Undercover Hunter (14 page)

“To a point, that’s possible. Asphyxiation inside a bag takes a long time, though, and usually induces a hell of a fight. But did you see a tox screen in there? For any of them?”

Her head jerked a little. “No. Fill me in.”

“It’s speculation, but think about it. They go with him willingly. Maybe he even turns his little plastic handcuffs into some kind of game so they don’t fight too hard. Maybe they don’t fight at all. At least not until they realize something bad is happening. But apparently that didn’t last too long. Abrasions were actually minor, given the circumstances. I’d have expected raw skin from a violent struggle, especially once their faces were covered with plastic. Some evidence of a blow or two. But it’s not there. Just like the toxicology isn’t there.”

She was beginning to see it but wanted to hear his scenario. “Tell me.”

“Okay, our perp establishes himself with the kid. Friendly. Nice. Someone they can talk to, whatever. Regardless, he gains their confidence. At some point they go off with him. He creates a game for them that gets them to acquiesce to the cuffs. With a kid that age it wouldn’t be hard. Maybe part of the game is wrapping them in plastic up to a point.”

“I can’t imagine a game like this.”

“We don’t really need to, although I have some ideas. Just keep in mind the age of the victims. God knows how he got them to go as far as they did, but it’s apparent from the autopsies that there was very little violence or struggle. So just accept the premise for a moment. All these kids were reaching toward adolescence, becoming sexually aware and maybe even active to a point. He could have promised them the best sexual experience of their lives. I don’t know. Just stick with the point—he got them bound before they knew they were in trouble.”

“Okay.” She nodded. She tried to take a bite of toast, but finally put it down. “You’ve mentioned toxicology twice.”

“Because it’s missing. My scenario is that he gets these kids to cooperate until nearly the last minute. Then, like your spider, he stings them.”

Everything inside her froze. She stared blindly, absorbing what he was saying. “Oh. My. God.”

“A paralytic maybe, so he can finish wrapping them and watch them suffocate. I’d like to think he knocked them out, but...” He shook his head. “Not likely. He had to get something out of this. Your spider analogy really got me to thinking. Spiders paralyze their prey before they wrap them. And there’s not one tox screen in the bunch. The cause of death seemed obvious, so why look any further? Hell, nobody would have thought to look for a minute needle puncture, especially with bodies that old, however well preserved. Decomposition would probably have made it all but impossible, and I doubt anyone even considered it. They thought they had all the pieces.”

A nauseating feeling washed over her in waves, and she put her head in her hands. She’d forgotten the towel wrapped around her head, but as it started to tumble, Cade moved swiftly to catch it. She was vaguely aware that he tossed it over the back of a chair.

“DeeJay?”

“Give me a minute,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’m not feeling well.”

“I don’t blame you.”

What he said made perfect sense, but the imagery horrified her. A few minutes passed before her stomach stopped rolling over. Finally, she reluctantly reached for the toast as a way to settle the rest of her nausea. Maybe some jam would help it go down. She scooped some onto it.

“Adolescence,” she said. “That’s probably a key point.”

“It seems obvious now.”

“I was thinking small, easy to take and handle, but what you just said...”

“Boys that age would be easy to get that way. They’re a bundle of walking, raging hormones. Adventurous, too. Think of all the autoerotic strangulations.”

“I’d rather not.”

He paused. “You’ve dealt with it?”

“Unfortunately. One case. It didn’t require a whole lot of investigation. The file was closed almost immediately, but I’m sure the hell continued for his parents.”

“Yeah, it would. DeeJay, eat. You haven’t slept, now you’re not eating. I need a partner.”

She bit into the toast. Not even the jam could keep it from tasting like dry cardboard. The hell of it was, she could see the ugly logic in what he was suggesting. All of it. However twisted it might be, there was always some kind of purpose behind what a serial killer did. Some kind of play or scenario in their own heads that they acted out at the expense of others. Whether they felt empowered by their actions or got some kind of sexual thrill, there was always a reason for their rituals.

“Now we have to figure out how to use this,” she said. “How to get proactive and draw him out, because there sure isn’t enough here to point us to him.”

“Well, that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Understanding what he’s doing isn’t necessarily a way to get to him. Assuming I’m even right.”

She looked at him from gritty eyes, the lack of sleep beginning to catch up with her. “I think you’re right. Unfortunately we can’t bank on it.”

“No. But we certainly need to think it through to see if we can wring any ideas out of it.”

She nodded, then reached for more toast. Anger was beginning to build in her, and it was driving her appetite. She couldn’t afford to let her feelings get in the way of clear thinking, but she could indulge for a little while.

Being in the army had exposed her to some of the very best in human nature, people willing to give and risk everything for an ideal. But her job in the army had unfortunately given her too much exposure to the dregs, people who polluted the uniform simply by wearing it.

She was no wide-eyed naïf—she’d seen plenty of violence—but this guy was so low she had discovered she could still be shocked. He shocked her. Horrified her. Sickened her in ways she’d never felt before.

The mere fact that he was still drawing breath infuriated her. Out there somewhere, sitting in his hideous web, probably already planning his next abduction. Maybe already making the contact with some boy.

Seldom had she felt the urge to commit cold-blooded violence with her own hands, but she did right then.

That shocked her, too. She knew she wasn’t that kind of person. She could do plenty with provocation. Her history was littered with it. Being an MP wasn’t always a nonviolent job. But never without direct provocation, and only to the extent necessary to bring a situation under control.

This was different.

“DeeJay?”

Cade’s voice seemed faraway. She shook herself and answered, “I’m having some unholy thoughts.”

“So am I.”

She met his gaze at last and saw a cold anger there for the first time. Apparently, his calm explanation of his theory had belied his feelings about it. Bad enough to think of these youths being kidnapped and killed. Worse to plumb the insanity and depravity behind it.

The phone rang, jarring DeeJay so much that she almost jumped. Her mind had been far away from the mundane, looking into one of the pits of hell.

Cade twisted and grabbed the receiver. A moment later, she heard him say, “Lew. Good to hear from you. How’d it go?”

She glanced at the clock, registering Cade’s noncommittal responses. Shortly after six here, but eight in the morning at Quantico. Lew must have just hit his desk and found something. She waited impatiently, but Cade’s end of the conversation revealed nothing. When he grabbed for a nearby pad and began scribbling things down, she knew only that Lew’s digging had yielded some kind of treasure.

Get a grip, she told herself. Stop thinking about what those boys must have endured and think about how good it would feel to catch their murderer. About how much they still had to do, how they needed to turn slender threads of information into ropes they could use against this guy. About how important it was not to waste any precious minutes. Some kid could already be in the killer’s sights.

At long last, Cade hung up the phone.

“Well?” she demanded.

“We’ll have to thank our sheriff. He apparently put all the information from five years ago into the national database, so Lew even had photos to work with. I can tell you for sure our guy hasn’t been in prison for the last five years.”

She closed her eyes, nodding slowly. “So there have been other victims.”

“Minneapolis, Chicago, Houston and Boston.”

“Timing?”

“Closer together there than here. Bigger cities so I guess he felt he had more cover. Lew’s emailing everything he has, so whenever we get the wireless backup, we can take a look at all the fine details.”

“But he’s sure?”

“MO is the same. Victims the same age and description. Only two possibles that don’t exactly fit.”

Her eyes snapped open. Her heart began to thunder. “Tell me.”

Cade looked down at his pad, then straight at her. “Two were women. Died the same way. Fit the general description, but not exactly.”

“God,” she whispered. “You know...”

Cade nodded. “You’re probably thinking exactly what Lew suggested. Our guy could be going for boys who remind him of himself at that age. But the women...”

She drew a deep breath. “The women could have been stand-ins for his mother. There’d be a resemblance.”

“That’s Lew’s thinking exactly. This guy has a grudge against mama.”

Her mind began spinning at top speed. She rose from the table and began pacing. “It’s fitting,” she said finally. “It’s coming together. Mother mistreated him. He hated her. He couldn’t get back at her, maybe because he was too young or too afraid, or maybe because she was his mother and he loved her anyway. And somewhere in that tangled mess, he’s doing to these boys what she did to him. He’s carrying out the same torture, following whatever reason she gave him for the mistreatment he suffered, essentially doing what she would have done. Reenacting, fulfilling her stated purpose, whatever. It could even be some kind of sick tribute to her. But every so often, he acts out his rage against her. It’s not logical, but it freaking fits.”

“If you start looking for logic in the mind of a serial killer, you’d need to be a pretzel,” he said heavily. “One other thing that was omitted from the autopsies here, but was picked up on some of the others—genital bruising.”

“Perimortem?”

“Definitely. And only on the boys.”

She swore and sank slowly back into her chair. “I could write his history now.”

“So could I. Now we need to turn it into action. That’s where Gage comes in.”

She looked him straight in the eye. “That’s where I come in. If I look enough like those boys that Gage noticed it, then I may well look like his mother. I need to see photos of the women.”

“Lew’s sending them,” he said grimly. “They’re definitely coming.”

* * *

The storm had bollixed everything up. Gage said he’d be over as soon as he could, but he didn’t want to come in his official vehicle. He joked about hitching a ride on one of the plows.

Looking out the window, DeeJay could well believe that might be necessary. Craig Stone from the forest service called and said it would probably be afternoon before he could make it. Everything was still on hold, and the snow was still falling.

DeeJay turned from the window to Cade. “I have to keep telling myself that we have a little time, that the timer on this bomb isn’t set to four minutes or something.”

“I hear you. But considering the stakes, it might as well be.”

They’d both been doing a lot of pacing, but she could tell he was also doing as much ruminating as she was. Neither of them had apparently yet come up with something they thought worth sharing. At a stand. She hated it.

She heard him swear and he faced her. “This isn’t doing a damn bit of good. I mean, I’d wade out there right now, but everything’s closed. I couldn’t even get into a decent conversation about this with someone without barging into a living room.”

The image made her smile faintly. “The questions we’d ask would only raise more. We might even get committed.”

Some of the tension seeped out of him. “You’re right. So how about a nap? If we can. Right here on the couch. We’ll hear if anyone knocks.”

She
was
feeling weary from lack of sleep. “Worth a try,” she agreed.

They settled on the couch with a couple of blankets. She curled up, and he stretched his legs out across the floor, sliding down until the back of his head rested against the couch.

“I wonder,” he said, “if our guy is feeling as bottled up as we are right now.”

“I hope not. I don’t want him taking any action at the very first opportunity.”

“Yeah.” He closed his eyes. “I just like the idea of him being miserable.”

She couldn’t argue with that. The wireless was still down, so she laid her tablet on the end table and wiggled around beneath her blanket until she felt reasonably comfortable and warm.

Sleep was not usually a problem for her. Time spent in the military pretty much taught everyone to grab a nap at any opportunity. You never knew how long it might be before you slept again.

But exhausted though she was, sleep eluded her. There was far too much rolling around in her mind, none of it pleasant. She tried to replace thoughts of the killer with thoughts of making love with Cade, but even they couldn’t take over. She lay there growing tenser by the minute and arguing with herself over whether she should just get up and go to the kitchen. If she lay there much longer, she feared she would start wiggling and keep him awake. He needed sleep every bit as much as she did.

But then he astonished her. She felt his weight as he leaned over and rested against her.

“If you curl up any tighter,” he murmured, “you’ll turn into a black hole.”

“Sorry.”

“Shh. Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“No.” It actually felt good to have him pressed against her like this. At some level she knew that was dangerous, that she shouldn’t indulge in this. After all, this was an ephemeral thing, whatever was happening between them, and they’d need to work together for years. But she couldn’t make herself resist, not when he made her feel so good.

Little by little, her muscles relaxed. Finally, she dozed off, carried away from the nightmares of reality.