by Kay Hooper
9
When Lucas reported the conversation with Wyatt and the sheriff’s suspicions of Samantha and the carnival, Jaylene thoughtfully asked, “Think he might be right?”
“No. I don’t believe there’s any conspiracy here, not to commit the crimes and not to hide them. One man. One kidnapper. And he’s a loner. An observer. He’d never be a part of any average group, let alone a carnival.”
“So you and Bishop still agree on the profile.”
“The basics, yeah. That our kidnapper is an older man, thirty-five to forty-five, and probably lacks a criminal record. He’s careful, compulsive, highly organized, and goal-oriented. Likely to be single, though he may be divorced or widowed. He could be gainfully employed but is just as likely to be independently wealthy through some inheritance—even before the ransoms he’s been paid so far.”
“You didn’t agree with the boss even in the beginning, though, about the reason why this guy kills his victims. Bishop was by the book: the psychological probability is that a kidnapper kills his victim to avoid identification.”
Lucas frowned and, almost as an aside, said, “Odd, that. He so seldom goes by the book in profiling.”
“Well, it looks like you were right to suspect another motive. The kidnapper still may be killing them to avoid identification, but it looks a bit less likely now. And Sam was right about broken minds not really working the way we expect them to.”
“Yeah.” But Lucas was still frowning.
“You’re worried about her.”
He shrugged that off, not entirely convincingly. “Sam can take care of herself.”
“Doesn’t stop you worrying.”
“I’m just thinking we might have missed something very important.”
“What?”
“As unlikely as his theory is, Wyatt may be right about one thing. The kidnapper may well be connected to the carnival or the route they took.”
Jaylene waited, brows raised.
“It’s just a feeling I got while he was talking, laying out this carnival conspiracy he can’t get out of his head.”
“It’s not going to be pleasant,” she murmured.
Lucas nodded with a grimace. “If we can’t find a more legitimate target for him to focus on, he’s going to waste time and energy, and shine a very unwelcome and hostile spotlight on the carnival.”
“And on Sam.”
“Yeah. No telling whether the town will remain simply curious or become unfriendly once they see where their sheriff’s suspicions lie. Especially now that a cop has died, and a female cop at that.”
“You could see it in the faces of all her fellow cops at Lindsay’s funeral. They’re taking it hard. And they want someone to blame just like Wyatt does.”
“I know.” Lucas shook his head. “Still, when it comes to that sort of thing, as long as it stops short of violence, Leo can take care of the carnival and, like I said, Sam can take care of herself. That’s not what worries me.”
“Then what? If the kidnapper isn’t involved with the carnival, how could he be connected with it?”
“Ever since Sam dropped her bombshell about this guy playing his little game with me, we’ve considered the possibility if not probability that the kidnapper could have been observing us while we followed along behind him these last months.”
“Makes sense, if Sam is right and he sees this as some twisted competition with you. The note we found in that old barn certainly seems to point in that direction. That was a very personal taunt, directed at you by name.”
“Yeah. But what if he hasn’t just been watching me, you, the investigation? Sam thinks he’s a natural profiler, that he’s done his research on me and on the SCU. If that’s true—”
“If that’s true,” Jaylene finished, “then he might know about your past relationship with Sam.”
“It was in the newspapers, some of it,” Lucas said. “The case, the carnival. Sam. Just the local papers, but still. Everything’s available now, stored digitally or on the Internet, ready for anybody to look it up. Somebody who knows how could find those stories easily, read between the lines and learn . . . quite a bit.”
“Then we have to assume he knows all about Sam.”
Slowly, Lucas said, “And about the carnival. About their seasonal route, just as Wyatt suggested. Jaylene . . . I think we’d better compare that route to the series of kidnappings ourselves. We can find any correlation faster than Wyatt and his people will be able to; we have more background info on all the other kidnappings.”
“Okay, but . . . are you thinking the kidnapper made Sam part of his game? Somehow controlled her appearance here, her involvement? How? How could he have done that?”
“It’s not impossible, if you look at it from another angle. He could have done what Wyatt’s doing now. Researched the carnival’s route, maybe even followed them from town to town last season or even earlier. You said yourself, we don’t know he hasn’t been planning all this for much longer than the eighteen months he’s been active. He could have begun setting all this up—setting us up—two or more years ago.”
“You really believe that’s possible?”
Lucas said, “It hit me while Wyatt was talking. I know every member of the carnival, and none of them is the person we’re after. I’m positive of that. But if the kidnappings do coincide with the nearby presence of the carnival for eighteen months, all across the East and Southeast, that can’t be a coincidence. What isn’t coincidence is planned.”
“By the kidnapper.”
“Part of the game somehow. Or the setup for the game. Getting all his chess pieces on the board. Arranging everything to his liking. Playing God. We have no way of knowing how many goddamned sets of puppet strings he’s pulled.”
“That would be . . . diabolical, Luke. To involve the carnival, Sam, to pull you in. To spend all that time planning and kidnapping and killing all those other victims, all of it designed to get you here, now, under these circumstances. It’s elaborate as hell. Complicated doesn’t begin to describe it.” She paused and stared at him. “Something like this doesn’t just happen, we both know that. There’s always a catalyst. A trigger. If he went to all this trouble, then something set him off.”
“Yes.”
“Something personal. He’s out to prove to you that he’s better. Smarter, stronger, faster—whatever. Just like Sam said. But not because of any media attention focused on you. Not because he just happened to notice how good you were and decided to test your abilities. He’s doing this because, somewhere in your past, in his past, you stepped on his toes.”
Lucas nodded. “If we’re right about all this, I know him. So part of the game will be figuring out how I know him. And what, if anything, I did to him to put him on this path.”
“Sam was right about something else, you know. No matter what, you didn’t create this monster.”
“Maybe not, but I seem to have created the game, however inadvertently. Inspired it, at least. And so far, more than a dozen people have died.”
Jaylene knew better than to offer either logic or platitudes, so she merely said, “Sam said she was certain you couldn’t win the game without her.”
“Yeah.”
“And if this guy has been investigating you, tracking you, and does know about you and Sam, then you’re probably right about there being nothing coincidental in her presence here. However he did it, he must have deliberately included her in the game, somehow maneuvered her here. And while your psychic abilities haven’t been publicized since you joined the unit, hers are posted outside the carnival on a marquee every night.”
Lucas nodded slowly. “The thought had occurred.”
“Do you think that’s what Sam’s been hiding from us? The fact that she knows the kidnapper is fully aware of who and what she is?”
“Another thing I think we’d better find out. Because in the wrong hands, Sam could be an unbeatable advantage.”
“And in the right hands?”
> “An unbeatable advantage.”
Getting to her feet as he got to his, Jaylene said, “Am I wrong, or isn’t the queen the most powerful piece on the board in chess?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Um. Have you told Bishop yet? About Samantha being here? Being involved?”
“He knew, more or less. The news reports.”
“Did he say anything about this chess game?”
“Yeah,” Lucas replied rather grimly. “He told me not to lose.”
As soon as Samantha picked up the small silver medallion, it started.
The black curtain swept over her, the blackness thick as tar, the silence absolute. For an instant, she felt she was being physically carried somewhere, all in a rush; she even briefly felt the sensation of wind, of pressure, against her body.
Then stillness and the chilling awareness of a nothingness so vast it was almost beyond comprehension. Limbo. She was suspended, weightless and even formless, in a void somewhere beyond this world and before the next.
As always, all she could do was wait for the glimpse into whatever she was meant to see. Wait while her brain tuned in the right frequency and the sounds and images began playing before her mind’s eye like some strange movie.
Flickering images at first. Passing so fast they were a blur. Echoing sounds and voices. Everything distorted until, finally, it snapped into place.
It wasn’t at all what she had expected.
She found herself looking down on a scene that seemed ordinary enough. A little family. Father, mother, two small children, a boy and girl. They were gathered around the dinner table, apparently for their evening meal.
Samantha tried to concentrate on what they were talking about, but there was a kind of pressure in her ears, as though she were going up in an express elevator or a plane, and all she could hear now was a distant, muffled roaring. She tried to shift position so she could see their faces, but no matter how hard she concentrated she couldn’t seem to stop hovering above them.
The scene dimmed before she could begin trying to memorize details, and she found herself once again in the dark, dark emptiness.
It was getting colder.
And it seemed an eternity before another scene brightened and steadied before her. This time, only the little girl was there, or a little girl, maybe a different one, huddled in a corner of some unidentifiable room, cradling one of her arms with the other in a protective posture that struck Samantha as jarringly familiar.
It’s broken. Her arm. Why doesn’t she tell someone? Why is she afraid?
In a blink there was another scene, a woman sitting on a bed in a neat bedroom, her hands folded in her lap, feet together on the floor, the posture oddly stiff. And across from her was—
Cold. Dead. Cold. Dead.
That’s what she’s thinking. Feeling.
Waves of the woman’s fear pushed Samantha away, carried her swiftly to the next scene. A little boy in his bed, visibly shaking, his eyes huge with terror as he stared at the window. And outside, lightning, the rolling boom of thunder, rain pounding.
It’ll get me. Get me . . . get me . . .
Another scene, and this time Samantha didn’t see another person, just spiders, hundreds of them scurrying toward her across a wood floor, and she tried to back away, looking down, seeing her feet, except they weren’t her feet at all—
And then she was in a dark, stinking forest, nearly smothered by the stench of the damp rot all around her, trying to get away from all the snakes that were slithering toward her, grabbing for a limb to try to beat them back, surprised to see a man’s hand instead of her own—
Once again, before she could note further details, that scene was gone, this time replaced by a dizzying stream of them, like a slide show revved up to high speed. She thought she was in some of the images, strangers in others, but all of them were filled with terror.
She couldn’t take in one image before the next one flashed by. And the confusion of dozens of conversations all going at once nearly deafened her.
Fear pushed at her, washed over her, waves and waves of it battering her, cold and wet and black. She could feel pressure building up, outside and inside, steadily increasing until it was painful, until she knew it was dangerous, until she was almost numbed by the force of it.
And then, abruptly, she was back in the absolute silence, the cold, dark emptiness so lonely that—
What are you afraid of, Samantha?
She opened her eyes with a start and a gasp, her ears dimly registering the thud of the pendant falling onto the table. Her open hand was burning, and she stared at it, at the white imprint of a spider and its ghostly web overlaying the much fainter line and circle that already marked her palm.
“Sam . . . Sam, you’re bleeding.”
She looked across the table at Caitlin’s white, shocked face and felt a tickling beneath her nose. Reaching up with her left hand, she felt wetness, and when she held the hand out saw that it was smeared with scarlet.
Samantha stared at both her hands, one marked with icy fire and the other with her own blood.
“Sam?”
“What are you afraid of,” she whispered to herself.
“Me? Heights. But it isn’t really a phobia.” Caitlin grabbed a handful of paper napkins from the dispenser on the table and handed them across the table. “Sam, the blood—”
Absently accepting the offering and holding the slightly rough paper to her nose, Samantha murmured, “Thank you.”
“What the hell did you see?”
“How long was I out?”
“About twenty minutes. I was getting worried. In case you don’t know, it’s very spooky watching you do that. You go as still as a statue and as pale as one made of marble. Except this time you started shivering toward the end. What did you see?”
Slowly, Samantha said, “Maybe what he wanted me to.”
“Who? The kidnapper? But you said he probably left the pendant for Sheriff Metcalf to find.”
“I did say that, didn’t I?” Samantha looked at the other woman. “Know anything about chess?”
“Not much, no. How about you?”
“I know pawns are sacrificed. And I know that a very good chess player is able to think several moves ahead of his opponent.”
Baffled, Caitlin said, “So?”
“So I think this guy might just be several moves ahead. Ahead of the cops. Ahead of Luke. Ahead of me. And no matter which way you look at it, that’s not good.”
It was later that afternoon when Lucas stood in a storage room of the sheriff’s department garage, studying the large glass-and-steel tank where Lindsay Graham had died.
The old mine was so inaccessible, it had been impractical to transport CSI officers up and down the mountain the numerous times that would have been necessary for a thorough investigation of the tank. Though trucking it down the mountain had required an entire day and half the department working on the transport. There had literally been no better way, since the heavy forest made any kind of airlift impossible.
Not that having the tank had helped them, as far as Lucas could tell. No useful forensic evidence to speak of had been recovered. Only Lindsay’s prints had been found inside the tank, and none whatsoever had been found on the outside.
A few hairs had been found in the tank, at least two of them black, so not Lindsay’s. Lucas had sent the lot to Quantico for analysis, along with a request to Bishop to do what he could to hurry things up.
The kidnapper had apparently left the area before the afternoon rains that had washed away any track. Either that, Lucas thought savagely, or he had sprouted wings and flown his ass out of there, leaving no trace behind.
Dramatic, but hardly likely.
Lucas circled the tank slowly, studying it, trying to get a feel for the man who had built it.
They’d had no luck in finding where the glass and steel had been purchased or when, but it was clear the painstaking work had taken time and concentratio
n. There was no way this had been constructed after Lindsay was taken. In fact, experts consulted offered their opinion that the tank could have required a week or more to build, depending on the skill of the builder.
And then there was the careful piping that had connected this tank to the old mine’s water supply, an old reservoir replenished by rainwater in the years since the mine had closed. The simple but lethally efficient clock timer that had opened the valve to flood the tank at the appointed time.
Lucas had never seen anything like it. Never even heard of anything like it.
“Almost like those campy old superhero TV shows, isn’t it?”
He turned quickly, disturbed that she had managed to approach without his knowledge.
Stepping into the room, Samantha said, “Glen Champion let me in, and Jaylene told me you were down here. The rest of them studiously avoided me.”
“You know cops,” he said.
“Yeah. They can’t logically blame me—not yet anyway—but they don’t like me.”
“What do you mean, not yet?”
“Come on, Luke. I don’t have to be told that Metcalf is moving heaven and earth to try to find some connection between these kidnappings and the carnival.”
“Will he find one?”
Instead of answering that, Samantha turned her gaze to the tank and moved closer. “Weird, isn’t it? And a lot like those old TV shows. Remember? The colorful villain would capture our heroes and tie them to some absurd Rube Goldberg contraption designed to kill them—but not until next week’s episode. I always wondered why, once he got his hands on them, he didn’t just shoot them.”
She looked at Lucas steadily. “Why didn’t he just shoot them?”
He glanced at the tank briefly. “There was a timer. If we had gotten there soon enough . . .”
Again, Samantha asked, “Why didn’t he just shoot them?”
“Because it’s part of the goddamned game. If I’m fast enough, nobody dies. Is that what you want to hear?”
Samantha didn’t back down in the face of his ferocity. She didn’t even flinch. In the same level, calm voice, she said, “But why is it part of the game? Don’t you see? He’s deflecting the responsibility, Luke. Certainly with this, with Lindsay. Maybe with all of them. It’s not his fault because he didn’t kill them, not really, not with his own hands. It’s the fault of the police, the investigators, because if they’d done their jobs, no one would have died.”
