by Kay Hooper
She stared at the ring lying on the table, then looked at her palm, where a circular white line now lay across the fading red line that was all that was left of the earlier frostnip.
“Shit.” She lifted her gaze to the woman and found her pale, her eyes both shocked and eager.
“You saw something. What did you see?”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t you know? Can’t you—”
“Who are you?”
“I’m—Caitlin. Caitlin Graham. Lindsay’s sister.”
Despite the clear skies and bright moon, Lucas and Jaylene were having a frustratingly slow and difficult time of it. Not to mention exhausting. And judging by the intermittent radio and cell contact with the other two teams, they weren’t the only ones; the terrain in these isolated spots was so rough it was as though they had been swallowed up by some more-primitive time, the strained roar of their vehicles’ engines alien. When they could use vehicles, that was.
Sometimes, it was literally hacking their way through clinging, thorny underbrush.
Jaylene held the flashlight to illuminate the map spread out on the hood of their vehicle, and Lucas crossed off the second property on their list.
“At this rate,” he said, “we don’t have a hope in hell of covering all these places by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Not much of a hope, no.” Deputy Glen Champion, who Metcalf had assigned to go along with the federal agents because he was not only trustworthy but had grown up tramping all over these mountains, shook his head. “This is some of the roughest terrain in the state, and most of the places are like this one was—inaccessible by anything but a heavy-duty all-terrain vehicle, on horseback, or on foot.”
They had borrowed a four-wheel-drive ATV from the sheriff’s department motor pool, but even it had found the narrow, rutted dirt roads a challenge, especially after the late-afternoon storm and its torrential rain.
Jaylene said, “Just getting from one spot to the next takes time. Look at the next place—am I wrong, or is it at least five miles away?”
“Five miles of a winding dirt road,” Champion confirmed.
“Shit,” Lucas muttered.
Jaylene glanced at the deputy, then asked her partner, “Any hunches?”
“No.” Lucas was still frowning, and even in the moonlight she could tell his face was beginning to take on that drawn, exhausted look it always acquired as they got deeper and deeper into a case.
She knew better than to comment on it. “Then we move on to the next place on our list.”
Champion drove, again more experienced with this type of road than either of the agents. But even with his skill, it still required nearly an hour to travel the five miles.
He parked the ATV seemingly in the middle of the road and the middle of nowhere and cut off the engine. “It’s about a hundred yards farther along, just past the top of that next rise.”
The area was so heavily wooded that the trees literally pressed in on them from both sides of the road, and since the leaves hadn’t yet begun to drop, even the bright moonlight did little to illuminate the road ahead.
It was also very quiet.
Jaylene checked her detail list with the aid of a pencil flashlight, and said, “Okay, this property hasn’t had a house on it in about fifty years. Thirty acres of mostly mountainous pastureland and a big barn is all that’s left. Says here the barn’s still in good shape, and it was sold to an out-of-state developer about a month ago.”
“Does the developer have a name?” Lucas asked.
“Not yet. It’s a holding company. Quantico’s checking all this, but it’ll be tomorrow at the earliest before we know any more than we do now.”
They got out of the ATV, moving quietly, and kept their voices low for the same reason that Champion had turned off the police radio a good ten minutes back: because sound carried oddly up here, smothered by underbrush or trees in one spot and bouncing around madly in another.
“We’ll stay together until we get the building in sight,” Lucas said. “Then split up to search the area.”
Jaylene checked her watch and said, “It’s almost ten. As much as we’ll all hate the lost time, we should definitely stick with the plan and meet back at the station for food and caffeine at midnight. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to keep this up all night.”
“That is the plan.” Not saying whether he agreed with it—or whether he intended to have more than his customary coffee at the break—Lucas concentrated on moving as silently as possible, his gaze probing the dark road ahead of them. “The good news is, we’ll be able to move faster once dawn breaks tomorrow.”
“And the bad news?” Champion murmured.
“You said it yourself. Not much hope of getting through every property on our list. So we’ll have to find her before we do that.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky, and she’ll be here or the next place we check,” the deputy offered.
“I never had much faith in luck,” Lucas said. “Unless I make it myself. And I like shortcuts.”
“I’m game for anything you suggest,” Champion said promptly. “Lindsay’s a friend as well as a fellow cop.” He paused, then added less certainly, “I guess you’ve already talked to Miss Burke.”
Jaylene thought he was one of the very few around here who would refer to Samantha with so much respect, but she left it to Lucas to reply.
“That’s why we’re searching these properties, Deputy.”
Jaylene heard the note of frustration in her partner’s voice but, again, remained silent. She had picked up absolutely nothing from Samantha’s belongings at the station but was nevertheless aware of much the same uneasiness he felt.
If they had not been so desperately pressed for time, she had little doubt that Lucas would be at the Carnival After Dark, doing his best to get at whatever it was that Samantha was keeping to herself.
As it was, they simply had no time for anything but the concerted search for Lindsay.
“We should be able to see the building as soon as we top this rise,” Champion breathed.
He was right. As they emerged from the dense forest surrounding them, the top of the rise showed them a moonlit clearing just ahead, with a dark, hulking building at its center.
This was the third property they had checked, so their responses as a team were becoming more certain; with barely a gesture wasted between them, they split up and moved cautiously across the clearing to the barn.
After the long journey to get here, it took no more than ten minutes for them to reach the barn—and see, from the two big doors that were open and half off their hinges, that no one was being held in this derelict place.
Still, they were all cops and all thorough, so they turned on their big flashlights and began to search the interior.
“Moldy hay,” Jaylene said, her voice normal now. “Rusted farm equipment. And”—she stiffened but managed not to cry out when something skittered across her foot—“and rats.”
“Okay?” Lucas asked her.
“Oh, yeah. I just hate rats, is all.” She continued searching the old barn.
“Judging by all this junk, the building hasn’t been used for anything but storage in decades,” Champion said, his flashlight directed to one wall holding a hanging collection of rather lethal-looking farm implements.
“Hold on a second.” Lucas had stopped near one corner, where an old stump—years dead, but still in the ground the barn had been built around—sprouted a rusted hatchet.
Champion said, “Probably used that to slaughter livestock at one time. Chickens, at least. For Sunday dinner.”
“I doubt a farmer left this,” Lucas said. “Take a look.” When the other two joined him, he indicated the folded piece of paper wedged in between the edge of the hatchet and the stump.
While Jaylene held her flashlight steady, Lucas produced a small tool kit and used a pair of tweezers to carefully extract the note and then unfold it on the stump. And they could all see what wa
s block-printed on the paper.
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME, LUKE.
Samantha wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep for about twelve hours, but instead she found herself waiting in the conference room of the sheriff’s department for the search teams to return to the station for a scheduled midnight break.
Nobody had offered her so much as a cup of coffee, but one deputy kept sticking his head in the doorway, clearly keeping an eye on her so she didn’t disturb the stacks of folders on the other end of the table or steal a pencil or something.
She thought about that as she sat and stared at the walls. It wasn’t a lot of fun being an outcast.
Of course, carnies were, by definition, outcasts of a sort, since they traveled from town to town, never putting down roots and seldom building relationships outside their own close-knit groups. But since her Carnival After Dark friends were the only family Samantha had ever really known, she had never felt an outcast among them or as one of them.
Being psychic was something entirely different.
Viewed as a fraud at best and a freak at worst, Samantha had become accustomed, over the years, to scorn and disbelief. She had become accustomed to aggressive “Tell me what I’m thinking, I dare you!” in-her-face confrontations with bullies, and “routine” questioning from cops whenever there was a problem anywhere near her.
She had become accustomed to the needy, desperate people who visited her booth, with their hungry eyes and pleas for help, for the knowledge they craved. She had even become accustomed to the occasional attractive man being interested in her until, ironically, he discovered that her “act” was at least partly genuine and she was in fact psychic.
She had become accustomed. But she had never learned to like it. Any of it.
“They tell me you’ve been here more than an hour.” Lucas came into the room, carrying two cups. He sat down on the other side of the conference table and pushed one across to her, adding, “Tea rather than coffee, right? With sugar. Sorry, there was no lemon I could find.”
Samantha thought he looked very tired and more than a little grim, and even the simmering anger she felt toward him couldn’t stop her from appreciating the courtesy.
He was most always courteous, Luke.
Damn him.
“Thanks.” She sipped the hot tea. “I gather you guys have had no luck.”
He shook his head. “No luck finding Lindsay so far. But the bastard apparently guessed where we’d look. He left a note. For me.”
“What did it say?”
“Better luck next time.”
Samantha winced.
“He’s been more than a step ahead all along,” Lucas continued. “You were obviously right about this being some kind of twisted game or contest in his mind.”
“You couldn’t have known that.”
“I should have figured it out, and long before now.”
Samantha shook her head. “I don’t think he wanted you to before now. I think he was busy figuring you out, learning to understand how your mind worked, how you search for lost people.”
Lucas frowned. “Are you saying he knows I’m psychic?”
From behind him in the doorway, Sheriff Metcalf said, “What? You’re what?”
“Shit.” Lucas couldn’t help giving Samantha a look, but she was shaking her head.
“No, I didn’t ambush you. He popped into that doorway like a jack-in-the-box as you were speaking. I didn’t know he was out in the hall, honestly.”
Metcalf came into the room and moved around the table so he could see Luke’s face. “You’re psychic? Psychic?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re a federal agent.”
“Yes, I am. And my psychic ability is just another tool to help me do my job, like my training, my weapon, and my proficiency with numbers and patterns.”
“No patterns here,” Samantha murmured, hoping to turn the focus of the discussion from the paranormal to the scientific.
“That’s been one of the problems,” Lucas admitted. “Nothing to latch on to, either logically or—intuitively.”
“Except that now you know he’s matching his wits against yours.”
Lucas nodded. “Now I know. Which means I’m playing catch-up. If you’re right, he knows a hell of a lot more about me than I know about him.”
Metcalf sat down at the table, still looking both stunned and distinctly unhappy. “No wonder you were on her side,” he muttered.
“I was on her side because I know she’s genuine. Not because I’m psychic too, but because I’ve seen her in action.” Lucas turned his head and stared at the sheriff. “We can argue about this, Wyatt, or we can concentrate on finding Lindsay. Which will it be?”
“Goddammit, you know I want to find her.”
“Then I suggest we put our energy and abilities into doing that, and discuss the plausibility of the paranormal later.”
Metcalf nodded, however ungraciously.
Returning his gaze to Samantha, Lucas said, “I’m guessing you’re here because you picked up something during a reading tonight.”
“More like had something thrown at me,” she said. “Guess who showed up unexpectedly at my booth? Caitlin Graham. Lindsay’s sister.”
“I didn’t know she had a sister.”
“Not local; she lives in Asheville.” Shifting her gaze to the sheriff, she added coolly, “And heard about her sister’s kidnapping, by the way, on the six o’clock news.”
Metcalf looked stricken. “Oh, God, I should have called her.”
Relenting somewhat, Samantha said, “Find Lindsay, and I’m sure all will be forgiven. Caitlin’s staying at the same motel I am for the duration. She wanted to come here and wait, but I told her it’d be hard enough for one of us to run the media gauntlet outside.”
“How did you manage?” Metcalf asked, curiosity overcoming hostility.
“Jedi mind control.”
He blinked.
Lucas said dryly, “She’s kidding. How did you get past them, Sam?”
“I had Leo create a distraction. He’s good at that.”
“I remember,” Lucas murmured.
“Yeah. Well, anyway, he drew them away from the front door, and I slipped in. Hopefully unseen. Despite the news frenzy, I don’t think the kidnapper has taken me seriously so far, and I’d just as soon keep it that way as long as possible.”
“Why?” the sheriff demanded.
It was Lucas who answered. “So you can continue to be our ace in the hole.”
Samantha nodded. “If he’s been watching you as long as I think he has, I’m betting he’s at least wondered if your ability to find people is paranormal. If he’s good enough at research, I also think he may know a lot more about the SCU than Bishop would be at all comfortable with.”
“Great,” Lucas said.
“Wait a minute,” Metcalf said. “You mean all of you, the whole unit, are—”
“Wyatt, please.” Lucas was frowning at Samantha. “If you’re right about all this, then he might just decide to grab a psychic of his own. To keep the playing field level.”
Samantha’s smile was grim. “The thought had occurred to me.”
7
Once she realized she was alone, Lindsay began working on the tape binding her wrists. To her surprise, the tape started to give way almost immediately, and it probably took her no more than twenty minutes or so to free her hands.
She immediately reached up to pull the bag off her head, only to be confronted by total darkness.
At least, she hoped it was darkness.
He had ordered her to get out of the chair and lie on the floor, commands Lindsay had no choice but to obey, and had continued to talk to her casually for several more minutes. Then he had simply fallen silent.
Try as she might, Lindsay hadn’t heard anything else. She hadn’t heard a sound to indicate that he might have gone away. But, gradually, she had become convinced that he had indeed left her alone.
Now, lying on a cool, hard floor and groping in the darkness to free her ankles from more duct tape, she strained to listen just in case he returned. But she heard only her own breathing, shallow and ragged in the silence. It took longer to get the tape off her ankles, but she judged no more than half an hour or so had passed when the tape finally gave way and she was completely free.
That happy illusion lasted only as long as it took for Lindsay to slowly and carefully explore the space around her. Cool, smooth floor; cool, smooth walls; and a cool, smooth ceiling about a foot above her head when she was standing.
The entire space, she realized, was no more than about eight feet square.
Baffled, Lindsay felt her way around, searching for an opening, a knob, a seam—something. She found only one thing, a small opening that felt like the end of a pipe in one corner of the ceiling. She pulled at it hard, hoping to dislodge it, but it might as well have been frozen in cement.
She thought at first that the pipe might be providing air for the space enclosing her, but she could detect no air coming from it at all. She felt the first real chill of fear then, but shoved it aside determinedly and explored the walls, ceiling, and floors one more time.
Nothing. No opening other than the pipe. No handle or knob. No crack she could wedge something into—even if she had something to wedge into a crack. Nothing.
Lindsay rapped her knuckles against one of the walls, and realized something.
“Glass,” she murmured.
The word was barely out of her mouth when there was a sudden loud sound, and a blinding light came on directly overhead.
For a moment, Lindsay could only blink as her eyes adjusted to the light after being in darkness for so long. When she finally could see, what she saw didn’t make sense.
Not at first.
It was the sheriff who said, “Some of the media out there could have seen you, we all know that. If you’re a potential catch for this bastard, aren’t you taking a chance by coming here and at least appearing to involve yourself even more in the investigation?”
