The Hunted Girls

by Jenna Kernan

  “Gonna tack you up there when I’m through. Leave you as a gift for posterity.” He checked his work, rubbing a thumb over the pointed tip of the sliver of wood. “You’ll probably end up in an FBI textbook of what not to do when confronting a predator.”

  Jack’s stomach twitched as the man stood and sidled forward. If he had seen him before, he did not recall. The man was clean-shaven, dressed in camouflage, laced military-style boots and wearing a red cap. There was a pistol fixed in a leather holster at his hip and fastened to a nylon belt around his waist. Jack made him at five-seven, one-sixty. Slim, athletic and maybe thirty-five. He had the gaunt cheeks and rasping voice of a habitual smoker. Dark hair and eyes.

  In other words, he looked unremarkable.

  “Got me memorized yet?” His captor folded the blade and tucked it away. “Did you see I’m missing the tip of this finger?” He held up his right hand, indicating his index finger. “Shrimping accident. Winch. Unfortunately, you won’t have a chance to give that description to anyone.” He thumbed at the gator skin again and smiled.

  “You should let me go. Kidnapping a federal agent—”

  “Hush now, or I’ll muzzle you.” He didn’t raise his voice. The calm was chilling.

  “You’re the Huntsman?”

  He doffed his hat and then tugged it back in place.

  “And you are the man who dared to touch my intended.” He squatted beside Jack. His eyes blazed, intent, as his smile broadened, curving into a terrible mockery of contentment. Anticipation, Jack thought. The look of a cat the moment before…

  He pounced, capturing Jack’s left hand, and pinning it to the ground.

  Jack struggled, in an ineffective attempt to escape. The Huntsman slipped the sharpened wedge of wood under Jack’s nail and shoved.

  The pain exploded up his arm and Jack screamed.

  The agony finally receded to a pulsing throb and he could think once more. He looked at his left hand. Blood trickled around the wooden shiv rammed beneath his index fingernail. Jack glanced back, finding the huntsman again sitting on his stump, whittling a new sliver of wood.

  Nadine and her team sat with Agents Coleman and Wynns in the safe house on the video call with Skogen’s supervisor.

  Nadine closed her gaping mouth, still wrestling with the revelation that Jack had released her name to the media after promising to keep her involvement private. He’d betrayed her to get his investigation moving. And he’d succeeded, but at great personal cost.

  From the monitor, Agent Gabriella Carter fixed her attention on Clint.

  “Detective Demko, right?” asked Carter. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “None of it good, I’d imagine.”

  “Little. But it seems you are the closest we have to a liaison with local law enforcement, so I’m putting you in charge of that.”

  “I don’t work for the agency,” Demko reminded.

  “I’m making you a special agent, effective immediately.”

  Special Agent Carter scanned Nadine’s group.

  “We’re landing. I’ll be there in eighteen minutes.”

  TUESDAY

  From then on, everything happened very quickly.

  The FBI took Nadine’s phone and gave her a replacement. The substitute worked, but the FBI now had the ability to record all incoming calls and listen in real time. Agent Wynns told her she’d never know the difference. Even the cover was identical.

  Unfortunately, as the afternoon dragged to evening, they still had not located Skogen, and, at Tina’s insistence, Nadine had finally dragged herself to bed.

  So when the phone rang at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, it startled Nadine from a sound sleep.

  The disorientation lasted only a moment and she had the phone in her hand before the third ring. Her first thought was that it was Demko with word on Skogen. She had tried to get Demko to stay with her but, as liaison with local law enforcement in the hunt for a missing FBI field supervisor, he had too much to do and left as soon as he was assured that she, Tina and Juliette were secure in the safe house.

  She lifted her new device and checked the caller ID: SKOGEN.

  Her heart rate tripled as she pushed herself to a seat, frozen as the phone rang again. The Huntsman had Jack Skogen. So he also had Jack Skogen’s phone.

  Nadine swallowed, her mouth now a salt mine, clogging her throat.

  “Hello?” she whispered.

  “Dearest one.” The male voice was unfamiliar, high-pitched and unnatural. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Yes. I was asleep.”

  “That doesn’t bode well for your fiancé, Jack. He’ll be grieved to know he is so easily forgotten.”

  “Do you have him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “He touched you. That means he belongs to me.” The sound he made rippled in his throat like a purr of pleasure. “For a while longer.”

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  “Too late for that.”

  “If you give him back, we’ll…” She struggled for some bargaining chip.

  “You’ll what?” His voice contorted, as if he were an actor playing some part.

  “We won’t press charges for his abduction.”

  He laughed.

  Nadine’s heart slammed against her ribs. Were they listening? Tracing the call?

  “You can do better.”

  “Why don’t you use your real voice?”

  Another chuckle.

  “What do you want?” Even as she said this, she understood her mistake.

  “Hmmm. Beyond the sound of your sweet voice?” His heavy breathing gave her chills. “I want you, Nadine. But you know that.”

  Her skin went damp in a cold sweat, and icy tendrils constricted her throat.

  “I’ll release him alive only if you agree to come to me tomorrow by noon. If you fail to appear, I’ll skin Agent Skogen alive and tack his hide on my wall.”

  “Where?”

  “So quick to trade your life for his? Heroic, my love.”

  “You aren’t going to kill me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we’re the same. It’s why you want me.”

  He chuckled. “Very good, my little huntress. Very good. Already we understand each other. And this one? He’s not for you. Too predictable. Too moral. Too one-dimensional and far too weak. He’s bound by all those rules that don’t apply to ones like us.”

  “Tell me where.”

  She had been off the phone only moments when her security detail had charged in. They hustled her out of bed and debriefed her, sending Nadine back to her room after two in the morning. Once alone, she called Clint and, bless him, he picked up on the first ring.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The hour of the call accounted for the alarm in his voice.

  She told him. No one from the FBI had alerted him that they’d had contact with their unsub.

  “He’s lying again,” she said. “He won’t let him go.”

  She knew this because she understood him. The Huntsman believed Jack Skogen had been with her. There would be no pardon from that sin.

  “Does he think to take us both?” she asked.

  “He’ll never do it. You’ll have better protection than the president. Did they tell you their plan?”

  “What do you think?”

  “That’d be a negative.”

  “Right in one,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Four forty-one at a roadblock.”

  “I don’t think he’s using the roads.”

  “We are also stopping marine traffic.”

  Nadine turned the engagement ring on her finger, so it caught the light. Wearing this at night had become a habit. It reminded her of the future that she and Clint might share if she were brave and he were understanding.

  “When are you coming back?” she asked.

  This was met with silence.

  “Clint?”

  “Nadine
, you know what he’ll do to him. I have to try to find Skogen.” He blew away a breath. “I told him tempting the Huntsman was a terrible idea.”

  “Yes. You did.”

  What was the Huntsman’s plan? Was he going to grab her and keep them both? Would he make her watch Jack’s death? Now that sounded so much like what her mother had done that it had her drawing the covers up over her knees.

  “I need to speak to you,” she said, noting the quaver in her voice.

  “I’ll be there in the morning. Try and get some sleep.”

  “I sleep better when you’re here.”

  “Me too.”

  He disconnected and she watched her phone flip back to the factory-set home screen, realizing belatedly that the FBI had been listening to their call, in real time.

  She curled in a ball, pressing her left hand into her right, feeling the precious metal against her palm. Then she rose from the bed and dragged on her robe. The agents stood as she entered the center of the house.

  “Just getting Molly,” she said.

  She found Demko’s dog asleep on his bed. Instead of bringing his companion back to her room, she crawled under the covers beside Molly.

  The dog groaned and then placed her head on Nadine’s stomach. She rested a hand on the dog’s shoulder, listening to her soft snore. Sometime after the sky turned gray, she melted into exhaustion, sliding away to troubled dreams.

  The gentle rap on the door brought her awake.

  “Dr. Finch? We need you,” said a female voice.

  She slipped her legs over the side of the bed and headed after Molly. One of their security detail took the boxer out and she continued to her room where she slipped the engagement ring back off her finger and returned it to the box. Each morning she was more reluctant to let go of her ring, the physical reminder of Clint’s love.

  Tina’s cat appeared from the hall to lounge in the patch of sunlight on the plush carpet. Nadine stepped over her on the way out.

  When she appeared in the kitchen, it was to find two women sitting at the table with Tina and Agent Coleman. With a jolt she recognized Gabriella Carter, Skogen’s supervisor. Nadine nodded a hello.

  Carter had brown skin, was tall, curvy and cast an imposing figure in a pinstriped fitted suit. Her shoulder-length hair, styled in corkscrew curls around her face, did not soften her forbidding expression. The director motioned to the other newcomer, who wore a navy-blue suit, peach-colored blouse and a familiar necklace. Now that she thought about it, Nadine recognized both the suit and the blouse as well. Because they were hers.

  The woman rose and Nadine noted that she was small, with dark brown hair, tugged back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck, exactly as Nadine now wore her hair.

  The female faced Nadine and she recognized other similarities. The shape of her face, her pale complexion, height and weight, even the makeup all matched. But not the eyes. Her eyes were not hazel but gray.

  “Dr. Finch, I’d like to introduce you to Agent Taplin. Samantha will be your body double for today’s operation.”

  “My what?”

  “She’s taking your place,” said Tina. “We’re staying here while Taplin heads to the Marion Sovereign Building on Magnolia.”

  The peeling white elephant was once the tallest in the city, an anchor in the older section of town. A hotel in the 1880s, it survived through transformation into an office complex and sat on the next block to the new, imposing concrete-and-glass complex of the Marion County Judicial Center, built over the original courthouse. That massive complex stretched over three blocks and held who knew how many court security officers, police and correction officers. The location seemed an odd choice, but her indignation at being left behind overwhelmed her puzzlement.

  She was an FBI agent, too.

  “Oh no she isn’t,” she stormed.

  “We aren’t letting you go on this operation.”

  “Why not? He expects to see me.”

  “You don’t have the appropriate training for this sort of field operation.”

  She pressed her mouth tight, trying to think how to convince them. This was a mistake. He’d seen her more than once, up close. He’d been following the last case and likely watched the press conference. But her belief that the body double would fail accounted for only part of her disquiet.

  It was the site. It didn’t fit.

  The Huntsman had picked downtown Ocala. The historic district could not have been more unlike the national forest, plus this location simplified the FBI’s operation. Surely, he’d realize this.

  “He’ll know. If you want him, it has to be me.”

  Director Carter shook her head. “Nonnegotiable.”

  The pause stretched as Nadine refused to back down.

  The doppelganger stepped between them, facing Nadine.

  “Dr. Finch, I’m so pleased to meet you. I’m a fan.”

  She offered her hand. Nadine took it and found another difference. The woman was clearly in top physical condition judging from her bone-crushing handshake.

  Carter took the opportunity to step away from the confrontation.

  “I’d like to spend some time with you this morning, getting to know your mannerisms, how you walk, sit and so on.” The woman had a hard New York accent.

  Nadine stepped back as annoyance crept up past the indignation.

  “Are those my clothes?” she asked Agent Taplin.

  “Why, yes. Your assistant collected them for me this morning from your room.”

  Because she’d been sleeping in Clint’s room.

  “The operation is only three hours away,” Tina said. “She needed to get prepped. I helped her with the makeup.”

  Nadine gaped.

  “Not your makeup,” Tina assured her. “Mmm, let me get you some coffee.”

  Nadine studied the light makeup and familiar lip stain on Samantha Taplin. She felt stupid that she had not known there would be a body double until she remembered that she could not read minds.

  Director Carter motioned Nadine to a seat and the two began peppering Nadine with questions. Over the next hour, Nadine performed such difficult tasks as walking, sitting and speaking, while her doppelganger practiced.

  “Where’s your gun?” asked Nadine.

  “Which one? I have three,” said Taplin.

  Nadine did not think the Huntsman would be fooled. This woman was too bold and brimming with confidence. A standout, where Nadine preferred the role of observer and entered the spotlight only as a last resort. But Taplin seemed destined for press conferences and commendations. An attention-getter.

  During the morning together, the woman’s accent faded, replaced with Nadine’s, as she picked up the same intonation, cadence and tone.

  Agent Taplin left wearing Nadine’s sunglasses with one of the security detail, before eleven. As she watched her go, Nadine felt sick to her stomach. She knew it wouldn’t work, but there was nothing she could have said to convince Agent Carter otherwise.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “Anything you like. Try to relax, Dr. Finch. You seem tense,” replied Carter.

  “What if he calls me again?”

  “He won’t. Agent Wynns is seeing to that. Calls intended for you will be routed to Agent Taplin for now. If all goes well, we will have him in custody in a few hours.”

  The hours passed and none of the agents returned.

  Demko arrived back that evening. She and Tina saw him fed before he dragged himself off to bed for a few hours. Molly joined him, curling up with her jaw resting on his feet.

  Nadine returned to the main room to find Muffin walking across the buffet. From the kitchen came Tina’s voice.

  “Yes, I’ll get her.” She rushed from the room, coming up short when she spotted Nadine. “The exchange failed. Something went wrong.”

  “Do they have Jack?” asked Nadine. She pressed both hands over her heart, trying to stem the frantic beating. What had gone wrong?

  Would he kil
l Jack?

  “No. He never showed. They’ve been waiting for hours. But nothing.”

  “He still has Jack.”

  Tina extended her phone. “Carter wants to speak to you.”

  She took the phone. “This is Nadine.”

  “Dr. Finch, I’m sure your assistant told you.”

  “Where’s Jack?”

  “We don’t have him. The target either backed out or this was some part of his game. Do you have any opinion?”

  “Neither the time nor the place seems appropriate. His captures have all taken place in the forest or at the perimeter. Yet this meet was urban. Even worse, there is no way to escape with a hostage from the Marion Sovereign Building. And no cover on 1st Street or Magnolia for a getaway. He wouldn’t have cover and you would have taken the higher ground.”

  “We had snipers in place on the Judicial Center and surrounding buildings.”

  “He would never have been able to get away from you.”

  “That’s true. Dr. Finch, this input would have been helpful during the planning.”

  “And I look forward to being included in that planning going forward.”

  The silence was as close as she’d ever get to an apology.

  “Noted,” said Carter. “Operation is shutting down.”

  “How is Agent Vea?”

  “Out of ICU. Prognosis is good.”

  “May I see him?”

  “No. Too dangerous at this time.”

  Nadine heard muffled voices.

  “Hold on a moment.” She picked up more side conversation before Carter returned to the call. “Wynns has a call for you. Patching it through now. Pick it up, Nadine, it’s the Huntsman.”

  Twenty-Six

  Even expecting the call, the ring from the phone clenched in her hand made Nadine jump. Tina stared at her, wide-eyed, clutching her cat.

  Nadine cleared her throat and answered.

  “This is Dr. Finch,” she said. Her voice relayed calm, a technique she had learned when dealing with her mother’s manic behavior. But inside, her blood roared, pounding in her temples like a battering ram.