Wait for Dark

by Kay Hooper

  Titles by Kay Hooper

  Bishop / Special Crimes Unit novels

  HAVEN

  HOSTAGE

  HAUNTED

  FEAR THE DARK

  WAIT FOR DARK

  The Bishop Files novels

  THE FIRST PROPHET

  A DEADLY WEB

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Kay Hooper

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hooper, Kay, author.

  Title: Wait for dark / Kay Hooper.

  Description: New York : Berkley, 2017. | Series: A Bishop/SCU novel ; 5

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016046729 (print) | LCCN 2016055946 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780425280942 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698194007 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bishop, Noah (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Government

  investigators—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—North Carolina—Fiction.

  | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police

  Procedural. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3558.O587 W35 2017 (print) | LCC PS3558.O587 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046729

  First Edition: March 2017

  Cover photograph of room with the window open by Vasilyev Alexandr / Shutterstock Images; Photograph of red shoe by Africa Studio / Shutterstock Images

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Titles by Kay Hooper

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  Special Crimes Unit Agent Bios

  Psychic Terms and Abilities

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  Clarity, North Carolina

  July

  It didn’t seem like a big deal when Clara Adams saw, a couple of blocks ahead of her car, what looked like a child playing in the center of the road, almost directly under a streetlight. Dumb, but no big deal, after all.

  Idiot kid, playing in the street. Where are the idiot parents?

  She put her foot on the brake pedal, already mentally rehearsing what she wanted to say to the kid.

  The pedal went all the way to the floor. And the car didn’t even slow down.

  Clara hadn’t been going very fast since the downtown speed limit was only twenty and rose only to thirty-five in the residential areas surrounding downtown. But as she gripped her steering wheel in growing horror, her foot pumping the unresponsive brake pedal, she realized that the car was not only not slowing—it was gaining speed.

  She pressed frantically at the car’s horn button, but there was no response. Pushed the button for the car’s emergency flashers and, again, no response. No way to warn the little boy, whom she could see more clearly now, playing contentedly with a toy dump truck. Even with no one else in sight, she tried to lower the car’s window so she could yell a warning at the child. But that didn’t work either. Even the steering wheel was fighting her.

  As if the car wanted to run over the boy.

  The needle on the speedometer inched higher, matching the blue numbers in the digital readout that were inexorably climbing as the car’s speed increased.

  Clara had no more than seconds to choose between horrible alternatives, and all she knew for sure was that she could not run over a child. So she used all her strength to wrench the resisting steering wheel to the right, trying to aim the car between two others parked at the side of Main Street just before the next intersection. Beyond them was a construction site, as one of the businesses set back from the street was being given a facelift.

  A stack of lumber, she thought, was probably the most forgiving barrier she could see.

  The car turned—but just enough to avoid the child, shooting past the opening between the two parked cars, crossing into the empty intersection, and then, engine screaming, speed increasing, plowing headfirst into the thick iron post that held the streetlight out over the lanes.

  Clara never heard the awful crunch of metal or the screaming engine dying with a sputter. She never heard the car’s horn begin to screech, or smelled the gasoline.

  Or saw the first flickering flames.

  A blessing, most said later, when word got around. That she never saw. Never knew. A true blessing.

  —

  THE LITTLE BOY stood up, holding his dump truck, and looked with a singular lack of expression at the wreck no more than fifty yards away from him. Then he turned, still expressionless, and walked away, unnoticed by the people spilling out of restaurants and the businesses that were still open, uninterested in their cries of horror, their frantic shouts for someone to call 911.

  He stopped briefly on the sidewalk, an expression of confusion passing suddenly over his face. He heard the shouts and the first sounds of emergency-response people and vehicles, and looked over his shoulder to see flames shooting into the air. It was all he could see, really, because of all the parked cars and all the people.

  He wanted to drop his toy and run in that direction along with everyone else, wanted to see what had happened. It looked awfully interesting, and different for Clarity, where nothing ever really happened.

  He hesitated only because he had a strong feeling his ma would not be happy about him near a fire.

  And now that he thought about it, why was he here? Hadn’t he gone to bed? It had to be late, or at least it felt late, and he could have sworn he had gotten into his pajamas and gone to bed—

  “Sean.”

  He didn’t even have a chance to look up before a large, heavy hand gripped his shoulder. And for an instant, things whirled and flipped inside his head, making him dizzy.

  The sounds down the street died into a peaceful silence, and he realized he just wanted to go home. To go home and . . . and slip in through the side yard to the window into the laundry room, the one with the broken lock.

  It was the way he always slipped in and out of the house whenever he wanted to break one of his ma’s rules or just sneak out to join friends even if he was grounded.

  He got grounded a lot.

  “Time for bed, Sean.”

>   Yes . . . that was it, that was where he was supposed to be. In bed. He’d leave his dump truck outside near the driveway, where his ma would expect to find it. And then he’d get back into his pajamas and go to bed.

  “It’s just a dream, Sean. Just a dream. You’re fine. You’re absolutely fine.”

  The soothing voice made sense, and Sean accepted the information it offered. He was asleep and dreaming.

  He just needed to go get back into bed so when he woke up, he’d know for sure he’d been dreaming.

  “I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine,” he murmured.

  The heavy hand fell away from his shoulder, and eight-year-old Sean Brenner walked away into the unusually cool evening.

  He didn’t look back.

  ONE

  August

  Thursday

  “Accident,” Deputy Emma Fletcher said, her tone that of someone who had convinced herself of truth.

  Sheriff Malachi Gordon frowned at her. “Yeah? And how many years has Brady Nash used his harvester without getting thrown out of a closed cab and into the teeth of the machine?”

  Emma winced, even though describing it, she thought, was never going to have the shock value of seeing . . . what was left of a man she had grown up knowing. Spread out behind the machine in a bloody trail of . . . shreds of flesh and jarringly white shards of bone mixed in with the ripped brown stalks and leaves of corn. Like some obscene salad.

  Emma fought a sudden urge to gag and silently told herself to stop with the gross mental images.

  “Well?” Mal demanded.

  Grateful, she dragged her mind back to being a cop. “I don’t know. A lot of years. Since I was a kid. I remember seeing him plowing his fields in the spring to plant. Harvesting in the summer and into early fall, sometimes late fall. Plowing everything under after the harvest to get ready for winter. He got older and older, but he never seemed to get any slower.” She scowled at him. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “Just wondering how long it’s taken you to convince yourself this was an accident.”

  “All morning,” she confessed.

  Mal took a couple of steps back away from the front of the hulking machine until he could look behind it, at the trail of mangled and bloody cornstalks and shreds of human flesh that stretched back for at least a hundred feet.

  “No sign it even slowed down.”

  “I noticed. And he had to have . . . He must have gone into the blades way back there, or else there wouldn’t be . . . all the blood and stuff.” Field salad. People salad. Farm salad. Stop it! She added hurriedly, “And it’s a straight path; a car with nobody at the wheel definitely would have wandered left or right. Would a machine like this keep going in a straight line if it wasn’t being steered?”

  “No idea. I’d assume so, given ground this level.”

  “Even with the ruts?”

  “Especially with the ruts. This machine was designed for planted fields, and they’re rutted.” Mal shrugged.

  Emma cast about for some other question or tidbit of information she might have and came up empty. Too many questions and too little information. It was unusually cool for an August day even in the mountains; she told herself that was the reason why she had jammed both hands into the pockets of her uniform jacket.

  “Safety features,” Mal muttered. “Brady showed me once when I asked. The controls inside the cab. If the operator has a heart attack or something, that’s what he said. A kind of dead man’s switch; they tend to be on most dangerous machines. The harvester blades stop turning unless the operator is holding that one lever back—and it won’t stay back by itself. They use the same sort of switch on subway trains. And even in gear, the machine doesn’t keep moving forward unless the operator has his foot on the pedal.”

  Emma nodded mutely. That made sense. It made all too much sense.

  “So why didn’t it stop? It comes to that, how the hell was he thrown out of the cab? Doors are fastened securely, glass is intact. And it did come to a stop, here, even though the engine was still running. Even though he couldn’t have been inside the cab holding that dead man’s switch and with his foot on the pedal all the way down the row since the . . . trail starts way back there.”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “All . . . this . . . and I’m still trying to figure out why he was even out here last night, nowhere near the barns. That’s what his wife said, right? That he went out to check on his milk cows late, before turning in himself, because one was due to calve, and so she went on to bed without him. Woke up hours later, just before dawn, realized Brady wasn’t in bed. Not that unusual with a cow calving—until she heard the harvester, looked out her window, and saw it sitting here, headlights and the lights above the cab glaring, engine running. Their dog had been shut in the barn and was barking his head off; Brady wouldn’t have left him in there if he wasn’t there himself, since the dog sleeps in the house with them. Sue knew something was wrong. Knew it.”

  “I’m just glad she rousted Hank out of bed to check instead of coming out here herself,” Mal said. “Bad enough he had to see this, and call us, and tell Sue—and then come back out and wait until we got here.”

  He looked over to the split-rail fence, which was more decorative than anything else and bracketed the long dirt driveway up to the farmhouse, noting that Hank Taylor, who was more of a very good friend and partner than an employee to Brady Nash, had his back to the cornfield as he leaned against the fence, gazing off at nothing. The Nashes’ border collie, Murphy, sat at his side, ostensibly held by a makeshift twine leash even though the dog showed no sign of wanting to go anywhere—especially toward the harvester and its gruesome trail.

  Hank, a widower who lived on an adjacent plot of land with a tidy little house just over the hill, within easy walking distance, had been badly shaken and wasn’t the sort of man to try to hide it. He and Brady had been as close as brothers.

  Mal walked over to the man and dog by the fence, more out of concern than because he expected to learn anything new.

  “Hank?”

  “That didn’t happen, Mal,” Hank said in a queerly conversational tone, still gazing off into the distance.

  “We both know it did.”

  “No, I mean . . . it couldn’t have happened. Machines are machines. They work a certain way, the way they’re designed to work. They break down or malfunction a certain way. A machine goes wrong, you know why. But this . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?” Hank turned his head to stare at the sheriff, a frown creasing the skin between his oddly glazed eyes. “Do you understand this? Because I don’t. It’s . . . like something I dreamed. It’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

  “Yeah. Look, Hank, why don’t you go on home? We’ll have people here for hours yet, maybe coming back over days to study what happened here, and the harvester can’t be moved until I give the word. Nothing here can be . . . changed, until I give the word; we’ll be putting up Police Line tape around the whole area. I know where to find you if anybody else has questions you might be able to help answer.”

  Hank looked at him a moment longer, still frowning, but then nodded. “Okay. I’ll . . . go tell Sue I can keep Murphy with me for a while, since she has her sister now. He’s slept at my place before. I . . . don’t think he wants to stay around here. The . . . smell. Stronger for him, of course.”

  “That sounds good, Hank. You go take care of Murphy. And take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Sure. Sure, Mal. I’m fine, though. I’m absolutely fine.”

  Mal stood there for several moments, staring after the tall, lanky man trudging along the fence back toward the house, then slowly returned to the horror in the field and his deputy.

  “Is he okay?” Emma asked.

  “Are you?”

  She drew a short breath and let it out i
n a rush. “Good point. No, I’m not okay. I’m not even close to being okay, not with stuff like this happening. First that weird car crash, then a grill exploding, and the elevator falling the way it did . . . and now this. Four people dead since the middle of July, all from accidents that shouldn’t have happened. That’s not normal, not for Clarity. I looked it up. The last accidental death here was from a farmer falling off the roof of his barn. Nearly fifteen years ago.”

  “Yeah.” Mal was still frowning, brooding.

  “We’ve been averaging one body a week, Mal.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Emma cast about mentally once again, then offered a bit uncertainly, “Maybe it isn’t Brady. I mean, even if Hank seems sure, how do we even know—”

  “His ring.”

  She blinked, glanced toward the machine, and then looked hastily away. The clearly male hand was oddly unmarked, jutting up from the bloody metal teeth of the machine from a point between elbow and wrist, fingers relaxed but not curled. And he wore a big ring on that hand, his right hand.

  Emma wasn’t really tempted to get any closer. “I never noticed him wearing anything except his wedding ring,” she said.

  “Didn’t you? He never took it off.” Mal brooded, still frowning. “It’s his West Point ring.”

  Emma blinked. “He went to—”

  “Yeah. Didn’t want to be career military, not in the beginning, just wanted the discipline the school offered. Or needed it. Apparently he was a real hellion as a teenager, and his father gave him a choice between some kind of military training or no bail money or quiet word with the judge the next time he landed in jail for being stupid. He was smart enough for West Point, and that’s where he went. Told me he actually enjoyed it, that it suited him. Served the required five years in active duty, then chose a few years in the reserves afterward rather than a military career in peacetime. There was the farm to run, but that wasn’t really why he made the choice. He told me once he was almost sorry his age was never right for wartime. Too young for Vietnam; too old for all the Middle East wars since.”