by Paige Tyler
Carhart looked around the room at the agents, profilers, and techies. “All we have to go on is this code without any context as to what it might mean. We don’t know if it’s related to the victim or where this hunt is supposed to take place. We need to ask ourselves how the hell we’re going to stop the Hunter from grabbing his next victim.”
“We can’t,” Clayne said.
Carhart gave him with what would have been a withering look if Clayne gave a shit what he thought. “I don’t know how they do things at Homeland, Buchanan, but the FBI doesn’t give up. This is a man’s life at stake here.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Clayne fought the urge to bare his teeth. “But we’re not going to be able to stop the killer from grabbing him. Not this time.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because he already has his victim,” Danica said before Clayne could answer. He turned to give her an appraising look. She always was one step ahead of him.
Carhart frowned. “How can you possibly know that?”
“Because the killer detailed exactly how he was going to chase this rabbit down,” Clayne said. “He said his victim would trust his feet and try and outrun him instead of standing up to him in a fight like the others had. He knows the guy will head uphill and through the thickest parts of the brush, trying to lose the killer on the rough terrain. Those weren’t guesses. He’s stalked this victim long enough to know exactly how he’s going to react. I wouldn’t be surprised if this victim is a runner—probably cross-country.”
Which was one demographic the DCO hadn’t included in their search parameters.
“That doesn’t mean he already kidnapped his victim,” Carhart insisted. “He could be on his way to grab him right now.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” Danica answered before Clayne could reply. Which was probably just as well. Carhart didn’t seem willing to listen to anything he said anyway. “The killer wouldn’t have bargained away his time if he didn’t already have his victim ready to go. He’s not stupid. He didn’t give up anything.”
More than one FBI agent looked a little ill at that.
Carhart looked to Hobson for confirmation. The profiler nodded.
“Agent Beckett is right. And if we accept that the killer has his victim already, our only hope of saving him is to stop the hunt before it starts.”
Carhart swore. He looked completely out of his element on this one. If he wasn’t such an a-hole, Clayne might feel sorry for him.
He turned to Clayne. “You seem to have some kind of connection with this killer. How do we stop him?”
Clayne didn’t like what he was implying, but this wasn’t the time to get in another pissing contest with the head of the task force. If Carhart could put aside his animosity, so could he. “Assuming we’re correct about him already having his prey, that means the clue he gave us has to be related to the location where the hunt will take place. We need to figure it out and get there first.”
Carhart considered that, then nodded. “Okay, that’s what we do.” He gave the other people in the room a nod. “Make it happen, everybody. And see if local PD got any missing person reports within the past twenty-four hours.”
Half the room immediately started typing furiously on computers, while the other half worked the phones. It was pure chaos, but with a single purpose—figure out what that string of numbers and letters meant so they could save a man’s life. But while they were diligent, they weren’t the DCO.
Clayne turned to Danica. “I’m going to make a call.”
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and went into the hallway. When Kendra answered, he explained the situation, then gave her the code.
“I’ll call you when we have something,” she said.
Not “if” but “when”—that was one thing Clayne liked about the DCO. He put his phone away and went back into the room.
“We’re not coming up with anything obvious,” Danica told him. “That string of letters and numbers doesn’t correspond to any known address, building code, company, organization, city zoning district—anything.”
Clayne knew it couldn’t be that easy.
“I think I figured out who the victim is,” Tony announced.
Everyone froze.
“Sacramento PD got a report of a kidnapping this morning—a high school track and field coach named Joshua Vender. Witnesses saw a man drag Vender into a van outside the school’s gym.” Tony gave Clayne a nod. “You were right. Vender’s specialty is cross-country running. He’s won dozens of awards for races he competed in.”
“Did they get a description of the guy who grabbed him?” Danica asked.
Tony shook his head. “No. Just a big guy, wearing a hoodie and sunglasses. Nothing on the van, either. Cops found it a few blocks away, wiped clean.”
Carhart singled out a female agent. “Jansen, take Anders and talk to the witnesses. See if one of them remembers something that’ll help.”
As the woman hurried out, Danica turned to Clayne. “Why change his MO and grab a runner this time?” she asked softly. “Why not go after the guys on our profile, the ones who’d put up a fight?”
Clayne shrugged. “Maybe he got bored. Maybe he thought it’d be more fun to chase someone who could run fast. The other ones weren’t much of a challenge for him.”
Around the room, people had separated into smaller groups to pursue their own interpretations of the clue the killer had given them. This was the part of the job Clayne hated. He was lousy at this kind of stuff. So he stood hovering over Danica while she listened to the recording of the telephone conversation on a pair of headphones. In the front of the room, Carhart and several other agents studied the killer’s clue that had been enlarged and projected onto a screen. Clayne didn’t think much of Carhart, but he hoped the bastard could come up with something soon.
Two hours later, Danica pulled off the headphones. “I might have something.”
Everyone stopped what they were doing to give her their full attention.
“I think the killer gave us an additional clue. Listen to what he says right before he hangs up.”
She played the recording on speaker so everyone could hear it.
“You mean the part where he says it’d be a tragedy?” Clayne asked.
Danica nodded. “He puts emphasis on the word. It’s too deliberate and precise to be a coincidence. It has to mean something.”
“Yeah,” Tony agreed. “But what?”
While half of them kept trying to decipher the code, the other half focused on the word tragedy and what it might mean. Clayne put in a quick call to Kendra to give her the new information, then sat down with Danica and Tony to work on it. Unfortunately, there were dozens of locations in the Sacramento area that could be associated with the word—and that was just in the literal sense. When they started looking at tragedies that had occurred in the area, the possibilities jumped astronomically.
Clayne stared at the computer screen they were crowded around until his eyes went blurry. They had less than three hours until the deadline and all this searching was getting them nowhere.
He got to his feet and walked over to stare out the window. The view wasn’t much, but in the distance he could see trees and, beyond that, mountains. That’s where they needed to be focusing their search. Behind him, Danica pushed back her chair and got up.
“You okay?” she asked.
Clayne gave her a sidelong glance. The concern on her face almost looked genuine. He turned back to the window. “As much as I hate your boss, I’m wondering if he was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have antagonized the killer.”
“You got a clue about where his next hunt is going to take place. That’s more than any of us could have done.” When Clayne didn’t say anything, she sighed. “Now that he knows who you are, he’s more interested in challenging you.”
Clayne looked at her, a wry smile curving the corner of his mouth. “Don’t you mean what I am?”
Something
flickered behind her eyes, but she turned away before he could figure out what it was. “Come on. Let’s get back to work.”
Was that what she was calling it? He called it wasting time. He was just about to suggest to Danica they go check out some of the places while the rest of the task force kept looking, but Carhart beat him to it. Clayne waited impatiently as the fed divided up the locations among the agents.
“Beckett, you and Moretti take the house in Rancho Cordova,” he said. “There was a home invasion there a few years back. The whole family was murdered. Papers called it a tragedy. It also had a few of the numbers in the address.”
Danica took the piece of paper he held out, then showed it to Clayne. “It’s close to a wooded area.”
But it wasn’t nearly remote enough. Clayne didn’t mention that, though. Maybe he’d think better outside in the open air. Not that the four-door sedan was all that open, but at least it made him feel as if he was doing something other than sitting on his hands. And for once, being in the tight confines of the car with Danica and her sweet scent didn’t distract him. If anything, it made him focus.
He pulled out the map of the Sacramento area he’d grabbed from the field office, hoping something would jump out at him. Regardless of the clues, going to a residential area didn’t feel right.
“This is the wrong way,” he said. “Turn the car around.”
Danica did a U-turn and headed east without batting an eye. Tony, on the other hand, didn’t have as much faith in him.
“Where are we going?” He glanced over his shoulder at Clayne and frowned. “Are you reading a map? How the hell can you even see in the dark?”
Clayne didn’t answer. Why he could see in the dark was need-to-know. And as to where they were going, he wasn’t sure. He only knew it wasn’t Rancho Cordova.
He studied the map again, looking at it more closely. If he was a psycho shifter serial killer, where would he go to hunt? A big-ass forest would be nice. And look, there was one to the east of town. Why the hell hadn’t someone mentioned that before? Because they were all focused on that damn string of numbers the shifter had given them. Which didn’t have anything to do with the Eldorado National Forest.
Hang on.
There was a picnic area called Tragedy Springs.
“The Eldorado National Forest,” he said. “There’s a picnic area there called Tragedy Springs. If he’s going to hunt someone, that’s where he’ll do it.”
Danica’s gaze met his in the rearview mirror. “That’s almost two hours from here.”
“If you’re wrong, we won’t be able to get back to Sacramento before the deadline,” Tony added. “You know that, right?”
Clayne nodded. “I know.”
Tony turned around in his seat. “Why didn’t the computers flag this place?”
Clayne’s cell phone rang before he could answer. He pulled it out and checked the screen.
“Kendra,” he said as he held it to his ear. “Tell me you’ve got something.”
Preferably something to confirm his gut was right.
“Maybe,” she said “That combination of letters and numbers you gave me correlates to a small road in the Eldorado National Forest near a picnic area called Tragedy Springs. It’s the only place I could come up with that had both of those parameters. I’m sending the directions to your phone, but it’s still going to be hard to find. Especially in the dark.”
“I’ll find it,” he said. “Thanks, Kendra.”
Tony glanced back. “Was that Homeland?”
Clayne nodded. “There’s a road near the picnic area that corresponds to those numbers. Kendra’s sending me the directions.”
Danica gave him a grin in the rearview mirror. She’d never doubted him, he realized. Despite everything that had happened between them, she still trusted him. The knowledge did strange things to him. Analyzing what those things were now wasn’t an option, though. He needed to focus on stopping the shifter.
Danica made the two-hour drive in an hour and a half with her lights and siren, scaring the hell out of both him and Tony, as well as everyone else on the highway.
Clayne glanced at his watch. They weren’t quite there yet, but they were damn close. For the first time, he honestly thought they might make it.
But the moment they entered the national park area, his hopes plummeted. There were dozens of paved roads with hundreds of smaller dirt roads and trails crisscrossing them. Clayne had a hard time reading the tiny signs in the dark. He didn’t know how the hell Danica and Tony managed. And the directions Kendra gave him were worthless.
“This is going to take all night,” he muttered.
“Maybe not,” Danica said.
She’d always been a glass-half-full kind of woman. Clayne opened his mouth to remind her of that when she suddenly spun the car into the path of an oncoming pickup truck and slammed on the brakes.
Clayne jerked forward in his seat belt. “What the hell?”
But Danica was already out of the car and running toward the other vehicle. It had to be the shifter. Why else would she stop?
Clayne jumped out, ready to protect her against the crazy-ass killer, only to skid to a stop when he realized the truck belonged to a park ranger. Behind him, Tony did the same. Danica already had a map spread out on the hood and was asking the gray-haired man if he could help them find the road they were looking for.
The old guy pulled out a flashlight and squinted at the map. “Yeah, I can take you to it. But there really isn’t anything there. It just dead-ends at a trailhead.”
“If we don’t get there in less than twenty minutes, a man’s going to die,” she said.
That got the ranger’s attention. He snatched the map from the hood and yanked open the door of his truck. “I hope that car of yours is insured because it ain’t going to look so good by the time I get you to that road.”
“Just get us there,” Danica told him.
The ranger might look like he was on the downward slope toward retirement, but when he started driving, he didn’t mess around. Danica was hard-pressed to keep up with him. Clayne thought more than once that maybe he should have driven. His reflexes and night vision would have helped. Driving also would have given him something else to do besides check his watch every five seconds.
Danica switched on the siren to accompany the lights that were already flashing in the grill of the car. The screams filled the heavily wooded surroundings and bounced back at them.
“Maybe the sound will make the killer bolt if he thinks we’re close,” she told him and Tony. “Or at least give Joshua Vender something to run toward.”
What she said made sense, but something told Clayne it wasn’t going to matter. They still had ten minutes until the deadline, but his gut was saying they were already too late.
Clayne slammed into his seat belt again as Danica slid the car to a stop inches from the rear bumper of the park ranger’s truck. Clayne opened the door and immediately jumped out. The old guy’d been right about there being nothing up here. Except for an opening in the overgrown bushes that some adventurous hikers might call a trail.
Behind Clayne, Tony ordered the ranger to stay in his truck even as he leaped out, gun in hand.
“Can you find him?” Danica asked.
Clayne had gotten the shifter’s scent from the first time he’d chased him. Even now, he picked up a slight trace of it on the breeze. They’d been fortunate to come in downwind of the hunting sight.
He gave Danica a nod.
“Then go,” she said. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Clayne ignored the startled expression on Tony’s face and took off at a sprint into the trees.
He shifted as he ran. His sense of smell immediately exploded, and he was assaulted by the thousands of scents that made up the forest. Rabbits, deer, squirrels, and mice predominated, but somewhere nearby, a black bear prowled about. And overlaying all of it was the overpowering scent of humans. This national forest probably saw hundr
eds, if not thousands, of visitors per day, so if he’d been trying to find Joshua Vender out here, he might have been in trouble. But he wasn’t tracking Joshua Vender—he was hunting a shifter.
Luckily, shifters possessed a distinct scent all their own. Once Clayne sniffed a particular shifter, he never forgot the scent. Hell, he could pick it out of a crowd at a football stadium. Out here in the forest, with the thousands of powerful scents coming at him, he could still pick out the shifter as easily as if he were standing beside him.
The breeze carrying the scent was coming from the right. Clayne turned that way and put on more speed. The smell was strong enough to make him think it was coming from the shifter himself, not a trace he’d left behind on the ground.
That was good. But also freaking weird. The shifter’s scent seemed to be all over the place. Like he’d been pacing his prey at a distance, watching and playing with him.
Clayne ignored the side trails and focused on the primary scent he picked up on the wind, not worrying about where the shifter had been and where he’d run. He only cared about where the killer was at the moment.
But as Clayne ran toward the source of the scent, unease gripped him. The shifter wasn’t moving anymore. Did that mean the hunt was already over? Praying he was wrong, Clayne growled and pushed himself harder.
While he was focused on reaching the killer—and the victim—Clayne couldn’t deny he was worried about Danica. And Tony, too. But mostly Danica. They might not be partners anymore, but he still didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone in the pitch-black forest. What if she got turned around in the dark and ran off a cliff or something?
He slowed a little, straining his ears for sounds of movement behind him—sticks snapping underfoot, someone crashing through underbrush or over rolling rocks, even cursing. Anything that would let him know where Danica was.
But as he pushed his senses out, he was shocked to discover he knew exactly where she was—behind him and a little to the south. He must have subconsciously picked up some sound that let him pinpoint her location. But he immediately dismissed that thought. He hadn’t heard anything. He’d felt something—that same twitchy sensation he’d gotten right before Danica had walked into the conference room that first day at the FBI field office.
