FADE TO BLACK - Thrilling Romantic Suspense - Book 1 of the BLACK CATS Series

by Leslie A. Kelly

Finally, either because she’d gotten herself under control or because there was nothing left inside her to spew out in protest of what had been done to Lisa, Stacey rinsed her mouth out and left the bathroom. Reentering her office, she found the two men sitting where she’d left them.

  The agents looked up at her return, but didn’t rise to their feet in some antiquated show of courtesy. “I apologize for the interruption, gentlemen,” she murmured, returning to her seat.

  “We quite understand,” the supervisory special agent, Blackstone, said. “It’s not something any normal person would ever want to see.”

  He was stiff, dispassionate, his black suit starched and crisp despite the heat and humidity. Probably in his mid-forties, the man was almost too elegant to be in law enforcement. She suspected he kept a wall of formality and coolness around himself at all times. Even the way he sat, one leg crossed over the other, hands folded in his lap, displayed an almost visible disdain for any macho law enforcement posturing. Yet he was so intense and focused she dared anyone to think the pose was at all feminine.

  “Are you all right?” a gruff voice asked. That was the other one—Special Agent Dean Taggert. And he was not stiff, dispassionate, and aloof. Definitely not cold, either. Not one tiny bit.

  “I’m fine.”

  From the moment they’d shaken hands in the vestibule, Stacey had been unable to help noticing the coiled strength of the man. While Blackstone was all calm, controlled professionalism, Taggert appeared tense and hard, wary and maybe even belligerent. Blackstone’s grip had been cool and smooth, Taggert’s powerful and rough. The older agent never looked around, appearing completely at ease and comfortable with his surroundings. The younger one never stopped checking things out, eyeing entrances and egresses, always on alert, edgy and ready for action. With his thick dark hair, flashing eyes so brown they were almost black, and strong-boned face, he looked almost too street-wise to be in the eminently professional FBI.

  The senior agent emanated authority. The junior one, pure physical excitement.

  “Here,” Taggert muttered, tossing a pack of mint-flavored gum toward her.

  Stacey caught it in midair.

  “Believe it or not, it helps get the taste of imaginary blood out of your mouth.”

  Perfect description. Watching Lisa’s final moments, she’d felt as if she were swallowing the horror whole. “Thanks.”

  She took a piece, hoping her stomach could handle the simple act of chewing, then pushed the pack across the desk toward its owner, watching him pocket it.

  “Want some water or something, too?” he asked, displaying concern that completely surprised her.

  “No, really, I’m okay.”

  Though as polite as his colleague, Special Agent Taggert’s gravelly voice, tight tone, the tension in his body, and the fire in his eyes told her the man wasn’t used to playing nice, to asking courteously and talking quietly.

  Right now, he watched her with an assessing stare. But there was also a hint of warm compassion. Understanding. It was as unexpected as it was genuine, just like the offer of the gum. Stacey found herself staring back at him for a brief moment, their eyes locking as they took silent measure of each other.

  “Did you find what you were looking for in the footage?” Blackstone asked, sounding courteous, yet not quite so … What was that tone in his colleague’s voice? Protectiveness, maybe. Yes, when she thought about it, the near-stranger had seemed almost protective of her. Such a novel thing. Nobody had tried to protect her in years. She did a damn fine job of it herself, and part of her should have been offended.

  She wasn’t. She’d evaluate why later, when she didn’t have to look across her desk at those deep brown eyes.

  “Sheriff?” Blackstone prodded.

  Determined to get past the awkward moment of her sickness, she nodded and reached for her notepad. She’d jotted down specific moments of interest in the film. “You said this video was made public last April? About a month after she disappeared?”

  The senior agent nodded. “But we believe it had been made sometime prior to that, given the wintry appearance of the background location.”

  She thought about the scene, the stark, skeletal bareness of the trees. Then she recalled the early spring they’d enjoyed last year; her pollen allergies had been in high gear by the first week of April. The timing definitely fit. “I noticed that, too.”

  Blackstone folded his hands in his lap, saying nothing.

  “She left Dick’s Tavern, a hangout two miles outside of town, a little before two a.m. That night was the last full moon of the cycle. I remember because we’d had a really bad week, calls out to Dick’s every night. Around here the general consensus is that the crazies come out during the full moon, and they all end up at Dick’s. Most folks think Lisa ran off with one of them.”

  “Maybe she did,” Taggert muttered.

  “Maybe. But if so, she didn’t get far. Because she died within hours.”

  Both FBI agents watched her closely. Neither appeared surprised. Just interested.

  “There’s one moment when she’s looking directly up, when the camera panned up, too,” she explained, suddenly feeling weary. “Maybe the bastard wanted to see if there really was a God up there listening to her prayers. It’s only a split second, but I’m nearly certain the moon was full.”

  “Yes, we saw that,” Blackstone admitted. “We sent the tape for evaluation beyond what our office could handle, and I imagine they’ll verify it. But the fact that you caught something that appeared so briefly says a lot about your powers of observation.”

  Under other circumstances, she might feel pleased by the compliment. Now, though, her mind still awash with the visions of Lisa’s final moments, there was no room for anything positive.

  “To recap …” She ticked off the obvious points on her fingers. “We know she was last seen at close to two a.m. on the final night of the full moon in March. We know she was killed under a full moon. We know there were no buds on the trees, while if it had happened at the next full moon, there would have been. And we know the video went public in April.” It was simple deduction, really. “She had to have been killed the night she disappeared. It had to have happened somewhere close to here, since there would have been only a few hours between when she left the tavern and dawn, and there was no sign of morning on that video. With the time it took to grab her, get her somewhere entirely secluded, and do what he did, there wouldn’t have been time to drive too far out of the area.”

  Agent Taggert leaned forward in his chair. “You said you might know where she died, meaning you saw something else.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  They waited.

  “During the segments when your suspect zoomed out and panned the clearing, you can see a glint of silver through the branches of some of the trees, to Lisa’s left. I first spotted it in the third picture you showed me. You can see it better in the video.”

  Taggert opened the folder, glanced at it, then offered it to his colleague.

  “Brandon Cole, our IT specialist who’s been working on this, spotted the same glimmer,” said Blackstone. “But he couldn’t isolate it enough to identify it. It was too far away and too small. It could be a flash from the spotlights, a smudge on the cheap camera lens. Maybe even a reflection from one of the blades the perpetrator used.” He put the picture down. “It’s not a headlight or something, if that’s what you’re thinking. We considered that, but the height and dimensions don’t work. We’re hoping the final analysis of the footage will give us more to go on.”

  She wasn’t thinking vehicle. And the other explanations could be correct. But the first impression Stacey had had when she’d spotted it hadn’t been of any of those things; it had been of wire. Very thin, very sharp wire, looping on itself.

  Intuition. But she trusted her own intuition. She always had.

  “I think it might be razor wire. If you use Lisa’s position to gauge it, the image is about level with the tops of
her hands.”

  She stood, demonstrating, raising her arms above her head, thrusting away the thought of Lisa being tied in this position. Actually, she needed to thrust away the thought of the Lisa she’d known, period, if she was going to be of any help in this investigation. She needed to think of her as only another victim. Nothing else.

  “I’m five-ten. Li … the victim was a good six inches shorter. The level of her hands would be right about the same height as the wire running across the top of a steel fence.”

  Blackstone immediately reopened the folder, and the two agents looked down to test her theory against the eight-by-tens. Stacey lowered her hands, tucked her shirt, which had slid up over her middle, back into her khakis, and returned to her seat. Why the hell she’d had to play Miss Show-and-Tell, she had no idea. Far from being eminently professional, she’d probably looked like some amateur detective solving bloodless murders on an old, pre-CSI TV show.

  “Damn, I think she’s right,” Taggert said. He looked up, caught her eye, and immediately leaped to the next conclusion. “Not many places need that kind of security. You know of a fence like this in the area?”

  Still not quite believing that Lisa could have been killed at a place she drove by practically every day, Stacey nodded. “I do. One of the locals, Warren Lee, has a farm outside of town. He’s a bit of a character.”

  Taggert stiffened. “Violent?”

  She considered it. “Possibly. He’s a survivalist type; I suspect he’s armed to the teeth out there.” Realizing why he’d asked, she almost immediately ruled out the agent’s unspoken supposition. She knew Warren well enough to fear that when he snapped he’d go out guns blazing. He didn’t have the patience, the calmness she’d seen in the video.

  “I don’t believe that was him on the tape, but it could have happened near his place. He has a huge spread. It’s fenced in, with razor wire across the top.”

  Agent Taggert immediately swung to face his boss. “Can we get a warrant?”

  Blackstone shook his head. “We’ve got nothing to justify one.”

  Stacey cleared her throat. “I didn’t mean I thought the crime occurred on Warren’s property. The way he guards his place, the only way it could have is if he did it, and I tell you, everything I know about the man says he didn’t. I think it’s more likely this happened on the other side of his fence. In which case, you can easily look around.”

  They both waited in tangible expectation.

  “Most of Warren’s land skirts along part of the Shenandoah National Park.”

  A quick grin appeared on Taggert’s face, as if he’d heard his first good news in days. “Federal property.”

  “Exactly,” she replied, thinking for a fleeting moment how much younger the man looked when he smiled. “No warrant required.”

  CHAPTER 4

  YOU’RE UGLY. You’re damaged. Who would want you?

  “Shut up,” he whispered, not even looking away from his computer screen. He’d heard the words too many times to feel anger or fear, and merely brushed them away like he would have a pesky fly.

  But the voice wouldn’t shut up. The voice never shut up. Awake, or in his dreams, it taunted, it ridiculed, it bit with teeth as sharp as the incisors of a hound from hell. Only … he no longer felt the bite.

  Hideous. Evil. Nasty.

  “Go away; I’m busy.”

  It didn’t go away, so he reached for the volume button on the front of his laptop. He jabbed at it ruthlessly, until his index finger bent backward and almost snapped. That might have been interesting, just to see how it would feel and how he handled the sensation. Better than most, he suspected. Better than any woman, that was for certain.

  Pain had interested him for a long time. How to take it, how to deliver it. He’d done some experimenting over the years—starting small, with rats or strays that wouldn’t be missed. And he’d found that when a creature was frightened enough, it almost didn’t even seem to notice when it was dying. Or maybe it was merely grateful for the release.

  Much like Lisa. And all the others.

  He himself hadn’t been tested that far yet, but he’d certainly experienced the acrid bitterness of terror and the cloying taste of physical agony. So he understood how some pain simply ceased to exist when a mind drifted to other places in the sheer, primal need for escape.

  Would it do so if the pain were self-inflicted? He’d often wondered.

  He pushed his finger against the button again. Hard, until the metal bit into his skin and left an indentation. The joint bent backward, the tip turning bright red, the knuckles ghostly white.

  He could snap it. Easily.

  “Not now,” he whispered. He was busy now. He could test that another time, as he’d tested the feel of fire licking the soles of his feet or blades scraping across his belly.

  Now there was only this. The sounds emerging from the fully enabled speakers grew louder, filling the room, filling his ears, filling his brain.

  Filling his soul.

  He relaxed in his chair, one world falling away, another spreading out before him, full of unexplored places and exciting opportunities.

  No hateful voices greeted him, and none followed. Just friends speaking their cyber chatter. Some people would listen and hear only gibberish. But he understood it perfectly, even without reading the flood of text messages that appeared the moment he arrived in the playground. Welcome, where have you been? Come see my latest project. Take me. Choose me. Hurt me.

  We’ve missed you.

  His friends were all here, waiting for him in the only world he wanted to inhabit. Here he was somebody. Here he was never called useless or ugly. Here they respected him, were in awe of him. Feared him.

  Because here, everyone knew who he really was. And what he was capable of.

  When? someone asked. More took up the cry. When will you show us more?

  He checked the date—nearly five weeks since his last premiere. And then he considered his finances—very low. How he’d managed only one auction every couple of months at the start was beyond him.

  It was time. He had things he wanted to buy, places he wanted to visit, and he didn’t have the means to do it.

  Besides, his palms were beginning to itch. Right hand meant money coming in, left meant money going out, according to the old saying. But to the Reaper, both meant only one thing.

  Time to kill someone.

  DEAN WANTED TO get right to work on the search for the murder site. Though they suspected it had been a long time since Lisa had died, and the odds of their finding anything were minimal, this was the first real break they’d had in the case. All the other bodies had been found in dump sites, the original location of the killings unknown.

  That the lead came courtesy of the sharp eyes of a small-town sheriff with a great ass did not escape him.

  “Enough of that,” he muttered, not even wanting to go there in his head when it came to Stacey Rhodes. No matter how attractive she was—physically and mentally.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he told Wyatt. “Just wishing we could get right on the search.”

  But they couldn’t. They’d spent the past two hours with the sheriff, laying out a search grid and making plans to start first thing tomorrow. Not only because it was late in the day, but also because they lacked the manpower. Even with the help of the sheriff and her deputies, there weren’t enough of them to search hundreds of acres of woods.

  Besides, neither he nor Wyatt knew a thing about the deputies on her staff. For all they knew, the guys who worked for her could be small-town old-timers who’d been in their jobs for decades. Given the emptiness of the sheriff’s office, and the casual, laid-back atmosphere inside, they weren’t expecting a top-notch crew.

  Stacey Rhodes was top-notch enough all on her own.

  “Rather a remarkable woman, Sheriff Rhodes, wouldn’t you say?” Wyatt asked as he drove them down the main street, in search of the town’s only hotel.

  Dean
flinched, wondering if he’d been wearing an I’m-thinking-of-a-hot-female expression. Then again, any man with an ounce of blood below the waist and a brain cell in his head would be thinking about the woman whose office they’d just left. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Good of her to arrange for us to get a block of rooms on such short notice.”

  The sheriff had called the owner of the inn, getting him to offer government rates on their rooms. Dean and Wyatt were alone now, but Mulrooney and Stokes would show up tonight, Fletcher and Cole in the morning. With all of them, as well as Stacey and the deputies she vouched for, they could begin the search for the scene of the crime tomorrow. Jackie Stokes was bringing all her forensics gear, and they’d have the state police on standby with a cadaver-sniffing dog, just in case they got lucky.

  Dean doubted they’d get that lucky. Finding the site would be enough of a stretch. They knew the Reaper dumped his bodies far from his kill zone, so they almost certainly wouldn’t find remains. If they could find where he’d killed her, though, there might be some surviving evidence. Doubtful after more than a year’s worth of weather and animals and natural decay, but it was more than they’d had twenty-four hours ago.

  “If we find the crime took place on federal land, it’ll make things easier. But even barring that, I get the feeling the sheriff will be highly cooperative,” Wyatt said.

  Dean was about to respond when he saw Wyatt flip on the blinker and turn into a small, gravel parking lot. “God, I didn’t even see the place,” he said, gawking out the window at the rambling, single-story building before them.

  It was an inn only by the loosest definition of the word. A long, low strip of rooms with a sagging roof and paint-stripped doors that ended an inch above the jamb, the Hope Inn was in serious need of renovation, or a few gallons of gasoline and a match. “Think this is really the only option? What about Front Royal?”

  “Too far away.” Wyatt shrugged. “When in Rome …”

  “But you’re not the one who’s probably going to be stuck here for days.” His boss was heading back to D.C. tomorrow, once the rest of the team was in place.