by Kay Hooper
She didn’t see anyone; nor was there a sound coming from the cabin. No car or truck was within her sight, but she obviously couldn’t see the rear of the cabin and whether there was a second drive or roadway leading to it.
After that long, tense waiting, Jessie finally made herself move. Keeping the same distance between herself and the cabin, which was probably around fifty yards, she began to circle it, crossing the wide, shallow creek with ease and quiet because it was filled with granite slabs that were stable enough to hold her weight and near enough to one another to provide a path across the water.
On the other side, she found the same sort of ground, with pines and poor soil sporting little else but briars and weeds—until she came parallel to the side of the cabin. Someone, she realized, had gone to the trouble of bringing in tons of rich topsoil at some point, spread so thickly it was almost a sprawling berm, and had then planted the sorts of bushes and trees commonly found in suburban yards.
It hadn’t been recently done, but she guessed it had been only a few years ago.
From one side of the cabin, around the back, and—as far as Jessie could tell from her position—wrapping around the other side was this thick layer of rich soil, heavily planted. There were hardwood trees that appeared to her to be at least ten years old, perhaps more. There were azaleas, most past their spring blooming season, and other flowering shrubs. There were beds of flowers separated by a winding footpath of flat slabs of flagstone. There were big garden urns, here and there, planted with flowers, and Jessie could see at least one rustic bench placed to afford the best view of the odd little garden.
Odd because this place was out in the middle of nowhere. Odd because the single “road” she could see didn’t appear to be used regularly, and yet the cabin was cared for, as was its roughly two-acre yard. And odd because, unless she had badly misread her sketched map, this place was on the edge of land she owned; this land belonged to Victor.
And unless fifteen years had changed him a great deal, this was definitely not a place Victor would have for himself. Not his style at all.
Unless…a love nest? A meeting place kept so pretty and homey by some woman hoping Victor would finally settle down?
Possible, she supposed. Likely? She didn’t know. But the fact remained that this place existed; it was here.
So…what were the alternatives? Squatters? That didn’t make sense. Squatters settled down but were prepared to grab a few things and run when they had to; whoever had built this place put down roots. Money had been spent here, and a great deal of time and effort. And who would go to all that trouble on land they didn’t own?
Despite the silence, Jessie had to believe that someone occupied the cabin, and was perhaps even now inside.
And she wasn’t about to just go up to the door and knock.
She hesitated, but a glance at the sun told her that the afternoon was nearly gone, and that she needed to head back toward Baron Hollow if she hoped to reach Rayburn House before dark.
She really didn’t want to spend any time at all wandering around in the dark. Not out here.
Reluctant, but relieved as well, she began to cautiously retrace her steps. Tomorrow, she thought, was soon enough to return. Soon enough to explore further and try to determine who lived way out here in this odd little cabin on this oddly cultivated patch of “useless” land.
And find out why the place filled her with dread.
“FOLLOW PROCEDURE,” MAGGIE told her operative. “Study whatever you can of the scene, photograph for later study, then report it to the local police.”
“And then keep looking.”
“Well, one victim doesn’t a serial killer make. She could have been running to escape an abusive husband or boyfriend; it happens. You’ll have to see if you find more, or if the local police are worried enough by this one to call in reinforcements.” Maggie paused, then added, “And watch your back, will you? If you’ve got a local killing, and he’s been doing it for years, he’ll either be very complacent—or hypervigilant to threats. You poking your nose around is likely to be construed as a threat.”
Navarro sighed. “Yeah, it usually is.”
“Just be careful.”
“I will. Talk to you at the next check-in.” He ended the call, frowning a little.
Maggie had a bad feeling about this whole situation. Bad feelings Navarro understood. Bad feelings he took serious note of, especially when they were voiced by people he trusted and most especially when his subsequent activities, such as this rapid but seemingly casual exploration, turned up a body very quickly.
Or what was left of one.
He eyed the scattered remains a minute or two longer, certain this was a fresh kill, someone who had been alive no more than a week or two ago. And still certain she had died while trying to escape…something or someone.
His extra senses were offering him no more than that.
Navarro’s strongest psychic ability was in locating the dead—their actual physical remains; he wasn’t a medium, had never seen a spirit, and barely understood how his own ability worked, especially since he’d come to it recently in life. What he did know was that he could look at a map, or just start walking, and…somehow…that extra sense led him to what he was looking for.
But locating the dead wasn’t his only psychic ability. Haven and the SCU called it clairvoyance, though his understanding of the term was that it covered a rather broad range of different ways of sensing one’s surroundings. Some clairvoyants heard information as if listening to nearby whispers, some had visions or dreams, and some simply…knew.
Things they couldn’t possibly know. Except that they did.
He looked down at what was left of this woman, this young woman, and in his mind’s eye he could see flashes of a desperate, dogged race through a dark forest—and the sudden plunge off a cliff that had ended it. Clairvoyance or simply imagination—he didn’t know which.
Not fair at all, of course, that she had escaped a twisted killer only to die here, like this.
But life wasn’t fair. And neither, more often than not, was death.
Navarro returned his cell phone to the case clipped to his belt, hesitated, and then shrugged out of his backpack and retrieved his camera. It was a good one, and he was adept at using it. He took numerous shots of the remains, then added a few of the surrounding area. He knew this wasn’t a crime scene but, for want of a better phrase, it was most certainly a dump site, and he wanted to look over the photos later at his leisure and after he e-mailed them back to Haven, something he would have done even if it wasn’t part of Haven’s normal procedure in such situations.
Finished to his satisfaction, he put his camera away and shrugged into the backpack, then remained where he was for another several minutes, carefully studying his location.
He was a considerable distance off the trails, so he’d have to think up a plausible reason why he had ended up here; stumbling over a body tended to focus police attention rather sharply on details like that one. He set a part of his mind to formulating and answering likely questions such as that one even as he noted landmarks that would lead him—and the police—back to this place.
Then he adjusted the straps of his backpack and began to make his way back to the trail. It was uphill.
As he climbed, he continued to study the area, both to fix landmarks in his mind and because he was pondering the location of the remains and wondering how she had ended up where she was.
Escaping, he knew. But what that told him was that she had been kept somewhere in the area, likely not too far from where her remains had wound up.
Panicked and injured as she’d certainly been, in shock and desperate, it was almost certain that she had not run as far away from wherever he’d kept her as she’d probably thought she had. People lost in the woods rarely traveled a straight path, and given all the dips and ravines and winding trails in the area, the chances were good she had wandered around quite a lot without actually moving any g
reat distance from her prison.
She had probably fallen more than once, injuring herself even more, and that would have slowed her. If she had been climbing, as she likely had been given where her remains had been found, that also would have slowed her. If he had kept her without food or water even for a brief amount of time, that also meant she wouldn’t have had much strength or speed once the adrenaline rush wore off.
So she had probably been held nearby, at least as the crow flew. “Nearby” meaning within a three- to five-mile radius, most likely— and assuming she had escaped from where she had been held, and not during transport.
That still meant a lot of territory, virtually all of it incredibly rugged terrain.
Navarro ticked off the possibilities in his mind, detached because he had to be, because feeling too much for a victim’s life cut short was a sure route to burning out quickly and being unable to do his job.
Whoever she had been, the girl deserved justice, and whoever her killer was, he deserved…
Well, to Navarro’s way of thinking, he deserved a bullet in his brain, with no further human resources wasted on him. Navarro didn’t believe in rehabilitation, not when it came to twisted killers.
But Navarro wasn’t a cop, and he was no longer a soldier, so that sort of decision wasn’t his to make.
Not unless he was defending his own life, of course, or someone else’s, and that was always possible.
There were even ways to make it possible. If, that was, he was able to identify and find the killer.
“Not my job,” he muttered. Well, not exactly his job. His job was to find more victims, or find some other evidence that a serial killer was operating in this seemingly nice little town.
The town that felt rotten to him, somewhere down deep, and not just out here in the mountains.
“SO YOU WERE just hiking up here and found the body?” Police Chief Dan Maitland eyed the tall man standing with him several yards away from where his small forensics team worked over remains that could hardly be called a body.
“That’s right.”
“A fair bit off the path, weren’t you?”
“I like to explore. Paths are there because the exploring’s already been done.”
“Dangerous in these parts, to wander off on your own.”
Navarro’s wide shoulders lifted and fell in a faint shrug. “I’m no novice when it comes to hiking in remote areas. I’ve a good sense of direction plus a compass, and picked up a map of the area yesterday to study before I set out. Besides, I know how to live off the land, and I always hike with enough supplies and equipment to see me through a week or more if necessary. Just in case.”
“Boy Scout?”
“Military.”
Well, that explains a lot. It explained how the man was able to carry the obviously loaded backpack now at his feet with a deceptive ease. It explained the way he walked and the way he stood. It even explained the crisp report he had offered when he’d turned up at the Baron Hollow Police Department nearly an hour before.
He hadn’t wasted words, and he hadn’t seemed particularly disturbed by his grisly discovery. And he had led them back here without taking a single wrong turn, which would not have been an easy thing even for a hiker with years of experience in these woods.
I’d never have pegged this guy as a writer. Not that Maitland had ever met one before, not a book writer anyway, so for all he knew they all looked like recently ex–Special Forces guys who had played quarterback in college.
Maitland said, “So you weren’t planning to return to Rayburn House tonight?”
“Hadn’t made up my mind, to be honest. I let the innkeeper know I’d be coming and going, out here as well as in town, so they gave me one of the ground-floor rooms with its own entrance. That way I won’t disturb any of the other guests no matter how late I’m out or how early I come back.” He paused, then added, “With storms forecast most afternoons for the next week or so, I decided to get in some hiking before the weather got temperamental. I wanted to get a solid feel for the area. Lot of stories attached to these woods.”
“Lot of tragedies,” Maitland said. He hesitated, then added, “Not everybody is happy about a writer nosing around looking under rocks. In case you weren’t warned about that.”
“I was.” Navarro smiled faintly. “When you write fiction, nobody much cares how many rocks you turn over; when you write nonfiction, people tend to get a little more nervous.”
“Is that why you use a pen name? And why there’s no photo of you on the books?”
“Not really. More for my own privacy than anything else. As a general rule, writers don’t like celebrity. So Colin Sheridan gets all the fan mail—and the occasional threat—and I don’t have to listen to long, drawn-out stories on airplanes from wannabe writers.”
“Threats?”
“There have been a few along the way, when I was writing about something controversial. Goes with the job.”
“I guess everybody has stuff hidden under rocks they’d rather stayed there.”
“It’s human nature,” Navarro agreed. “But this time around I’m more interested in older history, in legends and local mythology, and the kinds of stories I’ve dug up so far here in the South usually aren’t much of a threat to the living.”
Maitland reached up to wipe away a trickle of sweat from his brow, and the gesture prompted by the usual oppressive June heat also prompted a thought. “Still, I’d be careful if I were you. Here in Baron Hollow, I mean. Many of the families in the area have been here since this place was nothing more than a footpath through the mountains, and with families like that, old secrets can sting even after generations.”
Navarro studied him for a moment, head slightly tilted, then said, “I do my best never to make enemies, Chief, especially when it’s needless. Baron Hollow has quite a history, most of it already well documented, and the ghost stories of Rayburn House and Baron Hollow are already well-known enough to draw tourists.”
“And ghost hunters,” Maitland said rather sourly. “Constant parade of them now that it’s the sort of show really popular on TV. So they come here. With boxes of equipment and cameras and a tendency to scare themselves silly when a gust of wind slams a door shut or century-old wood pops and cracks because the weather changes.”
“They give you trouble?”
“Not all of them, but a few. I can hardly send them packing when they aren’t breaking any laws and they bring some much-needed tourist dollars to the community. And they’re mostly harmless, if incurably nosy.” He shrugged. “Still, a lot of the locals haven’t been very happy to see their homes show up on some of those cable programs, even in background shots. Enough so I was surprised when Emma agreed to your visit.”
Navarro offered the “official” version of events, even as he wondered about the real author and how persuasive Maggie had had to be in order to arrange for someone else to come in his place. Then again, perhaps she had simply doubled his book advance; Haven got what it needed, and being privately funded by a multibillionaire like John Garrett meant money was always on the table.
A lot of money, when necessary.
“When we spoke by phone months ago, I told Miss Rayburn I wouldn’t make either Rayburn House or the town look ridiculous, and offered to let her read the manuscript before my editor sees it. That seemed to satisfy her. She’ll get approval of any photos I decide to include as well.”
“Uh-huh. And how does your editor feel about that?”
“I don’t talk much to my editor until a book’s done.” Navarro shrugged, hoping he wasn’t denigrating editors everywhere. “What she doesn’t know, we won’t argue about.”
“I guess when you’re as successful as you are, you get to call a lot of the shots.”
“A few, at least.” His gaze tracked across the several yards separating them from the remains he had found, and he changed the subject abruptly. In a sober tone, he asked, “Do you think there’s any chance of making an identi
fication?”
“God knows. Unless my people find a skull, we won’t even have dental records to work with. All I can tell you is that she’s been out here at least a week, maybe longer.”
“She?” Navarro asked, reminding himself it was information he wasn’t likely to know, even as he focused his attention intensely on Maitland; he didn’t believe in mind control, but he had noticed that when he concentrated on the questions he was asking, most people tended to provide him with information. Even normally hard-nosed and closemouthed cops.
Whether it was part of his clairvoyance or something else, Navarro neither knew nor cared. He simply used it as another tool to do his job.
“According to my ME, enough of the pelvic bone is intact to determine sex. Definitely female, probably young. No fingerprints, of course, and just about all the labs servicing law enforcement are so backed up on toxicological and DNA tests that it isn’t practical even to submit a sample except in an active homicide investigation. With what’s left here, I doubt very much Doc will be able to determine cause of death, and that means we play the odds and list the death as unexplained, probably accidental.”
He paused. “Or a potential homicide.”
“Homicide?” Navarro’s voice was mildly curious.
“Well, I have to consider it until I have evidence to the contrary. So we ship the remains to yet another backed-up lab in Chapel Hill. Might hear something back in a month. Or three. And even then the report will as likely as not tell us little more than we know right now.” He shrugged, wondering with faint irritation why he was being so forthcoming with this stranger. “We’ll go through the motions, do what we can to try for an ID, but we have open files on dozens of missing people.”
One of Navarro’s dark brows lifted, giving his pleasant but unremarkable face a momentary and rather unsettling sharpness. “So many?”
“Over the last dozen years. And within a hundred-mile radius, most of it wilderness like this peppered with a few small mountain towns like Baron Hollow. Not a lot of residents to the acre, but plenty of tourists passing through, including a lot of campers or hikers who don’t exactly introduce themselves. And too many of them do something careless or just don’t understand how easy it is to get lost up here. So they do. And sometimes I doubt we even know about it, so the numbers of actual missing are probably higher.
