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He goes on with the story. The man apparently strangled Pinder through the bars and called for help. The cops torched the lock open and got him out, but he attacked them.

“What was this guy like? Violent? Crazy? Did you meet him?”

“I interviewed one of the hunters who found him. He said the guy seemed normal at first, carrying on conversation like a regular guy. The cops got the lock open, and he slips out and heads for the door. One of the cops tried to keep him from leaving, and that’s when this guy went wild. Well, he’d been in a fucking cage for a year. Guy broke a cop’s arm and hit another in the face on his way out, and that man lost use of an eye. It was a hard hit.” He goes through the rest. The manhunt through the woods. A vet finally brings him down with a tranquilizer gun.

“Did you ever get a name on the captive?”

“No. They had him out at the station,” Maxwell says. “I get there to find things shut down. I can’t interview him. The cops aren’t talking. Next I hear, the feds have the case, and the guy’s gone. And the owner of the paper didn’t even want us calling it ‘resisting arrest’ in our police blotter. This was a hostage situation with a murder, and it got covered up. You know what kind of juice covers that up?”

“It would’ve been a national story,” I say.

“Easily.” He gives me everything else he can. He can’t do the story or be a source, but he really, really wants me to do it.

A few minutes later I’m driving off, heart pounding, because this is a story and a half. I sketch out a timeline while I drive. I figure there were two weeks between his capture and the commitment testimony of the psychiatrist in Duluth. So where was the hearing? It’s like he bypassed the entire legal system.

I speed on down the wooded road.

Patient 34 has powerful enemies who have gone to great lengths to hide him. This thing is bigger than me. I have to work safe and smart.

And I realize that my best ally is actuallyStormline.

Stormlineis disreputable, but it has a hell of a bank account and a great legal team, and they’d do anything to help me…if they could have this story.

A “Where is the Savage Adonis Now?” story where Savage Adonis turns out to be criminally insane is a sad story. A tragic story. But a “Where is the Savage Adonis Now?” story where he only ever tried to be free and now he’s been stripped of his identity and deep-sixed inside an institution for the criminally insane, deprived of due process?

That’s a unicorn of a story.

But it’s also tricky. Patient 34 is vulnerable and possibly quite dangerous.

The light of the media is really 34’s best hope right now.

I hesitate a moment before calling Murray, my editor.

The light of the media is probably not something Patient 34 would choose, considering he was sent into a shark tank of paparazzi while he was weak from surgery. It would have felt like a vicious attack. Publicity will bring them back again.

Still.

I put in the call. My editor is there, of course, because nobody in New York ever leaves the office.

As soon as I utter the words “Savage Adonis,” he sucks in a breath. He had people on-site the first time around—of course. He’s all about Savage Adonis. He tells me he wants to send his top guy, Garrick, a total slimeball.

I tell him it’s me alone or nothing. He wants proof. Pictures. I want money. I want the resources required to get the story right. He wires a few thousand dollars into my account to get things started.

I hang up and drive in silence. This is how 34 gets free—the bright light of the media. An exposure of what was done to him. It’s the best I can do for him.

And I feel like total shit.

Chapter Thirteen

Lazarus

My executive coachValerie says there is a new lesson to be learned every day. That the world is full of knowledge. Here’s my lesson for today: a home for the criminally insane? Not hard to break into.

We put a team on the underground cables around five in the morning, taking out the alarm system.

The perimeter guards are the only heavy guns here. We bribed one to fake an illness and leave early. We wait for the other to get the call from his wife about an intruder. As soon as he’s out of there, we ice the other two. We turn off the electrified fence. We pull our stockings over our faces and roll in.

We take out a few guards inside. The middle-aged woman behind the window in the wall screams.


Tags: Annika Martin Erotic