A Deadly Influence (Abby Mullen Thrillers) Read online

  “I guess she wouldn’t have been happy.”

  “What do you think your nieces, your father and your mother, will feel when you’re gone, immediately after your sister?” Abby asked.

  He cleared his throat. Then, apparently trying to buy some time, he placed another cigarette between his lips and took out his lighter. It slipped from his fingers.

  He fumbled at it and, with that sharp movement, lost his balance. He waved his arms, panicking, tilting into the void. A scream rose in Abby’s throat.

  Then his hand clutched at the scaffolding, and he managed to gain his balance. His face was white, his mouth wide open. Abby’s heart thudded in her rib cage. She remained silent, not trusting her voice at the moment, but locked eyes with him. The wind howled in the background.

  “Phil,” she finally said. “Do you want to go back inside?”

  “Yeah.” His voice trembled. “I’m not sure I can. I’m scared I might fall.”

  “That’s okay; don’t move. I have a couple of people here that’ll help you.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Abby’s relief at feeling the solid floor beneath her feet was palpable. Walls and ceilings were an underestimated commodity. She felt an urge to lie prostrate on the floor just to get the full floor experience. But before she started the floor fan club, there was work to do.

  “He’s ready to come in,” she told the ESU guys. “But he needs you to help him.”

  They walked out the window like it was a common occurrence. As if they traipsed hundreds of feet between heaven and earth every Tuesday. Show-offs.

  She shook her head and turned to Will. “Is the mental health consultant on the way?”

  “Already waiting downstairs with the ambulance.” He grinned at her. “Nice work with the cigarettes.”

  She returned his smile, letting his reassuring, serene demeanor calm her down.

  Ask a cop about their partner, and you’d get a myriad of responses. “He will always have my back.” Or “I can trust him with my life.” Or maybe “We’re a family.”

  To Abby all this was true. But her first and foremost thought about Will was that around him, she could let go. She didn’t need to stay on guard, to think about how she acted or what she said. He was one person with whom she could just relax for a bit. He was one of the few people she could trust.

  Trust didn’t come easy, not to her.

  Will was tall. Tall enough that half the time when he met people, they invariably said, “Oh wow, how tall are you?” which was why Abby, who’d never actually asked him how tall he was, knew that he was six foot five. Inevitably, when hearing his name, people would say, “I never knew wolverines were so tall,” sometimes adding, “Get it? Wol-vereen?” Will usually chuckled as if it were the first time he’d heard it.

  His skin was a rich umber, and his bushy eyebrows and wide nose gave him the appearance of a father who’d found out you’d gone joyriding with his car. But he was actually a softhearted kitten trapped in the body of a nineties-movie action hero.

  “I’m exhausted.” She leaned against the wall, shutting her eyes.

  “Well, saving lives is hard work.”

  She glanced out the window, watching the two ESU guys carefully helping Phil stand up. “I wish we could take the day off.”

  “We have two simulations scheduled for today.”

  “I know that. I just wish we didn’t. What about Kimberly? Did you two have a nice evening?” Will had celebrated his five-year anniversary with his wife the day before. Abby had helped him pick a restaurant.

  “It was very nice. But we went to bed late—”

  “Spare me the details.”

  “I wasn’t about to offer any. Still, went to sleep at one a.m.; then the call came after three. The phone rang for ages before I managed to pick up. Kimberly kept snoring. I swear, that woman could sleep through anything. What about you? Who’s with the kids?”

  “My mom, as usual. You can imagine how happy she was when I woke her up.” Still, even though her mother had sounded exhausted, she’d showed up on Abby’s doorstep ten minutes after the phone call.

  “Well, you’re lucky your parents live nearby, or you’d have to call Steve.”

  “Ugh. I don’t want to imagine what that would be like.”

  “I’m going back to bed for a few hours.” Will rubbed his eyes. “Then I’ll go to work. Otherwise I’ll be a zombie all day.”

  She checked her watch. Four forty-five. The kids needed to wake up at six fifteen. “I think I’ll grab a cup of coffee once we’re done here, then go back home to relieve my mom and get the kids prepared for school.”

  They both stopped talking as Phil came through the window, now secured with a rappelling harness of his own. The ESU guys followed. Phil gazed around him bewildered, his eyes wide open. Abby had seen this look before with other men and women brought back from the brink of death. A wonder at still being alive. Often, it was enough to keep them from trying to kill themselves again.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked him softly. “Do you need water?”

  “I’m good, thanks,” he said sheepishly.

  “Phil, I’m Will Vereen,” Will said. “I’ll walk you downstairs. There’s an ambulance waiting for you.”

  “I don’t need an ambulance. I’m not hurt.”

  “They just want to make sure.” Will was already by the man’s side, walking him toward the stairs.

  “Thanks.” Abby smiled at the two ESU guys.

  “Sure.” One of them smiled back. “It was nice working with you again, Mullen.”

  She recognized his face now. He had been on the ESU team from the bank siege eight months before.

  “You too!” she said brightly, hoping it wasn’t glaringly obvious that she didn’t remember his name. “See you around.”

  She turned and followed Will down the stairs. She had a long day ahead of her.

  CHAPTER 3

  He woke up with a burning need, inflamed by a half-remembered dream. Gabrielle was there, smiling, kissing him, the touch of her lips as soft as a cloud. When he opened his eyes, the harsh reality was too empty and cold, and he tried to fall back to sleep, to clutch at the loose threads of his dream. But it was gone, and all he had left was a gnawing hunger he had to satisfy.

  He had to see her.

  But first, there were things he needed to do. Obviously, he had to brush his teeth. And Gabrielle liked it when he shaved before seeing her.

  He took his time, made sure his cheeks were smooth. “I like a man’s face as smooth as silk,” she’d once told him. And he’d shaved off his mustache that very day.

  He returned to the bedroom, where he removed his shirt and his pants, then folded them and placed them on the nightstand. He took off his underwear next. When he met Gabrielle in the morning, he preferred to be naked, just like she often was.

  That done, he lay on the bed and grabbed his phone. Then he tapped the Instagram app. She’d posted a new story like he’d known she would. He touched her profile photo gently, his finger brushing her lips, a ritual that never got old.

  She’d taken a selfie in bed, only her bare shoulders visible. He didn’t need to see more. He knew she was lying nude, those satin bedsheets she’d bought two months before twisted between her legs.

  Good morning, the caption read. She was smiling that sleepy half smile that never failed to stir him.

  “Good morning,” he whispered back.

  Need shone in her eyes, a lust that mirrored his, and he lowered the phone, her mouth caressing his torso, his stomach, pausing between his legs. He squeezed the phone hard, his body spasming as he reached his relief.

  Later he lay in bed and they talked. He scrolled through her posts, reading the captions or her comments. And then he answered her. Pillow talk.

  I wish I could stay in bed all day, one post said, with her peeking under the blankets, grinning mischievously.

  “Me too.” He smiled at her.

  Another post had her standing
on the beach, the wind toying with her hair, and the caption was, Do something your future self will thank you for.

  “I plan to,” he said. “Today’s the day. And future you will thank me too.”

  He scanned other comments on her posts, reading the inane blather her fans wrote, rife with grammar and spelling mistakes. Your so beatiful, one of them wrote, adding an emoji of a heart and another one with a rose. Her fans didn’t realize an emoji meant nothing. If you wanted to send a rose, you sent an actual rose.

  Of course, her fans didn’t know she wasn’t posting for them at all. Sure, they put bread on her table. But for more than a year, all her posts had been aimed only at him.

  He scrolled a bit more, another glimpse before he started the day, and then suddenly paused, frowning at one of the images. A recent picture of her eight-year-old brother in his bedroom.

  Something in the background caught his eye. A new drawing.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, getting up. He put on his clothes, feeling irritable. It was a good thing he’d spotted it before it was too late.

  He stomped to the adjacent room. A boy’s bed stood in the corner, with Star Wars bedsheets. A small desk and a dark-blue chair. A Harry Potter poster by the window. A nightstand with some plastic toys and a bed lamp. And a corkboard with a few crayon drawings pinned to it.

  He tapped the screen of his phone and compared the image there to the room he stood in. There was the bed. Same bedsheets. Same poster. The nightstand was identical as well; it had taken him weeks to find all those toys.

  The corkboard was almost the same. The one on the screen had seven drawings pinned to it. This one had six.

  He zoomed in on the missing drawing, frustrated by the low resolution of the image. It was a drawing of a family. A mother, a big girl, and a smaller boy. The girl was obviously Gabrielle. He had to smile at the child’s bad attempt at drawing his sister. Her body a rectangular block, her hair a few straight brown lines.

  Sitting down at the desk, he took out a box of crayons and a sheet of paper from one of the drawers. Carefully and painstakingly, he copied the drawing. He had to start afresh twice, once when he got the mother’s shirt color wrong and once when one of the boy’s feet was too long. On the third attempt, he managed to get it reasonably similar. If he’d had time, he’d have made several additional sketches, trying to get it just right. But time was short. He had to get things ready. He copied the signature he already knew so well—Nathan.

  He checked the image on-screen again. The picture was attached with a blue pin above the drawing of the spaceship. He found a blue pin in the drawer and stuck it in the exact same location.

  Taking a few steps back, he compared the image on the screen to the room.

  Perfect.

  While he had been working, she’d posted a new image on her feed. It was her, dressed up for her photo shoot. She wrote, How do I look?

  He commented, writing, Gorgeous as always.

  She liked his comment almost immediately and replied, thanks! coupled with a blushing emoji.

  He kissed the screen tenderly. “You’re welcome,” he breathed.

  CHAPTER 4

  Standing in the bathroom of the NYPD’s police academy, Abby stared at herself in the stained mirror as she washed her hands. It was only noon, but she was completely drained. She’d hardly gotten four hours of sleep before the call about the jumper had woken her up. And the night before had been just as difficult because Ben had woken her up, and it had taken her ages to fall back asleep.

  He’d had a terrible nightmare about spiders. Which in itself wasn’t unusual—a lot of kids had nightmares about spiders. Abby herself had had a few when she was young. However, Ben’s nightmare was that Jeepers, his pet tarantula, had died.

  Sometimes your children’s nightmares were your own shameful fantasies.

  Ben’s eighth birthday was coming. Abby ticked the tasks in her mental checklist. The invitations had been sent, and his best friends had already RSVP’d. She still had to figure out the refreshments and cake. There was a kid with a nut allergy in Ben’s class, so her usual go-to recipe for Ben’s birthday, german chocolate, would have to be adjusted. As for the rest . . .

  Lowering her gaze, she frowned at the running water. She’d been scrubbing her hands raw. How long had she been washing them? Two minutes? Three? And she’d been scraping her skin with her fingernails.

  She snatched her hands away and turned off the water. Damn it. Third time this week. It got more and more frequent. To think that only a few months ago, she’d thought she’d gotten over this habit.

  Maybe there was no getting over it. Maybe, like the small red patch on her neck, it was a scar that would never entirely heal.

  Wiping her hands, she checked the mirror. Presentable. She patted her wavy blonde hair, making sure it covered her ears, and straightened her glasses. Her sandy complexion was a bit paler than usual, and her eyes were slightly puffy from lack of sleep. But there was nothing she could do about that right now.

  She stepped out of the bathroom, checking the time. She still had an hour before the next simulation started. She walked back to her desk and sat down, then jostled the computer mouse to wake up her laptop. Lately, it had been going into sleep mode every five minutes if she didn’t move the cursor, as if the computer were the one who was sleep deprived. Maybe the computer had it right. She could try to sleep whenever no one talked to her for five minutes and only wake up if someone moved her cursor.

  It almost sounded like weird sexual innuendo. How was the date last night? Did he move your cursor? Nudge, nudge.

  Not that she’d gone on a date last night. She had no interest in anyone moving her cursor at the moment. She just wanted a good night’s sleep.

  She yawned and focused on the screen. The transcript she was reading was dated August 2019, two months before. It was a conversation between Sergeant Gutierrez, one of the NYPD’s hostage negotiators, and a man who had barricaded himself in his ex-wife’s apartment, threatening to shoot himself. The man, thanks to Gutierrez’s efforts, hadn’t killed himself or anyone else.

  A big part of Abby’s job was to dissect the transcript, figure out what Gutierrez did right and what he did wrong. Then she would incorporate it into the protocols and training material. She was in charge of the department’s crisis intervention course as well as the training of the force’s hostage negotiators. She had, in fact, trained Gutierrez.

  She skimmed over the pages, noting approvingly how Gutierrez had managed to keep the man talking for over two hours. It had taken an hour and a half for Gutierrez to start nudging the subject softly, letting the man convince himself to unlock the door and hand his gun to the cops.

  After a while, she found herself reading the same line over and over again, her brain not even registering the words. She sighed, minimizing the transcript window. Leaning back, she rotated her neck gently, letting her hands drop to the sides of her body. If only they had a masseuse in the office. Just a nice woman who’d walk by every hour or so and give your shoulders a relaxing massage. She glanced at the framed photo on her desk, Ben and Sam smiling at her. Well, Ben was smiling, and Sam was doing that thing she did when told to smile for the camera. A sort of grimace, not unlike the face she’d make if electrocuted.

  Abby straightened the photo. Went over some paperwork on her desk, reshuffling it. Tried the four pens in her pen holder, verifying they all worked. Watered her succulent plant with her water bottle. Her very own procrastination ritual. Then, almost compulsively, she double-clicked an icon on the laptop’s desktop, opening another transcript. This document was older, a scanned handwritten report. It was shorter than the Gutierrez transcript. Much shorter. And she knew it by heart. She skimmed it, reading fragments of sentences as if this time they might be different.

  . . . a gun pointed at my head. He says if you come closer, he will shoot. He says you should stay back.

  . . . put him on the phone?

  . . . together in the dining
hall. All sixty-two . . .

  Hearing footsteps behind her, she guiltily closed the document and turned around. One of the instructors walked by, smiling at her distractedly. Abby smiled back, her cheeks flushed as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  And perhaps she really shouldn’t have.

  She tried to get back to work, but couldn’t focus. The skin on the back of her hands stung from the recent abuse. She should really buy some cream for that. Though that would only cement the problem. It would be better to just stop doing it.

  Her phone blipped, and she glanced at the message. It was her friend Isaac. How was last night? Better?

  She sighed and tapped back, Ben didn’t wake me up tonight, but I had to answer a call. I’m exhausted.

  I’m sorry :( anything serious?

  Yes, but it ended well

  Oh, good. Did you see the new forum post?

  Her interest was piqued. Checking it now

  She opened the browser, then logged into the support forum. She and Isaac had both been members for years. She checked it daily, rarely participating herself. She wasn’t there for the support. She was there for information.

  A new user had joined the forum. Like many others, she wasn’t sure she was in the right place. After all, the forum was for cult survivors. And she wasn’t really in a cult. At least, she didn’t think so. It was a dedicated group, the woman explained, and the guy who managed it had become difficult. Abby read the post about the so-called-group, whose goal was to follow and spread some sort of revolutionary diet. The woman detailed the increasing demands for their loyalty. The punishments for perceived disloyalty or other infractions, which became more and more severe. The pressure to donate money to the group. The woman had been encouraged to cut connections to family and friends, who were a “distraction.” And then came the pressure to give more and more of her time. Until she lost her job.

  Finally, after two years, the woman had gathered the courage to quit the group.

  It wasn’t a cult, she explained again, as if trying to convince herself. After all, they didn’t commit any crimes, and they weren’t even some sort of fanatic religion. It was a diet group.