“I think it hurts a little now too. Even though you know where it’s coming from this time.”
“Knowing something intellectually is one thing.” Samantha’s smile twisted. “Feelings are something else again. Anyway, I’m not asking him to love me, I just need him to trust me.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Yes,” Samantha answered instantly.
“Even though he walked out on you last time? How is that possible?”
Slowly, Samantha replied, “I’ve trusted him from the moment we met. What I trust is that he won’t lie to me and that he’d be there if I needed him.”
Jaylene shook her head. “Then you’re a better woman than I am. The last time I was dumped, it wasn’t nearly as public as what you went through—and I very nearly got a buddy in the IRS to audit him for the previous ten years.”
Samantha smiled, but said, “You wouldn’t have done that.”
“Maybe not. But maybe I would have, if more than my pride had been hurt.”
Refusing to admit anything of her own feelings, Samantha merely said, “As your Bishop is so fond of saying, some things have to happen just the way they happen.”
“Is fond of saying?”
Samantha lifted her eyebrows inquiringly. “Has he stopped saying it?”
“No,” Jaylene replied after a moment.
“Didn’t think so. I got the impression it was practically his mantra.”
Jaylene eyed her. “Umm. Listen, getting back to the subject of you needling Luke, I gather your plan is to force him to break through whatever that barrier is and find out what’s on the other side.”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, well, my advice is to be careful. We build walls for reasons, and the reasons tend to be painful. Force somebody to deal with that pain before they’re ready to, and you risk a mental breakdown. Force a psychic to deal with buried traumas, with all the extra electromagnetic energy in our brains, and you risk a literal short circuit that can put them—him—beyond anyone’s reach. For good.”
“I know,” Samantha said.
Bishop had told her.
She found him in the storage room of the sheriff’s department garage where the glass-and-steel tank was being kept. He was alone and in one hand held a copy of the taunting note the kidnapper had sent him that morning. His gaze moved from the note to the tank and back again.
Samantha came only a step into the room, and asked quietly, “What are they telling you? The note, the tank?”
“That he’s a sick bastard,” Lucas replied without turning to face her.
“Besides that.”
His gaze went to the tank once more, and he said in a distant tone, “We found several hairs inside the tank, at least a few of them not Lindsay’s. I just checked with Quantico, and DNA tests confirmed they belonged to a victim killed in this part of the country some months ago. A woman of Asian descent. Drowned.”
“I doubt he missed those hairs.”
“So do I. We—I—was meant to find them.”
Samantha glanced at the tank, then back at his profile. “What does that tell you?”
“That he used this tank before. Maybe here, or maybe he has some means of transport; there was certainly no evidence it was constructed up at that old mine. Wherever he used it, when his victim was dead, he removed her and left her where she was found—along a creek bed more than fifty miles from here.”
“So . . . chances are Metcalf isn’t being threatened with drowning.”
“No. I haven’t checked to be sure, but memory says at least three of the previous victims, counting the woman, were drowned. Lindsay makes four. I don’t know if he had this tank all along or built it at some point in order to better control his victims.”
“And to terrify them.”
“Yes. And that.”
“But now you have it. So maybe he’s lost—or given up—one of his murder machines. What does he have left?”
His jaw tightening, Lucas said, “Mitchell Callahan wasn’t the only victim to be decapitated. Two others were as well.”
“So he has a guillotine.”
“It looks that way.”
“What else?”
“Three were exsanguinated. A very sharp knife to one or both jugular veins.”
“I suppose one could build a machine to do that.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“By my count we’ve covered nine or ten of the victims. What about the others?”
“Three were asphyxiated. Not manually.”
Samantha had spent too much time considering this not to have a suggestion. “The easiest way to smother someone, slowly, over a period of time, and inflicting the maximum amount of terror . . . would be to bury them alive.”
“I know.”
“So a box somewhere, a coffin, buried in the ground. Reusable.”
“Probably more than one,” Lucas said, still remote. “It’s the easiest to recreate. Just a wooden box and a hole in the ground, nothing fancy. And no timer required. Just cover the box with dirt, bury it. Let the air run out. Put in a canister of oxygen if you want to extend the available air a bit.”
“That leaves two or three victims. How did they die?”
“I don’t know. In those cases, the remains were left out in the elements long enough to leave us very little; no cause of death could be determined with any certainty. They might have been asphyxiated or exsanguinated or drowned. We don’t know.”
Samantha frowned slightly at that distant tone, but all she said was, “So you know he has at least three machines—or methods—of killing remotely still available to him. That’s assuming, of course, that he doesn’t resort to quicker, up-close-and-personal methods, like a gun or a knife.”
Lucas nodded. “Which, if we’re correct, means that right now Wyatt Metcalf is either staring up at a guillotine, trying to claw his way out of a box in the ground, or trying not to get his throat cut.”
“Where is he, Luke?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because you can’t feel him.”
He was silent.
“What about this kidnapper, this murderer? Can’t you feel him? I mean, he certainly seems to have crawled inside your head over the last year and a half.”
Lucas swung around to face her, his face tense. “You don’t have to tell me that I’ve failed at every turn,” he said, far less remote now.
“That’s not what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Oh—right. I’m closed up. ‘Tight as a drum,’ I think you said.”
“That’s what I said. Want to deny it?”
“Samantha, I’m investigating an abduction. A series of them. I’m doing my job. Either help me, or else get the hell out of my way.”
Samantha allowed a long moment to pass, then said simply, “Okay, Luke.” She turned around and left the storage room, and the garage.
He didn’t follow her.
She wasn’t crazy about walking through the sheriff’s department unescorted. None of the cops had said anything to her directly that was openly hostile, but she could feel the stares and the simmering anger. The few who believed she might actually be psychic were angry because she couldn’t instantly tell them where their sheriff was, and the majority were convinced she was somehow to blame for all of this. They didn’t know how, but she was a handy target.
Samantha didn’t really blame them for that reaction; she had seen it before, time and time again; being someone who could always be classed under the heading of “different,” she had learned through bitter experience that people were seldom rational when bad things started happening in their lives.
But understanding that didn’t make it any more comfortable to walk through a building knowing stares and muttered comments lay in your wake. It was only a matter of time, she knew, until the hostility became open. Unless, of course, she proved herself. Unless she helped find their sheriff.
Samantha thought about that as she worked her way
through the building and back upstairs. In the vision that had brought her here, she didn’t think this had happened, the sheriff being taken. So the question was, why had it happened this time, with her in the . . . game?
And what could she do about it?
She paused at the conference-room door only long enough to speak to Jaylene. “I’m headed back to the carnival.”
Surprised, the other woman said, “Alone?”
“Looks like. I’d stay if I thought I could help, but the only thing I seem to be doing around here is making all the cops even more tense.”
“Most of them won’t be here much longer,” Jaylene pointed out. “Search teams. We still have that list of remote places to check and double-check.”
“Still.”
“There’s media camped outside. Even more than before, with news of the sheriff’s abduction out.”
“I know.” Samantha hesitated, then said, “I may stop and have a word with them. Luke and I might have been spotted this morning, coming in together, even though it was early. If it comes to that, he could have been seen at the carnival last night, hanging around my booth.”
“And you think you can head off speculation?” Jaylene was skeptical. “Sort of doubt it, Sam.”
“I’m just a bit curious to find out what’s in their suspicious little minds—before the next edition of the newspaper hits the streets, or the six o’clock news on TV.”
“Throwing gasoline on a fire.”
“Maybe. Or maybe water.”
“Luke won’t like it.”
“He’s so pissed at me right now he won’t notice. Unless somebody points it out.”
The two women gazed at each other for a long moment, and then Samantha smiled and retreated.
Staring after her, Jaylene murmured, “So I need to trust you too, huh, Sam? I wonder if I do? I wonder if I even agree that shaking up Luke might be the best thing for him and the case.” She got up, adding under her breath, “Shake nitro, and it blows up in your face. Something to keep in mind.”
Then she went in search of Luke.
13
Caitlin had considered leaving her small motel room several times that morning, especially when one of the “local” channels she was almost watching broke the news of Sheriff Metcalf’s disappearance and probable abduction. But the most she had done was drive to the nearby café to have coffee and one of their huge cinnamon buns while her room was being cleaned.
The two deputies still watching her—or quite likely a new pair on the day shift—kept within her sight but didn’t go into the café, and she had to wonder how upset they were over having watchdog duty when they undoubtedly wanted to be in on the hunt for their sheriff.
She could sympathize, at least with having to sit around and basically do nothing. It was not fun.
She returned to her room, which now smelled strongly of antiseptic, and resigned herself to a boring day. Dumb soaps on TV, or movies so old they could only be scheduled in the morning dead zone, or news or weather—those seemed to be her main choices for entertainment.
“I need to go to a bookstore,” Caitlin said aloud. “God knows how long it’ll take the cops to let me back into the apartment so I can do what I have to do there. If I’m going to be stuck here for much longer—”
The television abruptly went out.
Caitlin sat there frozen for what seemed like minutes, then said tentatively, “Lindsay?”
The surprise she felt in that moment, oddly enough, had less to do with the possibility that her dead sister was trying to communicate with her than it did the timing. For some reason, she had it in her head that the spirits were abroad in the wee hours of the night or at least after dark, not in the middle of the morning.
Which assumption, she thought, might not be so far off, as the minutes passed and nothing else happened.
“Lindsay?” she repeated, beginning to feel foolish. And beginning to wonder how soon she could get her only line to entertainment repaired.
Quite abruptly, the lights went out. And since Caitlin had drawn the heavy drapes over the single wide window, the darkness was complete.
“What the hell?” she muttered. She got up out of the chair, hesitated, and took a step toward the nightstand and the dark lamp.
Something touched her shoulder.
Caitlin whirled around, trying to see—and seeing nothing. “Lindsay? Dammit, Lindsay, you got my attention, you don’t have to scare the shit out of me!”
She stood there in the darkness, half mad and half scared, and wondered suddenly if she had imagined that touch. Surely she had. Surely.
Because there was nothing after death, nothing, and wishing there was didn’t make it so. Lindsay couldn’t be trying to communicate with her, because Lindsay was dead, dead and gone, with all the rest only a figment of her guilty and grieving imagination—
She heard a faint scratching sound that made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.
Long seconds passed, only the soft scratching disturbing the silence.
Then, abruptly, the lights came back on. With a click, the TV also came back on. The very normal sound of human voices filled the silence.
Caitlin stood frozen, blinking for a moment in the sudden light before her gaze focused on the nightstand. Even without moving closer, she could see that the notepad lying there had something written on it.
Before the lights went out, it had been blank.
She drew a breath and went over to the nightstand, picking up the notepad with shaking hands.
HELP THEM, CAIT
HELP THEM FIND WYATT
YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU THINK
“Miss Burke, is it true you helped the police locate the body of Detective Lindsay Graham?”
“No, it is not true,” Samantha answered the reporter calmly. “Solid police work located Detective Graham.”
“Not in time to save her life,” somebody muttered.
“The killer meant her to die. That’s what killers do. It’s obviously a mistake to think of this . . . person . . . as anything other than a cold-blooded murderer.” Again, Samantha was calm, her tone even. She stood on the top step of the front entrance of the sheriff’s department and looked at the small herd of media eager to hear whatever she had to say.
No TV media, thank goodness. She wondered how long her luck on that would hold out, how much time she had before she found herself starring in the six o’clock news. It had only been avoided this far because the “local” TV stations were nearly a hundred miles away in Asheville, and they’d had a few major crimes of their own on which to concentrate in the past few weeks. They had sent a reporter to cover the murders and kept fairly up to date on the facts of the investigation, but so far hadn’t ventured into speculation about the carnival or Golden’s visiting seer.
Heavy local coverage that did speculate in the print media was bad enough, but Samantha was prepared for that. If the regional television stations started paying real attention to the story, then it would be only a matter of time before everything hit the national spotlight—and the fan.
She was gambling that wouldn’t happen, even knowing that with every abduction and murder they were moving closer to a much larger and very unwelcome spotlight.
“Are you helping the police now, Miss Burke?” the first reporter asked. She had her little cassette recorder held high, and avid green eyes fixed on Samantha.
Aware of the door behind her opening, Samantha said deliberately, “That appears to be a question open to discussion, at the moment.”
“How could you help?” another reporter demanded, rather aggressively. “Look into your crystal ball?”
Samantha opened her mouth to reply just as Luke grasped her arm and turned her toward the door, saying to the reporters, “Miss Burke has nothing more to say. And you’ll be updated on the facts of the investigation when the sheriff’s department has information to share with you.”
A barrage of questions were yelled after them, but Lucas mere
ly pulled Samantha into the building and around a corner to be out of sight of the reporters before demanding, “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
He was pissed. And it showed.
Samantha eyed him for a moment, then held up her right hand to display the palm. If anything, the marks burned there by a steering wheel, a ring, and a spider-and-web pendant were even clearer than they had been before.
“Pity you stopped me,” she said mildly. “I was just about to show them this.”
“Why?” Lucas demanded.
She shrugged. “Well, the killer’s already watching me; I just thought it was time to give him some idea of what I can do.”
“Are you out of your mind? Jesus, Sam, why not just paint a bull’s-eye on your back?”
“And why not rattle the son of a bitch if we can? Why not make him wonder if maybe, just maybe, he’s not quite as in control of this little game of his as he thinks he is? Everything’s been going exactly as he planned so far, so maybe it’s time we changed that. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in chess to a wild card, but that’s me. And I say it’s time we let him know the rules just went right out the window.”
Lucas was about to say something in response to that—what, he wasn’t sure—when he realized, abruptly and belatedly, where they were. In the doorway of the bull pen.
He looked away from Samantha to find that every cop in the place was staring at them with open interest. And even though he felt some embarrassment over losing control, and more than a little anger at the moment, he also noticed that a few faces that had shown open hostility toward Samantha now appeared at least as thoughtful as they were unfriendly.
“When are the search parties going out?” he asked the chief deputy, whose desk was nearest the door.
Vance Keeter looked down at the clipboard in his hand as if it would answer, then said quickly, “Ten minutes, and everybody should be ready to go.”
“Good,” Lucas snapped, and headed down the hallway to the conference room, pulling Samantha along with him.
She allowed herself to be towed, a little amused and more than a little interested in this definitely less-controlled side of Lucas. Not that he needed to know that. So the moment they were in the conference room, she jerked her arm away.