Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  He became a master of the handgun, he learned fast shooting and target shooting and he became known among the shooters of West Texas as a competitor to be aware of. He learned tae kwan do and karate, and learned them well. He went beyond the normal investigative skills of a police detective, venturing into areas as diverse as wilderness tracking and the use of sophisticated bugging devices.

  His colleagues admired his skills and feared his obsessive dedication to his cases. When he was on a kidnap, he routinely worked twenty-four hours at a stretch and slept three. He could have risen in the department to a captaincy, but he prevailed on Eddie to leave him a lieutenant so that he wouldn’t get sucked up into administration.

  As the years wore on, he gradually turned his den into what became known on the force as the Abby Room.

  Even though the FBI had abandoned the investigation before it was three days old, Eddie did not abandon it. Far from it, he hid Flynn’s case time for him, allowing him to continue looking for his wife for two more years.

  Finally, he quietly and sadly eased it into the cold case file. This meant that nobody could be assigned to it without his personal approval.

  Still, though, Flynn’s investigation continued. He became the most knowledgeable expert on kidnap in the State of Texas. Every force in Texas consulted him. The Texas Rangers consulted him. He solved case after case after case. But the Abby Room only grew more full of clippings, of clues, of false leads. He slid his unending search for her ever deeper into his caseload, accepting Eddie’s silent compliance with equally silent gratitude.

  Their bond of friendship deepened. Eddie had loved Abby, too. He had sat on the summer porches of youth with her, also. He had never married. Instead, his love affair with her had continued down its own lonely path, and he had watched with pain and joy as she and Flynn made their life together. When he went to their house for cop nights, he’d watch her out of hooded eyes. She’d had a dancing heart, had Abby Carroll, and looks and ways that no man could ever forget.

  Not often—maybe once or twice a year—Flynn ran into a case similar to Abby’s, an apparent walkout that seemed to him to be something else. Time and again, the FBI abandoned these cases after a few days.

  Flynn did not abandon them.

  Somebody was out there taking people, he knew it, somebody very clever and very skilled.

  Somebody was out there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Night had come and gone, November 16, as always, the worst night of Flynn’s year.

  As he always did on the anniversary of Abby’s disappearance, he had spent it in the Abby Room, pouring over files, seeking some new lead hidden in some record he hadn’t considered before.

  As always, he’d found nothing. Her case was dead cold. Still, though, she lived on within him. His side of the conversation of life continued.

  Sarah Robinson’s little girl Taylor was in grade school now. He had never asked her if Abby, also, had been pregnant, but every time he saw Taylor, a question came into the edge of his mind: were there bones somewhere of the woman he had loved, and tiny bones tangled within them?

  He’d never remarried, never even considered it. After seven years it would have been legal, but he would never do it, not until he knew for certain that she was no more.

  Eddie came out of his office and headed his way. His gut was rolling, his dark glasses bouncing in his breast pocket. He was coming fast, his scowl as deep as a grave.

  Flynn was hoping that he was headed anywhere else, but he did just what it looked like he was going to do, and dropped down into the old chair beside his desk.

  He said, “Special Agent Diana Glass wants to talk to you regarding an investigation you’ve been pursuing.”

  “The Mercedes case? The meth lab on Fourteenth Street?”

  “The Carroll Case. Abby.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  “She even knows about the Abby Room,” Eddie continued. “She knows you were interviewing Charlie Boyne again yesterday.”

  The Boyne case was one of the other disappearances that were mirror images of Abby’s. “I wasn’t.”

  “ ’Course you were.”

  “Dallas PD and the FBI closed the Boyne case years ago. So I wasn’t interviewing him, as there is no case on the books.”

  “Then let’s say you were pursuing your hobby of refusing to drop closed cases.”

  “Who the hell told her?”

  “Not me. I just sit in my office and wait for the parade to go by. Which it never does.”

  “There was a parade. When the Tomcats won the semi-finals.”

  Eddie looked blank.

  “The Tomcats. Menard High’s football team on which you once served as a wide receiver. Last year they reached the semi-finals and the school decided on a parade. You were there. You rode in the lead pickup. In a uniform with a big cap. Very impressive.”

  “Is that sardonic or sarcastic?”

  “Both. Anyway, where is Agent Glass from, Dallas or San Antonio?”

  “She emailed me for permission to talk to you about disappearance cases in general. Pick your brain, be my guess.”

  “Okay.”

  “Could be a break, Flynn, if the Bureau’s gonna finally do something.” He paused. “Thing is, she’s got a Gmail account.”

  That was odd. “So she’s not the Bureau? Did she name an agency?”

  “She did not.”

  But who else would it be? ATF? No, no interest in missing persons there. Border Patrol? Possibly. “I’ve looked for evidence of border transport for years. So maybe she’s Borders.”

  Eddie Parker said, “You’re gonna find out. Right now.”

  A woman in a suit stood in the doorway of the squad room.

  “My God,” Flynn muttered.

  Her hair was so dark it made her skin look as pale as marble. She wore a black, featureless suit that shimmered like silk. Her eyes moved to Flynn, then to Eddie, then to back to him again. Then the most beautiful woman Flynn had ever seen in his life strode through the dead-silent squad room. She stopped at his desk.

  Eddie had taken off. His office door was already closing.

  “Lieutenant Errol Carroll?”

  He stood up and shook an unexpectedly powerful hand. Her eyes, emerald green, drilled into him. She was all job, this woman. Beauty, yes, but in service to a cause, which was very clear.

  “Lieutenant, we need to talk.”

  He gestured toward his chair.

  “Privately.”

  Silently, he led her toward the conference room. He could see Eddie lurking way back in his office, watching through the blinds, not wanting to get anywhere near this. He didn’t want a single thing to do with this ice sculpture, either. She might as well have “Bad News” tattooed on her forehead in big red letters. Expensive clothes like hers did not go with garden variety FBI personnel, or any ordinary personnel at all. No, this lady came from way up high where the dangerous people lived.

  After they were in the conference room, she shut the door. She turned the lock with a decisive click. He hadn’t ever seen that lock used before.

  “Sit down, please.”

  “What’s this about?”

  She reinforced her statement with a sharp gesture, and he found himself dropping into one of the old wooden chairs that were scattered around the scarred conference table.

  She went into her briefcase and pulled out a tablet computer. She tapped a couple of times and he could see a file appear. Like many a detective, he was good at reading upside down. He saw his own name on it, and his picture.

  She began flipping through the file, touching the screen with a long finger every time she turned a page.

  “Do I need a lawyer?”

  She stopped reading and looked up. “You have investigated twelve of them, starting with your wife. Each time, you’ve put in a request for more investigative support. May I ask you why?”

  “May I see a cred?”

  “You’re suspicious of me?”

&
nbsp; He did not reply.

  She held out an FBI credential that identified her as Special Agent Diana Glass.

  “Satisfied?”

  Not in the least, but that was beside the point. First off, the credential could be rigged. Second, he would never know the truth—at least, not until it was too late to save himself from whatever dire fate she had in mind for him.

  “What do you want from me, Agent Glass?”

  “First off, you’re not in any trouble. And I’m Diana, Errol.”

  “Flynn. People call me Flynn.”

  “Flynn? That isn’t in your file.”

  “Errol Carroll? My folks had a tin ear. Flynn is a joke, as in Errol Flynn.”

  She gave him as blank a look as he had seen in some time. His guess was that she’d never heard of Errol Flynn.

  “Just call me Flynn without the joke.”

  “We want you to help us nail the bastard whose been doing this, and we want you to start right now.”

  “Sure,” he said carefully. “I’m ready to start any damn time. But why the change of heart?”

  She got up and went to the door. “Tomorrow morning at eight. Be prepared to travel.”

  “Travel? Where? For how long?”

  She froze. She turned. “This is going to happen again, Lieutenant, and soon. With all the effort you’ve put into your investigations, the expertise you have developed, we believe you can help us prevent the next crime. So to answer your question, we’ll be going wherever we need to go, and it’s going to take however long it takes.”

  She left.

  He stood staring at the door. What the hell had just happened? As he walked out into the squad room, he saw her striding toward the front lobby.

  Guys were being careful, pretending not to be absolutely fascinated with whatever had just gone down.

  “I don’t know,” he said into the silence. “I have no idea.”

  Eddie burst out of his office. His neck was pulsing, his face was crimson. This was not a man with a temper, but he was on full burn right now.

  “What in goddamn hell’s the matter with you,” he snarled.

  “Nothing.”

  He held up a fax. “They’re telling me you’ve requested an indefinite leave. Thanks for this, ole buddy, ole pal. Next time just damn well tell me. Discuss it with me. Because we’ve been friends for years, jerkoff that you are.” As he talked, he waved the fax.

  Flynn snatched it from him. And his jaw nearly sank out of sight.

  “I didn’t know about this.”

  “You didn’t ask for a leave?”

  “ ’Course not. Why would I? I like to put creeps in jail. It’s my damn vocation.”

  “So if I tear this up, you’re back here in the morning?”

  At that moment, his phone vibrated with an incoming text. He read it. “You have a chance to catch the man who kidnapped Abby.”

  Her timing was excellent, he had to say that.

  “No, Eddie, actually the request is good.” He could hardly believe what he was saying, but he was doing it and as he did so, his conviction was growing. “The request is good.”

  “I can’t pay you. I’d like to but I can’t.”

  He didn’t spend much money, hadn’t since Abby. So he could handle the absence of a salary. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I have to do this.”

  “Yeah, I get it. But clean out your locker. If the janitor has to scrape any rotted doughnuts outa there, you’re gettin’ a bill.”

  Their eyes met. His friend was there for him and nothing more needed to be said. Eddie turned away and Flynn did the only thing left for him to do. He gathered up his few personal items and left the way cops always left on their last day, with a cardboard box in their arms and a few good-byes. A police force is like a lake. When you get out, you don’t leave a hole.

  By the time he was unlocking his car, another guy would already have his current cases. But not the Abby Carroll case, of course. Not the Boyne case, and not any of the other missing persons cases that had gone cold.

  He drove home in the quiet of the midday. This was all insane, of course. He never should have done this.

  “Abby,” he said into the rattling of his old Malibu, “I’m coming, babes, I’m coming.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  As soon as he got home, Flynn texted Diana Glass that he was ready to go, but received no reply. He did an Internet search on her and found nothing. No Facebook page for a Diana Glass that looked like her. No Twitter account. A check of the National Law Enforcement Roster also turned up no Diana Glass, meaning that she’d never been in a local or state police force. His access to FBI records was limited, of course, but he’d emailed their personnel department a verification check on her from the office. Usually, you got an answer in a few minutes, and usually it was “verified.” FBI creds were not easy to come by and not easy to forge. If hers had been false, he would have gotten an urgent call, he felt sure. They would investigate an imposter immediately.

  So she was for real, but for whatever reason, they weren’t going to be releasing any information about her.

  He went into the Abby Room. He’d spend the rest of the day looking over his cases. Of course, there had been many thousands of adult missing persons in the years since he’d lost her, but only twelve fit the precise criteria that interested him: an apparent walkout without any sign of forced entry, and a spouse or loved one who insisted that there had been no motive for the person to leave, and had credible support for the assertion.

  It was a surprisingly rare situation, so rare that to Flynn it was an M.O.

  On the walls were pictures of Abby, of the house as it was then, photographed in methodical detail, of the neighborhood, all the cars, all the houses.

  There were maps of the other cases, blueprints of each house from which a victim had been abducted, with all the information from every crime scene intricately cross-referenced.

  Abby smiled down at him, her hand shielding her eyes. The shot had been taken at Kitty Hawk in 1999, the summer of their courtship. She had been wearing her blue shorts and tank top. She’d been laughing and you could see it in her face. Later, back at their rental, he would unsnap that tank top and slip it off and stand on the tan carpet in the bedroom. She would seem, when she came close to him, to move with the lightness of a woman made of air, and the moment he had looked down into her eyes on that warm afternoon would remain engraved in his memory forever.

  Sitting in meditation, he closed his eyes. “To study the self is to forget the self,” he whispered into the silence. That was where he always started. Then he took his attention out of his mind and placed it on his body.

  He felt his heart rate slowing until the beating seemed almost to stop. The cool of the room touched him so closely that it felt as if fingers were caressing him, fingers that were both intimately alive and as stiff as death.

  He had understood the deep message of martial arts training: you cannot gain the freedom to fight at your best until you make friends with your death.

  Beyond fear lies the balance that enables the blow to be perfectly struck, or deflected with perfect grace.

  You never quite reach that spot, but you never quite fail.

  He sat among his records, a naked man in a cold room.

  He sat for a long time, letting go of his thoughts, his concerns, his questions.

  As the stars made their nightly journey, he traveled deep within himself, sitting and flying at the same time. His heartbeat was now little more than a memory.

  Other names and other faces came back to him: Claire Marlow, Hank Feather, Lucinda Walters, Gail Unterwager, George Nathan Chambers, Kimberly Torgelson—the list that haunted his dreams.

  All had disappeared at night. All had taken a small number of personal belongings. Gail Unterwager left three young children and a devastated, uncomprehending husband. So had Lucinda Walters. George Chambers had two sons and a seven-figure bank account, a wife that loved him and a flawless life. Kimberly Torgelson’s littl
e boy had been two and her husband had been completely shattered.

  Yeah, buddy, I get it. Welcome to hell.

  Three o’clock came. Outside the wind whipped the big old trees that surrounded the house, causing skeletal shadows to dance on the lawn. In the distance, an owl hooted, its voice flying in the gale.

  When the hour grew late and still sleep did not come, he did what he always did at times like this, and walked through the house thinking and remembering, trying to understand how somebody could have come in and taken her out of bed like that and then carried her off, and all without her police officer husband noticing a thing.

  Flynn was not a heavy sleeper now and he hadn’t been then. So how had it been accomplished? To this day, he didn’t even have a theory, not for any of them and especially not in Abby’s case.

  Once or twice, he had dreamed of her so vividly it was as if she was back. Once, the kitchen door had opened and he’d heard her voice calling up, “I’m home,” her tone bright. He’d run downstairs, run like the wind, to find her standing in the dining room. “I’m all right,” she said, and there had been a mixture of sadness and love in her face that had made him ache.

  He had woken up, then, still in his bed.

  Just before dawn his cell rang, startling him so thoroughly that he almost dropped it and lost the call.

  It was Diana Glass.

  “Can you come to a meeting?”

  “Now?”

  She gave him an address in the warehouse district near the grain elevators. He agreed to go and ended the call.

  He called Eddie. It rang. Again. Again.

  “Whassa matter?”

  “It’s me. Glass just called. She wants me to meet her on Avenue Twenty.”

  Silence.

  “A warehouse, Eddie, at four in the morning.”

  “So you called to wake me up?”

  “I did.”

  “You want a squad car? Protection?”

  “I want you to know where I went and when.” He gave him the address.

  “Okay, got it.”

  “In other words, if I disappear, it is not voluntary. You got that? Not voluntary.”

  “If you have reason to be suspicious of this woman, don’t go alone.”