Fear the Dark (13 page)

Not that carjacking was the sort of thing that went on in Serenity. Still.

She sat gingerly in the driver's seat and started up the engine. Seemed to be working fine. Tank was full of gas, according to the gauge. Nothing in the car said there was anything wrong. Except for the absence of the teenagers.

Sarah turned off the Jeep and got out, and after a slight hesitation she walked farther down the grassy verge so that when she went down the sloping embankment, it was not close to the footprints. She walked around the area carefully, noting that last night's rain had left everything soaked, the dirt now mud that clung to her shoes.

She was careful. She circled widely, looking for any sign that the kids had gone beyond the point where the eerily precise footprints had stopped.

No signs they had. No signs of anyone else, at least since the rain. Absolutely no sign to tell her what had happened here.

Except that two teenagers appeared to be missing.

It wasn't a conclusion Sarah jumped to. Simon Church was inordinately proud of his old Jeep and had a habit of twirling the keys around one index fing
er.

The keys were in the ignition.

Amy Grimes was inordinately proud of . . . well, herself. Her possessions. And she was a girl who liked to make plans.

Sarah doubted that any plan of Amy's would include leaving her prized purse and a wad of money behind.

It would have been easy, of course, to call the Church and Grimes families and ask if their kids were home, safe and sound and, if so, could they please
tell Simon he'd left his car inexplicably here and Amy had left a purse full of cash . . .

Sarah returned to her cruiser, sighed, and made the call that would undoubtedly wake up Jonah. And then—

“Skip ahead, Sarah. Jonah arrives, you both check out the scene, and he asks you to take photographs and call for the police tow truck. Isn't that the way it happened?”

An odd voice, Sarah thought. Soothing and yet . . . an order. So she skipped ahead.

Yes, that was the way it happened. Jonah left in his Jeep, and Sarah was making adjustments to the camera before taking the pictures—

No. When Jonah left, she was already down the embankment and on the flat, placing a ruler beside the footprints before photographing them. Wasn't she? She thought she had been doing that. But here she was, near the hood of her cruiser, making adjustments to the camera, just fiddling, really.

And then Tim came with the tow truck, and they stood there talking for just a minute or two, she was sure it was no longer than that, because thunder was rumbling and they both knew they had to hurry to beat the storm.

So
then
Sarah took pictures of the car with the doors open, so Tim could go ahead and close them and get the Jeep hitched to his tow truck while she took photographs of the footprints on the bank and down on the flat.

And Tim helped her up the bank, both of them cursing the mud on their shoes, and—

“That's not the way it happened, Sarah. Concentrate. When Jonah left, you
were
down on the flat, placing a ruler beside the footprints. What happened then?”

Annoying voice now. Annoying command.

No, I was by my cruiser, fiddling with—

“Sarah. You're down on the flat. You're bending over to place a ruler beside the footprints. Jonah saw that. He's driving away now. What are you doing?”

For a moment, it seemed that all Sarah's memories flipped and rolled in her head, a confusion of what was real and what had been . . . given to her. Stuck in her head, in her mind, by an alien voice she . . . almost . . . recognized.

Almost.

I . . . pick up the ruler and stick it in my back pocket. And then . . . I look at the pictures I've taken, and I delete them.

“Why, Sarah?”

Because . . . he told me to.

“Who told you, Sarah?”

I . . . I'm not sure. I think I know his voice, but . . . it's strange in my ears. In my head.

“Listen more closely, Sarah. Do you know who he is?”

I . . . No. He doesn't want me to know. He's nearby, over in the bushes, but every time I try to see him . . . it gets dark. So dark I can't see anything at all. I don't like the dark.

So I do what he wants. I go back up the bank, and wait for Tim. And when Tim comes, we . . . I thought we talked, but I think . . . I think we just stood there. For the longest time, we just stood there.

And then, when he told us to, we could move again. I took pictures of the Jeep so Tim could close the doors and hook it up to the tow truck. But I took the pictures after Tim closed the doors. And then I took pictures of the bank and the flat.

“Did you see the footprints, Sarah?”

Yes. No. No, they were gone. But he told me to take the pictures. He told me the footprints would be there. I didn't want to believe him, but I had to.

“Why did you have to, Sarah? Why did you have to believe what he told you was the truth?”

I had to . . . because . . . he said if I didn't . . . if I didn't believe with my whole heart and mind that the footprints were there . . . he'd know. And he'd leave me to drown in the darkness.

“Sarah—”

He'd leave me to die. Alone. In the darkness. Where no one would ever be able to find me
again.

Sarah was pacing the floor, fuming. Robbie eyed her with more than a little sympathy.

“I'm sorry. It's not much fun to realize you can't even trust your own memory. Believe me, I know.”

“That son of a bitch. That sorry son of a bitch.” Sarah swung around abruptly to face the others. “Okay, how do we go about finding this bastard?”

Robbie nodded toward the files piled all over the conference table in the center of the room. “For now, old-fashioned police work. We have to go over these files, one by one. In fact, we should double up, make sure at least two of us study each file. Jonah, you and Sarah know this town better than anyone, so one of you should look at every file. Dante and I are strangers to the town, which means we may spot something important that anyone belonging here would take for granted.”

Jonah nodded toward a file box he'd set on a chair near the door. “What about Annie's files? And her notes. As a matter of fact, I got just about everything I could from her desk.”

Robbie thought about it briefly, then said to the chief, “Whichever of you—you and Sarah—knew her best should go over those files separately. And whether or not you find anything, Sam should go over them when she gets here. She's the one who caught at least a glimpse of Annie's memories. She may see something all the rest of us miss.”

“Sarah knew her best,” Jonah said.

Sarah was nodding. “She was on my shift, usually. Jonah and I switched it up so we each got a couple nights off every week, and Annie was pretty much on the same schedule. I'm talking first and second shift; we kept a skeleton staff on the third shift because it was so quiet here. Until the disappearances started. Since then it's been all hands on board and you rest when you can. We even have a few cots scattered around the station, in the break room and a couple of unoccupied offices and storage rooms. At least half the cots tend to be occupied whenever you walk through. Lotta overtime.”

Dante said, “I doubt the town council complains.”

Jonah grunted. “They're nervous as hell and want me to hire on more officers. But not locally. I'm not putting inexperienced people on the payroll, not at a time like this. I've put a call out to a few police chiefs and sheriffs I trust, asking if they can spare an officer or two for what I hope is no more than a few weeks at most, at double pay.”

Sarah frowned at him. “Am I getting double pay?”

“Yes. And we should have another dozen officers here by tomorrow—I mean Friday. The town will foot the bill to put them up at the hotel for the duration. At least then we'll have enough
manpower to fill all three shifts with experienced personnel, and everybody will get some decent rest.”

Jonah looked at his second's continued frown and sighed. “Yes, I know I need to rest. If you
swear
to me you got some sleep—”

“I swear. I slept at least three hours, and you know for me that's as good as eight.”

“Okay. Then I'll leave you all to start going over all the files. I'll go home and get a few hours' sleep, and be back late morning.”

“Make it noon,” Sarah suggested. “I'll be fine until then. Plus, Lucas and Samantha will probably be back here by then.” She looked at the two feds, adding, “And the three of us will probably be more than ready to crash for a few hours.”

“Works for me,” Robbie said. “Good night, Jonah.”

He smiled faintly, but took the hint. “Do me a favor, and all of you stay here, together, at least until it gets light. Call me immediately if anything changes, or you find something we need to act on without delay. Got it?”

“Got it,” Dante said. “Good night, Jonah.”

Jonah managed another smile, then lifted a hand and left their makeshift command center.

“There goes one tired man,” Dante said.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “But he's got better sense than to waste any off time not actually resting. He'll sleep. Now—how are we going to go through all these damned files in some kind of logical, reasonable way? We need a system.”

In the end, they came up with an easy system. Each file folder had a sticky note attached, and whether it was one of the cops or one of the agents, once it was studied, that person made a note of having done
so, along with time and date, on the note. They also each kept legal pads, jotting down any notes they felt might be important or need to be further investigated.

By the time they were done, Robbie had said, “Each file will have been studied by a cop and a fed.”

And, hopefully, they'd have various notes to study,
and
be able to narrow down the amount of paperwork on the table. They were, after all, starting with files of anyone they could link in any way with any of the victims. The second step, assuming they found no solid connection, would be to separate out the files of all adult men roughly between the ages of thirty and fifty. It was an arbitrary age range, Robbie had confessed, adding that when Luke and Sam returned, they might be able to narrow it more because they were far more experienced profilers.

Dante said, “What happens if we find nothing that raises a red flag in any of our minds in any of the files?”

“Let's not borrow trouble,” Sarah begged. “I just want to stay busy and focused so I'm not worrying about whether that bastard is trying to worm his way into my mind again.”

“Awful as it feels,” Robbie told her, “at least we can be pretty sure now that nobody disappeared into thin air, that footprints didn't magically vanish when photographed and car doors didn't shut on their own. Everything was stage-managed to look more eerie and . . . otherworldly . . . than it actually was. At best a distraction for us. At worst a calculated move to further spook an already shaken town.”

Sarah let out a sigh. “It's too late now, but in the morning, either Jonah or I need to go see Mildred Bates. The neighbor with the cast. She was watching that morning, the whole time Jonah and I were
there, and while Tim was there with me. As many times as I've cursed those binoculars of hers, she may actually have seen something helpful.”

Robbie pursed her lips. “But it wouldn't be anything obvious, because otherwise she would have called one of you. Right?”

Sarah nodded. “Trust me, she doesn't hesitate to call the station if she thinks anything's going on. Which makes me feel pretty certain that if the bastard was actually out there, he stayed out of sight in the vegetation down below the bank. Still, she might have seen something she didn't think was important at the time, or since then.”

“Any information could help us,” Dante noted. “It's not like we've got a whole hell of a lot to go on so far.”

Sarah went to get the file box Jonah had filled from Annie's desk and brought it back to the conference table, sitting down in a chair with a fair amount of clear table space in front of her. “So we really don't have
any
kind of a profile on this guy yet?”

Dante said, “If you mean the white male, age range, occupation sort of stuff that usually helps make up a profile—no, not really. Not reliably. That's why we're at least initially working with a really wide age range. We can guess he's white only because all the missings are and it's the majority demographic for Serenity. And it's a guess, if an educated one, that he's probably in his thirties or forties, maybe even older, because he's been too patient and too clever to be younger.”

Robbie sat down at the conference table as well, continuing, “In a small town like this, we're bound to have way too many overlaps when it comes to victimology: same church, same doctor, same bank, shop at the same stores, kids go to the same schools—that sort of thing. So that doesn't really help. But he picked these people, he went
out of his way and to considerable trouble to abduct these people, these
particular
people, for a reason, and that's what we have to look for. Somewhere, somehow, there's a specific connection between the missing people that will lead us to the man who abducted them.”

—

NESSA WASN'T EXACTLY
sure what had happened. She'd gotten up to get a drink, she knew that. But then . . . then there was a time she didn't remember. And now she was here.

In the dark.

Nessa had always feared the dark. Always. It was why her daddy had made sure she never had to walk through a dark house to get to the kitchen for the chilled water she usually wanted in the middle of the night. Her mama had said there was water in her bathroom, after all, and Daddy was spoiling her, but not in that voice that said she really meant it.

There were perks to being an only child.

But none of those were going to help her now, here. Wherever
here
was.

She was afraid of the dark, but Nessa was old enough to know there were worse things, so she made herself squash the fear, made herself not think about it. She could do that, she knew.

At least for a while.

But . . . it was really dark. It was so dark she couldn't see so much as a sliver of light, a pinpoint of light, anywhere at all. It smelled . . . musty. Like a basement. Or a freshly dug hole in the woods. And there was something else too, a smell she recognized but couldn't quite place.

She was beginning to feel things physically, as if her body were
slowly waking, but it wasn't awake yet. So everything she felt was sort of distant, hazy, uncertain.

She thought she was sitting in a chair. Not a comfortable chair either, not one with padding or cushions. More like a wooden kitchen chair, hard and unyielding.

What she was not, was tied to it.

Or restrained in any way she could feel.

Without trying to move, Nessa considered that almost idly. She'd thought she was tied somehow, because once before, she had nearly woken up, and had been sure she couldn't move.

Now she thought she was a little more awake than she had been before, and she was just as sure she could move. She didn't know how she was sure, because she hadn't tried yet, but she was very sure she could move now.

But . . . move where? Her eyes were open, had been open awhile now, and the dark wasn't getting any lighter the way it normally did after you were in it for a while, and kept your eyes open. It was dark and she had no idea where she was or which direction she should move in so she could escape this place.

Then Nessa heard something. An odd, soft little sound that made a chill skitter up and down her spine.

Somebody else was breathing.

Close.

She wasn't alone here.

—

SARAH SIGHED. “WE'VE
already studied the files on the missings, and even though you're right about that overlap, nothing stands out
as something connecting them. I don't want to sound like a defeatist, but I'm afraid we'll find the same load of nothing in these files.”

Dante said a bit tentatively, “Once we've cleared—as well as we can—the people closest to the missings, then concentrating on males in our wide age range makes sense. If nothing else, we should be able to get a more complete sense of what's normal, average. That should help us to notice something that
isn't
normal or average, something that might not otherwise stick out.”

Robbie was nodding. “Like you said, Sarah, we've gone through the files of the missings, specifically, once already, and nothing stood out. To any of us. We even had all the names run through national databases via Quantico, and everything looks normal, average. No wants, no warrants, nothing unusual. Just your average people in your average small town. So we take a few steps back to look at the larger picture. And that means going through the files on every adult male in the town of Serenity—and in outlying areas. Sarah, your people made a good start, but we'll need them to keep canvassing, especially the outlying areas of town, pretty much at first light.”

Sarah nodded, “I'm betting Jonah already has the duty list drawn up. Everybody will be working, especially now that we know reinforcements will be here soon. And, believe me, after what happened to Annie, every officer in the department wants to be the one to find her killer.”

Dante looked a little troubled. “No offense, but we don't want lynching parties out there.”

“No offense taken. We don't have a huge force, but the officers we do have are well trained, observant, and rational. And Jonah was talking to them when I left to come here with Annie's files. He's not
one to stand for hotheads, never has been. He was making it plain that if
anybody
draws their gun, it better be because there was no other choice. You don't have to worry. They'll do their job, and they'll do it well.”

Dante nodded, visibly relieved. “It's just that we've seen the mood of small towns change drastically with something like the murder of an officer. Bad gets worse in a hurry.”

“I've seen it too. So has Jonah. We won't let that happen here.”

“Good enough.”

Sarah frowned, her mind shifting to other questions. “We're sure it's a man?”

Dante looked at her steadily. “You, Robbie, and Samantha are the only ones of us we can be sure touched, in some way, the mind of this bastard. What does your gut tell you?”

“Male,” Sarah said immediately, while Robbie nodded agreement.

“Not sure why in my case,” Robbie added. “There really wasn't a sense of personality. In fact, for most of it I wasn't aware of a presence at all. Just that confusion of memories that didn't mesh.”

“Because he was just testing you,” Dante guessed. “Unlike with Sarah, he didn't
need
you to remember something that didn't happen. Also why he didn't threaten you, I bet. He didn't, right?”

“No.” Robbie frowned. “The first time I was even really aware of him was when I sort of snapped back—and I saw Officer Duncan stagger out onto the sidewalk. I knew her killer was behind her, in that alley, and I knew he was the one who had been rearranging my memories. But it was knowledge, not a sense of him. Maybe just a cop's knowledge that you can't move more than a few steps, if that, with your throat cut.” She looked at Dante. “When Sam gets back
here, we really need to know everything she saw and felt when she touched Officer Duncan. And I mean everything. She may have the best sense of the killer, even if she didn't see him.”