ONCE BOUND

by Blake Pierce

  “We sure do,” Ulrich said.

  “OK, then,” Riley said. “We’ll have somebody watching the surveillance feed when the twelve thirty train arrives from Chicago. We’ll also have three people in plainclothes on the platform itself. Everybody will be linked by phone, and they’ll watch all the passengers who get off the train, looking for a woman who resembles the other murder victims. We’re pretty sure the killer is obsessed with that particular appearance.”

  Cullen looked skeptical.

  He said, “And what do we do when we see a woman who looks like the others? Use her as bait and see if the killer comes after her?”

  Jenn said, “What’s the alternative? Yank her aside and tell her a killer might be after her, when we can’t even be sure of that yet? She’ll be traumatized right there and then, and probably for a long time afterwards, and we’re liable to cause a panic among the people around her.”

  “Jenn’s right,” Bill said. “We simply won’t let her get in any danger. The second a threatening man comes after her, we’ll swoop in and catch him. If we can do it deftly and quietly enough, bystanders might not even realize it has happened.”

  Those words rang in Riley’s mind …

  Deftly and quietly.

  Those qualities were going to be especially necessary right there on the train platform.

  She said, “I want Bill and me to be on the platform, coordinating with two plainclothes officers. Jenn, I want you to be nearby watching the surveillance feed, alerting us the second you see anybody. Dillard and Royce, I want the two of you to run things up in the tower, communicating with the men on the ground near the tracks.”

  Then she noticed Mason Eggers.

  Let’s not leave him out, she thought. She knew by now that he had a shrewd eye for detail.

  She told him, “I want you on the lookout in that tower with Royce and Dillard.”

  Bull Cullen spoke up in a petulant voice, “What about me?”

  Riley glanced at Jenn and Bill. She knew they were all thinking the same thing …”

  What about Cullen?

  None of them trusted him much at this point—and with good reason.

  He had a lot invested in the failure of this operation.

  She certainly didn’t want him with her on the train platform. And she absolutely didn’t want him sitting in a booth with Jenn watching the surveillance feed. Nor would it be a good idea to stick him up in that tower with Mason Eggers, given his open contempt for the older man.

  If Riley had her way, she’d bench him altogether.

  But that really wasn’t an option.

  She said, “Cullen, I want you with the team on the ground near the tracks.”

  Then she said to Chief Royce pointedly, “I want four of your best people down there as well.”

  She noticed that Cullen cringed at her words—and the implication that he wasn’t the “best” in her estimation, at least for the job at hand.

  Royce brought a select few of his local cops into his office and gave them their assignments. Riley thought they also looked more like movie stars than cops, but they all seemed to understand what the chief was telling them very well.

  They’ll do fine, she told herself.

  Within an hour, everyone was at an appointed post. And just in the nick of time, too. It was almost 12:30 by the time Riley, Bill, and the two plainclothes cops stepped out onto the train station platform to mingle among unsuspecting people.

  Riley spoke into her hidden microphone, “Can everybody hear each other?”

  Bill and the two cops answered in the affirmative. So did Jenn, who was sitting in a nearby room watching the surveillance feed.

  Now we wait, she thought.

  The few remaining minutes seemed to take forever. But soon she heard a train whistle and the dull, monotonous roar of the locomotive.

  Riley’s heart started to pound as the train approached the platform.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Riley’s heart pounded harder as the train slowed to a stop. Her breathing quickened.

  Why am I so nervous? she asked herself.

  After all, this was hardly the first stakeout of her long career.

  But then she realized—it was extremely rare to catch a perpetrator in the very act, in the moment before a crime was committed. Opportunities like this didn’t arise very often.

  We’d better not screw it up, she thought.

  She glanced around to make sure that Bill and the two cops were well positioned to see who would come out of the train cars. In a matter of moments, passengers were climbing down the steps from the cars.

  After a few minutes, the stream of passengers slowed to a trickle.

  Just when she thought almost no one was left on board, Riley’s eyes lighted on one woman in particular.

  At that moment, she heard Jenn’s voice over her earpiece.

  “I see someone. She’s coming off the fifth car back from the engine.”

  It was, in fact, exactly the same woman Riley had just spotted.

  She looked remarkably like the three victims—thin body, thin face, long nose, curly brown hair.

  Riley murmured into her hidden microphone, “Does everybody see her?”

  Bill and the other two cops said yes.

  “OK,” Riley said. “Let’s follow her. Stay at a radius of about twenty-five feet. Try not to be conspicuous.”

  She could see Bill and the other cops start moving into their positions. There were enough people clustered around—mostly passengers and people greeting them—to help camouflage their actions.

  Carrying a small suitcase, the woman continued on inside the small brick train station.

  Riley said to the others, “We’ll go single file through the door, with me in the lead, and Agent Jeffreys right behind me. Keep about ten feet away from each other.”

  When she led the way into the train station, Riley saw that the woman was continuing on through the building and heading out through the front door. Sure that her companions were behind her, Riley followed the woman out into the parking lot.

  An SUV that was moving through the parking lot slowed as it approached the woman. Riley could see that a man was driving it.

  Riley’s hand neared her weapon.

  “I see a man in a vehicle,” she said to the others. “Get ready to move.”

  The SUV came to a stop. The man looked out the window and waved at the woman.

  She knows him, Riley thought.

  Of course, she’d realized early on that the murdered women might have known their captor.

  But then the side doors of the SUV slid open, and two small children bounced out—two little girls yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!”

  The woman put down her suitcase and welcomed the children with a hug.

  The man looked out the window and said to her, “The girls have missed you.”

  The woman laughed and said, “I can see that. I’ve missed you too. All of you.”

  The woman reached for her suitcase and picked up the smaller girl with her free arm. The other girl scampered alongside the woman, and they all got into the SUV, laughing and chatting together.

  The SUV drove away.

  Riley’s mouth dropped open from shock.

  Was it possible? Had they been wrong?

  She asked Jenn over the phone, “Did you see any other passengers who resembled the victims?”

  “Not even close,” Jenn said. “And I got a good look at each and every one of them.”

  “Are you sure they’re all off the train?”

  “Yeah. The departing passengers are already starting to board.”

  Bill and the other two cops joined Riley in the parking lot.

  “This isn’t over,” Bill said to Riley. “Maybe he’s made some adjustments to his MO. The killer’s next victim might not have been on the train at all. He might be abducting her somewhere else as we speak. Or …”

  Riley finished his thought.

  “Or the killer might
not be sticking to his usual type, and we may have missed the real victim when she got off the train. Maybe he’s already abducted her.”

  Riley said to the two local cops, “Agent Jeffreys and I need a ride to the lookout tower.”

  One of the cops dashed away toward a parked vehicle.

  Riley spoke again to Jenn through the microphone, “Bill and I are heading on over to the tower. Stay on the surveillance feed, just in case something new comes up.”

  “Like what?” Jenn asked.

  Riley suppressed a discouraged sigh.

  “I don’t know,” Riley said. “Just keep watching.”

  The cop who had walked away a moment before drove up in his vehicle. Riley told the other local cop to stay at the station and keep in touch with Jenn. She and Bill got into the car, and the driver took them out of Dermott—as fast as he could move without drawing attention to the car. Even without the use of sirens and lights, just minutes later they were entering the lush forests of the neighboring state park.

  As the car wended its way into the beautifully forested hills, Riley looked at her watch. It was about time for the passenger train to leave the station again. According to Mason Eggers’s dispatcher friend, the freight train would come through in about an hour.

  But she also remembered what Eggers said about freight trains …

  “They don’t follow any strict schedule.”

  How soon might the freight train follow after the passenger train?

  Riley had no idea.

  The road that wound up through the hills seemed interminable, even after the huge wooden tower came into view above them. Riley’s spirits sank further when she realized that they had to park the car at the base of a cliff about seventy-five feet below the tower itself.

  She flung the car door open and raced up flight after flight of wooden stairs up the side of the cliff, with Bill close behind. Then they climbed another several flights of stairs to reach the top of the sixty-foot tower itself.

  Riley’s chest and legs were hurting by the time she and Bill reached the top. For a few moments, they both stood gasping for breath.

  Three men armed with binoculars were already there on the highest platform of the wooden tower—the Dermott police chief, the Chicago FBI chief Proctor Dillard, and Mason Eggers.

  All three looked astonished to see Riley and Bill.

  “What’s going on?” Dillard asked.

  Struggling to bring her breathing under control, Riley gasped, “We didn’t see the victim get off the train. Either we missed her or …”

  She was too out of breath to finish her sentence.

  She leaned against the railing for a moment, dizzy and exhausted, her heart pounding fiercely. She couldn’t help noticing that the view from the tower was truly astonishing. Lakes were visible in the distance, and so was the town of Dermott. Even without binoculars, Riley could see that the passenger train was no longer at the station platform.

  Bill asked the three men, “What have you seen so far from here?”

  Mason Eggers said, “The passenger train passed through a little while ago, right on schedule. Now we’re waiting …”

  Before he could finish, Dillard called out, pointing into the distance.

  “Here it comes—the freight train.”

  Riley borrowed Eggers’s binoculars and looked up the tracks.

  Sure enough, she could see a locomotive coming toward Dermott, pulling what appeared to be about thirty cars. She gasped and turned the binoculars to the curve in the tracks where they expected the killer to strike.

  No one was there—neither a man nor a victim.

  She scanned the entire length of the tracks all the way back to Dermott. She saw nothing suspicious at all.

  She watched as the freight train passed through the station in Dermott, then continued on into the forest, rounded the curve, and rolled away into the distance.

  Nothing had happened.

  Nothing at all.

  Riley was swept by a flood of confusion.

  She couldn’t help but feel relieved that the killer didn’t seem to have seized another victim.

  But what could this mean?

  She and Eggers had both been so positive that the killer would strike again right now, in this very place. This would have matched his previous pattern so exactly.

  How could they have been so wrong?

  Had they somehow given away their presence to the killer?

  Then she heard Bill’s voice.

  “Riley, I think we’ve got trouble.”

  Riley looked down to see what Bill was pointing down at.

  Several vehicles were pulling in near where the police car was still parked, all the way down the cliff below the tower. As people climbed out of the vehicles, Riley realized with dread …

  Reporters!

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Bill’s heart went out to Riley as he watched her staring down at the crowd of reporters far below. He’d seldom seen such a defeated expression on her face.

  He touched her on the shoulder and said, “Come on. We’d better go deal with them.”

  Riley simply nodded, then started down the stairs. Bill followed her, with Dillard, Ulrich, and Eggers right behind him.

  As they made their way down, Bill kept wondering …

  What the hell went wrong?

  Riley had been so positive that this would be the time and place of the next murder. And her instincts were nearly always right. In fact, she was famous in law enforcement for the reliability of her gut feelings.

  Maybe this is my fault, Bill thought.

  After all, he had let Riley talk everybody into this stakeout, even though he hadn’t fully shared her conviction.

  Maybe he should have overruled her.

  But then he thought …

  Overrule Riley?

  He almost smiled at the very idea. He couldn’t remember ever being able to talk Riley out of anything, not when she’d really set her mind to it.

  When they reached the base of the cliff, the reporters crowded around them, shouting one question on top of another.

  “Why did you hold a stakeout here?”

  “Did anything come of it?”

  “We’d been informed that another suspect was in custody.”

  “Does the murderer have an accomplice?”

  “Is there a copycat killer?”

  Bill was surprised with the force in Riley’s voice when she shouted them down.

  “No questions! I’ve got a question to ask you!”

  Startled, the reporters fell silent.

  Riley said, “Who the hell told you anything was going to happen here? How did you know about the stakeout?”

  A murmur passed among the reporters as they protested that they had no intention of revealing their sources.

  Just then a voice called out from nearby.

  “False alarm, folks. There’s nothing more to see.”

  Bill turned and saw Bull Cullen emerging from a path that led back into the forest.

  An angry sneer took form on Riley’s face, and Bill knew what she was thinking.

  This is all Cullen’s doing.

  After all, Cullen had been sure all along that Riley’s hunch was wrong. Not only had he been looking forward to seeing Riley fail, he’d obviously alerted the media to make her that her failure was as public and humiliating as possible.

  He’d told them exactly where and when to show up.

  Worse still, Cullen hadn’t even been at his post during the stakeout. He’d stayed in the woods close to the tower so he’d be able to greet the reporters when they arrived.

  That son of a bitch, Bill thought.

  He started toward Cullen, his fist clenched and ready to punch the man out.

  Riley reached out and stopped him.

  “Don’t, Bill,” she said. “Things are bad enough as it is.”

  Meanwhile, Cullen was basking in the situation, holding court among the reporters and offering his own full expla
nation for what was going on.

  “Yes, we do have another suspect in custody. A good, solid, suspect. His name is Timothy Pollitt, and we expect to bring charges against him soon. But FBI Special Agent Riley Paige here had her own theory, and we felt compelled to follow up on it. As you can see, it didn’t pan out. But we didn’t want to leave any loose ends.”

  He looked at Riley and Bill with a gloating smile and added, “On behalf of the railroad police, I want to thank Agent Paige and her FBI colleagues for their help. Now, of course, the FBI’s work on this case is through, and they’ll be flying right back to Quantico.”

  As Cullen continued to talk with the reporters, Riley said to Bill, “We can’t quit yet. We just can’t.”

  “There’s nothing left for us to do,” Bill said.

  “Yes there is! I’m sure we aren’t wrong. We just made a mistake about the time. We need to find out when the next freight trains will be coming through. We need to keep this stakeout going. Let’s go talk to Dillard. Maybe we can convince him—”

  Bill interrupted her.

  “Riley, listen to me. Even if you’re right about the killer’s plans, there’s no way he’ll strike here now—not now that reporters have arrived and our cover is blown. Besides …”

  Bill hesitated.

  “Besides what?” Riley asked.

  Bill sighed and said, “I think we need to face facts. In all likelihood, Timothy Pollitt really is the killer. There really is nothing more for us to do here.”

  Riley’s stricken expression broke his heart.

  Before she could say anything, her phone buzzed. Riley looked at it and rolled her eyes in despair.

  “Jesus,” she said. “It’s Carl Walder.”

  Bill could hardly believe it.

  As if things weren’t bad enough, he thought.

  He remembered all too well the countless conflicts Riley had had with Walder. The incompetent, baby-faced bureaucrat had suspended and even fired Riley on more than one occasion.

  This is too much, he thought.

  “Let me take that,” he said to Riley, taking the phone away from her.

  Walder sounded surprised to hear a male voice instead of Riley.