Apex Predator Read Free

through these rituals like all mothers who could not spot their child right away, Marybeth knew something was seriously wrong. She had never lost sight of her little girl for this long, and looking at the sea of people strolling the streets of New York, she felt a sense of helplessness.
    The first thing she did was to look for a policeman, luckily finding one at the far corner. “Excuse me, excuse me, officer, but I can’t find my little girl!”
    It was most definitely not the first time Officer Allen heard this from a frantic mother, especially at this time of year. Most of the time it turned out the little girl went into a store or was with another relative, so Officer Allen remained calm and asked all the pertinent questions. Was there another relative with them? Had she lost her before? Was there a favorite place the little girl might want to go to nearby, an ice cream stand, a toyshop?
    Having gotten a negative on all pertinent questions and seeing the true panic on the mother’s face, Allen put out a “be on the lookout,” or BOLO, call on his radio for the missing little girl, giving her physical description, her last known whereabouts and her possible locations.
    After two hours of not locating the girl, an all-city bulletin went out over the police band turning this from a lost girl into an actual missing person report with a possible kidnapping involved.
    Every officer out there looking for the little girl had the same thought, but none dared speculate about it. There had been six other little girls, same description, same M.O., that disappeared in the past three weeks, and although no one wanted to think it, most were already counting her as number seven.
    Trinity pulled his van into his rented warehouse and workshop. He had been careful to rent it in an industrial area where waste was dumped and processed at all hours of the night, negating the need to soundproof his space or bother with the odor.
    Walking into it, one might think they were walking into a movie set. Behind plastic curtains was what could almost be called an operating room, complete with IVs, surgical instruments, an operating table of course and a cabinet full of drug vials.
    Next to this was a curtain that separated the “clinical” part of the space into what anyone seeing it would describe as a typical little girl’s bedroom, a small bed with four posts and a white frilly cover on the top, a dresser and two nightstands with small lamps. Then the observer would most likely notice that there were dolls, dozens of dolls, arranged all over the stands and the dresser in the middle.
    Nothing strange about dolls in a little girl’s bedroom, except these dolls were in various stages of disassembly. Some had the eyes cut out, others had no arms, and yet others were nothing but a torso with a head. Each had been carefully arranged to fit in with other dolls in a similar state. The dolls with no eyes were all arranged together, the ones with no arms likewise, and so on.
    Another vast difference between this and any other little girl’s room was the handcuffs attached to every one of the four posts, each pair having left bloodstains on the part of the bed it was on and on the post it was attached to.
    The final part of this make-believe world was also divided, but by plastic curtains only. It could only be described as a chamber of horrors.
    In the corner of the space near the entrance, there was an actual workshop with a table saw, various tools hanging on the wall, and a carry pack with various forms of cutting instruments as well as tools for machining fine parts.
    Even the best crime profilers in the business could not have imagined a more disparate and sick space.
    He headed over to the cabinet with all the drug vials, selected the appropriate vial and loaded a syringe, not too much though, she must be compliant but not fully unconscious; no sir, it would not do at all for her to pass out or worse, stop breathing, like the one before