Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) (2 page)

As he thanked Dennis, he realized that he was beginning the rest of his life, and it would be a time of wondering and suffering and the pain of love that has been stolen, but not lost.

As he expected, the rest of the canvas turned up nothing.

Late in the morning an FBI agent came up from Austin to Menard, a kid named Chapman Shifley. Agent Shifley wore a suit, cheap but carefully pressed. He had a burr haircut and the fast eyes of someone who might have a special forces background. He introduced himself, jamming his hand out and pumping Flynn’s arm, the gesture an unconvincing parody of manly sympathy.

Only one assignment mattered to the FBI in Texas, and it wasn’t this. Either you were on drugs and gangs or you were essentially nowhere. This assignment was nowhere.

The first thing he asked for was an inventory.

“I haven’t done that. Except that her purse is missing.”

“Could we just do a little looking around,” Shifley said, not unkindly. He wasn’t insensitive.

“Please be my guest.”

The house was filling up with forensics personnel, “Lady” Christopher with her careful hands, her supervisor Jamie Landry, who hailed from the Evangeline Country over in Louisiana and made remarkable crawfish bisque.

It would take hours, but the two of them would methodically work over the entire house, looking for fingerprints and subtle evidence of some kind of skilled break-in.

As he climbed the stairs, followed by Eddie and Shifley, Flynn found that he didn’t want to go back into their bedroom. He never wanted to go back in, not until Abby was safely home.

The cheerful curtains, the soft blue wallpaper, the sleigh bed—it was all as familiar as ever, but it now seemed miraculously beautiful, like a room from some past world found in a museum.

Landry came up and handed out latex gloves. “Don’t move things more than you absolutely have to,” he said.

Nobody replied.

Flynn rolled on his gloves and opened Abby’s top drawer.

Immediately, he saw that clothes were gone, two or three bras, socks, underpants.

“Everything in place?” Shifley asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Because that looks like somebody took stuff outa there.”

“It sure does.”

In the closet, he found her backpack missing. Also, her white sneakers were gone, and some shirts and jeans.

If he’d been working this case on a stranger, he would have said that they’d left voluntarily.

“Flynn,” Shifley said, “were you guys doing okay? I mean, the marriage?”

“She didn’t run out on me.”

“I have to ask.”

“Yes, okay!
Yes
. We’re happy.”

“Because that’s not what this looks like.”

“Then it’s a setup! She’d never walk out on me. She—we—we’re in love. It’s a happy marriage.”

He knew the Bureau. He knew that they were going to back this down to an adult missing person, probable walkout. That would give the case maybe two more days of search time.

Eddie said, “They’re happy.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

His tone said that Flynn was right, and in that terrible moment, he could almost feel her soul flying away from him.

Of course, the locals didn’t quit. Eddie didn’t quit. But police forces live in a strange sort of a straitjacket. A local Texas police force has access to information from other Texas authorities, but not other states, not other countries. To really pull down a sophisticated kidnapper, you need the reach of the FBI with its connections around the world, and the co-operation of Interpol. The motive for stealing beautiful young women, if it was not perverted, was often nowadays for sale into slavery abroad. A twenty-two-year-old blond like Abby could bring big money in hidden slave markets.

By the time Landry and company had finished, Flynn had been awake for more than fifty hours. He was not in grief, but desperation. It wasn’t as if Abby was dead, it was as if she was waiting for him. Abby trusted him. She would believe that he would do anything to find her. She would have faith that he would come.

By sunset on the third day, the house was empty and quiet. Not a single trace of useful evidence had been found. Abby, her backpack, her purse with her ID and a little money in it were all gone, along with three changes of clothes.

His wife had not walked out on him. His wife was out there somewhere, in the hands of a monster. He chose not to consider the possibility that she might be dead, and in so doing joined many thousands of people waiting every day of their lives for closure that never comes.

He had nightmares that she had been buried alive.

He had nightmares that she was being starved.

He had nightmares that she had been sold to some Arab prince.

On and on and on it went.

Every morning at five, he ran. He ran through the quiet streets of his neighborhood and down into the Railroad District where the great grain elevators stood, past their ghostly immensity, past the long lines of hopper cars dark in the early dawn, past the heaving engines with their great, staring lights, past the café with its warm windows and steaming coffee. He ran like a man under threat. Over time, he became narrow and hard, his body steel cable.

He became a master of the handgun, he learned fast shooting and target shooting and he became known among the shooters of West Texas as a competitor to be aware of. He learned tae kwan do and karate, and learned them well. He went beyond the normal investigative skills of a police detective, venturing into areas as diverse as wilderness tracking and the use of sophisticated bugging devices.

His colleagues admired his skills and feared his obsessive dedication to his cases. When he was on a kidnap, he routinely worked twenty-four hours at a stretch and slept three. He could have risen in the department to a captaincy, but he prevailed on Eddie to leave him a lieutenant so that he wouldn’t get sucked up into administration.

As the years wore on, he gradually turned his den into what became known on the force as the Abby Room.

Even though the FBI had abandoned the investigation before it was three days old, Eddie did not abandon it. Far from it, he hid Flynn’s case time for him, allowing him to continue looking for his wife for two more years.

Finally, he quietly and sadly eased it into the cold case file. This meant that nobody could be assigned to it without his personal approval.

Still, though, Flynn’s investigation continued. He became the most knowledgeable expert on kidnap in the State of Texas. Every force in Texas consulted him. The Texas Rangers consulted him. He solved case after case after case. But the Abby Room only grew more full of clippings, of clues, of false leads. He slid his unending search for her ever deeper into his caseload, accepting Eddie’s silent compliance with equally silent gratitude.

Their bond of friendship deepened. Eddie had loved Abby, too. He had sat on the summer porches of youth with her, also. He had never married. Instead, his love affair with her had continued down its own lonely path, and he had watched with pain and joy as she and Flynn made their life together. When he went to their house for cop nights, he’d watch her out of hooded eyes. She’d had a dancing heart, had Abby Carroll, and looks and ways that no man could ever forget.

Not often—maybe once or twice a year—Flynn ran into a case similar to Abby’s, an apparent walkout that seemed to him to be something else. Time and again, the FBI abandoned these cases after a few days.

Flynn did not abandon them.

Somebody was out there taking people, he knew it, somebody very clever and very skilled.

Somebody was out there.

CHAPTER TWO

The Night had come and gone, November 16, as always, the worst night of Flynn’s year.

As he always did on the anniversary of Abby’s disappearance, he had spent it in the Abby Room, pouring over files, seeking some new lead hidden in some record he hadn’t considered before.

As always, he’d found nothing. Her case was dead cold. Still, though, she lived on within him. His side of the conversation of life continued.

Sarah Robinson’s little girl Taylor was in grade school now. He had never asked her if Abby, also, had been pregnant, but every time he saw Taylor, a question came into the edge of his mind: were there bones somewhere of the woman he had loved, and tiny bones tangled within them?

He’d never remarried, never even considered it. After seven years it would have been legal, but he would never do it, not until he knew for certain that she was no more.

Eddie came out of his office and headed his way. His gut was rolling, his dark glasses bouncing in his breast pocket. He was coming fast, his scowl as deep as a grave.

Flynn was hoping that he was headed anywhere else, but he did just what it looked like he was going to do, and dropped down into the old chair beside his desk.

He said, “Special Agent Diana Glass wants to talk to you regarding an investigation you’ve been pursuing.”

“The Mercedes case? The meth lab on Fourteenth Street?”

“The Carroll Case. Abby.”

Flynn said nothing.

“She even knows about the Abby Room,” Eddie continued. “She knows you were interviewing Charlie Boyne again yesterday.”

The Boyne case was one of the other disappearances that were mirror images of Abby’s. “I wasn’t.”

“’Course you were.”

“Dallas PD and the FBI closed the Boyne case years ago. So I wasn’t interviewing him, as there is no case on the books.”

“Then let’s say you were pursuing your hobby of refusing to drop closed cases.”

“Who the hell told her?”

“Not me. I just sit in my office and wait for the parade to go by. Which it never does.”

“There was a parade. When the Tomcats won the semi-finals.”

Eddie looked blank.

“The Tomcats. Menard High’s football team on which you once served as a wide receiver. Last year they reached the semi-finals and the school decided on a parade. You were there. You rode in the lead pickup. In a uniform with a big cap. Very impressive.”

“Is that sardonic or sarcastic?”

“Both. Anyway, where is Agent Glass from, Dallas or San Antonio?”

“She emailed me for permission to talk to you about disappearance cases in general. Pick your brain, be my guess.”

“Okay.”

“Could be a break, Flynn, if the Bureau’s gonna finally do something.” He paused. “Thing is, she’s got a Gmail account.”

That was odd. “So she’s not the Bureau? Did she name an agency?”

“She did not.”

But who else would it be? ATF? No, no interest in missing persons there. Border Patrol? Possibly. “I’ve looked for evidence of border transport for years. So maybe she’s Borders.”

Eddie Parker said, “You’re gonna find out. Right now.”

A woman in a suit stood in the doorway of the squad room.

“My God,” Flynn muttered.

Her hair was so dark it made her skin look as pale as marble. She wore a black, featureless suit that shimmered like silk. Her eyes moved to Flynn, then to Eddie, then to back to him again. Then the most beautiful woman Flynn had ever seen in his life strode through the dead-silent squad room. She stopped at his desk.

Eddie had taken off. His office door was already closing.

“Lieutenant Errol Carroll?”

He stood up and shook an unexpectedly powerful hand. Her eyes, emerald green, drilled into him. She was all job, this woman. Beauty, yes, but in service to a cause, which was very clear.

“Lieutenant, we need to talk.”

He gestured toward his chair.

“Privately.”

Silently, he led her toward the conference room. He could see Eddie lurking way back in his office, watching through the blinds, not wanting to get anywhere near this. He didn’t want a single thing to do with this ice sculpture, either. She might as well have “Bad News” tattooed on her forehead in big red letters. Expensive clothes like hers did not go with garden variety FBI personnel, or any ordinary personnel at all. No, this lady came from way up high where the dangerous people lived.

After they were in the conference room, she shut the door. She turned the lock with a decisive click. He hadn’t ever seen that lock used before.

“Sit down, please.”

“What’s this about?”

She reinforced her statement with a sharp gesture, and he found himself dropping into one of the old wooden chairs that were scattered around the scarred conference table.

She went into her briefcase and pulled out a tablet computer. She tapped a couple of times and he could see a file appear. Like many a detective, he was good at reading upside down. He saw his own name on it, and his picture.

She began flipping through the file, touching the screen with a long finger every time she turned a page.

“Do I need a lawyer?”

She stopped reading and looked up. “You have investigated twelve of them, starting with your wife. Each time, you’ve put in a request for more investigative support. May I ask you why?”

“May I see a cred?”

“You’re suspicious of me?”

He did not reply.

She held out an FBI credential that identified her as Special Agent Diana Glass.

“Satisfied?”

Not in the least, but that was beside the point. First off, the credential could be rigged. Second, he would never know the truth—at least, not until it was too late to save himself from whatever dire fate she had in mind for him.

“What do you want from me, Agent Glass?”

“First off, you’re not in any trouble. And I’m Diana, Errol.”

“Flynn. People call me Flynn.”

“Flynn? That isn’t in your file.”

“Errol Carroll? My folks had a tin ear. Flynn is a joke, as in Errol Flynn.”

She gave him as blank a look as he had seen in some time. His guess was that she’d never heard of Errol Flynn.

“Just call me Flynn without the joke.”

“We want you to help us nail the bastard whose been doing this, and we want you to start right now.”

“Sure,” he said carefully. “I’m ready to start any damn time. But why the change of heart?”

She got up and went to the door. “Tomorrow morning at eight. Be prepared to travel.”

“Travel? Where? For how long?”