The Altruism Effect: Book One (Mastermind Murderers Series 1) Read online

  She was still in the room at the end of the hall, though it wasn’t empty anymore. She was lying on an elevated table, something similar to a massage table. Wide eyed, she moved her head back and forth to try and see what was happening. Her arms and legs were bound with leather straps that stretched to hooks on the walls.

  And her gown had been removed. She lay naked and exposed on the cool leather table, helpless. She let her limbs relax, which relieved the pressure on her wrists and ankles. Tears of utter fear leaked out of her eyes and disappeared into her hairline. She sniffled and felt the familiar sting of chemicals in her nose.

  “I’ve only let one other girl see who I am. She brought me comfort when I thought all hope was lost. But she’s still a prisoner. And for that she will be punished.” The voice had come from above her head, though she wasn’t able to twist to see him.

  “Megan,” she croaked. “Is Megan here?” she asked. Silence. “Please don’t hurt me.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I get to be the one that asks the questions now.” His voice was cold as he rounded the table.

  She flinched at the sound of a scrape on leather, and opened her eyes to see the knife she’d acquired from his kitchen earlier dragged across the table by her side.

  The knife! she screamed inside her head. She followed the line of the blade up the arm of her captor and into his face.

  It was not Troy.

  She was mostly relieved, but overwhelmed with fear and unresolved feelings, all at the same time.

  The middle-aged man with thinning white hair glared down through the doubled barred nineties aviator frames.

  She didn’t know him. She didn’t recognize his face.

  “Lets not talk about Megan. Lets talk about you. You toy with people’s minds all day long. You think you have the upper hand.” As he spoke to her, he punctuated his words with the knife. “Because you’ve studied the brain doesn’t mean you have any idea what’s going on inside the minds of your play toys. I’m the smartest Warden there ever was. I’ve gotten all you murderers off the street for the greater good of the rest of humanity.”

  “I never killed anyone.”

  “Quiet!”

  She shivered in her restraints at his outburst, which only pulled them tighter. She realized she was in some sort of mechanism. A trap. Just like one set for an insect or vermin. Quicksand. The more you struggled, the tighter the restraints. She couldn’t move any more, or the straps would cut into her skin.

  He leaned back and watched, then smirked as if he were proud of his work. Proud of his control.

  Raine struggled inside herself to find the strength to figure out what to do next. She had a lot of training in how to deal with clients and patients who lost it. She’d been highly qualified to work with unstable people, people that needed help. That’s what she did for a living. That’s what she dedicated her life to. In order to survive this, she needed look past fear and use her training.

  This man was delusional. He needed help. She’d been told to shut up, but she wanted to try one last thing. “We can get through this. You are not alone,” she breathed.

  When he didn’t respond right away, her mind took off, considering his possible reactions. She always thought the absolute worst until she got a response.

  “Dr. Batterman used to say that. But he is not my friend. He was toying with my mind too, trying to make me take drugs, just like you do to other people.”

  There was the answer she’d been looking for. “Dr. Batterman… you know Troy then? The sandalwood… Were you—were you one of Troy’s clients?” She began to put it all together.

  The knife dropped to the floor with a clatter. Raine shut her eyes, turned her head, and exhaled.

  The Warden bent down quickly, revealing the balding spot on the top of his head, and picked it back up. He laid it on the table next to her leg.

  She felt the cool, flat blade against her thigh; just another reminder of how little physical control she had. But she still had her mind, unlike many of the prisoners above her, who had been there too long and already lost the hope of surviving. She wasn’t going to be one of them. She needed to fight, just like she had her whole life.

  When he didn’t respond to her question, she gathered it must have been true. He had seen her go in and out of the office, and who knew how long he’d been watching her as Troy drilled into his brain.

  She tried to change the subject to keep him engaged. “The prison. It’s impressive.”

  The Warden shifted on his feet and scratched the tiny prickles of white hair on his chin.

  She thought she saw the hint of a smile, as though he hadn’t expected her to flatter him. She suspected this had been the trap Megan fell into as a method of survival. Flatter him. Raine needed to get out of here, and since she was limited in what she could physically do, she was going to have to talk her way out of it. “Why the prison, though?” she asked. “Why the guards?”

  “Because I’m doing it better. I’ve recreated the great experiment. The experiment I wasn’t allowed to partake in. It was cut short, but my—my experiment will prove human behavior to the world. It will prove that you don’t know what you would do until you are in the situation. The guards. I don’t tell them how to do their job. I don’t tell them to beat the prisoners, or throw them in solitary confinement. They act on their own.”

  She actually did find that interesting. The guards acted how they thought the Warden wanted them to act, to avoid the consequences. So his so called experiment was tainted.

  Her thoughts drifted from the guards to the prisoners. These were good people, stolen from their lives. These were not murderers, yet they were treated like criminals. Was this the reason many of them had given up?

  Were jails like this in real life? Why did people play the role of their own accord? Because that’s what society expected of them? As a psychologist, she was expected to be the levelheaded, sound, anxiety-free one. “You’re talking about the prison experiment done at Stanford in the seventies? What do you mean you weren’t allowed to take part in it?”

  The Warden backed up to the wall, leaned against it, and slid down to the floor.

  Raine relaxed a bit as she saw him settle into his thoughts. This could be either good or bad for her. Keep the conversation moving, just keep it moving. Keep him busy. She ran those thoughts over and over in her head.

  “I was a student at community college back in 1971, when I saw the ad in the paper. $15 a day. That was a lot. I applied. I interviewed. They didn’t choose me. Said I showed too many signs of emotional instability.”

  “So you created your own experiment?” she whispered, looking at him as he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

  “You’re not as stupid as you look.”

  The words were chilling, but she put up the wall in her mind. She didn’t allow his words to penetrate her. “Why did you choose me? Why not take Troy?” She thought she’d try and ask.

  He contemplated. Then he stood up quicker than she was expecting, and grabbed the knife from the table. He moved up to her face, just inches away. He used the blade to gently push back a section of her hair, revealing the bloody gash at her hairline. “Because you think you don’t deserve this.”

  She watched him scan her injury, then look down into her eyes. “Nobody deserves this,” she said, looking directly back at him, not knowing if that was a mistake.

  “Humanity does. All of this, for the cause.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to stop her lip from quivering, and more tears from pooling. He was going to kill her. He had every intention of killing her when he strapped her to this table. Her last moments on Earth were going to be spent pleading with this madman.

  “I’ve been studying you, studying me.” he said in a low voice, chilling her.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked him. Her voice
trembled.

  “You’d like that, huh?” he laughed.

  She shook her head back and forth. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Interesting… the will. The human desire to survive. It’s a shame some of your patients lack that. And you use it to your advantage.” He turned from the table and went to the area of the room above her head again.

  She couldn’t see what he was doing as he fidgeted with tools, clinking them together. She tensed. “If you kill me, then how will you conduct your experiment? You want to observe human behavior, right? How will you do that if you kill your inmates? Do you expect me to be a good little inmate? Everyone responds differently. Take a look at that original experiment in 1971. I studied it too. Did those boys all comply? Did none of them fight back?”

  He didn’t respond.

  She hoped it was because he was contemplating what she said.

  He came back around to her side with a syringe, a needle that looked thicker and longer than any she’d ever seen. He poked it into a vial of clear liquid, then tossed the now empty container into the corner of the room.

  She squeezed her eyes shut when the vial shattered.

  The Warden twisted her forearm to face the ceiling. He slapped it, trying to raise a vein.

  “My family will be looking for me,” she warned.

  “No. No they won’t.”

  She shuddered. What did he do to them? What did he do to my family? She instantly thought of the nice guard’s family, and his biggest fear.

  He set the needle down on the table next to her. The syringe was touching her bare skin. She tensed up. She needed to buy more time.

  The Warden moved out of her line of sight and returned with an electronic tablet. He poked the screen for a moment, his face illuminated by the light.

  She saw a reflection of flames in his eyes before he turned the image for her to see.

  It was a car. Her car. In flames. The red, orange, and black licked the vehicle and twisted in every direction as a camera panned over to a fire safety vehicle arriving at the scene. A reporter hunched over in front of the camera with her microphone, rapidly speaking words that Raine could not hear. But the banner was vivid underneath the clip, “Deadly Car Fire on Outer Road”.

  He ripped the screen back from her gaze and swiped his finger on the touch pad. He read from an article, “Woman’s car crashed in a suburban backwoods outside of the Bay Area. Car fire. Body badly burned. Authorities are looking into dental fragments to identify the body, but the car is registered to a Dr. Raine Walsh, 28, psychologist.”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But as he spoke the words, the colors of the memory became vivid in her mind. This entire time she had no clue how she’d gotten here. Now it started to become clear once more. It was her facing her trauma, as she had helped so many of her clients before.

  “Nobody is looking for you, because they are grieving your death.”

  FIFTEEN

  It was a violent torrential rain. Clutching the wheel. Lights in the rearview mirror. Blinding white lights. Screeching tires on the smeared wet pavement. The grinding of metal. Pain. Red. Flickering red and orange and yellow. And then a man. Help.

  The ice sunk into the glass and floated back to the top. Raine added a few more cubes to each before picking up the cocktails and carrying them out of Marcus’s kitchen, into the family room.

  “Thank you.” He took the glass from her, sipped it, and set it on the coffee table.

  She leaned over and slid a coaster under it. Habit.

  “I don’t know what you’re so worried about. I’m cool with just doing what we’re doing. As long as there are boundaries. I enjoy spending time with you, you know that. Obviously I’m into you. I’d like something more. But, I also understand.”

  She smoothed her hair up into a ponytail and tied it with the black hair tie from her wrist. “I just… I don’t know. I think we complicated things when we slept together,” she said quietly, picking her glass back up and taking a big swig of the clear liquid that stung her throat as it went down.

  “You didn’t enjoy it?” Marcus leaned back in the couch.

  “It’s not that.” She laughed under her breath. “We work together. We have a history. We’ve been close friends since college.”

  “Please don’t give me the line that you don’t want to ruin our friendship. Anything but that.”

  She tilted her head. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “And how would you feel if you saw me with another girl?”

  She thought about it, and shook her head. “I’d hate it.”

  “Hm. So you don’t want me, but you don’t want anyone else to have me?”

  He had a point. She sighed. “Can I just ask that we step back then? No more complications. No gray areas.”

  “Anything you want. If you want to be just friends, then lets be just friends. If it’s what I have to do in order to spend time with you outside of work, then I’m cool with that.”

  She turned and searched his face. Was he?

  He was calm and collected, as always.

  “But I don’t want it to just be what I want.” She downed the rest of her drink.

  He smiled. “It’s not complicated, Raine. I can do the friend thing. It’s okay.”

  She nodded.

  He reached for her glass and stood up, walking towards the tiny kitchen. “Is that all you wanted to talk about tonight?” he asked. “I can tell something’s wrong. And I know it’s not just our relationship status.” He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Yeah… uh, have you talked to Troy at all?”

  “Aw shit, is he still giving you trouble?” The glass

  slipped from his hand into the sink.

  Raine adjusted herself on the couch. “He stayed late one

  night when I did. I didn’t know he was still in the office.”

  Marcus leaned against the kitchen sink and crossed his arms over his chest. “What did he do?” His voice was low.

  “Well he—he manipulated me into giving him a private a yoga class.“

  “Seriously?”

  “Well it didn’t last long. I caught him staring and he made an inappropriate comment about my ass.”

  Marcus threw his hands in the air. “All right, that’s it.” He reached for his phone on the end table.

  Raine stood and held her hands out in front of her. “Hey it’s okay. I don’t want to upset you. It was just uncomfortable and I told Melita about it, she thought I should tell you.”

  “Yeah, no. Raine.” He stepped into her arms.

  She wrapped them around him, embracing him.

  “I’m upset because you had to go through that. I don’t want you to think… well I mean I’ve made comments about your ass before. I’ll stop. I’m sorry.”

  She backed up. “There’s a difference, Marcus. It’s okay for you to say something like that because I let you. It’s consent. I did not give Troy my permission and he knows it.”

  Marcus nodded. “We’re going to do something about this, okay? How about we all sit down and have a conference. We can invite Sylvie to take notes. Lets try to talk this out, and if nothing changes after that, we call the authorities and get the hell out.”

  Raine nodded. “Okay.” She watched Marcus cross over to the window. “I should probably get going.”

  “You realize there’s a storm passing through right now? It’s really coming down out there. Maybe you should wait.” He peered around the curtains to the darkness outside.

  “Naw, I’ll be fine.” She smoothed out the fabric of her magenta shirt.

  “You know I have room here for you to sleep. You take the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  That was almost enough to convince her. It was late. It was storming. The safer choice would be to just stay the night an
d leave in the morning. “I don’t want Viona to be by herself tonight. She hates thunderstorms. I’ve driven in storms before, I’ll be okay.” This was the truth. If she hadn’t lived alone, if she’d had a roommate to let her dog out when she couldn’t make it back home because of a terrible storm, she wouldn’t have to worry. “I’ll see you later.” She turned to grab her purse, and looked over her shoulder to smile at him.

  He rounded the couch and walked with her to the door of his apartment, opening it and holding it for her. “Drive safe, okay? Text me when you make it home.”

  “Will do.” Normally, they would kiss, but this time she felt weird about it. She just patted his chest with her hand and turned to leave. “Have a good night, Marcus.” She smiled at him and headed down the hall to the stairs.

  Outside, Raine tucked her chin to her chest and burst out from under the awning. She’d already hit the button on her key fob. Her car headlights blinked twice and she reached out for the door handle, whipped open the driver’s side door, and thrust herself into the seat. She shut the door behind her and breathed out into the car, allowing her whole body to shiver. She locked the doors, dropped her purse on the passenger seat, and shoved the key into the ignition. The engine revved.

  It was just rain, cold drops that plummeted down like needles on the pavement and smeared her windshield. She sat in Marcus’s apartment parking lot, getting her bearings and waiting for the defroster to kick on. She didn’t catch the news that there’d be a big storm passing through the area. She looked at the radio clock. It was a little past 11:30, almost midnight. The only thing she had on her side was that hopefully other people were smarter than her and would stay home. It was to her advantage that not many other people should be on the road.

  She reached into her purse, pulled out her cell phone, and dropped it on the driver’s seat between her legs. It was her safety blanket. She used the thing for directions, to call for help if she had car troubles, etc. She’d become more and more dependent on it. But with a night like tonight, she liked to know that she wasn’t alone; that there was help just on the other side of that device if she needed it.