Kylie Brant - What the Dead Know (The Mindhunters Book 8)

by Unknown

  Minutes later they had O’Shea loaded in the car and left Mary with him as they strode back to the shed where Hank, Phil, and Brody met them at the door.

  “Is there any sign that Tiffany’s been here?” Keira’s tone was tight as she moved into the building and scanned the interior. Without waiting for an answer she crossed to an area beneath the watery overhead lights and crouched. “Looks like blood.”

  Finn came to kneel next to her. After a minute he nodded. “We’ll test the stain for hemoglobin. But this guy’s a trapper, you said. It might not be human.”

  “We found this.” They straightened and turned to join Hank, who was standing in front of a tool bench. The pegboard and tools that had hung above it had been taken down. Silently they looked at what had been uncovered.

  A computer printed list with Tiffany’s address and details. Lives alone. No dog. Curb parking. Work. Park back lot. Mon. Left 1:27 am. Tues. Left 2:22 am. There was more. Much more. He must have watched the woman for days. Keira stood there a moment longer, her jaw clenching and unclenching until Finn nudged her to get her attention. She switched her gaze to the photos scattered across the wall. They had been taken at night. Longitude and latitude were noted on each along with a big red X and a time. Three am. “What is this?” she muttered.

  He wasn’t sure himself. “Ideas where to hide her?”

  She peered more closely. “You could get these from Google Earth. Or maybe some other sort of geospatial technology.” Finn nodded at Phil. From the camera in the man’s hand, he knew he’d already started a photographic log. The entire place needed to be documented before the evidence was collected.

  “Found this,” Hank said. When he pulled a drawer out of the workbench, Finn saw a package of photo paper and a black Sharpie. “And there are stray strands of blond hair all over this place.”

  “There’s more,” Brody put in excitedly. Keira and Finn followed the man around the woodpile stacked neatly in the far corner of the shed. Wedged between two logs in the center of the pile was a rifle.

  Keira looked at it for a long time, before glancing at Finn. “You can stay to complete the search. I’m taking Doug O’Shea in for questioning.”

  _______

  “I want to help. I do.” The man shook his head helplessly. “But I don’t know what we’re talking about here. Who is the ‘she’ you’re looking for? What am I supposed to have done with her? Why would I do anything with her?” His expression turned pleading as he looked from a silent Mary to Keira. “Help me help you. Tell me what this is all about.”

  It was difficult to conduct a criminal interview of a man she’d known most of her life. One she’d liked. Admired. Respected. Harder still to Mirandize him and listen to him waive his right to legal counsel. Although a law enforcement officer’s dream, that move was rarely in a suspect’s best interest. Doug O’Shea was going to need a very good defense attorney.

  Keira opened the file she’d carried in the room with her and placed a picture of the message she’d received today on the table in front of them. “Last night after Dizzy’s closed, you kidnapped Tiffany Andrews.”

  O’Shea’s gaze bounced from the paper to Keira’s face. “Wait. What?”

  “You forced her to write this note,” she continued inexorably. “You cut her hair and attached some of it to the back.”

  “No. No. I would never...”

  She pitched her voice over his. “Tell me where you’ve hidden her. I’m not going to play hide and go seek, you understand? The games are over.”

  “Games?” The man rubbed his forehead. “What games?”

  “The ones you played with my father before killing him.” The sound Doug made could have come from a wounded animal. “The game you played with your second victim. The one you engaged in with Bruce Yembley…”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” O’Shea asked in a roar.

  Satisfied to have gotten a response, Keira sat back in her chair. “We found paper that matched this in your workshop.” She tapped the photo of the message between them. “A Sharpie. It will require lab testing but the paper and marker will match the note, written in Tiffany’s hand. There was a rifle concealed in your wood pile that I’m guessing will turn out to be the one used to kill Bruce Yembley.” She wondered for an instant if it were the same one that had been fired at her. Her father’s weapon.

  She abruptly switched tactics. “It’s hard…what you’ve gone through.” He blinked at the softness in her tone. “No one else can understand the kind of pain you’ve experienced. No one cares. No one respects you. Look at everything you’ve accomplished. Played by the rules all your life, didn’t you and where the hell did it ever get you?”

  He frowned. “You know better than that. No. No, I don’t feel that way.”

  “You told me yourself, everyone cheats out in the wild.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “They bend the regulations. But not you, you follow all the guidelines, but so what? Do you get gold stars from the DNR when you play fair while trapping? Bet you don’t. Everyday you see people screwing around and no one steps in. Maybe you wanted to even the score. Or perhaps you decided to teach them a lesson.”

  The man slumped in his chair, hands folded in front of him. Every now and then he’d give a weary shake of his head, but that was the most she got from him until she changed tacks.

  “You tell us where she is right now and we’re looking at a completely different situation.”

  “I wish I could.” There was a sheen in his eyes before he blinked it away. “Tiffany…she was a good kid. I don’t know where she is.”

  “You’d be cooperating.” Keira was growing hoarse. “We’d make sure and note that. We need your assistance. You’re in charge here. You’re still in control of the game. Help us find her.”

  O’Shea’s voice, his expression, were exhausted. “I think I want a lawyer.”

  _______

  “You did well in there.” Finn handed Keira a bottle of water when she returned from the interview room. He’d only caught the tail end of the interview on the closed circuit TV in the next room, but she’d come at the man from several different ways. Playing it tough, sympathetic, indifferent, then soft. He wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have broken himself under the pressure.

  Instead of drinking the water she held the bottle to her forehead. “I don’t know. I’m not sure he’s our guy.”

  “All evidence to the contrary.” And there was evidence. A ton of it. Enough to tie O’Shea up in a bow. “If that rifle turns out to be your father’s, you might be singing a different tune.”

  She lowered the bottle to glare at him. “I’ve done my share of interviews, okay? I’m not letting emotion sway me here. I get anyone in that room for as many hours as I questioned him, and he doesn’t budge, I’m going to have doubts. I’m going to recheck my facts.”

  “Fair enough.” Finn did the same when test results didn’t add up. He verified and re-verified trying to discover the source of the problem. “But you can’t tell me you’ve never come across a killer before that no one would suspect. That case I mentioned with the bodies in the South Carolina swamps? The perpetrator was a pillar of the community. Ran the local food pantry. Sunday school teacher. An officer at the bank. His neighbors are probably still shell-shocked.”

  Keira nodded reluctantly. “Okay, yeah. Of course, I’ve had my share of suspects like that, too. But this is just a little too neat. We found nothing in the house; it’s all in the shed. It could have been planted. The padlock he had securing it is a joke. Everything we discovered could have been placed there to make it look like we had our guy.”

  “Except the thumbprint on the paper,” he reminded her.

  “Right. I haven’t figured that out yet.” She paused a moment before asking, “What about the boots?”

  “They’re tens,” he admitted. “But…” He waylaid her next words. “It would be easy enough to wear a larger pair to disguise his size.” />
  “Which would make perfect sense…if we’d found a second pair.”

  “I’ve never been on a case yet where every piece of evidence fits. Where we can figure out every single move an offender made and why. O’Shea could be convicted based on what was on his property. He has no alibi for any of the nights in question. Don’t be too ready to dismiss him. We didn’t find your friend, but maybe those photos tell us exactly where to look.”

  She finally twisted the cap off the water bottle. Brought it to her lips to drink. “And could be that’s why we found them. Because the game can’t start until the killer gets all his players in one place.”

  _______

  He could label them leadership skills if he wanted, she thought later, but she preferred to call a spade a spade. And Finn Carstens didn’t lead her toward leaving work that night. He bullied her into doing so.

  She’d allowed it because she was ready to pitch face forward. It was well after midnight. Keira had sent her deputies home long ago. She and Finn still had to analyze those photos and pinpoint the locations and scout them. Both would take hours of work. In the meantime, they were going in circles about O’Shea’s culpability. They needed to start fresh tomorrow.

  Keira hoped from the bottom of her heart that Tiffany had that long.

  Once she got to the cabin, she was too tired to eat. Too weary to do anything but crawl into bed. Finn slipped under the covers beside her minutes later. And the warmth of his body next to hers had a measure of her tension slipping away.

  “You could have eaten.” The man didn’t do well skipping meals and eating on the random schedule she often kept.

  “I had a PopTart.”

  She surprised herself by smiling. “You bought PopTarts? What are you, eight?”

  “Only my palate. Actually,” his arm snaked out to settle her closer against him. “I had two.”

  “Well, I don’t want to hear any more complaints from you about food then.” Her smile faded away as the urgency of their discoveries today returned. “I wonder if he’s feeding her.”

  Finn didn’t utter empty platitudes. He just swept a comforting hand down her spine. Up again. “Whatever he has in store for her, she’ll need her strength.” Diz said Tiffany had closed the bar at midnight. She might have been too busy at work to check her phone, but it would have been the first thing she did once she got home. If she’d gotten home. She’d left Dizzy’s nearly forty-eight hours ago. Had she eaten in that time? Been given something to drink? Was she terrified, wondering why Keira hadn’t found her yet?

  “I think she was trying to send me a message on that note,” she whispered. Her eyes were open in the darkness. How could she sleep knowing her friend was in danger? “I don’t get it. I can’t figure out what she was trying to tell me.”

  “You will.”

  But she wasn’t so sure. And if she did, she didn’t know if it would be in time. “Tiff didn’t deserve this.” The thought brought guilt, but also a flare of anger. “She wouldn’t have come to his attention if it weren’t for me.”

  “Random acts of violence can happen to anyone. Anywhere. And she has you to depend on.” His voice was a husky murmur in her ear. “You’re her best chance of escaping this. So you focus on that. Bringing her home. And everything that happens after.”

  Everything that happens after. It occurred to her that she had no idea what that involved. Certainly it meant Finn would be gone, back to DC. And she…Keira still wasn’t sure what the future held for her. Not long-term anyway.

  “Sometime I want you to visit Ohio.” It was as if he’d plucked the thought from her head. “Meet my parents. My sister. They’ll like you. Not the fact that you’re from Michigan, of course. Buckeyes are equally disparaging of both the Spartans and the Wolverines.”

  She smiled, as he’d meant her to. “As it happens, I’m a Northwestern alum.”

  “A Wildcat. Fitting.”

  “I’ll do you the favor of not introducing you to my mother.”

  “I don’t know why not. Mothers love me. I’m adorable.”

  He was. She drew in a shaky breath. Released it. Finn Carstens was all manner of things, all of them admirable. Most of which she was beginning to think that she didn’t want to let go of.

  And that realization terrified her at least as much as the killer she was convinced was still on the loose.

  _______

  Dorie Hassert cooed over the doughnuts he’d brought from the Kwik-E-Station and turned to get some plates. She was a lot more amenable to being awakened in the middle of the night for a fuckfest than she was at being called at four-thirty. He’d figured the pastries would go a long way to smoothing things over.

  She set a cup of coffee in front of him and he reached for it, already knowing it would be weak. When she offered him a doughnut he shook his head. “I bought those for you.”

  Dorie beamed. “They’re just as sweet as you are.”

  She should just paste the damn things to her ass. From the looks of her, he was fairly certain that’s where they’d end up. “I can’t stay. Just wanted a few minutes with you before work.”

  Lifting a pastry to her lips, she took a large bite, which left her with a frosting mustache. “I heard there was something big going on in town last night.”

  He stilled. Gossip was the only attraction she held for him. If a mouse so much as farted in Munising, she knew about it. “How big can it be in Munising on a Sunday night?”

  Her brows arched. “I have a friend who’s a cook at the prison and they do the meals for the county jail. And she overheard that the sheriff arrested Doug O’Shea for something last night and that he spent the night in lockup. Doug O’Shea! Can you imagine?”

  “Don’t know him,” he lied, lifting the mug to his lips again. That was fast. Damn fast. A part of him might have been a little impressed at how quickly Saxon and her special consultant had put it all together. He dismissed the feeling. Jesus, he’d practically drawn them a map. And they’d been led down the exact path he’d wanted them to go.

  Adrenaline fired through his veins and he drained the cup. Set it down. Things had gelled faster than he’d expected, but that was fine. Everything was ready. All the pieces were in place.

  “I’ll see you later.” He stood, not even hearing the woman’s protests. There were people who paid big money to go on safaris or to kill a rare animal in the wild. They were suckers, all of them. They’d never know that they didn’t have to go to Africa for a real hunting challenge. And they sure as hell didn’t have to spend a fortune.

  He had his hunt lined up right here on the UP. It would be the most thrilling kill of his life.

  _______

  “Thanks for your help,” Keira told Gary Paulus. “I’m not sure we could have found all of those spots depicted in the photos on our own without getting hopelessly lost.” They’d spent hours with the man, first at her office with his computer and forestry maps and then in the Hiawatha Forest. It had been slow going, but eventually he’d helped them locate each of the areas. They’d taken daylight pictures at all of the spots.

  Every time they’d reached a new location, she’d given a mental sigh of relief. They hadn’t found Tiffany at any of the spots. It had been twelve degrees last night. She wouldn’t have survived had the killer left her outside overnight.

  “No problem, Sheriff.” Paulus’ face was unusually sober. “I figure there aren’t many around here who know the forest as well as I do. I was glad to be able to help in some small way. After seeing what the guy did to the body we saw yesterday…” He swallowed and looked away. “I hope you find him.” With a friendly wave, he walked toward his truck.

  She and Finn headed toward the cruiser. “Now would be the time to thank me for rounding up those snowmobile pants you’re wearing.” Each of them was dressed similarly, although initially he had argued against the need. Some of the places they’d hiked today had had drifts up to their hips.

  “Thank you,” he parroted as he opened up th
e passenger door.

  “Insincere, but I’ll take it.” She got in the vehicle and shivered. Despite the warm clothes, it was going to take her a while to thaw out from their excursion today. Her toes felt frozen, even with the three pair of socks and boots. Keira put the key in the ignition and started it. But before she could do anything else, her phone rang. Taking out her cell, she looked at the screen.

  “It’s Phil,” she said in an aside before answering it. “Hey,” she said to the undersheriff. “We just finished here.” She listened for a couple of minutes. “Okay. Thanks for the update.”

  Finn reached out to turn up the heat, although she could have told him they’d be back at the office before warm air flowed through the vents. She lowered the phone. Looked at him. “Doug O’Shea just made bail.”

  His oath was vicious. “Unbelievable. Why doesn’t that judge just give him a fat juicy kiss on the ass while he’s at it?”

  She winced. “An interesting visual image, and one I prefer not to contemplate. This wasn’t totally unexpected. Isaacson would have been amenable to a prompt bail hearing. O’Shea’s not a flight risk, as he’s lived and worked in the area for decades. He also has no criminal record. Plus, we didn’t find Tiffany on his property. That might have been the deciding factor.”

  Finn’s tone was baleful. “At least tell me they put an electronic tracking bracelet on our main suspect.”

  “They did.” And she owed the county prosecutor for that one. She couldn’t afford the man hours necessary to provide around the clock surveillance on O’Shea. Keira nosed the car toward the blacktop at the entrance of the forest. “But that means he can’t get to Tiffany. If we don’t find her quickly, she starves.” The thought struck genuine fear in her heart.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. The killer will believe he’s considered every angle. What better way to ‘prove’ his innocence than with an ankle bracelet or surveillance putting him at home when we find your friend?”

  She mulled over the suggestion. “He’d have to have an accomplice in that case. Someone to show up in the forest with Tiffany in the middle of the night. He’d know we would check the places out as soon as possible to make sure she wasn’t there.” The idea was plausible. In that scenario, she had no doubt that a defense attorney could get O’Shea’s charges dropped. If the killer was indeed O’Shea. “The offender doesn’t seem the type to delegate the big moment to someone else.”