Winter's Ghost

by Mary Stone

  “I understand completely,” Noah replied with another reassuring smile. “Emma, you were by yourself at the gym then, right? No friends or anyone else with you?”

  “No, it was just me. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure that Mr. Yarr was there until I left.”

  “All right,” Noah said. “Walk us through that, then.”

  “Okay. Well, I just put the ball away in the crate like I always do, and then I went back to the girls’ locker room to get my backpack so I could go home. I didn’t see anything when I went into the locker room, but when I got back out, that’s when I saw that Mr. Yarr’s office was open.”

  “What happened next?” Noah prompted after the girl paused for a little too long.

  “I didn’t even know he was there, so as I was walking by to leave, I looked in the room, and that’s when I saw him. He was dead, face down on the desk, just like you guys found him.”

  “Did you try to do anything to help him?” Sun asked.

  Noah swallowed a sarcastic comment and kept his gaze on Emma.

  “I, no, I didn’t. I mean, you saw all the blood, right? It seemed pretty obvious that he was dead.”

  “We looked over the security camera footage,” Sun went on, unperturbed. “You didn’t call the police until the suspect had been gone for close to ten minutes. Why’d you wait so long to call 9-1-1?”

  Emma’s dark eyes darted back and forth as she shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I was scared.”

  “Scared of what?” Sun pressed.

  “Scared that the guy might come back for me, or I m-mean, I d-don’t know,” Emma stammered.

  “For the love of god,” Emma’s mother snapped. “She’s a sixteen-year-old girl! She saw a man facedown in a pool of his own blood, and you want to know why she didn’t call the cops sooner? What planet do you live on?”

  Sun ignored the outburst and forged on. “You saw the killer, didn’t you, Emma?”

  The shadows shifted along the girl’s throat as she swallowed. “Yeah.” Her voice was hushed.

  “What did he look like?” Sun was on the warpath. And apparently, she had never realized they could catch more flies with honey. Or if she had, she hadn’t taken the concept to heart.

  “I didn’t really get a good look.” Emma shook her head. “The overhead lights all dim after six o’clock, so it wasn’t bright enough for me to make out what he looked like under his hood.”

  “I thought you said the light in Mr. Yarr’s office was on?”

  “It was,” Emma swallowed hard again, “but it didn’t really help me see him.”

  “How so?”

  Emma opened and closed her mouth, but she only shrugged in response.

  “You know, Emma,” Sun said, her voice deathly calm. “If you’re lying to us, we can charge you with obstruction of justice. How do you suppose that’ll impact your scholarship to Virginia Tech?”

  Before Emma could reply, Noah cleared his throat. They were headed full speed into a brick wall if Sun didn’t dial back her hostility.

  “Agent Ming,” he said, waving a hand to the closed door. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  Sun’s dark eyes glinted with malevolence, but she nodded and pushed herself to stand.

  “We’ll be right back.” He offered Emma and her mother a quick smile.

  As soon as the door latched closed, Sun whirled around to face him. “What do you want, Dalton?” she hissed.

  “I want you to get yourself in check, Ming,” he returned. Any semblance of amiability had vanished. He wasn’t going to let Sun ruin what might be their last chance to identify and catch The Norfolk Executioner. “This isn’t Guantanamo Bay, and unless you think that girl in there can shoot someone between the eyes with a Barrett M98B from almost a mile away, she isn’t a damned suspect!”

  “She’s holding something back,” Sun replied. “She’s lying. She saw more than what she’s telling us. She might know the killer.”

  “I doubt she knows him. You know what happened with Gina Traeger, right? I’m sure by now you’ve heard about how Detective Olson screwed that whole thing up for us, right? About how he was a complete asshole to the only witness who’d ever seen The Norfolk Executioner and lived, and about how she won’t say a damn word to us now, right? You’ve heard that story?”

  On any given day, Noah had a long fuse.

  He could laugh at his own misfortunes, and he rarely took off-color comments as a personal affront. But as he stared Sun Ming down while he waited for her response, he was close to the end of his fuse.

  If she ruined their only opportunity to identify a man responsible for at least twenty murders—none of which had turned up a single, solitary shred of forensic evidence—he would snap.

  “She’s lying, Agent Dalton,” Sun repeated.

  He straightened to his full height as he narrowed his eyes. “If you fuck this up, Sun, you’d damn well better believe you won’t skate away from it scot-free like you did on the Presley case. You might still think I’m some damn newbie fresh from Quantico, but I’ve been here long enough to understand how this shit works. We’ve got one more shot to find this guy, and if we don’t, that’s going to be on you. You understand me?”

  Jaw clenched, she glowered at him. “She’s facing a federal obstruction charge. She’ll cooperate now, Dalton. Trust me. I’ve been doing this for a while.”

  There was an unmistakable condescending tinge to her voice, but he could see the shadow of anxiety behind her eyes. She knew she had made a mistake, and now she was trying to convince herself that the act wouldn’t cost them the entire case.

  “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” With one last scowl, he dropped his hand to the metal lever and pushed open the door. “Sorry about that,” he said as they stepped back into the room.

  “It’s fine.” Amber Olmsted’s voice sounded like it could cut through a chunk of cinderblock. “My daughter is scared, agents. She watched a serial killer walk away after he slit a man’s throat. She’s lucky she’s alive. I hope you’ve at least got enough empathy to understand why a teenage girl would be scared to describe someone like that.”

  Noah glanced to Sun.

  Though the motion was stiff, she nodded. He felt the tension ease just a bit from his shoulders. “Yes. I do. Emma, did he say anything to you?”

  “Just something about Greek mythology,” Emma replied with a slight shake of her head. “About how Artemis was a protector of girls and women and how that’s what he’s doing.”

  He barely kept his sharp intake of breath in check. Winter had seen a festival celebrating Artemis in her vision not long ago.

  “He was wearing a hoodie, but I think…” Emma paused to look to her mother. When the older woman nodded, she continued. “I think I could probably describe him a little. I don’t know how accurate it’d be, though.”

  “What did he show you on his arm?” Sun asked, but her voice was as gentle as Noah had ever heard it. “We saw him show you something on the video.”

  The girl swallowed. “A tattoo.”

  Sun’s voice was still gentle. Noah was actually proud of her sensitivity. He hadn’t known she had it in her. “Of what, Emma?”

  Noah watched the conflict at war on her face. Finally, she sighed, tears slipping down her cheeks. “Artemis.”

  “Have Emma sit down with one of your sketch artists,” Ms. Olmsted suggested. “We can do that tonight, but after this…” her gaze slid to Sun, “anything you want to ask us had better come through our lawyer.”

  36

  When Autumn saw the determined glint in Winter’s eyes as she took the call from Noah Dalton, she half-expected her friend to pack up and dash out the door. Instead, she thanked Noah for the update and told him she would see him in the morning. Winter leaned back and propped both stocking feet atop the stone coffee table.

  “You’re not going to go in?” Autumn asked, arching an eyebrow as she took another swig of beer.

  Winter shook her head. “Not right now, n
o. Noah said they’re having the witness talk to a sketch artist, and that usually takes a little while. Not much I could do there in the meantime, you know? Even Noah’s heading home.”

  “Got it,” Autumn replied with a nod.

  “I mean, I guess I could go in and sift through a hundred and fifty more names and phone numbers,” Winter muttered. “But I’ll leave the telemarketing for the daytime.”

  “How’d the interview with the witness go? Sounded like it might’ve been a little dicey.”

  Winter snorted a laugh. “Noah said he’d tell me about it tomorrow, but yeah, he said it got iffy as soon as Sun decided to take over. She threw an obstruction charge out there, and I guess they got lucky. They’re doing the sketch artist thing right now, but the kid’s mom lawyered up from here on out.”

  Stretching her legs along the couch, Autumn shrugged. “Even a broken clock’s right twice a day.”

  “Plus, at least we have confirmation that the killer’s a man. That ought to cut down on the number of alibi phone calls I get to make every damn day.”

  “Wow,” Autumn laughed. “Is that normal? Do you have to call seven hundred people to check their alibis on every case?”

  “Oh, hell no.” Winter looked stricken. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of tedious work in every investigation, but this one’s just a special kind of tedious. I can deal with sorting through databases or searching through old case files, stuff like that, but when it comes to making boring phone calls to see if someone was at the place they said they were at? That’s something else. If I could go the rest of my life without making an outbound call to anyone who isn’t a friend or family member, believe me, I’d do it.”

  “So, there’s just a wider pool of suspects for this case, then, right?”

  “Right,” Winter replied. “And I swear, we’ve looked through every damn law enforcement official in the state of Virginia, and none of them match up with the guy we’re looking for. There are a couple who don’t have alibis and who we might be able to classify as a suspect, but the evidence is still all circumstantial. It wouldn’t even hold up in front of a grand jury, much less in a trial. That’s the whole reason we’re even looking at LEOs, honestly. Because whoever this guy is, he hasn’t left a damn bit of evidence behind.”

  Autumn whistled through her teeth before she drained the rest of her beer. “Could be a crime scene tech too. I mean, if there’s anyone who knows how not to leave behind forensic evidence, it’d be a forensic scientist.”

  She expected a chuckle or a sarcastic observation about how Winter would add crime scene techs to her telemarketing list. But as Winter opened her mouth to respond, her blue eyes snapped open wide as a look of sudden realization passed over her face.

  “You’re right,” Winter breathed. “We talked about that in one of our briefings but had relegated them to after we’d finished the law enforcement list, since it seemed more important to find someone who could make that kind of shot first.”

  Autumn leaned forward. “They keep databases of forensics people, just like they do with cops, right?”

  Winter nodded and reached for her bag. “Looks like I’ve got a new list to start going through.” She paused in her hurried movements and faced her friend again. “I really wanted to talk to you about something tonight, but it’s going to have to wait. Don’t let me forget about it, though, all right?”

  “I’ll pencil you in,” Autumn replied with a grin.

  Winter thought she should have felt guilty for abandoning her friend out of the blue, but Autumn had become as much a part of their case as the agents in Violent Crimes.

  Winter sent Noah a text message before she left the parking lot of Autumn’s apartment building, and his response was almost immediate.

  It’s better than having to call people, his first message said. I’ll help you with it. Sounds like it might be a long night, so I’m going to shower before we head out. We should probably stop at a gas station and get coffee.

  No need, Winter wrote in response. It’s the night shift. Weyrick’s got that coffee maker, remember?

  You trust Weyrick’s coffee maker? Starbucks, darlin’.

  The drive home felt like it took an hour.

  At every red light and stop sign, she had to stifle a groan. Her pace was just below an outright sprint as she made her way from the car to her front door.

  Though she wanted to change, grab her laptop, and run back out the door, Noah was right.

  Just because the forensic techs in the state of Virginia had been compiled into a database didn’t mean the work would be any less tedious than the plethora of phone calls they had made so far. No matter how revolutionary their new evidence, the search for the killer would still be painstaking.

  With the remainder of the boring search ahead, she slowed her breathing and calmed her racing heart. The killer wouldn’t materialize as soon as she and Noah walked through the doors of the FBI office—they would put in hours, maybe even days of work before they finally found the object of their search.

  The shower relaxed her tired muscles, and by the time she rinsed the conditioner from her hair, clarity had returned to her thoughts.

  She could deal with her depressing realization—a realization about which she was reminded whenever she thought of Noah—some other time. She had a serial killer to catch.

  She repeated the mantra to herself, but the little voice in the back of her mind was persistent. The idea was faint, almost like a whisper beneath the shouts of another group of people, but she couldn’t silence it.

  What would she do if he left? What would she do if he found someone? Did she really expect him to put his entire life on hold while she worked out her conflicted feelings?

  Were the feelings even conflicted anymore?

  She had seen Aiden plenty over the last couple weeks, but the encounters hadn’t come with the usual rush of adrenaline. When he smiled at her, there was nothing more than a twinge of something akin to pride in his pale blue eyes.

  For the first time in recent memory, their interactions weren’t nerve-racking, they were…what? Friendly. Calm. Normal.

  As she stepped out of the water’s warm embrace and dragged a comb through her hair, she mulled over the slow-moving shift in their dynamic. Ever since the start of the Haldane case, Aiden and Noah’s pissing match had dwindled to little more than an occasional sarcastic comment. Even then, Winter suspected the remarks were more akin to an inside joke than any actual insult.

  Twenty minutes later, leaving Noah in the vehicle, she was walking into her favorite coffee house. And almost got knocked on her ass as she dug into her purse for her wallet.

  Strong hands wrapped around her upper arms, steadying her. “Sorry, ma’am. I—”

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” she said at the same time.

  The man was wearing combat fatigues. And as her gaze swept up from his sand-colored boots, up his camouflaged legs to his smooth-shaven face, the pulse of pain in her temples took her off guard.

  The hands tightened around her arms as she felt herself tilt to her left. Concern etched across the blue-eyed soldier’s expression. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  No, she wasn’t. But not for the reason this man was thinking.

  She forced a laugh. “Of course. Sorry again for not paying attention.”

  And she bolted for the restroom.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  She didn’t have time for a damn vision, but by now, she knew better than to make an attempt to stop the inevitable.

  She was turning the lock just as the searing sensation edged its way farther into her brain. She dropped down to the tiled floor. She had bounced her head off the floor enough to learn her lesson. The closer she got to the ground, nasty public bathroom or not, the shorter the fall and any resulting injury.

  When her eyelids fluttered closed, she was no longer in the bathroom. The sun’s burning heat touched her face, and she blinked repeatedly to clear the dust from her vision as a br
eeze whispered along the desert.

  Aside from the move to New York for college, Winter hadn’t traveled much in her twenty-six years of life. Though she had never been to a desert, she knew the desolate landscape and searing sunlight for what it was.

  She was on a bluff, and below, a sprawling stretch of sand, rocks, and scrubby plants went on as far as she could see.

  Above the wind’s mournful cry, she heard another sound. A weary sigh.

  The sound had come from a man at the edge of the bluff, and when she spotted his attire, the desert setting made sense.

  Tan, digital camouflage fatigues, a matching Kevlar vest, and sandy colored boots. In one hand, he clutched the grip of a matte gray rifle as he ran the other through his black, disheveled hair. Winter wanted to approach him to catch a glimpse of his face, but she was rooted in place.

  It was him.

  Not the man she’d bumped into moments before.

  The man who stood with his back to her was The Norfolk Executioner.

  A distant crack drew the man’s attention, and as he turned, she squinted to read the insignia on his shoulder. No matter how hard she tried, however, she couldn’t focus her gaze on his face.

  With a sharp gasp, Winter’s eyes flew open as she sat bolt upright. She reflexively dabbed beneath her nose and was relieved when she spotted only a slight smudge of crimson.

  She may not have seen the man’s face, but whoever he was, his uniform had labeled him as a US Army Ranger. There was no doubt in her mind that she had just seen the man responsible for the murder of Tyler Haldane—The Norfolk Executioner.

  After splashing water on her face and pulling herself together, she smiled at the anxious soldier hovering outside the bathroom.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  She wanted to throw her arms around him. Not just for his obvious concern for her wellbeing, but this man had given her a gift she could never tell him about.

  “I’m wonderful. Promise.”