Pitch Black (33 page)

“Regarding the supposed other inmate? Maybe. It’s hard to see how he could know as much as he did.”

“Look, Sam, you said yourself this guy was good enough to bilk hundreds of people through the Internet. You really think he couldn’t find out everything he wanted to know about you and your family history? He certainly knew today was your birthday.”

“I don’t know how he found that out. His sentence forbids Internet access.”

“Sentences usually also forbid drugs, pornography, and weapons in prison. You honestly think there aren’t any? I have no doubt Flynt has at the very least found himself in the vicinity of someone who has online access and can find out anything he wants to know.”

She conceded his point with a nod.

“He really knocked you for a loop, didn’t he?” he murmured.

“I guess.”

“You feeling better now?”

“I’m fine. I was fine almost right away, once I got out of that hot room. But I didn’t want to interfere, so I didn’t even think about coming back.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. I don’t think I’d have kept Jimmy’s attention if you were there.”

“It wasn’t a hardship. Despite being a prick about women’s skirts, the warden was pretty nice to let me wait in the privacy of his assistant’s office, rather than sending me to the car. I guess he felt bad for making me keep the coat on.”

He tried to lighten the mood with a teasing smile. “And no dress code?”

“No dress code. Now, back to Jimmy?”

His smile faded immediately. “I don’t think it was just that he had no sympathy for his victims, although that was certainly true.” Alec thought about it, trying to put his impressions in words. “He seemed almost . . . disgusted with them, I guess, for being stupid enough to fall for his line.”

“Like they had it coming?”

“Exactly. Had a very Nietzschean philosophy that some people were predators and some were prey and that’s just the way things are. That it was no more wrong for him to steal from them than it was for a hungry wolf to cull the weakest sheep from the flock to fulfill its needs.”

“Sociopathic,” she murmured.

“Probably. He honestly saw himself as doing the world a favor by teaching these fools a lesson, even though he doubted most of them learned from it.”

“Kind of like your unsub.”

Alec nodded. “Most definitely. He has referred to his victims as fools, called them stupid.”

They both thought about it. Alec kept playing Jimmy’s words in his head, knowing there was something he had overlooked. Some natural conclusion he should be able to reach, yet it remained elusive, hiding in the corners of his mind.

“Lucky him to have found a way to lure gullible people,” Sam mused. “I bet it’s not hard for him to find people he considers stupid online.”

And just like that, something clicked. He sat very still, closing his eyes, thinking about her words. “Lucky,” he whispered. “Yes, he just sends out a blanket lure and waits for the right type of victim to respond.”

Sam seemed to realize he was talking more to himself than to her and remained silent.

“But maybe he doesn’t see it as luck. Maybe it isn’t random.”

“What?”

Alec rose from his chair and paced the room, trying to verbalize the idea he couldn’t quite nail down. “I mean, maybe he’s not just trying to find miscellaneous victims to satisfy his need to kill. He intentionally sets his lures up to be easily avoided. The scams are simple to check, the backgrounds so obviously faked. Even the crime scenes, which seem like such senseless deaths, usually have a way out.”

“So the objective . . .”

“Isn’t just to kill.” He placed his hands on the back of the chair he had just vacated, and gripped it. “The victims aren’t random. The means he uses to pull them in ensures that he’s getting
exactly
the kind of people he wants to kill, and the farther they venture into his path, the more they confirm their status as sheep to be culled. The ones he considers unworthy, stupid.”

“Like the world would be better off without them?”

“Yes!” He dropped back onto the chair, mumbling, “Darwin. He wasn’t just referring to the survival of the fittest. He is trying to help evolution along by thinning out the gene pool.”

Sam shook her head in disgust. “Unbelievable.”

“But true,” he said, nearly certain of it. He just needed a little more information to firm up his theories. “His first several victims, the ones he killed without the e-mail scams . . . there must have been something that attracted him to them.”

The victims hadn’t had any surface connections. They’d been from widely different backgrounds, different ages, sexes, socioeconomic groups. Yet there must have been something to swing Darwin’s big, evil eye in their direction.

Alec flipped open his laptop and opened his documents on the case. The details of each murder were here, and he refamiliarized himself with them, again acknowledging that there were no surface similarities.

Acting on a hunch, he went a step farther and established an Internet connection. “We checked the backgrounds on every one of these people and found absolutely nothing that linked them. Now, I wonder if Darwin himself does,” he muttered.

Sam eyed him curiously, but he didn’t explain. Instead, he typed the name of one of the victims and the word
Darwin
into a search engine, and pressed enter.

The returns were almost instantaneous and they were numerous. He scanned down the first page, looking at each snippet, not entirely sure what he was looking for.

And then, he quite simply found it.

“Here it is,” he murmured, his heart thudding in his chest.

“What?” she asked, scooting her chair around so she could see.

Alec clicked on the link, though he didn’t need to read the entire newspaper article that came up to know what it contained.

“Oh, my God,” Sam whispered after she read the first few paragraphs.

“The Darwin Awards,” he said. “They’re not only real, the expression is commonly used to describe people who survive after doing something stupid that should have killed them.”

“Thereby cleaning up the gene pool.”

Exactly. Before their unsub had begun bringing the stupid masses right to his door via the Internet, he’d had to go out and hunt for them. He’d found them by watching news feeds from up and down the East Coast, keying on that one expression, on the word
Darwin
. And had, over a period of a few years, found six people to slaughter.

Alec reached into his pocket to retrieve his phone. Wyatt needed to know about this. If Alec’s hunch was right, and the other victims all had a similar Darwin Awards–type incident in their past—which a little more digging should confirm—they had another tool with which to view the psyche of the man they sought. But before he could even retrieve it, the thing rang.

“Speak of the devil,” he said as he answered the phone.

“Alec, are you near a computer?”

He tensed, hearing the concerned tone of Wyatt’s voice. “Yes.”

“Is Samantha Dalton with you?”

Wary, he replied, “Yes. She is.”

Sam looked up in curiosity, but Alec shrugged to tell her he did not yet know what the call was about.

“You need to go to her blog site.”

Fuck.
“Did he do it again?”

“It appears so.”

They hadn’t changed Sam’s passwords, actually hoping Darwin would hack in again, because every effort he made was another clue in finding him.

“Keep her calm, question her thoroughly, and get back in touch with me. I’ve already got Taggert and Mulrooney heading in and will put them on the road to Baltimore as soon as they arrive. You need to get some information and get back to me with names and addresses.”

“Why?” he asked, not asking specifics because he honestly didn’t want Sam to read anything into the one-sided conversation. What he really wanted to ask was,
Why Baltimore? Whose names and addresses?

“You’ll understand when you read it. Just remember, keep her calm. Tell her we are on our way and we already have the Baltimore police on notice.”

This was not good. “I’ll call you back in a couple of minutes.”

“No more than that,” Wyatt cautioned.

Cutting the call, Alec reached for the laptop and began typing. Sam’s gaze followed his fingers and she immediately realized what words he was typing.

“Don’t tell me he hacked me again.”

Alec didn’t respond, he simply waited, his fingers resting on the keys. As the page loaded, he realized he was holding his breath. He also realized Sam’s hand had moved over and dropped onto his leg, just above his knee. She was squeezing him, as if needing to physically grab something and hold on tight. He covered her hand with his. And the screen filled in.

“What?” Sam mumbled, obviously not understanding the words, so stark and bold, just like the last hacked-in message from Darwin.

It took Alec a split second less to figure it out. Something inside him died a little as he thought of what this meant for Sam, who seemed to have so few people in her life.

Because it appeared one of those people might soon be
out
of her life.

“‘You’re too late to save her’?” Sam murmured. “What does he mean? I’m right here.”

Alec scrolled the screen down with a flick of his finger on the touch pad, already knowing there was more. And he was right.

So sorry, Samantha, dear, but it has to be done. Too bad she didn’t listen to you and learn a bit of caution—you did warn her about men like me, didn’t you? Do remember to avoid wearing mascara to the funeral . . . it won’t hold up under your tears, and you’re far too lovely to have dark smears beneath your eyes.

Sam read the words and finally grasped them. “Oh, my God.”

Alec nodded once.

“He’s gone after someone I love.”

She leaped to her feet, already racing toward the door before he even had time to stop her.

“Sam, wait, I need to know who it could be. Wyatt and the others are ready to charge to the rescue. We just need to know who the target would most likely be.”

Her expression terrified, her breaths merely short gasps, she said, “She had a date tonight with someone she met on the Internet. I did warn her, but she didn’t listen.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Alec, that psychopath has my
mother
.”

E
ven though he’d needed
to make some adjustments this evening after a highly unexpected development, the ambush had gone exactly as he had expected it to. As usual, his plan had been flawlessly designed and easy to carry out. Glancing at his watch, Darwin realized he was right on schedule. A few hours, at least, until he’d need to dump her, leaving him with sufficient time to get her ready for her night on the town, as it were.

Once he’d had her in his hands and knew he’d gotten away clean, he had posted his message on Samantha’s Web site. She had probably already read it; the FBI almost certainly had. All of them were, right now, in a blind panic, racing to save the stupid cow behind him.

That cow had been so stupid, she’d never even been the least bit suspicious. She hadn’t checked him out, had never questioned him. She had not even second-guessed the location for their get-together when he’d called her a couple of hours ago. She’d walked blindly into her fate, as so many had before her.

But she wasn’t like all those who had gone before her. This one was special, if only because of how much losing her would hurt Samantha Dalton.

“Silly, impulsive, reckless woman,” he murmured, though, of course, she was unconscious and couldn’t hear him. “You really don’t value yourself very highly, do you, my dear?”

Fortunately, he had known this moment would come, so he’d been paving the way for weeks. Reaching out to her on e-mail, he’d let her get to know him, or think she did. He’d called himself Randolph Gertz, a wealthy widower dabbling in various investments. And her greedy little soul had been unable to resist him.

His companion had entered their arranged meeting place right on schedule and had never even seen him come at her with the chloroform. Not being sure he would be able to get her to drink something right away, he’d had to resort to the slightly riskier means of taking her down.

He’d
kept
her down with a few sharp blows to her face and head.

Regrettable, his losing his temper like that; he so seldom did. But something about seeing her lying there, helpless and vulnerable, when she should have been Samantha, had enraged him.

“A few hits won’t kill you,” he said, speaking casually over his shoulder to the woman sprawled in the back of the van. A trickle of blood from her nose smeared one cheek, her lip was swollen, and one eye was showing a bruise. He imagined she would have a terrible headache if she ever woke up. Still, she didn’t look too much the worse for wear.

In fact, she should fit right in where he intended to take her.

“You’re lucky, you know. There’s a very good chance tonight’s ordeal won’t kill you, either. You could be lucky, or you could be unlucky. You could play it smart, or you could panic and get yourself killed.” He smiled, thinking about the way he most wanted it to turn out. “I rather hope you live through it.”

Live through it enough to talk about it. To tell Samantha about it. To reveal her pain and her agony and ask
why
something so awful had happened.

Because it would be awful. Of that he had no doubt.

In fact, he might be able to assure it. Because as he’d beaten her, he’d been quite surprised to find himself growing erect. No, her prone body was not the one he wanted . . . but violating it was almost as good. Something to keep in mind, if he had the time.

Reaching the storage facility where he’d rented a private garage, he quickly got out and pulled the van inside, needing privacy. The stupid bitch probably wouldn’t wake up, but just in case she did, and made a fuss, he did not want to have to answer any questions. The facility would more than likely remain deserted at this time of the evening, but it didn’t pay to be careless.

Once within, he quickly closed the rolling door and flipped on the portable lights he always left here. He positioned them toward the sliding panel door of the van, wanting plenty of illumination while he got her ready, then opened it.