Seeking Worthy Pursuits: A Dark Romantic Suspense Novel (Alace Sweets Book 2)

by MariaLisa deMora

  “Did we ever get a good timeline on the deaths? I know we’re talking about half a dozen counties, with all kinds of different paperwork requirements, but even estimations might tell us something.” He sat straight, scanning the area, head on a swivel out of instinct, not because anything in their vicinity alerted him. Owen was simply vigilant, all the time. “Just from the pictures, I had a feeling that the largest grouping, that pod of six, I think that was his first. Something happened, either it got out of hand, or it was too hard to get the outcome he wanted, and he abandoned them.”

  Alace looked up from the tablet to stare at him.

  He shrugged and angled his face away, either embarrassed or playing at an act. “What?”

  “That’s the same feeling I had after I studied the info for a while. Gimme a sec.” She glanced back at the tablet, navigated to a different folder on a different server, and took the time to make her patient way through three levels of pass phrase security to get to the blind keystroke key she preferred. “Here.” She maximized the document and turned the tablet towards him, waiting as Owen stood and made his way to her pile of rocks. “Look at the dates as I’ve got them lined up here. That group is identified by P6.” She appreciated the fact he didn’t reach out to take the device, because she likely wouldn’t have given it up, but he didn’t know that. Glancing around him, she saw he had brought his backpack with him, gripped in one hand, but angled to where she couldn’t easily reach for it. Maybe he would understand. She’d always been a jealous owner of the tools that allowed her to not only do her job but do it well and survive in the end. He might be, too.

  “Yeah, yeah. See that?” His finger hovered over the surface of the tablet, and his head bobbed in a staccato reaction to what she’d already discovered. “Six dead in that one pod, but two of them outlived the other four by days. Maybe more than a week. They’d been taken at around the same time, and there was no evidence of cannibalism, which means the two that lived longer must have fended off the other four for resources. Those four were slightly younger, maybe easier to intimidate. The two teamed up together.” His head shot up and he stared at her, eyes round, whites showing in a broad circle edging the dark iris. “Did you see the pictures? Those two were at opposite ends of their pod.”

  “Holding pen, that’s what I call what they were in. Yeah, I saw the positioning. At first I thought it was in avoidance of the dead in their midst, but now that you’ve laid things out, I wonder if it was more than that.” Alace withdrew the tablet, minimized the document, and found the image she was looking for a moment later. She angled the device so they both could see. “The one built a barricade from the corpses to keep the other one at bay. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “I can see that.” Owen nodded and sighed. “Humans are the most vicious animals.”

  “So you think the two women in that pen first banded together against our abductor? They were all starving, but it would have been slow. Water, though. Dehydration is a fast killer. Maybe they knew the odds, or saw something happening, maybe to one of the younger ones in their pen. So they changed the game, made it so it wasn’t enjoyable, or interesting? Then when the kidnapper’s attention turned elsewhere and there wasn’t any more food or water coming their way, they created a divided society?”

  “Yeah, in a bigass nutshell, that’s what I think.” Owen flashed her a quick smile, but his face quickly set back into somber lines as it faded. “Control, and lots of it. That’s what this guy wants.”

  “Why are you so stuck on the killer being male?” Alace angled her head back, staring up into Owen’s eyes. She affected a cold, flat demeanor, feeling that place in her gut settle, all unease leaving her, steady ripples of anticipation the only thing building. He knew her background, all of it. One of the things Alace had insisted on with the hunters she pulled into her circle. There was no danger to her in them knowing her history, and she’d felt the need to force feed the information in order to level the playing field. Most of the ones in their line of work, and she included herself in this mix, harbored a thick thread of narcissism. Playing judge, jury, and executioner fostered that personality flaw, and while she might not still be in the game like she had been, she certainly wanted to be top dog in the house she was building. Alace fought a smile when she saw the moment Owen realized what he had been implying, those quiet insinuations that women couldn’t, wouldn’t be the same kind of monsters men were. She was a silent but present contradiction to that stance, and he knew it.

  “Seventeen percent are female. Eighty-three are male. Those odds are overwhelmingly in my favor. No offense to the boss lady, but you’re pretty much an anomaly.” She marked his tight, small smile, more a contraction of the muscles at the corners of his mouth than a lifting; it was a slip in his good old boy mask. She also marked his language, pulling her exercise of her skill set into the present, when, for all Owen knew and all she’d suggested, it had been left behind when she folded herself into Eric’s life. “And I don’t care what that database says. It’s only as good and thorough as the killers who’ve been caught. Means there’s a wealth of data not present, and that’s not an absence I can map. Not like a void I can see. You’re a mystery to more than just me.”

  “Let’s keep it that way.” She scanned the forest, noting how the shadows had lengthened, marking time as it slipped away while they sat and talked. “We’re in agreement that the grouping of six corpses was probably the killer’s initial efforts. The existence of such a collection indicates whoever they are, they had a span of time not just to abduct so many, but to keep them alive for at least nine months.” The initial disappearance marked the start date to that section of the killer’s spree, and the tentative date of death in the reports put a pin in the outer ring of continued involvement in what had become a failed experiment. “You think the killer stayed to watch, or not?”

  “You think that portal was for viewing and not a privy pot?” Owen straightened, hands drifting across his torso for a few seconds, a private dance of reassurance Alace knew well, but she didn’t empathize enough to not use the unconscious action as a way to map where Owen’s weapons were. “You think he watched.”

  “I’m sure of it.” Each of the pens in Idaho had been constructed with two egress points. One was a trapdoor large enough to get a body through, and one was a too-small-to-exit round or square hole in the center of the ceiling built from a mix of wood and wire. The reports indicated they were all common to commercial shipping pallets, easily obtainable anywhere. That hole, though. “Trust me, they watch. But did he or she stay after disengaging from the prisoners, or was it not a failure at all, but an involuntary abandonment?”

  “Outside influences matter.” Owen went quiet, and Alace gave him the space to run through whatever scenario he had in his head. “Huh. What’s the intervals of those first thirteen again?”

  She rattled off the dates, letting him fill in the months between.

  Silence descended around them as he mulled things over. Alace threw another handful of trail mix into her mouth, the crunching as loud in her head as she imagined Owen’s thoughts were in his.

  Chin lifting, he pulled in a ragged breath, head turning as he scanned the area around them.

  “This dude’s military or something like it.”

  Chapter Seven

  Owen

  “Why do you say that?”

  Alace’s question wasn’t a surprise. It was the same exact thing he’d have asked in her place.

  The first time he’d met her, finding the truth of their similarities had been disquieting. Knowing up front the openly acknowledged measure of what she’d done, the acts for which she’d claimed responsibility, Owen had been half expecting a hulking monster schlumping along, some twisty-tortured frumpy woman with crazy eyes whom he wouldn’t be leaving alive when he was done with the meet.

  So far off the mark.

  Not movie star elegant—though if you saw images of those women out shopping with no makeup a
rtist at their elbow, it was questionable whether even movie stars lived up to the false reputation promoters and movie producers fostered—but still, Alace ranked up there if a body was inclined to measure things in numbers. Memorably gorgeous. But something that had struck him with greater impact than her beauty was the intelligence he’d recognized in her eyes.

  Alace Sweets wasn’t an angry person; she’d never been in biz for the thrills. Owen expected she still dreamed of her kills, and not in a held-breath excitement way. He’d bet money her dreams were more like his, where there was always one more person to save, someone out of reach, an illusory failure that crippled in the nightmares that visited him with disquieting regularity.

  So to have gone into that meeting with one expectation, he’d been dumbfounded at how wrong he’d been. Their paths up to the point where their journeys converged might have been very different—his an average raising in a comfortably situated Midwest family, hers birthed from violence in a town shattered by economic woes—but somehow they’d found themselves at the same fork in the road, and both had chosen to take the far less traveled and more bloody one.

  “The breaks.” He surveyed the area, marking the things that were the same as well as any differences since his last scan. A darkness at the base of a tree hadn’t shifted or changed with the setting sun; different angles of the rays were now shining off the scales, revealing a coiled snake. “They’re staggered in what feels like a deployment cadence. Other than that first pod, that first group. But he could have been home for longer for some reason. Injury, extended furlough, legal inquiry. All kinds of reasons he could have been sent back out of cycle. Legal would make sense, if he can’t keep it together while embedded or deployed. Or maybe that pod represented extreme frustration at being taken out of action. Hard to say for sure without more data.”

  “Yeah, but there are other occupations that entertain the same kind of in-and-out tempo when it comes to home life. Truck driver, offshore rigger, boat laborer. That’s off the top of my head.” She looked down at the tablet and fiddled with things, as comfortable in his presence here in the remote woods of a national park as she had been in that diner months ago. Is it confidence or true trust? Only time would tell. She snorted. “We’re in Utah. Perhaps it’s a missionary?”

  “Oh, add religion in the mix and that’s a recipe for confusion.” He scanned the area and abruptly decided he didn’t like how he was looming over her. He took a step back, crouching to rest one knee on the ground. “The intervals, though, do you see it?” Why am I asking for confirmation? He was used to working alone, sorting out the details provided by whoever was processing the orders from on high, but the final interpretation had always been his. “I have a guy I can reach out to, get him sorting through deployment orders for service personnel living in this area.”

  “Already done,” she said, sounding distracted. “It’s a large geo target, but the dates are immutable, so it builds a decent framework to bolster our question.” She looked up, and without missing a beat, asked him, “What is it that disquiets you about me being here right now?”

  “What?” A stalling tactic, because he’d heard her clearly. She knew what he was doing, too, telegraphing her knowledge with a tiny eyeroll and a delicate snort. “I don’t tandem things. I expected to come up and run some recon, hike out, and report back what a boots-on-the-ground view looked like. Drones are great, but unless they’re hired and self-directed, footage is subject to the original purpose. Can’t get a full picture from video alone. Maybe a little bit of me wanted to make the boss lady proud, doing the unexpected. Above and beyond.” Might as well be completely honest; he’d already opened up far more than intended. His next breath drew sandpaper up his dry throat. “You and me, we’re more alike than even I’d expected, and you showing up here makes sense, because you had the same thoughts I did. But we looked at different data sets and still came to the same conclusion. So you being here chasing something I didn’t see means there could be even more I didn’t see. It’s not necessarily you that’s torquing me over; it’s all”—he made a vague gesture with his hand, winding up resting his wrist on the knee that jutted upward—“that.”

  “So it’s not because my count exceeds yours?”

  Hell, how would she know he’d found out that tidbit, unless she knew he’d dug deeper into her than she might want a person to do? “Does it?” Keeping his tone casually light, he tried to sell idle disbelief. “I’m not too sure about your assumptions.”

  Her kill count was huge, when reckoned against these kinds of missions. His was far larger if the total from the first compound were included. In an instant, the smell of dust swept around him, heat from a central American sun shining down on his shoulders, holding him in place as the rattling rap-rap-rap of small arms fire sounded in the distance. Ignoring the swirl of anxiety that accompanied the skim of sweat covering his body, Owen waited it out and kept his eyes on Alace. As long as she didn’t fade, he was still here.

  Shifting position subtly, Alace abandoned the ease and relaxation of the half lotus she’d been in since he’d stalked into the clearing around her rock pile. Tension sang through her muscles, and the edges of her boots dug into the rock, ready to support a solid muscular flex if she needed to react to something.

  Tongue poking a tent from the inside of his cheek, he blew out a long, slow, silent stream of air, centering himself in a different, yet still so similar way.

  “Counts don’t bother me,” he said finally, deliberately pushing his shoulders down and back, opening himself physically, hoping she’d see the vulnerable position as it was meant. Trust. I trust you, Alace. He shouldn’t, but then again, she shouldn’t trust him either, and yet, she apparently did.

  “Me, either.” Her lips were still full and rosy, not pressed thin and white like his had to be. The only place she carried visible tension was directly in front of her ears; the muscles anchoring her jaw had pulled taut. Alace gave him a smile that, like the others he’d seen from her, didn’t even come close to reaching her eyes, then slowly tipped her head down and studied the tablet. “Did you finish answering my question about why you think it’s a man?”

  He ran their conversation back through his head, spending the moment wondering at her question before realizing the why of it. A dry chuckle escaped his lips and he saw her mouth curl, still directed down at the tablet. She’d re-asked a question from before he’d nearly lost himself to a flashback, undoubtedly to put him back in the more recent mindset and not the reeling vulnerability he always felt after his memories swamped him.

  “Statistics don’t lie.” He shrugged. “But anomalies exist.” He spread a hand, palm up, creating an unbalanced scale. “Guesswork and conjecture only take us so far. There’s no DNA, no sequencing, no physical evidence to point to who the killer is. One of us will be right, and one will be wrong, and the crux of the needing to know is being able to predict behavior based on an immutable facet of the killer’s personality and existence. With both of us, and taking different mental approaches, we’ll cover all angles regardless.”

  “That we will.” Her head lifted, and she stared into his eyes. “You cool, Owen? Really cool? Me being here, me disagreeing with you? All that jazz?”

  “Yeah, Alace.” This too was honesty. “I’m cool with you. I’m cool with you leading, as long as you don’t get me dead.”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind.” She placed the tablet and satellite Wi-Fi into a cushioning sleeve, and then into the backpack, followed that by wrapping up her snack and putting that into a smaller bag that clipped on the outside of her pack. “Ready to get rolling?”

  Owen pushed upright, adjusting his pack instinctively, settling the weight against his back. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Owen.” She stood, her hand drifting down before jerking to the strap of her pack. She lifted and slung it over her shoulders, giving it the same shoulder roll he’d done to place the straps comfortably. “Don’t ma’am me.”

  “Yes,” th
e following word hovered on his lips for a long moment but had Alace’s squinty-eyed stare to keep it at bay. He finally released a breath and caved, giving her only one word.

  “Alace.”

  Chapter Eight

  Alace

  Owen made for a great trailblazer. Walking ahead, being taller and broader, he successfully cleared the trail of briars that had made the leap across the space, as well as the plethora of spiderwebs spanning the gaps between the trees on either side. He just wasn’t very happy about it.

  Alace grinned down at the toes of her boots as he burst into curses again, arms moving to sweep webbing from his face and head. As amusing as he was, something about his responses was off, but she wasn’t yet sure what it was.

  “Hey, Owen.” She waited for him to turn, and without lifting her head, offered him the object in her left hand. “Doubles as a web gatherer.”

  The rough walking stick was yanked from her grip without a word, and a moment later, she heard his footsteps moving away. More walking and less stamping, which would be good for a lot of reasons. Alace chanced a glance up to see he had the thick piece of wood held like a scepter in front of him, the end whirling in a smooth figure-eight pattern. She let him get another few feet ahead before she stirred herself and followed.

  They’d traveled nearly five more miles before she believed she had the truth of it.

  “Smooth footfalls for a dozen steps, then a forced clumsiness. Your gracelessness reveals you.” He was silent, as he’d been since they’d left the unexpected meeting spot, with the exception of his growling arguments with the spiderwebs. “Why do you pretend you’ve no woodcraft at all?”

  She stopped walking when Owen did, kept her chin raised to meet his eyes as he turned to face her. For an instant—a fragment of a fraction of a second—Alace saw every piece of herself in his gaze. Flat, cold, with blunted affect and lacking empathy. Entirely familiar, and just as thoroughly disturbing. She’d understood logically, but recognizing and knowing were different in practice. The woods harbored at least two killers today, and, if they were lucky in their pursuit, perhaps three.