by Kay Hooper
“Do you expect him to be there?” Sam asked neutrally.
“Honestly? No. I expect that by now he knows Nessa’s escaped—whether he deliberately let her go or not—and that he’ll be watching from a safe distance. My only real concern is whether he has the place booby-trapped. We’ve never needed a bomb squad.”
“I can help you there,” Sam said.
Jonah eyed her. “You’re sort of handy to have around.”
“I have my moments. Our vests are in the SUV. Let’s go.”
EIGHTEEN
Jonah hadn’t known what to expect at the bottom of that long, long shaft into the earth. Nessa had tried to tell him, haltingly, but it was clear there was just something she couldn’t manage to tell him, something that horrified her exhausted little soul.
It might have been only the terrors of a little girl lost, but whatever it was, just her expression had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. So he’d exchanged his service weapon, a Glock .22, for the .44 Magnum he kept more as a showpiece—but also kept clean and oiled. And used at the shooting range whenever he used his service weapon.
The only one of the others to comment had been Samantha, who had said merely, “Looks like that cannon DeMarco carries.”
“It kicks like a mule,” was all Lucas said.
“I’ll say,” Sarah agreed, checking the load on her own Glock. “I fired the damned thing once at the range, and it knocked me on my ass. I don’t need anything that powerful.”
“Probably depends on what you’re aiming at,” Robbie murmured, envying the other woman her almost preternatural calm.
Sarah looked fairly rested, having logged, probably, a couple hours more sleep than Dante and Robbie, and she was most definitely ready to move, now that Nessa was safe and it seemed at least even odds they were going to find the others as well.
Safe and unharmed, they hoped.
They were all suited up in their body armor and armed, but they didn’t ride horses to meet the other two officers. Instead, Jonah’s Jeep was joined by four others from the police motor pool, and they loaded up and headed out in those.
Thunder rumbled about the time they turned off a paved road and onto a rutted track, and it was Samantha who asked, “Did anybody check the weather?”
Jonah, who was driving their Jeep in the lead, replied, “The worst of it’s supposed to hold off, except for the wind. But sometime after midnight, we’re gonna get slammed.”
There were still enough dead leaves from the winter past to be blowing across in front of them, and Jonah had the Jeep’s running lights on. Which helped more and more as the rutted road disappeared and he appeared to be following no more than a wide space between trees.
“I can see how you wouldn’t have to worry about kids coming out here,” Samantha said. “Spooky as hell. I know there’s a storm rumbling around, but . . . still.”
“This used to be fairly good riding on horseback,” he told her. “But the undergrowth got out of control and nobody wanted to keep up the trails. Land’s owned by a billionaire who also owns four or five mountains in the general area, and to his credit he wants to keep them wild. Hiking or riding is fine, but no lumber and no development.”
“Good for him,” Sam said.
“Yeah, I more or less agree with him. But a few hundred acres of this wilderness fall within my area of responsibility, so I’m really not keen on hikers or riders out this way.”
“Unless you send them,” Sam murmured as the headlights illuminated two clearly relieved uniformed police officers, who had their horses tied to trees just off the track. They were holding flashlights, and it was easy to see they’d been waving them around nervously until they saw the lights of vehicles approaching.
Jonah had gone over the plan with everyone, and everyone knew their part. There was no exit from this hole in the ground except the one they were going into.
They waited at the opening for just a couple of minutes, with Jonah and the other feds watching Sam. She swore under her breath, but said to Jonah, “No booby traps. No bombs.”
“Sam?”
She looked at her husband and partner briefly, then said to Jonah bleakly, “Go ahead and get EMS out here as quickly as you can. We’ll need five stretchers.”
“And five coffins?” Jonah asked steadily.
“No. No, they’re alive. Let’s go.”
He gave the order quickly, sending two officers back with one of the Jeeps to guide the EMS truck into the woods.
The first half-dozen people going in, which were Jonah, Sarah, and the agents, all had the big police spotlights that could be carried and gave off an amazing amount of light. They turned them on as soon as they started into the downward-slanting tunnel.
But within a very few steps, one by one they turned the lights off. Because there was light at the bottom of the tunnel.
Bright, bright light.
“It’s not a fire,” Lucas breathed. “Which means he wants us—you—to see his work.”
“Oh, Christ,” Jonah murmured.
“It isn’t what you think,” Sam said. “He didn’t physically torture them any more than he physically tortured Nessa.”
“Then—”
Jonah broke off as soon as he cleared the tunnel and stepped into the cavern. It wasn’t huge, maybe thirty feet from end to end, and about twenty feet across.
The lights had been placed with exquisite care, so that each of the missing people, watering eyes shut tight against the first light any of them had seen since they’d been brought here, weeks for some of them, were the inescapable focus.
Each of them sitting, unrestrained but unmoving, on upright wooden chairs. An IV pole beside each chair, the tubing from the bag snaking down and attached to the needles expertly placed in each victim’s arm. Unmoving. Unable to move.
Their pants and shorts, or panties, down around their ankles. And beneath them, fastened to the chairs they could not escape, were pots or bowls or buckets to catch their urine and feces.
“Oh, my God,” Jonah said, his voice hardly a whisper.
Lucas leaned over to say something to Sarah, and she immediately turned and began to herd the officers back up the tunnel. “We’ll need you later to help carry them,” she said, her voice breaking a little. “But not yet. Not just yet.”
“People always find new ways to torture each other,” Sam said. “Physically is the easy part. But mentally? Emotionally? How do you get over being abandoned in the darkness? Unable to move or speak even to call for help? How do you get over being so helpless that someone else has to empty— How do you get over that humiliation, that loss of dignity. How do you get over being so alone, and so untouched. For so long. Alone. In the dark.”
There was a moment of utter silence, and then they could all hear Amy Grimes mumbling to herself nothing that made sense. Nothing that would ever make sense.
“Let’s get some of these lights out,” Lucas suggested quietly. “Leave just enough for the medics to work by. And don’t break them. All these—all these people have bare feet.”
Jonah did his best not to look at them directly, as the level of light gradually diminished, but he eventually realized that none of them were going to open their eyes willingly. Not even Sean Messina, who had been taken barely a week before Nessa had.
None of them wanted to open their eyes even if they could. None of them wanted to believe in the voices they probably thought were imagined. None of them had it in them any longer to believe there could be anything else for them, ever, but the darkness.
—
WITH BOTH HANDS holding the hot coffee cup on the conference table in front of him, Dante said, “Nessa’s the only real survivor.” His voice was dull. “She wasn’t down there long enough. And she found her way out of the dark, on her own. That will count. That will mean something to her, some day in the
future if not now.”
Jonah looked across the table at the two most experienced profilers here. They were all here, the feds and Sarah, all with coffee they’d barely touched and eyes that didn’t want to meet anyone else’s. Every one of them had helped carry the stretchers up that long, dark tunnel, only then accepting the silent, respectful help of the officers waiting outside.
Jonah said, “I know enough about profiling to know it’s about damaged people and the reasons people have inside them that give them the ability to damage others. So tell me. How many of the five . . . survivors . . . we brought out of that place are going to have lives worth living?”
Sam was the first to meet his eyes, her own so dark, as dark as they’d been when he’d first met her, dark and unspeakably old in her urchin’s pale face.
She drew a breath and said, “Mrs. Lang’s baby may help her. The maternal instinct is strong enough to overcome almost anything. Amy Grimes is young, and the young are resilient. It depends on how strong her sense of self is. That’s true of all of them. But . . .”
“But?”
“The judge is never going to be the man you once knew, Jonah. He was a man of dignity, and he can never see himself that way again. If he even leaves the clinic, it’ll likely be to go to some kind of mental care facility or at least a residential medical care facility. Maybe Sean Messina too. His sense of self seemed to be very wrapped up in being strong, independent, able to handle himself and whatever else came along. But he couldn’t handle what happened to him. Even the ones that somehow manage to move on, even Nessa, will be marked forever by what they experienced down in that hole in the ground.”
“Because of me.”
She shook her head immediately. “No, because of someone with a sick and twisted mind who wanted to make you suffer. And not just by a blow dealt and then over with.”
“What do you mean?”
“He knows you, Jonah. He knows how you feel about this town, these people. Especially these people. You saved them. Every one of them owed their life to you.”
Jonah started to speak, but didn’t when she held up a hand.
“This is important. This is why everything has happened the way it has. He wants you to suffer. He wants you to spend the rest of your life suffering because of what happened to these people. And even wondering if they would have been better off if you hadn’t saved them in the first place. Blaming yourself for what happened to them. For the rest of your life. That’s what he wants, Jonah. That’s what he needs.”
Lucas nodded. “She’s right.”
Jonah finally took a drink of his coffee, vaguely aware that he had the wrong order, it was too sweet. Not that he cared. “I just . . . I honestly can’t think of anyone who could hate me that much.”
“That’s because he doesn’t hate you,” Luke said.
“What? All that—and he doesn’t hate me?”
“If he hated you,” Robbie said slowly, “it would have been you down there.” She glanced at Luke, who nodded.
“Exactly. He doesn’t want to torture you, he wants to watch you torture yourself.”
“I still don’t—”
“Think,” Samantha urged. “He isn’t someone on the periphery of your life the way we originally thought. At least he wasn’t always. He looked up to you somehow, admired you. But then something happened. Something happened to him, just like it happened to those six other people. Only for whatever reason, you didn’t save him. Maybe you couldn’t. Or maybe you made a choice, and saved somebody else.
“Think, Jonah. You know who this is. Whatever happened to him was so traumatic it turned a normal man into a monster. And he blames you.”
Sarah caught her breath audibly. “Jonah.”
“You know who it is?”
She looked at him, white-faced. “You said it yourself. That maybe you shouldn’t have gotten him out of there. Because of all the pain. Months and months in the burn ward out in Nashville. Horrible, disfiguring scars. And then . . .”
It was Sam who asked. “What happened then? He survived the burns?”
Sarah was looking at Jonah as if she couldn’t look away. “One of the few really bad car crashes we’ve had here. Five years ago. Bast—Sebastian Gettys. He was driving too fast and missed a curve. Swerved, hit a culvert, and the car flipped. He’d been on his way home to cut the grass, and he had a can of gasoline in the back, a can with a loose lid. And the car had a faulty wire, one they’d recall the model for just the next year. The fire was . . . God, the fire. It was an inferno.
“We could hear the fire truck coming, but he was screaming.” Sarah closed her eyes briefly. “I can still hear that screaming sometimes in my mind. You couldn’t stand it. You grabbed a big wrench from your Jeep and somehow pulled the door open. He must have managed to get the seat belt undone, but he was still screaming, beating at the flames.”
“You had a blanket ready,” Jonah said numbly.
“We covered him, and smothered the flames. I’ll never forget that horrible smell of burned flesh. And I’ll never forget . . . when the EMS tech looked at him. You just . . . knew . . .”
“That I should have let him die,” Jonah said.
“Your hands were bandaged for weeks,” Sarah said.
Jonah looked down at strong hands unmarked, and said, “Surface burns. And I never scar. I didn’t have a mark on me. But Bast . . .”
Sam waited a moment, then asked, “When did he come back to Serenity?”
“About a year ago,” Jonah answered. “I went to see him, but he made it plain he really didn’t want company. The car company had settled a fortune on him, took care of all his hospital bills. Set him up in a nice house just on the edge of town, with a great view. And a live-in caretaker.”
“Because of the burns?” Sam asked.
“Some of his fingers had . . . fused.” Jonah was still looking down at his own hands. “It was difficult for him to do some things. So she cooked and did the housekeeping. Supposed to keep him company, but he didn’t want her . . . hovering. He could walk fine even though he limped, and sometimes at night he’d walk around, places he knew he wouldn’t run into anybody else. He said he didn’t need anybody else. He said he liked the night. He felt normal in the dark.”
Lucas knew there was more. “Something else happened, didn’t it? To Bast? Something that was . . . unfair? Something recent?”
“A stressor,” Samantha said. “A final straw, something that set him off.”
“Some people just . . . have the worst luck,” Jonah said slowly. “The worst. He fell one day about four months ago. Just lost his balance and fell. So his caretaker called the doctor, over his objections. Within days he was back in Nashville for more tests.”
When he fell silent, Sarah said, “We probably wouldn’t have known until the end, if Bast had his way, but the doctors here had to know. And his caretaker. It was an inoperable tumor in his brain. They gave him six months. He didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. And people did tend to avoid him if they could. Because there were changes right away. Small, at first. Losing his temper. Muttering to himself as he walked. We all tried to talk to him, but he’d just walk away. Into the dark.”
Jonah drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I saved his life. So he could spend years in a hell of agony, and then die with cancer eating at his brain.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Sarah said.
“I don’t think that’s much of an excuse,” Jonah said.
Samantha leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Jonah. Whatever happened to him, whatever he went through because you pulled him from a burning car, he went through because you weren’t prepared to let him die without trying to save him. There’s nothing wrong in that. It’s one of the best instincts any human being can possess.”
“Tell that to the six people he punished for it.”
“He didn’t punish them for that,” Sam said.
Jonah frowned at her.
“You saved those six people, and their lives were just fine. They were alive because of you. He was alive because of you. But then he got cancer.” She shook her head. “A doctor would know better, but I’m guessing where the cancer is, its location in his brain, is the reason why it’s affected him the way it has. He needed someone to blame. He wanted someone to suffer. And while he was dealing with all that, he discovered that the tumor in his brain had given him something. Something special. A . . . final gift from a mocking fate.”
“He was psychic,” Jonah said.
—
BAST HAD THOUGHT it would be enough to watch Jonah suffer. He knew Jonah had suffered, was probably still suffering, but . . . that wasn’t really what he was thinking about now.
Things kept getting mixed up in his mind. He wasn’t even sure why he’d tried to make the telepath kill her partner. Except, maybe . . . he was jealous? No. Beauty and the Beast, that was just a fairy tale. But whenever he touched her mind, he felt . . . so much power. Power he didn’t think even she was aware of.
He thought . . .
He wondered . . . if maybe she could heal him. If all that power she had could burn away this cancer growing in his brain. Before his skull burst open like an overripe melon.
It felt like that sometimes.
The pressure. The pain. The almost overwhelming urge to find a knife or a chisel and dig it all out of his brain.
Maybe she could do that.
Maybe . . . she was the answer to his prayers.
—
LUCAS SAID, “BRAIN tumors have been known to trigger psychic abilities. But it isn’t a . . . normal trigger, for want of a better word. Instead of concentrating the ability, a tumor can disperse or diffuse it. It’s unreliable, even more so than usual with a new psychic. It can be erratic, like a lightbulb getting brighter just before it burns out.”
“He was able to control six people,” Jonah said.
“Control is probably too strong a word. It was more like he . . . sent a jolt of power into each of their minds. The initial jolts allowed him to control them, just for a few minutes. Just long enough. Once he had them down in that cavern, I think he gave them another jolt—and drugs in those IVs. Not just nutrients.
