by Alex Kava
That’s when he realized that it wasn’t his odd gestures that had unnerved his mother. It was that he was actually saying the words in his head out loud, over and over again.
Ethan shut up! Shut up, shut up! Stop screaming!
And Noah shut up immediately.
He stared at his parents and knew that he looked like he had been caught doing something unspeakable. If they only knew.
“You said he’s still out there.” Detective Lopez was standing at his bedside now. “Where is your friend Ethan, Noah?” Then without waiting for a response, he said, “What did you do to him?”
“Do to him?”
Noah could hardly believe what the detective was asking. He looked to his parents again.
“Go ahead and tell him what happened, Noah.” It was his father, but the tone was stern.
They thought he was responsible? Why?
“All that blood,” Detective Lopez said. “We know it wasn’t all yours.”
But he had done something to Ethan. He left him with a madman. And it was worse than that. Much worse …
“We found Ethan’s car.” Detective Lopez seemed to wait for Noah to look at him. “It was still parked at the rest area. Doors unlocked. Keys under the seat.”
He paused, studying Noah.
“We found the rest of your clothes. Folded up, neat and tidy. Right on the passenger seat. Shoes on top.”
Noah just stared at him. How could he explain that his clothes were part of the bargain?
“The boys are best friends,” he heard his mother explaining. “Since third grade.”
“Who goes first?” Noah heard the madman’s voice and searched the room, looking past his parents, looking past Detective Lopez, past the officer at the door. The killer wasn’t anywhere to be seen. But he was still in Noah’s head.
“Your cell phone was there, too,” Detective Lopez was saying, without acknowledging Noah’s mother. Without acknowledging the voice in Noah’s head.
“There were no phone calls to 911,” Detective Lopez said. “No text messages to friends or family asking for help or talking about being stranded.”
Again, Noah stared at the man. Why hadn’t he called for help? Why had he left his phone behind?
Then he remembered. The man had borrowed Noah’s cell phone. He’d told them that his own had run down its battery. His car wouldn’t start. Could they help him out?
Those eyes. That smile. They should never have rolled down the window.
Ethan’s fault. I told you not to roll down the window.
“Noah.” It was his father.
Had he said the words out loud again?
His father was growing impatient.
“Tell Officer Lopez what happened,” he said.
Noah glanced at the detective to see if he noticed his dad had just demoted him. A silly thing for him to notice, but his father was good at that. He could disarm someone with his words before the person realized what had happened.
Like father, like son.
But then his father snapped at him. “Just tell him for Christ’s sake.”
None of it fazed Detective Lopez, and he continued, “Noah, if Ethan’s hurt badly we might be able to still help him. Just tell us where he is.”
The room became silent. Machines hummed and beeped. And amazingly, Ethan’s screams had stopped for the moment.
“I don’t know where Ethan is,” Noah finally admitted. Then he added in a whisper that sounded embarrassingly close to a whimper, “But I know he’s dead.”
CHAPTER 12
Maggie had left Lily after writing her personal cell phone number on the back of her business card and handing it to the woman.
“What the hell good is this?” Lily had wanted to know.
“You can call me anytime.”
Lily had laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She was still laughing when Maggie walked out the door. But she had taken the card.
Now the sun began to sink behind the barn. Maggie had returned to the top of the heap alongside a CSU technician named Janet. The removal of the body in the garbage bag had become a slow and tedious chore. Because almost half the bag remained within the pile of dirt, they couldn’t just pull it out for fear of destroying evidence.
It had been agreed that they needed to dig out the bag from the top, removing the soil, bucket by bucket. Tully had convinced Maggie and the young CSU tech that because they weighed the least of the recovery crew, they were less likely to start a landslide. So here she was again—only this time with a hand trowel—so close to the bag she couldn’t avoid the smell or avoid seeing the writhing mass of maggots every time the plastic flapped open.
She had borrowed a pair of boots from the construction crew that swallowed her feet. Buzz, the foreman, had also offered her a ball cap, reassuring her that it was brand-new, even showing that it still had the sales tag dangling. It seemed easier than trekking all the way back to their rental to unpack their gear. So she had accepted the ball cap before she’d noticed the saying embroidered on the front: Booty Hunter.
It could be worse, she thought as she adjusted the cap and ignored Tully’s grin.
Maggie and Janet filled their buckets, one scoop at a time. Both were cautious, sliding the trowels in slowly and ready to stop at any hint of resistance or even a faint scrape of something that didn’t sound like dirt. Buzz and the three members of his construction crew, along with Sheriff Uniss’s deputies—and even Howard Elliott—had formed two assembly lines, one to take and replace Maggie’s bucket and the other Janet’s.
Maggie and Janet handed off the blue plastic buckets full of dirt. Then the buckets made their way down the lines, each man handing it to the next without moving, to avoid stepping more than necessary in the mud.
At the end of the lines were the other two CSU technicians, Matt and Ryan, who spilled the buckets across a three-foot-by-six-foot designated area on top of the grass. At a later time the techs would be able to sift through the dirt chunks. Right now, they all just wanted to remove the garbage bag, intact, place it in a body bag, and send it on its way to a medical examiner.
“Outdoor scenes are the toughest,” Janet admitted to Maggie.
She wiped a sleeve of her sweatshirt across her forehead. Her long sleek dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail and stuck out the back of her navy CSU cap. Her smooth skin showed only slight laugh lines at the eyes and Maggie guessed that she was her age—mid to late thirties.
Maggie could tell that Janet was a veteran at collecting forensic evidence, despite her age. She had taken command of the process with ease immediately after their arrival, allowing Tully to address other issues, like the flow of information. Maggie could see him still on his cell phone. At times she noticed him jotting down notes on anything he managed to pull out of his pockets. She knew that later he’d be trying to decipher his scratch marks on the backs of gas station receipts, his boarding pass, even a napkin with smudges from his chocolate doughnut.
“You have any idea who’s inside?” Janet asked Maggie.
“No.”
The woman looked at her and raised an eyebrow like she didn’t appreciate secrecy when they were ankle-deep in mud.
“We’ve been tracking a killer for about a month now,” Maggie said, but she wasn’t willing to tell anyone about the map that had led her and Tully here. “We suspect this farm might be his dumping ground.”
“Yeah, we heard about the bones.”
Janet glanced around the property but Maggie saw her attention go to the woods that lined the back of the farmstead. She was thinking the same thing Maggie and Tully had.
Before she could say anything more, Maggie told her, “We have a cadaver dog team on its way.”
“Don’t forget to have them check if there’s a storm cellar.”
It was Maggie’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
“Most of the old farms have them somewhere on the property for tornado shelters. Last year we found a woman and two k
ids. Husband claimed his wife had left him and taken the kids.”
She shook her head at the memory and Maggie could see it was still fresh.
“One of them was just a baby, not even two years old.”
Janet stopped digging. Shadows started devouring the last streams of daylight. They didn’t have much time if they hoped to remove the garbage bag before dark, but Maggie stopped digging, too, waiting, giving the woman time to do what she needed to put the image away and return to the task at hand.
“But hopefully we got enough evidence to nail the bastard.”
She offered Maggie a weak smile, more a thanks for understanding than an indictment on the weight of the evidence.
They were almost to the top of the black garbage bag when Maggie’s trowel met something more solid than a clump of dirt. She set the trowel aside and with gloved fingers she raked at the dirt until she saw white.
Janet had noticed and set her trowel aside, too. She watched Maggie slowly unearth what appeared to be another plastic bag. This one was smaller. Through the smears of mud Maggie recognized the major retail store’s logo. Janet helped her uncover it but both of them stopped, sitting back on their haunches when they were finished. There was definitely something inside. The bag bulged like the black garbage bag beneath it. This one was sitting upright with the top handles tied haphazardly in a loose knot. And it also smelled like rotten meat.
“We found something else,” Maggie yelled to the men below, and immediately her eyes searched for Tully.
CHAPTER 13
QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
It didn’t seem like that long ago that Dr. Gwen Patterson had been to the FBI facility at Quantico. Her boyfriend and best friend worked there, so she heard about the place on a weekly basis. But when the guard at the security hut scrutinized her driver’s license—eyes darting from her face to the plastic ID card—she realized it had actually been several years. The guards used to hear her name and wave her through. A few of them would recognize her and lift the gate before she’d had a chance to roll down her car window.
She was no longer a recognizable figure. And for a good reason. Gwen had purposely tried to distance herself from the place. The last time she had worked as a consultant on an FBI case, a psychotic young cult member had attempted to stab a sharp pencil into her throat.
The scrutiny started all over again at the front desk.
“I don’t have a name badge for you,” the receptionist said, making it sound like it was Gwen’s fault. “Who are you here to see?”
“Assistant Director Raymond Kunze. In the Behavorial Science Unit.”
“And what is the nature of your business?” the woman asked, holding on to Gwen’s driver’s license while giving her a full body search with her eyes. This was worse than the guard at the hut, and Gwen wondered how the woman thought she had made it this far if she was a threat.
She needed to calm down. She had been through tougher interrogations. This was simply more annoying than intimidating. She kept still, containing a sigh and resisting the urge to shift her weight and cross her arms. Gwen had spent most of her career compensating for her petite frame by wearing three-inch heels and fine tailored power suits—skirts, never trousers, and dark or bold colors, never pastels. She had refined her Brooklyn roots to create a classy, don’t-screw-with-me attitude. She believed confidence and poise more than made up for her lack in stature. But being back at Quantico reminded her only of vulnerability and of that split second of mind-numbing fear.
The receptionist continued to stare at her, and Gwen fought the unexpected flicker of nausea in the pit of her stomach.
“It’s okay, Stacy, I’ll vouch for Dr. Patterson.”
Gwen turned to find Detective Julia Racine coming in through the front doors.
“She’s on the Highway Serial Killings Task Force,” Racine told the receptionist, who was already pulling out a different stack of folders.
“I wish people would tell me these things ahead of time.” The woman now seemed irritated by both Gwen and Racine as she riffled through one folder and then another.
Racine positioned her back to Stacy and rolled her eyes for Gwen to see. Gwen smiled but tried not to show the young detective how terribly relieved she was. Julia Racine was cocky enough without knowing that she had just saved the District’s number-one psychologist to the politicos from launching into a panic attack over a misplaced name badge. And Gwen suddenly realized—and did not like it—how much she had changed since her last visit. What had become of her lately?
Turning fifty had sent her into a tailspin. Instead of focusing on her accomplishments, all she could think about were her physical challenges: tired, moody, uncharacteristically second-guessing herself. Not just herself, but second-guessing her choices, her career, her relationship, her life.
Focus on the here and now, damn it!
“So you’re on the task force, too,” Gwen said after she and Racine signed in and pinned on their badges.
She let Racine lead the way, though it hadn’t been so long ago that Gwen would have forgotten how to get to the BSU conference room.
“The homicide that tipped off this investigation is my case. Remember those arsons back in February? Three warehouses and a church in Arlington?”
“Of course.” The same arsonist had torched her friend Maggie O’Dell’s house before he turned himself in.
“We found a body in the alley next to one of the warehouses.”
Racine pulled open a door to the walkway and held it for Gwen to go through. It was a polite gesture that threw Gwen off coming from Racine. The detective was anything but polite. She’d built a reputation on being tough as nails, one she reinforced by wearing trousers and leather jackets and keeping her short hair spiked just enough to give her an edgy look. Yet the knit T-shirt beneath the bomber jacket couldn’t hide full breasts and the trousers only accentuated her long slender legs.
“The body,” Racine continued, “was Gloria Dobson. We’re pretty sure she and her traveling partner were murdered at a rest area in Virginia, just off the interstate.”
“I remember Tully and Maggie talking about it.”
But Gwen was careful not to mention just how much she knew about the case. It still unnerved her to remember how upset Tully had been when describing the crime scene he and Maggie had stumbled upon at that rest area.
R. J. Tully was a veteran FBI agent. He was one of the most centered and even-tempered men Gwen knew. He had seen and witnessed some gruesome murders, so this scene had to be horrendous to leave him shaken. And now he and Maggie were somewhere in the Midwest searching for the killer who had ripped apart that strong, healthy young man and left Gloria Dobson’s bashed-in body in a District alley.
Being a part of the task force, Gwen would learn more of the details, whether she wanted to or not. That was probably Racine’s thought since she continued to fill Gwen in as they made their way through the training facility and finally down to the Behavioral Science Unit. Gwen had worked on only one case with Detective Julia Racine and the detective had not been so forthcoming at the time. Actually “worked” was probably not the correct term. Racine would insist Gwen had obstructed evidence and gotten in the way.
Bottom line, the two women were acquaintances by accident and circumstance, not by choice—and by their mutual friend, Maggie O’Dell. Gwen knew it was more for Maggie’s benefit than hers that Racine was even polite to her.
Three men waited for Gwen and Racine in the Behavioral Science Unit’s conference room. Assistant Director Raymond Kunze waved them to take seats across the table. Kunze was a linebacker of a man, barrel-chested with a thick neck that looked strangled in his cheery yellow tie. Combined with a mauve sports jacket the colors almost looked clownish. Though there was nothing clownish about the assistant director.
Everyone else in the room appeared to know one another.
“I’ve asked Dr. Gwen Patterson to join our task force,” Kunze explained. “As a trained forensic
psychologist and a sort of outsider—” He stopped himself and turned to Gwen, quickly adding, “No offense intended.”
“None taken,” she answered.
Why was everyone being so damned polite? Like she was something old and fragile? She’d had her yearly physical yesterday. She was being overly sensitive. But she also trusted her instincts and she wished she had never agreed to this.
“I’m counting on Dr. Patterson to offer some fresh insights,” AD Kunze told his group.
Gwen smiled, thinking that wasn’t entirely true. While Kunze had, indeed, asked Gwen to be a part of this task force, it wasn’t his idea. A high-ranking senator had strong-armed Kunze to include her. It was a high-profile case. The Highway Serial Killings Initiative happened to be a program that Senator Delanor-Ramos had pushed through Congress. Everything in the District was about politics these days. Gwen joining this task force may have been sold as an outsider’s “fresh insights” but she knew it was really about covering the senator’s professional ass. She’d be the easy scapegoat if the project didn’t produce results quickly.
“Dr. Patterson has worked with the FBI on several cases,” Kunze was explaining to his team. “So she already has a working relationship.”
As Kunze continued his introduction, Gwen couldn’t help wondering if her familiarity might be as much a hindrance as a benefit. After all, her significant other and her best friend were assigned to this task force. Gwen hated the fact that AD Kunze may have agreed so enthusiastically to her presence to use her against Tully and Maggie. The assistant director had made both his agents’ lives a working hell since he took over the unit. So she couldn’t help but be suspicious of Kunze’s motive, of his agreeing so easily to her being foisted on his team.
“You’ve met Detective Julia Racine,” Kunze was saying. “The District was good enough to loan her to us.”
Gwen also knew Keith Ganza, the director of the FBI crime lab. The tall, skinny agent wore a white lab coat, frayed at the cuffs. His long gray hair was tied back in a ponytail, adding to his look of a reclusive scientist. Gwen had often heard Maggie claim the man to be a mild-mannered genius who could see more in a piece of lint or a clump of dirt than any trace evidence specialist she’d ever worked with.
