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No Regrets

No Regrets

Titel: No Regrets Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Ann Rule
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there? What time do they get up? Are your conversations in the office automatically recorded? When does the morning shift come to work?”
    She told him the truth—that there were five residents and they didn’t usually wake up until after eight. The day shift counselor, Gracie,* came to work at 7:00 A.M.
    “And the recorder in the office?” John pushed.
    “There is no recorder in the office,” she said. “That would be illegal, don’t you think?”
    Kari sensed that her best approach would be to let John think she was on his side, or at least that she was treating him with respect. If anything, Mike was more nervous than John. Or maybe he was just a lousy driver. He swerved, driving so erratically that they either were going to end up in a ditch or, blessedly, would attract the eye of a cop in a squad car.
    John told her that they wanted to head for Reno, by way of Sacramento. “What’s the quickest way to get on the freeway?”
    For the life of her, Kari couldn’t visualize the roads nearby. She was still so frightened. They had turned left on West Texas from Ohio Street, and then right on Beck Avenue at her suggestion. But she’d made a mistake, and they couldn’t find an eastbound freeway entrance.
    “You’d better think quick,” John warned her again, “or you are dead.”
    Kari was too scared to think, her mind frozen with fear, and they got on the wrong side of the freeway—onto the lanes heading west toward Vallejo and San Francisco,
away
from Sacramento. Finally, Mike said he was going to get off the freeway and take surface roads. At least they would be heading east again toward Reno. Their trip was a comedy of errors, or would have been if it weren’t so menacing.
    Kari’s job and training demanded that she be competent about assessing people in a short time. Gradually, she found herself moving into her social-worker mode, still a victim certainly, but a woman who knew that her own survival depended on reading John and Mike correctly.
    “I quickly assessed John as emotionally unpredictable,emotionally unstable, and insecure about his own masculinity,” she says. She knew she had to avoid startling or frightening him, and, above all, should do nothing to undercut his tenuous grasp of his masculinity. That was easy in group therapy sessions—but infinitely more difficult when she herself was his captive.
    As they hurtled, willy-nilly, along the dark, almost deserted freeway, Kari tried to think. If they got her to a field, she was pretty sure they weren’t going to just let her out there. Alive, she would be a danger to them and their freedom.
    Back at Sancho Panza, Shelly Corelli worked desperately to get out of the twists and turns of the lamp cord and the drape sash that bound her. By wiggling and twisting, she managed to slip one wrist out, and then was able to use that hand to pull the cord off her foot. Kari and the men had been gone for about twenty minutes, and Shelly wasn’t sure where they were. For all she knew, they might still be out in front of Sancho Panza. She didn’t dare risk going out that way. And she didn’t want to stay around to use the phone. Instead, she crawled along the floor toward the rear of the building. She exited through a patio door and crept toward the fence. She pulled enough boards out so she could slide through. One of the counselors lived nearby, and Shelly ran to pound on Jack Owens’s* door.
    Woken from a sound sleep, Owens opened his door to see Shelly standing there, disheveled from crawling through the fence, the severed electric cord still hanging from one wrist.
    “They’ve got Kari,” she said. “We’ve got to call the sheriff!”
    Owens ran back to Sancho Panza and called the Solano County sheriff and Fairfield Police Department’s emergency lines.
    Along with Fairfield officer Fred Jones, the same trio of officers who had responded to the call for help with the suicidal resident only about an hour earlier were back. They had the advantage of having seen the men who had abducted Kari. But there was no sign of them or of Kari or her car now.
    An all-points bulletin was issued for the Ford Granada and its occupants. They all hoped that there were still
three
people in the car.
    The taller man—John Martin—
was
familiar to some of the counseling staff at Sancho Panza, and police learned that he had walked away from the Delancey Street facility in San Francisco without authorization only the night before. A look at his rap sheet

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