Waking Nightmare Read Online Free PDF

than statement, but it was something, Ryne supposed. If she was accurate at all in her estimate, the man would have been around five foot nine when he was standing upright.
    “What about his build? Was he stocky? Slender?”
    “I don’t know. He wasn’t big. My ex weighed about one ninety and this guy wasn’t near as big as him. But he was really, really strong. I couldn’t get away no matter how hard I tried.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
    Abbie nudged the hand Barbara held the glass in. “Take some time, Barbara. Drink. Go on.” She waited until the woman had obeyed, then sent her an encouraging smile. “You’re doing great. And you’re still fighting him. With every detail you give us, you’re bringing us closer to catching him, so keep fighting, okay? This won’t take much longer.”
    A reluctant respect bloomed in Ryne when he saw the tremulous smile the woman sent Phillips. She was proving more useful than he would have thought, although given his initial reaction, that wasn’t saying much.
    “You said things got hazy after he injected you.” Ryne watched Barbara’s hand creep up to clasp her mother’s, where it lay comfortingly on her shoulder. “At any time did you lose consciousness?”
    “I think I must have. Because the next thing I remember, we were in my bedroom.” She shuddered, squeezed her mother’s hand hard. “I was lying on the bed naked, and my hands were tied together, above my head.”
    “Can you show me the position they were in?” Ryne set down his pen and held his wrists together. “Were the palms facing inward? Or were they side by side like this?”
    “They . . . they were . . .” Something seemed to snap inside the woman and her voice rose. “What difference does it make? I mean, really? How my hands were tied or how many times he hit me. How is that going to help? How is any of this going to help?”
    “Maybe you both should go,” Nancy Billings put in. She rounded the couch and sat down close to her daughter, slipping an arm around her shoulders.
    “It’s important because you don’t know who raped you, Barbara.” Abbie waited for the woman to look at her before going on. “Neither do we. But we do know the guy has been doing this for a while, and there’s a reason he hasn’t been caught. So every minute detail you can provide helps us, because then we put it together with other tiny little details. It’s kind of like one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. You know the ones?”
    The woman gave a slow nod, her gaze fixed on Abbie’s.
    “You dump out the box and you’ve got like two hundred pieces of sky and you wonder how in the world you’re ever going to put them all together. And if even one of those pieces is missing, there’s a chance you might not get the others to fit. That’s why everything you can tell us is critical. Things that seem inconsequential to you might be important to us because it helps us build a picture of the man who attacked you. A guy like this has a ritual, and the more we know of it, the better we can predict his behavior.”
    Barbara moistened her lips. “You believe . . . you think he’ll do this again.”
    “He will.” Ryne wished he didn’t have reason to be so positive about that fact. “You weren’t his first and you won’t be his last. Unless we can stop him.”
    “Perhaps we should do this another time,” Nancy Billings murmured to her daughter. “After you’re stronger.”
    “No.” Barbara let out a long shuddering breath. “The sooner they can get started, the sooner he can be caught.” She held her wrists out in front of her, palms pressed together. “I was tied like this. I don’t know what he used.”
    “What about your legs? Were they bound, too?”
    Billings shook her head. “No. I kicked at him a few times. At least I tried. But whatever he gave me. . .I was so weak. I don’t think I hurt him.”
    “What was his reaction each time you resisted?” Ryne went back to the