Hunting Fear (36 page)

“Still out of reach of most car owners, though,” Lucas noted. “And still pretty rare. I’m getting a list covering owners in every state in which there’s been a kidnapping, including this one.”

“And then?” Wyatt inquired.

“Hoping a name will jump out at one of us,” Lucas replied with a sigh.

“Would he be driving with an out-of-state tag?” Jaylene wondered aloud. “Wouldn’t it make him look even more conspicuous?”

“At this time of year?” Wyatt shook his head. “Place is full of tourists, especially in October. They come to hike, look at the leaves, camp. Even with all the publicity lately—or maybe because of it—the numbers I’m seeing are up over last year.”

“Lost in a crowd of strangers,” Samantha murmured.

“My bet,” Lucas said, “is that he only drives the Hummer when he has to. When he’s moving around here in town, he’ll have something a lot more ordinary and inconspicuous.”

“Bound to,” Wyatt agreed.

“Look,” Jaylene said, “he can’t be staying at any of the motels in town, right?”

“Unlikely,” Lucas said. “He’s a loner; he won’t be around other people any more than he has to.”

“Okay. And so far, he’s been leaving his victims in remote areas, mostly up in the mountains. But he knows we’ve been searching those places, at least the ones on our list of possibles, which is probably why he hid Wyatt away in a mine that wasn’t on any of our maps and that no one remembered.”

“Big assumption,” Wyatt said. “The mine must have been on
his
list, otherwise he wouldn’t have had time to get his guillotine up there.”

She nodded, a bit impatiently. “Yeah, but that’s not what I’m thinking. He has to be staying somewhere during all this. We’ve had rangers and cops checking campers and hikers since we got here, obviously with no luck, but he has to know what we’re doing.”

“He’s watching,” Samantha said.

Jaylene nodded again. “He’s watching. So he won’t put himself in a position to be noticed or questioned. And he won’t be too far away, not any more often than he has to be. Which means he can’t be sitting in a cozy tent off the marked campsites and trails way up in the mountains. He has to be close. Most of the time, he has to be close.”

“Pretending to be a member of the media?” Caitlin guessed. “Lost in that crowd of faces?”

Lucas considered, then shook his head. “He’s too focused on his game to be able to act a part, and he’d know that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t tried to talk to a journalist at least once in order to get information. Probably after those periods when he’d been occupied by a kidnapping.”

Wyatt lifted his brows. “I can put a few people to questioning the media—if you don’t think it might tip our hand in some way.”

Lucas didn’t have to consider that. “I think we need to get as much information as fast as we can.”

Samantha was looking steadily at him. “You feel it too. Time’s running out.”

He returned her stare, nodding slowly. “You were right—we beat him yesterday. And he is not going to want that hanging over his head for long.”

“Another kidnapping so soon?” Wyatt said. “Christ.”

“If we’re lucky,” Lucas said, “he’ll act out of haste, or at least out of anger, make a move before he takes the time to work out all the details. Because that’s the only way we’re going to catch this bastard—if he slips up.”

He had no idea how much those words would come to haunt him.

“What’re you, made of iron?” Quentin inquired somewhat irritably as Galen continued to pace from window to window in the living room of the small house rented for the duration. “Get some rest, for Christ’s sake. They’re all together and watching each other’s backs; we need to sleep while we can.” He had been trying to follow his own advice, stretched out on a rather lumpy couch.

“Something’s wrong,” Galen said.

“Yeah, there’s a kidnapping murderer on the loose. Got the memo.”

Ignoring the characteristic sarcastic humor, Galen merely said, “I thought you were supposed to be precognitive.”

“I am.”

“And you can’t feel that something is about to happen?”

Quentin sat up and eyed the other man. “None of my senses are telling me anything except that I’m tired as hell. Comes of tramping over half a mountain and then spending the night on guard.”

“You didn’t need to watch Sam; Luke was with her.”

“Habit. Besides, I couldn’t sleep. Then. I’d like to now, if you don’t mind.”

Galen moved from a side window to the front one and stood to one side of it as he peered out.

Still watching him, Quentin said, “If we’re seen during the day, it could blow our cover. Well, mine, at least. You blended nicely into the carnival these last weeks.”

A flicker of amusement showing briefly on his harsh face, Galen said, “Jealous?”

“Didn’t you want to run away and join the circus when you were a boy?”

“No. Wanted to run away and join the army. Which I did.” He paused, eyes narrowing as he gazed out the window. “As with most fantasies, it turned out that reality wasn’t nearly as much fun as what I’d imagined.”

Quentin was about to take the opportunity to further explore his taciturn companion’s rather mysterious past when fate intervened, in the form of one of the flashes of knowledge with which his ability often gifted him. He went perfectly still, concentrating.

Galen turned his head, eyes still narrowed. “Something?”

“Oh,” Quentin said. “Shit.”

“What?”

“We need to get to the carnival.”

“Why?”

“Games,” Quentin said. “He likes games.”

“I need to touch it,” Samantha said.

“No.” Lucas’s voice was flat.

They happened to be alone together in the conference room, at least for the moment, but Samantha kept her own voice low and steady. “So far, I haven’t touched any of his murder machines. But he built them, Luke. With his own hands and all the hate inside him.”

“Which is why you aren’t going to touch either the tank or the guillotine,” he said.

“They’re all we’ve got. And just because science couldn’t find any evidence on them doesn’t mean I can’t.”

“Jaylene tried. Nothing.”

“I’m stronger than she is, you know that. And I’ve already touched this maniac’s mind, with the pendant. I can connect with him by touching his machines. I have to try to do that.”

“No.”

“We have no leads worth pursuing. We’re questioning journalists and waiting for a list of Hummer owners on the East Coast you know as well as I do will be hundreds of names long. We’re waiting, Luke. Waiting for him to make his next move. We’re playing his game, just like he wants. And we can’ t afford that luxury anymore. You know that.”

He was silent.

“One of us has to connect with him.” She allowed that statement to hang in the air between them, never taking her eyes off his face.

Lucas almost flinched, but his gaze remained steady. “Then I will.”

“Your ability doesn’t work the same way. Touching doesn’t help you connect. So how’re you going to connect, Luke? How are you going to open yourself up enough to feel your way into this monster’s mind?”

“I don’t know, dammit.”

Caitlin came into the room just then, holding the cup of coffee she had gone to get and saying, “One of the journalists is saying he remembers somebody asking a lot of questions. Luke, Wyatt thinks you should hear what he has to say.” She stopped suddenly, looking from one to the other of them, and added uncertainly, “Should I leave?”

“No,” Lucas said. Then, to Samantha, he repeated flatly, “No.” He left the room.

“A man of few words,” Caitlin noted, still uncertain.

“And all of them autocratic.”

“You don’t really mean that. Do you?”

Samantha got to her feet. “Let’s just say that this is one time I can’t let Luke tell me what to do for my own good.”

“Have you ever?” Caitlin set her cup on the table and followed Samantha from the room. “Hey, don’t get mad at me. I just—”

“I’m not mad. At least, not at you. Or at Luke, really. He can’t help being the way he is; if he could, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

Caitlin wasn’t sure where Samantha was going, or why she was following her, but didn’t allow either question to stop her. “I gather this has something to do with you making him so angry yesterday so he was able to find Wyatt?”

“Something,” Samantha agreed, turning into a stairwell that took them down to the garage basement of the building. “I don’t seem to have the energy to do that again today. So I’m going to try something different.”

“Like what?” Caitlin followed her across the currently deserted garage to a room off to one side. When she saw what it contained, she felt a chill. “Sam—”

Samantha looked at her with a small smile, then moved to stand between the glass tank and the guillotine that were placed about four feet apart. “I’m sorry, Caitlin. I shouldn’t have let you come down here.”

“That tank. Is that where—”

“It’s how he killed Lindsay, yes. I’m sorry.”

Caitlin looked at it for a moment, thinking only that it seemed so unthreatening, just sitting there on the concrete floor, empty of water and life. And death. Or at least, so it seemed to her. She looked at Samantha. “What’re you going to do?”

“I have to touch both of these machines. He built them. I have to try to connect with him.”

Remembering the pendant and Samantha’s frightening vision-induced pallor and nosebleed, Caitlin said, “Nobody has to tell me this isn’t a good idea, Sam.”

“I have to try. I have to help them find him, if I can.”

“But—”

“I’m running out of time. I have to try.” She reached out with both hands, her right one touching the steel blade resting in its stained groove and her left one touching the glass of the tank.

Caitlin knew instantly that whatever well of emotion or experience Samantha had been psychically dragged into was very deep and very dangerous. She actually jerked, a faint sound coming from behind the lips pressed so tightly together, and what little color she could claim drained from her face.

“Oh, shit,” Caitlin muttered.

As Lucas listened to the journalist—a newspaper reporter from Golden—talk about the “really nosy guy” who had twice approached him with curious questions during the past week, something began to nag at him.

“He didn’t have much of an accent,” Jeff Burgess said thoughtfully. “Not from these parts, that’s for sure.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Well . . . not a young man, but not quite middle-aged. Maybe forty or so. Tall. One of those barrel chests you see on some men, the bull-strong ones. Otherwise very average. Brown hair worn short. Grayish eyes. One thing—he tilted his head just a bit to one side after he asked a question. Funny sort of studied mannerism, I thought. And irritating. Somebody should have told him to quit it years ago.”

“What else?”

“Well, would you believe it, he called me ‘sport.’ I mean, how long since you’ve heard
anybody
use that? ‘Don’t mean to bother you, sport, but I was just wondering’ . . . whatever. Probably why I remember him so well. Had a funny sort of smile too, like a guy who knew he should be smiling but didn’t really want to, you know?”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “I know. Mr. Burgess, I’m going to ask you to repeat this to a deputy, if you don’t mind, so we’ll have a written account.”

“Nah, I don’t mind.” Burgess’s eyes were sharp. “So he wasn’t just a nosy tourist, huh?”

“When I find out,” Lucas returned pleasantly, “I’ll let you know.”

Burgess snorted but didn’t protest as Lucas waved a deputy over to take the statement.

Retreating to the conference room, Lucas was barely aware that both Wyatt and Jaylene were following him, and he was honestly startled when his partner spoke to him.

“Something rang a bell?”

Lucas looked at her, his mind working quickly. “Maybe. The description . . . mannerisms . . . and I imagine he could certainly hold a grudge against me, though he never showed it then.”

“Luke, who is it?”

As if he hadn’t heard her, he murmured, “I just don’t understand how he could be doing this. Not killing, and not this way. He was a
victim
. He suffered, I know he did. He lost—He lost.
I
lost. Maybe that’s the crux of the whole thing. I lost her, wasn’t able to find her in time, and he blames me. I should have found her, it was my job. It was what I
did
. But I failed, and he suffered for it. So now it’s my turn to fail. My turn to suffer.”

Jaylene sent Wyatt a somewhat helpless look, then said to her partner, “Luke, who are you talking about?”

His eyes cleared suddenly and he looked at her, saw her. “When Bishop recruited me five years ago, I was working on a missing-persons case out in L.A. A girl, eight years old, never came home from school one day. Meredith Gilbert.”

“Did you find her?” Jaylene asked.

“Weeks later, and far too late for her.” He shook his head. “Her family went through hell, and very publicly, since her father was a real estate baron out there. Her mother never got over it and killed herself about six months later. Her father . . .”