Under Devil's Snare (Under Series Book 2)

by S. Y. Thompson

A fully formed, midnight black jaguar stood where a woman had only moments before. In this animal shape, Jamison retained her higher reasoning. Her mighty head swung from side to side, ensuring no one had encroached while she changed. Razor sharp claws ripped into the turf as she loped away, the scent of leaf mildew and damp earth in her nostrils. The full moon peeked at her through the branches, darting out periodically through the clouds. Jamison smelled snow on the wind and something else.

  She entered a clearing near a deserted campsite. Near the edge of the weeds someone had dumped their garbage. A rustling sound emerged from the pile of refuse and after a moment a white form backed into the moonlight. The possum turned its head and hissed at her. Although she’d heard that the little creatures had migrated all the way up into Canada, it was rare to find one in the interior of the Adirondacks though they did occasionally make an appearance. Sometimes Jamison would receive calls from frightened campers thinking the little beasts were giant rats.

  Rather than fall over into a stupor, the possum scuttled off into the weeds. Jamison sneezed in distaste. As a jungle cat, killing and ripping into prey was part of her makeup but she had no desire to eat this little scavenger. With the scent of rot in her nose, she shook her head and explored the balance of the large campgrounds. Staying to the brush and avoiding the few scattered campfires, Jamison spent hours scouting the area. The campers she did see stayed close to the fire, whether because of the nip in the air or the threat of a killer in the woods she didn’t know.

  She crossed back and forth over the hiking trails multiple times but discovered nothing to raise her suspicions. Lost in the sensations of powerful muscles sliding over bone and tissue, Jamison roamed the woods. She stopped near the lake for a drink of water and for a moment felt tempted to enjoy a swim. Unlike most cats, jaguars appreciated the water. A sudden, sharp gust of cold wind prevented her excursion. Casting sharp eyes overhead, Jamison realized how far the moon had traveled. The vision of Lee formed in her mind and Jamison turned back toward the truck. With all her speed and agility, it required another half hour to reach the vehicle.

  Back in human form, dressed and sitting in the truck with the heater blowing, Jamison considered trying to call Lee again. She rejected the notion after glancing at the dashboard clock. Few cars were out on the road. She pulled in front of the manor house a short time later. Lee’s rental car was nowhere in sight and no lights burned in the house. Jamison wondered if Lee was upset with her for working late and decided to go for a midnight shoot.

  The house was cold and quiet when she entered and Jamison wondered how long ago Lee had left. She tried to call her partner again and jumped in startled reaction when she heard a phone ring somewhere in the house. Jamison tracked down the cell phone sitting on the dining room table. Frowning, she walked through the house looking for signs of something out of place. The only thing that really stood out was that Lee had left her cell phone at home, something she never did, and Cleo was also missing. With her advancing years, Lee had started leaving the dog at home. On the surface, these two factors weren’t exactly a smoking gun but Jamison’s instincts told her something was off.

  Jamison wandered back through the living room and turned on a table lamp. A scrap of white paper lying in the fireplace caught her eye. Curious, she knelt down and reached into the hearth. Just enough of the paper remained unburned for her to see that it contained no stationary header, meaning it didn’t come from the notepad beside the phone. The edges of the page were burnt and crumbled to the touch while the middle was blackened with soot. Jamison rubbed a thumb over the smoke residue. Most of the words were completely obliterated. Holes had burned through in places, but just enough words remained to make Jamison’s blood run cold.

  Her heart felt like it skidded off a rib and began to hammer in her chest. Fear dried the saliva in her mouth. She jumped to her feet and raced to the house phone, dialing a number from memory. Jamison listened to the ringing on the other end and began to despair that it would never be picked up.

  “Hello?” Sheriff Macke’s groggy voice answered.

  “The killer has Lee.”

  Jamison heard Macke clearing her throat. “Who is this?”

  “Sheriff, wake up. This is Jamison Kessler. The killer has Lee.”

  Macke suddenly sounded wide awake. “How do you know that, what happened?”

  “I just got home. Lee and her dog are both gone and I found a burnt note in the fireplace. Most of it’s burned beyond recognition but there’s enough there for me to see that someone told her to come alone.”

  “That’s not much to go on. Do you have any idea where to start?”

  Jamison swallowed hard, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. At least Macke wasn’t trying to convince Jamison she was over reacting. “She took the rental car. It’s equipped with a GPS tracker in case of theft. We need to get hold of the company to track the signal.”

  “Kessler, I don’t mean to be insensitive but it’s the middle of the night. The rental companies are closed.”

  “Then wake them up!” Jamison’s voiced ended on a high trembling note. “Call Hex, she’s a federal agent. She has the authority to force the issue.”

  Jamison’s imagination was in overdrive. She could visualize the second hand on the clock sweeping around its face. Time was a luxury Lee did not have. Every moment wasted arguing with Macke ratcheted her fear up another notch.

  “All right, I’m convinced. The car company might demand a warrant, but I’m sure we can argue exigent circumstances. I’ll call Detective Hex as soon as we hang up.”

  “What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Sit on my hands?”

  “Unless you have an idea where to start looking. If you do, I’m all ears.”

  Unbelievably, Jamison’s mind went completely blank. She felt numb and couldn’t think of a response. Shock, she thought. She had to pull it together. Lee and Cleo were counting on her and now wasn’t the time to fall apart.

  “Kessler?”

  “I’m here. Call me back as soon as you get off the phone with Hex.”

  “Yeah, okay. Bye.”

  Jamison held the receiver to her ear until the shrill tones of a disconnect signal began to blare. She winced and hung up. She didn’t think the sheriff sounded sincere about calling her back. Almost dazed by the recent turn of events, Jamison stumbled over and fell onto the sofa. Sheriff Macke’s comment resonated in her mind. Did she have any idea where to start looking?

  Did she?

  A gnawing sensation pricked the edges of her consciousness. Jamison thought carefully about any small detail that might indicate who could have done this. She looked at the singed note crumpled in her fist. Smoothing out the paper, Jamison frowned over the few legible words. Mutt... come alone... gut like...fish.

  It didn’t take much to perceive the threat in those few words, or the anger. They reminded her of Brenda Thomas’s hostility when Jamison didn’t believe her about the altercation with Lee.

  The breath caught in her lungs. A flood of disjointed images assaulted her. Taken separately, none of them amounted to much. But as a whole, the events took on a menacing cast. Jamison envisioned Brenda entering her office unannounced a few weeks ago. She’d passed the infraction off as the product of exhaustion, but there was no good reason for Brenda to be there. Added to that, Jamison wasn’t even supposed to be at work that day. What was she looking for?

  Jamison also recalled Brenda’s haggard appearance the night Lindsay and Mira disappeared. Jamison had attributed it to calling the woman in unexpectedly on her day off. Why then had she smelled of old diesel oil, the same type used in the machinery at the defunct lumber mill? In combination with these small things was the look of absolute fury when Jamison defended Lee against the assault charge.

  She realized she skated on thin ice by even contemplating this possibility. A few inconsistencies and a misguided bid for attention were hardly grounds to accuse Ranger Thomas of murder and kidnapping. Still, there was one la
st piece of evidence that Jamison found compelling. She and Lee discovered a cigarette butt engulfed by a puddle of blood in the park. They suspected the site marked the killing ground of one of their two victims. Jamison knew Brenda was a closet smoker, she’d smelled it on her uniform on occasion. It wasn’t often and the lab results on the cigarette hadn’t come back yet, but Jamison had a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  Placing her hands on the sofa, Jamison pushed herself up and headed for the phone. If she was wrong, she would apologize later. Jamison quickly redialed Macke’s home number. She growled in frustration at the busy signal beeping in her ear and slammed the receiver back in place. Checking her watch, she realized only a few minutes had passed. It certainly felt longer than that. Sheriff Macke was probably still filling Hex in and deciding on their next move.

  Think, Jamison. She hesitated to rush over to Brenda’s home and confront the woman with nothing more than suspicion to go on. Finally, she decided that Lee’s life was more important than offending Thomas. She hadn’t removed her jacket when arriving home, which saved time now as she headed for the front door. Jamison’s hand was on the knob when the phone rang. Thinking it was Lee, she sprinted back across the room.

  “Hello?”

  “Detective Hex has access to federal GPS tracking software. She’ll have to call the office in New York, but she needs the license plate number and VIN of the car.”

  “Hold on, I’ll grab it.” Jamison dropped the phone onto the table and ran into Lee’s office for the rental paperwork. She dug around in the desk’s top drawer before realizing the contract lay right on the surface. She sprinted back to the living room and gave Macke the information.

  “Right, I’ll tell Hex and I’ll call you back as soon as I know anything.”

  “Wait,” Jamison said quickly, afraid that Macke would hang up. “I thought of a place to start looking.”

  She filled the sheriff in on everything she’d thought of, tripping over words in an effort not to leave out any pertinent details. Jamison expected Sheriff Macke to argue with her and she wasn’t disappointed.

  “As much as I appreciate your instincts, that’s not enough for a warrant. We need probable cause.”

  “That’s for a search. There’s nothing that says I can’t go over there and knock on the door,” Jamison argued. “If she comes to the door wearing pajamas and carrying a stuffed bear, I’ll assume she’s innocent.”

  “A stuffed bear? Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  “Don’t humans sleep with stuffed animals?” Jamison asked hesitantly. The Panthera weren’t strictly human and many of their customs differed. Sleeping with inanimate objects was one.

  “Only little kids do that. You have some pretty weird ideas.”

  Jamison shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, we’re getting off track.”

  “Yes we are, but you still shouldn’t go over there. Thomas is the suspect, at least she is in the kidnappings. I’m not sure about the murders but the point is that she might see you coming. She could kill Ms. Grayson before you even got close.”

  Jamison knew she was right and resisted arguing the point. “We can’t just do nothing.”

  A small silence ensued and Jamison allowed the sheriff a few moments to gather her thoughts. “How about this, you go to the park and search her locker. You guys do have one of those, right?”

  “Of course all park rangers have a locker so they can change into their uniforms.”

  “Good. You go do that and see if you find anything incriminating.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Jamison complimented. “As a federal employee, there’s no assumption of a right to privacy for a locker at work. It can be searched for contraband at anytime without a warrant. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to wake up Judge Mills and get a warrant. She owes me a few favors and believe me, I’ll be calling in every one of them to get her to sign off on this. We don’t exactly have a smoking gun. I’ll get Detective Hex and her people to help serve the warrant. I doubt she’s stupid enough to keep Grayson at her home, but we might get lucky.”

  “Since when? Forget I asked,” Jamison contradicted quickly. “I’m on my way back to the park now. I suppose I don’t have to ask you to stay close to a phone?”

  “You do the same.”

  Jamison thought it likely that Macke was just trying to keep her busy, but in reality she had a better chance of finding something in Brenda’s locker than the others did at her home. No one would be that careless and the killer had been very careful up to this point. There was no concrete evidence to go on, only supposition. Conjecture would not hold up in court, but Jamison wasn’t worried about legal procedures at the moment.

  She jumped in the truck and gunned the engine racing back toward the Paul Smith’s Visitor’s Center. With the streets deserted, it didn’t take long to turn back into the park entrance. Jamison bounded out of the vehicle before it stopped completely and jogged up the steps. She fumbled for a second to get the key into the lock. The lights were out in the building, but it didn’t occur to her to flip them on. Instead, she hurried toward the women’s locker room.

  As the station’s commanding officer, she had more freedom to come and go so didn’t require keeping a locker. For that reason, she rarely visited this part of the facility. Upon entering, Jamison smelled old soap, humidity and mildew. Water dripped from the shower area, striking ceramic tiles and echoing throughout the empty space. Out of habit ingrained by years of safety awareness, Jamison glanced toward the noise. She didn’t see anyone over the top of the short, half walls. That didn’t mean someone couldn’t be squatted down, hiding, but her instincts told her that wasn’t the case. She was alone.

  Jamison walked quickly along the row of lockers, checking the tags on the front for Ranger Thomas’s name. She reached the end of the single row before realizing it wasn’t there. Frowning, Jamison started back along the distance. Like most members of law enforcement, men significantly outnumbered women. There were less than twenty lockers to inspect. After going through a second time, Jamison concluded the name wasn’t there. Regardless, she considered that Thomas wasn’t as smart as she thought. Only one locker was unlabeled so it was process of elimination.

  Reaching for the latch, her hand froze in mid-air. Brenda had placed a padlock on the locker. Jamison cursed herself for not anticipating this. She grabbed the lock and yanked hard. She didn’t hold back, pulling with all her Panthera enhanced strength. The lock held. Brenda had shelled out for a quality, top of the line padlock.

  Irritated but far from defeated, Jamison headed for the building’s rear exit. A gardener’s shed stood out back. Utilizing the small key on her ring, she easily opened the door. The irony wasn’t lost on her that Brenda had purchased a better lock than the state did for the tool shed. Jamison could have snapped this one.

  The small room was extremely crowded, requiring her to switch on the lights this time. After digging through bags of fertilizer, dead plants and rusty tools, she found what she needed on a back corner shelf. The bolt cutters were almost rusted into place, but she didn’t hesitate to snatch them up. Jamison left the door to the shed open and the light burning as she raced back to the locker room. The bolt cutters made short work of the lock despite their rusty condition. As soon as the lock snapped, Jamison dropped the tool. She ignored it bouncing onto the floor and reached for the latch.

  She expected to have to dig through sweaty clothes and piles of old papers. Instead, the locker was almost obsessively tidy. What Jamison discovered as soon as she opened the door made her blood freeze. Despite the tidiness of the contents, photographs covered every square inch of surface space along the locker’s walls and the inside of the door. She’d known since the car accident that someone had their eye on Lee. Since the supposed altercation Brenda had told her about, she’d even suspected on some level that Ranger Thomas was that person. Given the circumstances, the photographs weren’t all that unexpected. How
ever, what was unexpected was that Jamison was the subject in the pictures...not Lee.

  At first glance, there appeared to be close to a hundred photographs. They were in all shapes and sizes, some cut from newspaper articles relating to the park. Others were candid shots, taken when Jamison wasn’t aware. She’d have remembered these. One large photo took up the rear wall of the locker. This one she remembered. It was taken the day Jamison graduated from the FLETC academy in Brunswick, Georgia. She sat proudly facing toward the camera wearing her full dress Forest Service uniform. Brenda must have taken the photo from Jamison’s official file and had it magnified hundreds of times.

  There was one picture of Lee. This single shot was easily as large as the one from Jamison’s file and rested on the backside of the locker door. Brenda had drawn concentric rings with what appeared to be a red marker around Lee’s image. A bull’s-eye rested over the center of Lee’s chest and the implications were obvious.

  Brenda was fixated on Lee, but not for the reasons Jamison had supposed. She was a target.

  Chapter Sixteen

  BLOOD ROARED THROUGH her veins like a freight train. Each throb of her heart reverberated through her head. Lee’s eyes cracked open to mere slits. The small amount of light allowed in sent daggers of pain into her skull. Lee groaned and closed them again. Absence of light only slightly diminished the headache. She attempted to raise a hand to her forehead, but couldn’t move.

  Why couldn’t she move?

  Lee worked her tongue around in her mouth, trying to relieve the uncomfortable feeling of dryness. She blinked and opened her eyes, combating the pain. Her vision swam and then began to clear. She could see directly in front of her, but objects at the edges of her vision remained blurry.

  Lee didn’t recognize the room. It was dark except for the soft glow cast by an oil lamp. Lee couldn’t see the lamp, only the flickering of shadows on the wooden walls. A large hearth dominated the room, framed by irregular, natural looking chunks of stone. Soot liberally coated the inside of the fireplace making it appear to be a doorway into space. Cobwebs and dust obscured every surface. Judging by the log walls, wooden floors and twelve-point buck trophy over the fireplace, she was in a hunting cabin. A heavy rope wound around her body several times, holding her to a chair with her hands tied behind her back.