of course; not only was Benny a black belt, she had motivation and drive like no one else they had ever known. She was tough as nails, and everyone knew it.
"Alexx, I…" He couldn't find words to express his worry. His impending IAB investigation was the least of his concerns. "I should have gone with her. None of this would be happening if I was a better…" The senseless anger flooded back, and he did the only thing that ever made him feel better again: he kept washing his hands.
"Ryan, that's not true, and you know it." Taking a towel from the rack above the sink, she took Ryan's hands in it and continued to dry them off. "None of this is your fault. We've got everyone working their best to find her, and you'll only make yourself sick by worrying about hypotheticals." She finished drying his hands, and inspected them for damage. He had really done a number on them this time. She had seen him and Benny after attacks before, their hands cracked from being washed excessively. But this was something else entirely. The majority of his skin was covered in deep scratches from the nail brush. This was a bad one.
They sat down on the bench and looked out the window to the beach, their conversation muted by a silence that was in no way awkward or content.
"I just keep thinking. She…she had to go home and clean. And I…I was too stupid to go with her. I should have known something was wrong. I just figured it was…flight anxiety." He laughed bitterly. "No self-respecting control-freak like us can stand the thought of being on an airplane."
There was silence for a moment, and then:
"Officer Wolfe, could you come with me, please." Stetler. That bastard. Benny's out there having God knows what done to her, and he's here to make my life even more miserable.
"Right." Ryan got up and crossed the room to follow the asshole from IAB. Looking back, he forced a weak smile for Alexx. She was only trying to help.
Poor baby. He's about to lose his job, at least.