Going Twice
Page 2
Rain was still coming down hard as he jumped out of his truck. He shouldered his backpack, grabbed his flashlight and began moving down the street, quickly getting lost among those who were already afoot.
Some were searching for survivors, while others appeared to have rescued themselves. They were wet, blood-stained and disoriented. Soaked by the downpour and on the lookout for live electrical wires, he kept moving through the area with an eye on his surroundings. At any moment the police or emergency services could show up, and then he would have to move on.
He saw a trio of men already working to free a couple from under what was left of their home. He wanted no part of that and kept running, dodging downed power lines and using the light from the intermittent lightning flashes to see a broader area than what his flashlight beam showed. Finally he heard what he’d been waiting for: a faint cry for help. He stopped, waiting for the cry again, and when he had a location, he headed into the debris.
At first he was just moving broken lumber and huge chunks of insulation, then he realized there was a standing wall with a partially attached staircase behind it. He removed a broken commode, cushions from a piece of furniture, broken table lamps and the water-soaked contents of a closet before he finally got to a door. As he dug his way closer, the shouting got louder.
“I hear you, man. Stay calm,” Hershel said, and the man quit shouting. Nothing like having the victim cooperate in his own demise.
Finally he cleared away enough to see that the man who lived here had taken refuge under the stairs. Hershel got out the Taser, grabbed a piece of rope from his backpack and reached for the doorknob.
An old man stumbled out into the rain.
“Thank you, thank you, you saved my life,” he cried, reaching for Hershel’s shoulder to steady himself.
“I didn’t save it. You don’t deserve to live,” Hershel said, and pulled the trigger on the Taser.
The man dropped to his knees, paralyzed by the electrical current pulsing through his body. Hershel glanced over his shoulder and dragged the man behind the wall, making sure there was no one around. Then he wrapped a short length of rope around the old man’s neck, yanked it tight and held on.
The old man’s body was seizing. Lightning flashed long enough for Hershel to see the shock and horror on his victim’s face, but he felt no guilt. When the man finally went limp, the release of endorphins that flowed through Hershel’s body was nothing short of elation.
Working quickly, he removed the electrodes from the man’s chest and then proceeded to strip him naked. Once the dead man was completely nude, he tossed the clothes and pulled a piece of Sheetrock over the body. There was nothing sexual about the act. It was all about humiliation and how the family would feel when their loved one was discovered in such a condition.
Satisfied with what he’d done, he stepped out from behind the wall and walked back down to the street just as a pair of young men came running toward him.
“Anyone in there?” they yelled.
“All clear,” he said, ducking his head, and kept moving in the opposite direction.
He added two more victims before the police and rescue workers closed off the hardest hit area, then returned to where he’d parked, jumped in the truck and began trying to find his way out of town. The power was out almost everywhere, and the place felt like a ghost town as he drove carefully through the streets. After a lot of stopping and backtracking, he found the highway he’d been looking for and pulled off the road. He took out the cell phone and sent FBI agent Tate Benton a text. Sending texts now and then had been part of his ritual since the agents began hunting him, and he needed to feed off their frustration to make this work again.
I am not dead, so do not weep. It was not my time. I have vows to keep.
Then he turned off the cell phone so it couldn’t be traced, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter to recharge as he pulled back out onto the highway.
As he drove, he could tell how far the power was out by the lack of house or security lights along the way. About five miles from his campsite, he began seeing the occasional light off in the distance, where people still had power.
When he finally found his turnoff and drove off the highway onto the old dirt road, he pulled around behind the abandoned ranch house where he’d set up his tent and parked so the truck couldn’t be seen. He checked to make sure nothing had been disturbed, and once he was satisfied all was well, he zipped himself inside the tent, took off his filthy, rain-soaked clothes and crawled naked into his sleeping bag. He was asleep in minutes.
Washington, D.C.
Tate Benton was in the den eating salted cashews and nursing a bottle of beer. The television was on CNN, and his wife, Nola, was in her art studio, working on a commissioned painting. He was coming off of a long, drawn-out kidnapping case that had ended badly, so when his cell phone indicated an incoming text, he almost didn’t answer.
Then he glanced at Caller ID and the skin crawled on the back of his neck. The last thing he expected was a message from the Stormchaser.
I am not dead, so do not weep. It was not my time. I have vows to keep.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and immediately forwarded the text to his partners, Cameron Winger and Wade Luckett.
Within moments his cell phone rang. It was Wade, and he had Cameron conferenced in.
“We’re absolutely sure it’s him?” Wade asked.
“It came from the same phone he used to use,” Tate said.
“I didn’t know the agency kept that old phone activated,” Cameron said.
“That’s on me. I told them to,” Tate said.
“I turned on The Weather Channel,” Wade said. “There’s a tornado outbreak along the Texas-Oklahoma border.”
“Do we wait for the bodies to begin showing up or go now?” Cameron asked.
“He’s already killed or he wouldn’t have sent the message. But we won’t know for sure that’s where he is until the medical examiner makes that determination,” Tate said.
“I’m packing tonight anyway,” Wade said. “I’ll be ready when you call.”
“I’m going to talk to the Director and then I’ll let you know what he thinks,” Tate added.
“I’m with Wade,” Cameron said. “I’ll pack and wait for you to tell us when and where to meet up. And just for the record, this sucks big-time, even though it means I’ll probably see Laura again.”
There was a click in Tate’s ear, and then the line went dead. It appeared Cameron’s attraction to the pretty Red Cross worker they’d met last year was ongoing. He knew the rest of his news wasn’t going to set well with Nola, but he had to tell her what had happened. After the hell the Stormchaser had put her through last year, he hated to let her know the bastard was starting up again.
He smiled when he walked into her studio. The painting she’d been working on for several weeks was almost finished, and the child’s face, which was the subject of the work, looked alive.
“Hey, pretty lady, do you have time to be bothered?”
Nola looked up and smiled. There was a smudge of paint on her cheek and more on her fingers.
“I always have time for you. What’s up?”
“Not-so-good news.”
She frowned. “Oh, no. Please tell me you’re not going to be leaving again so soon.”
He showed her the text and watched the blood drain from her face. Then, without speaking, she put the brush in cleaning solution and began wiping her hands. When she looked up at him, she was trembling.
“I thought for sure he was dead. I wanted him to be dead.”
“So did I, honey, so did I,” Tate said, and slid a hand beneath her hair to rub the back of her neck.
“Do you have a location?” she asked.
“Not yet. There’s a tornado outbreak on the
Texas-Oklahoma border, which might be where he is, but we’ll have to wait for the autopsies to know for sure.”
“Dear Lord. Those poor people,” Nola said, and wrapped her arms around him.
They held each other without speaking, lost in the memories of what they’d gone through before.
“You have to stay safe,” Nola whispered.
“I will, honey. He’s not after us. We’re part of the package that feeds his ego. If we’re dead, he doesn’t have anyone to needle, you know?”
“Okay…I get it, but still, he’s not normal. I was with him, remember. He talks to his dead wife like she’s right there beside him.”
“I remember. I remember everything—including thinking I was going to lose you.”
“Am I in danger again?” she asked.
“I don’t think so, but I’ll know more once we find out what he’s done.”
Nola hid her face against Tate’s chest. “I hate this. I just hate this.”
“So do I, honey, but we won’t quit until we get him.” He hugged her close, then leaned down and gave her a quick kiss. “I need to call the Director.”
“And I need to make sure you have enough clean clothes,” she said, and began cleaning her brushes and covering up the painting.
He frowned. “I didn’t mean to mess up your work.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t work now if I had to. I’m going to do laundry. I have this overwhelming need to do something for you to make it all better, and that’s all I’ve got.”
He watched her leave the room with her head up and that familiar take-charge stride, and knew she would be okay. It was the Stormchaser’s latest victims he was worried about.
After a quick phone call to the Director to let him know what had happened, he was given the go-ahead to proceed as the team saw fit and told to stay in touch daily.
He went back into the den and changed channels until he found one giving early reports of the storm front that had just gone through Wichita Falls. It had produced three funnels, one of which had cut through part of the city. Victims were being taken to the local hospitals, and so far two bodies had been taken to the morgue. Tate knew all they could do now was wait and see if the Stormchaser was truly back.
* * *
It took exactly sixteen hours for the news to break that storm victims had been murdered, and by that time five bodies had been pulled from the rubble, three of which had been identified as having survived the storm and killed afterward. And they were all nude, which was a new twist to his M.O.
Tate called his partners, then made a call to the local police in Wichita Falls to tell them what they were dealing with, and that the team was on the way.
Keystone Lake, Oklahoma
Hershel was no longer in the state of Texas. He drove all of the next day, following the storm front as it moved into Oklahoma. According to the National Weather Service, the chances of storms firing up in the northeastern part of the state were high, so he’d set up his campsite at Keystone Lake, near Tulsa. The camping area appeared to be a popular one. He’d chosen a site on the far side of the campgrounds in the hopes that the sound of his portable generator would not disturb nearby campers. He had a waterproof, two-room tent with zip-up windows and a heavy-duty floor, a fan for hot, muggy nights, and a laptop computer with a satellite connection for streaming live TV and keeping an eye on weather systems, as well as the FBI’s investigation of the Stormchaser murders. He liked knowing the media had given him a special name, and he liked hearing that the agents were catching fire for not stopping him last year in Louisiana.
The sun began to set as he was cooking his supper. He ate a solitary meal in the growing dusk, listening to a pack of coyotes announcing their arrival for an evening hunt, yipping in a high-pitched tone that morphed into brief howls.
The mournful sound made Hershel shiver. He wasn’t by nature a man who enjoyed sleeping out under the stars, and the thin walls of his tent weren’t much more reassuring. As it grew darker, he put out his fire, started up his generator and went into the tent to settle in for the night.
He kicked off his shoes at the front and padded across the floor to the sleeping bag beside his laptop. His choices were limited, but he finally found reception from a local station. When he saw footage of the agents in Wichita Falls standing at his first kill site, he upped the volume. He knew them well enough by now to read the frustration on their faces and actually laughed out loud.
Shame on you, Hershel Inman, laughing about people dying. You’re sick and mean, and I’m ashamed I was ever married to you.
Hershel frowned. Everything had been going just fine and now Louise had to put her two cents into his business again.
“Well, you can just be pissed all you want, Louise, because you went off and left me. I didn’t leave you.”
I didn’t leave you on purpose, and you know it. I died. I didn’t want to die, but I died anyway.
Guilt hit Hershel like a kick in the belly.
“You blame me for not getting your insulin. It’s my fault you died. My fault. Why don’t you go ahead and say it!”
I never said it was your fault. But I died, and that’s not my fault, so don’t you dare say it was.
Hershel shut down the laptop, but the night air was still. Without any breeze coming through the screen windows, he knew sleeping would be uncomfortable. He set up his fan so that it would blow on him during the night, trying to ignore the constant sound of Louise’s rants.
“I’m going to bed now, so you need to go away. How do you expect me to sleep when you’re talking in my head all the time?”
I don’t talk to you, Hershel. I’m dead, remember?
“Then who am I hearing if it’s not you?” he yelled.
Don’t ask me. You’re the one who’s crazy. Remember? You’re the one who turned into a killer. I just died. Now you go away and let me rest. I’m tired, too. I’m tired of watching you break my heart all over again.
Hershel zipped and locked up the flap to his tent, and then threw himself onto his sleeping bag. He wanted the knot in his gut to go away. His euphoria from his kills was gone. He needed the storms to come back. Rain washed him clean, and killing made the pain go away. He fell asleep to the rattle of the generator, and when it ran out of gas toward early morning, he never knew it.
Two
Washington, D.C.
Jo Luckett was at her desk, tying up the loose ends of her last case when her phone rang. She answered absently, still locked into what she was doing.
“This is Jo Luckett.”
“Agent Luckett, this is Julie. Hold for Director Thomas.”
Jo’s focus immediately shifted as her boss came on line.
“Good afternoon, Agent Luckett. Good job on closing that case.”
“Thank you, sir. Good teamwork, as usual.”
“Speaking of teamwork, what do you know about the Stormchaser murders?”
She tensed. Her ex-husband was on the team, but she was certain that wasn’t what he meant.
“Probably not much more than what anyone would hear on the news, why?”
“He’s killing again. We’ve activated the original team, but I’m adding you to it. Julie emailed you the file. Familiarize yourself with all the details and await further orders. At the moment the team is on the move. Once they get settled, I want you to join them.”
Even though her stomach was in knots, she answered firmly. “Yes, sir.”
There was a pause, and she thought he would hang up, but he didn’t.
“Will you have a problem working with your ex-husband on this?”
“No, sir, of course not,” she said shortly.
“Good. Agent Benton is lead investigator. You will take your orders from him.”
“Yes, sir.”
She got the message. Her skill at tracking perps via the latest technology was needed once again.
“Yes, sir, of course, sir.”
She hung up and immediately checked her computer, found the new message from his office and pulled up the attachment. The file was massive, far more than she had time to go through at her desk. She forwarded it to her laptop at home, then finished the report she’d been working on and filed it.
She wouldn’t let herself think of what the days to come would be like. She hadn’t had more than a half-dozen brief encounters with Wade in the past three years, and the thought of working with him made her sick to her stomach. She’d loved him so deeply—then, in one reckless afternoon, destroyed their world and their unborn child. She couldn’t imagine how this was going to turn out, but all she had left was her job, and she wasn’t going to fuck that up, too.
Tulsa, Oklahoma
On day three, Hershel pulled a hit-and-run during the storms that hit Tulsa, taking out three more people who had initially survived. He was back at the campgrounds at Keystone Lake long before daylight, sleeping peacefully while the city waited for sunrise, fearing the scope of the disaster.
The air at the scene of the debris field left from the tornado was hot and heavy, mingling with the scents of decaying food and diesel from the big machines the cleanup crews were using farther down the next block.
The yellow crime scene tape around the area where the two agents were walking marked the spot where the first body had been found. As soon as the body was identified as a murder victim, cleanup efforts in the immediate vicinity had been shut down, although the site had been so badly compromised, there was no way to tell what was storm-related and what might have been left by the killer.