It was a door.
Chapter 16
Stefan stood outside in the chill, staring at the back of the house. In his mind’s eye, he tried to gauge where the interior walls were, to get an idea of how big the hidden room would be. Not very. If the office had originally been the size of the other bedrooms in the house, then it was missing maybe four feet in width. Which meant that if the secret room ran the length of that room, that would make the space about four feet by ten.
Forty square feet. Not much. But enough for a serial killer to hide...whatever he was hiding in there? The possibilities for that were pretty grim. He’d seen some ugly things in his career, and he hoped this wasn’t going to be another gruesome scene to add to the memory banks.
He heard the crunch of footsteps on what little snow there was remaining here and looked up to see Daria approaching. She had her heavy coat buttoned up to her throat, the collar pulled up and held by the thick, knitted scarf she had wound around her neck multiple times. It was a deep gold that, wrapped so close to her face, made her eyes look the same impossible shade. Had she made it herself? If so, she was good—the intricate cables looked beyond difficult to his untrained eye. And he smiled inwardly as he remembered her warning about very pointy tools.
Other people count to ten to hold on to their temper. I count stitches.
Point taken. Er, no pun intended.
Too bad. It would have been a good one.
He almost smiled outwardly at that memory. He did like her sense of humor. Besides, with the big scarf and her heavy, fur-lined boots, she looked ready for the Antarctic, which also made him want to smile. He stopped himself, because he didn’t really want to explain what he was amused about.
“They’re ready,” she said as she came to a halt.
And just as she said it, he heard the call of, “Ready team!”
He looked over toward the team leader, who had ordered his crew to suit back up in vests and full tactical gear. Stefan didn’t really think Shruggs was in there, but more than one agent had died going on a wrong assumption. He didn’t want anyone to be a statistic, so they had left the house and turned it back over to the pros at CQB—close quarters battling without the proper gear was a chance he didn’t want to take.
It was a chance he could no longer take.
He had a sudden vision of Sam, already lost and scared, having to go through that. He’d arranged for him to go to his parents, but what if Leah had other ideas? She hadn’t wanted him now, but she’d never really gotten along well with his parents—they were far too unsophisticated and traditional for her taste. Would she demand to have Sam back to keep him away from them? Unlikely, but he didn’t like even thinking about his son having to go back to a mother who hadn’t wanted him and a stepfather who actively disliked him.
And for the first time in his career, it had really, truly struck home that he had a responsibility to take care of himself. For Sam’s sake. He’d always known his death would devastate his parents, but as long as they had each other, they’d get through it. Sam had no one else. No one who would feel about him as he did. Because he loved his son, even when he wasn’t liking him very much.
But he really liked the boy Sam had turned into around Daria. That was the happy child he remembered, the child he wanted back. And he had to stay alive to get there.
Stefan wasn’t surprised it only took moments for the team to reappear and declare the small hidden room clear. And to tell them they had, in a macabre sort of way, hit pay dirt.
“We didn’t mess it up—it only took a visual sweep from the doorway to be sure it was unoccupied,” the team leader said grimly. “You’re going to want forensics in there, in a big way.”
And so again they waited, he and Daria, as the crime scene unit arrived, and in their own gear to prevent contamination, went into the little room.
Daria started pacing, rubbing at her arms. Gloves, too, he noted. Thick, warm ones. Not knitted like the scarf, though. Could you even do that? With fingers? Clearly his pointy-stick education was lacking.
“You want to go back inside?” he asked as she kept pacing. “It’s warmer in there.”
“Only temperature-wise,” she said with a grimace. “I’ll stay out here, thanks.”
He nodded in understanding. “Don’t blame you.” He didn’t want to spend any more time in that house than he had to, either. The evilness of it was much, much chillier than the weather outside. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said, staring at the house, “if when you see sickness like this...it seeps into you somehow.”
“To paraphrase what a wise man once told me, that you ask that means that it’s not.”
Startled at hearing his own words quoted back to him, his gaze snapped back to her face. Slowly he smiled. “Wise?”
“Definitely,” she said.
He had been complimented on a few things in his life—his looks, his brain, his smile, even his height...but nothing had ever pleased him quite like that did. And he was afraid whatever he would answer would come out all wrong, make her think the wrong thing.
Except she wouldn’t be wrong.
“I think my son might argue that,” he finally managed to say.
“For now, maybe. But he’s young.”
Finally the forensics team emerged. “I’ll get the blood type to you ASAP,” the blonde woman said to his rather urgent request, her expression showing she understood quite well what they were dealing with and what was at stake.
The first thing Stefan thought when he stepped inside the small room behind the fake bookcase was that it reminded him of the room he’d told Daria about before. Photographs tacked on the walls, notes beside each one that he sensed were going to be grim and ugly. And...the trophy shelf. This was typical, this kind of collection, something from each victim, so that the man with the twisted mind could joyously relive the thrill of each of his kills.
But what riveted his attention now was the opposite side of the room.
The side with the cage.
It looked like the kind of metal crate used for large dogs. Except those didn’t usually have shiny new padlocks on them. Well, it had been shiny, until forensics had blackened it with fingerprint powder, finding nothing but a faint smear that might have once been a print.
But most riveting of all, most haunting, was the fact that there was relatively fresh blood on the side of the cage opening.
“I can’t believe I sat across an interview table from him and didn’t pick up on this.” Daria sounded devastated. “If I had, this new victim might not have been taken. If I had—”
“Funny,” Stefan said grimly, still staring at the cage, “I don’t remember seeing mind reading on your stellar résumé.”
He heard her take a deep breath, and when she spoke again, she sounded steadier. He hoped he’d helped with that. He was more...not inured to cases like this, because if the day ever came where this kind of thing didn’t disturb him, then it would be time to hang it up. But he had seen more of them than she had, probably a lot more, and so was less prone to be shocked at the existence of such human depravity.
Daria moved over to look at the wall of photos. In a sick twist, there appeared to be two of each girl—one alive, one dead. He’d already noted that any image of the new girl, alive or dead, was missing.
“I know her picture’s not here, but I still think it has to be the new missing girl,” she said.
“My gut agrees,” he answered. “Maybe he takes the photos right before he kills them.”
“He probably likes to capture the utter terror in their eyes,” Daria said, with a loathing in her voice that told him Curtis Shruggs had better be very careful when they finally caught up with him.
“It would fit,” he agreed. “I told them to advise us on a match to the blood type ASAP. Not that they wouldn’t anyway, but a reminder never hurts.” She’d been standing a few f
eet away at the time, and he wasn’t sure she’d been listening.
She was still staring at the wall. “He didn’t even want to have to take the time to call the photos up on a computer or phone,” she murmured. “He wanted them right here in front of him all the time.”
“And in front of them,” Stefan added. “That’s probably half the reason he brings them in here.”
Daria shuddered. “Mental torture. They would know the minute they saw this wall what was going to happen to them.”
He felt the strongest urge to put a comforting arm around her. Had they been alone in here, had not a dozen other people been on scene, he might have done it. He remembered his first serial killer scene, remembered the nausea it had caused, being forced to truly confront how evil some people could be.
“But he doesn’t kill them here,” he said, looking around again. “Maybe he doesn’t want the mess.”
“A fastidious serial killer?”
“One behavior often comes in conjunction with others.”
“Or he thinks he’s making up for being evil by being tidy?” she asked, sounding steadier now.
“I’ve seen stranger thought patterns,” he answered. “But the most important thing right now is...we’ve got him.”
He looked at her then and saw the belated realization dawn in those golden-brown eyes of her. She’d been so busy processing all of this, the enormity of it, that she hadn’t hit the bottom line yet.
They now knew for sure who the Avalanche Killer was.
Chapter 17
Energized, they spent a few more fruitless hours trying to track down where Curtis Shruggs might be. There was still the sense of urgency, but it had a different cause now. There was a chance, although Daria thought it a very slim one, that the most recent victim might still be alive. That put the entire situation into overdrive, and every police officer and sheriff in the county and beyond now had the bulletin they’d sent out.
A thorough crime-scene processing was not something you could hide from the neighbors. The locals had done a house to house and had reported back that the man seemed to mostly keep to himself—one rather dramatic young man speculated that he was mourning a lost love—but that was no guarantee one of them wasn’t friendly enough with Shruggs to warn him about what had been going on.
She and Stefan batted around the possibilities, and she sensed that he was as antsy as she was. Would Shruggs run? Or would he stay on his home turf? More importantly, where was he now? With his victim? Or did he have her stashed away in some secret place, where he could indulge his twisted fantasies? Was part of the torture leaving her there alone, giving her hope she could escape? Or would he be one of those sickos who liked to taunt his victims with what he was going to do to them for hours, even days before he actually took their lives? And when he did it, when he killed them, he did it with his bare hands, up close and personal. That spoke of a particular kind of drive and made it all the uglier.
“I think we need to talk to whoever hired him,” Stefan said. “I can’t believe the Coltons would employ someone for such a high-level position without vetting him pretty thoroughly first.”
“They would,” Daria agreed, “but I asked, and the person who actually hired Shruggs over ten years ago was the prior personnel manager.”
“The background check must be somewhere.”
She nodded. “All of that is in Decker Colton’s office, and he’s the only one who has access to it.”
He gave her a smile then that warmed her. “You don’t miss a trick, do you? So where do we find Mr. Decker Colton on a Saturday night?”
“I checked—he’s gone until Monday, off the grid with his wife.”
“Be nice if serial killers took weekends off,” Stefan muttered.
“I know. But it’s what we have to work with.”
“Hard to feel stalled when there’s maybe a still-alive victim out there.”
“Tell me about it,” Daria muttered.
Stefan gave her a sideways look. “You’re still convinced Sabrina Gilford wasn’t one of his victims?”
“Yes. And that her murderer knew who the Avalanche Killer was.”
“He knew a lot,” Stefan agreed, “to make it look like one of his kills.”
After the hours spent hashing over it all, dozens of phone calls and several reports from the further door to doors Liam Kastor had set in motion for them, they had a slightly clearer picture. Shruggs had many coworkers and several direct employees, but few friends, which seemed significant to Daria.
Stefan had one of the Bureau’s IT people start scouring for signs of his life—open or secret—online. Daria knew that people who had few personal contacts often had many online, and with the illusion of protection that step removed gave some people, they sometimes told those contacts things they would never say to anyone in person.
“If that doesn’t net anything,” Stefan said as they finally headed out to pick up Sam, “since we didn’t find a computer at his house, we’ll have to go for his work computer.”
She nodded but felt doubtful. “I just can’t imagine anyone as careful as he seems to be not keeping his two...lives completely separate.”
“Agreed. But people make mistakes. If they didn’t, we’d never get anywhere.”
“Point taken,” she said.
He gave her a sideways look. “Point reminds me to ask, did you make your scarf?”
Surprised but pleased, she smiled at him. “I did.”
“You weren’t kidding, then. You seriously knit.”
“I knit seriously,” she corrected with a grin. “Why, you want one?”
He reached out and ran a finger along the line of one of the cables. “Might look a little silly on me.”
“I think you could carry it off.” You could carry just about anything off. “Maybe in a more masculine color.”
In the process of pulling back his hand, his fingers brushed her jawline. She gave a start at the little electric shock it gave her. Had he done it intentionally? Of course not, she answered herself. It was just an accidental touch. She almost had herself convinced when something caught her peripheral vision and she realized his hand—the hand that had touched her—was tightened around the steering wheel far more than was necessary.
She didn’t dare look at him again and was relieved when they got to Fiona’s place. Sam was happily worn-out. But that didn’t stop him from chattering away excitedly about his day from the moment they got into the car. And the longer he went on, the wider Stefan’s smile at his son became.
“And they said I could come back,” Sam crowed. “Mrs. Alvarez said she could get me from school. Then I could come and play.”
Stefan glanced at her. “How do you thank people for that?” he asked softly.
“We’ll think of something.”
This got her the smile. And damn, it was a killer smile.
“C’n Daria fix dinner?” Sam asked innocently.
Stefan gave her another glance, this time wincing, as if he thought the boy was saying she belonged in the kitchen. She nearly laughed.
“Why would you want me to do that?” she asked the boy.
“’Cause you fix stuff that tastes good.”
She looked back at his father. “Sometimes,” she said with a grin, “it really is that simple.”
“How about we hit the burger place?” Stefan suggested. “You can order it however you want.”
“Okay,” Sam said agreeably.
Apparently a happy day with the Alvarez boys took the angry right out of him, which was what she’d hoped for.
“I mentioned to Fiona that we could be heading into a very demanding phase of the investigation,” she said.
Stefan gave her a sideways look as he drove, then lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “It’s not as if she doesn’t know what we’re working on. The
whole town knows.”
“Yes. And both she and Miguel instantly said Sam could stay with them whenever necessary.”
“Told ya,” Sam piped up from the back seat.
“Guess you made a good impression, buddy,” Stefan said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means they liked you,” Daria said, beaming at the boy, who grinned right back at her.
Dear heaven, he was going to have that same killer charm when he grew up, she thought. She tried to picture it, an adult Sam with an older Stefan. For some reason her mind kept wanting to put herself into that picture, so she veered away quickly.
“They’re nice. Really nice,” Sam said. He was looking at Daria rather pointedly. “Casey said they come play at your house sometimes.”
“They do,” she confirmed.
“They said your tree thing was cool.”
“They like it because it has other trees all around, and if you’re quiet when you’re up there, you can see all sorts of birds and animals.”
“Really? Like squirrels and stuff?”
She laughed. “More like deer, raccoons, hawks, now and then even an eagle.”
Sam’s eyes widened. “An eagle?”
“If you’re lucky. No wapiti, though.”
“What’s a—” Sam enunciated carefully “—wapiti?”
“An elk. Like a deer, only way bigger, with biiiiig antlers,” she answered, drawling out the big and spreading her hands as far apart as she could in the car.
“Wow! I’ve never seen anything that big.”
“I saw some down on the golf course just the other day,” she told him. “They come down during the winter to eat the grass, because it’s hard to find food up in the mountains.”
“I wish I could see one.”
“I bet you will, kiddo, now that you’re here.”
“Cool.”
They spent a cheerful half an hour eating burgers and fries at the local supplier of Sam’s choice. And sitting at the table across from the two of them, listening to Sam tell yet another tale of his exciting day—this one involving a snowball fight that had lasted until they’d run out of snow—she felt something she’d rarely felt in her life. A sense of...something. Wholeness? Completeness? Something she hadn’t felt since she’d made the decision to make her way without the weight of her adoptive family name—and the power and prestige of President Joe Colton—behind her.
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