HARD FAL (13 page)

Oshiro looked away.

“You paid for them yourself.”

He looked back, defiant. “I live alone, work sixteen hours a day, what else do I have to spend my money on?”

“A new vest for one thing,” Walden said. “You really care about her, don’t you?”

Oshiro’s glower was dark and threatening. Walden backed off an obviously sensitive subject. “Seth told you. Did he make you promise?”

“You, too?”

Walden nodded. “Said he’s dying. Was supposed to be dead already according to the doctors.”

“And we have to look after June and the baby once he’s gone.” Oshiro’s tone was solemn. “I gave him my word.”

“Me, too.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes when Walden’s phone rang. “Lucy, what’s up?”

“How’s Oshiro?”

“Fine. Ornery as ever. Docs want to keep him overnight but he’s saying no.”

“And you? Did they fix your shoulder?”

“X-rays showed it’s a broken collarbone. I can’t do much with my left arm, but other than that I’m fine. Where are you? I can head right out, if you want.”

“What about that crack on the skull you took? Don’t the doctors want to watch you as well?”

Yes. But he wasn’t going to tell her that. “You know me. Skull’s hard as a rock. I’m fine. Ready to get back to work.”

She made a noise that said she was skeptical. “I’m building a geographic profile and Seth told me you had some data points to add. Said there were more victims and burial sites?” Her tone was neutral, lacking her usual warmth. For Lucy that said a lot.

“I would have told you sooner but I had the techs analyze those locations and the time line every which way but Thursday. You can’t imagine how frustrating it was to know that we figured out this guy’s pattern just months after he grabbed the last kid.”

He blew out his breath and regretted it as pain shot through his shoulder and radiated up into his neck and skull. “I’m telling you, there’s nothing there. This guy must have the resources to pick up stakes every few years—and the savvy to cover his tracks.”

“The last girl, Missy Barstow? She might still be alive. She’s young enough—”

“That he wouldn’t have traded her in for a younger model,” he said bitterly. “Christ, Lucy, this guy…” He didn’t finish. He had no words adequate for the vile evil this guy embodied.

“Give me the dates and places, let me take another look.” Lucy’s approach differed from what the analysts at Quantico’s
NCAVC
did. She combined geographic information with behavior, psychology, and—according to several of the cybertechs—voodoo to narrow her search. Even she couldn’t explain it totally, but no one could argue with her results. She’d netted one of the country’s most notorious serial killers as well as tracking other predators.

Walden was silent. Not because he disagreed with her, but because he was busy cursing himself. He’d been working this case alone for so long that he hadn’t even thought to bring Lucy on board before now. He’d let his stubborn pride blind him—he’d wanted to be the one to capture Daddy. Foolish, arrogant, idiot. He might have cost a little kid her life.

“Do it,” Oshiro said. “Lucy’s the best tracker I’ve ever worked with.”

High praise indeed, coming from Oshiro. Also something he’d never say if he wasn’t under the influence of strong drugs. Still, he was right.

“Got a pen and paper?” He gave Lucy the data. No need to check his files, he had it memorized. Thought about those poor kids all the time.

“We’re sure it’s Daddy, not some other predator?”

“No, but the BAU guys said it would fit his profile.”

“We don’t know enough about him to build a profile,” she said. Lucy was not a big fan of the BAU profiles, he knew. They’d led her astray too many times by being either too vague or too specific.

“But the time line and locations fit. It has to be him,” Walden argued. “Besides, what else do we have to go on.”

She made a small noise of agreement. “So, we have an adult female with an infant, and two toddlers taken? But no adult bodies? Just the two girls?”

“My thought was he gets rid of the women as soon as he no longer needs them to care for the babies. Worried about the risk, so changed to grabbing toddlers instead.”

“They never surfaced? June’s mother and the woman he grabbed the day he abandoned her at the mall?”

“No. But the girls—those he leaves where they’ll be found. They’re washed, no trace evidence at all, wrapped in plastic—not a tarp, more like shrink wrap, like they’re dolls or something. Remote locations with no cameras, then anonymous calls, untraceable, to 911.”

“He cares about what happens to them.”

“Warped as it sounds, yeah.” He rubbed his temple; he’d been doing this for too damn long if these scumbags were starting to make sense to him. Maybe it was a good thing he was moving to the bank squad. Time for a transfer to a desk.

After
he caught this sonofabitch.

<><><>

LUCY FINISHED PLOTTING
the other points Walden gave her. Locations where women and children were stolen; locations where the girls’ dead bodies were found. She added a time line on a sheet of parchment paper as well.

Tracing the locations over time, they formed a definite spiral—a bit zigzagged, but that was to be expected. People liked to think they could be truly random, but in reality their habits always imposed order onto the chaos.

“There’s one more point, if it helps,” Seth said. He’d watched her in silence, drinking his coffee and Lucy had almost forgotten he was there.

“What’s that?”

“Washington DC, five months ago.”

His tone held more bitterness than the dark brew in his mug. Lucy glanced up. “What happened five months ago?”

“That’s the day I met him. June’s daddy.” He set the mug down. It rattled against the tabletop, his hand shook so bad. But his voice was steady. As was his gaze. “That’s the day he killed me.”

Chapter 16

LUCY STARED AT
Seth. He stared right back. Gave her a slow nod as if his head was too heavy to lift. She remembered this morning thinking how gaunt he looked, aged prematurely—he was only thirty.

“Tell me everything.”

He raised his mug but set it back down without drinking, using the time to collect himself. “This was before the threat on the judge when we got protection. I was leaving my office, on the way to file some motions, when a man called my name. He walked up, shook my hand, and said he’d heard what I was doing and wanted to thank me. Then he was gone again.”

“What’d he look like? Where were you—on the street? How about his voice?”

“There were no cameras anywhere around. It was a cold morning, he wore an overcoat with the collar turned up and a scarf, had glasses and a tweed hat. I remember thinking he was a professor—but I think that’s just because he looked like the one I had for Constitutional Law. Brown eyes. Forties, fifties, who knows? Nothing special.”

He paused, his lips twisting into a grimace. “Except that he wore gloves. And when he shook my hand, I could tell they were really thick. Figured the guy didn’t like cold hands, didn’t think anything of it until the next day when the funeral flowers came.”

“You traced the delivery?”

“Nothing there. Paid with a prepaid credit card, delivery guy took the order over the phone, no way of tracing it. The card said:
Warm thoughts for June after the untimely early demise of her husband
.”

“You thought it came from him?”

“I thought it came from another crackpot. You have to understand, ever since we started this, I get a dozen death threats a day. Only thing different about this one was that it came in the real world instead of anonymous emails and tweets from Internet trolls.”

“How did you finally put it together?”

“Not me, my paralegal—she loves puzzles. The guy signed it HG. That’s the chemical symbol for mercury. And the florist’s logo is Mercury, the winged messenger. Then our entire office was flooded with spam about some miracle cure involving mercury—all untraceable, of course. She made me go see my doctor and ask him about mercury poisoning. Turns out she was right.”

“But that was five months ago? If they found out so fast, why couldn’t they do something about it?”

“I think that’s why this guy basically told me what he’d done—he knew they couldn’t do a damn thing about it. They tried all the standard chelation therapies, but this is a rare form of mercury. One drop, absorbed through the skin and you’re toast. But the kicker is, you won’t see any symptoms for weeks, maybe even months. Then, once they arrive, you have only days before you’re dead.”

He wrapped both his hands around his coffee mug. “I’ve lived weeks longer than the experts thought I would. My doctor can’t wait to write up the case report—says there was a chemistry professor had the same thing happen to her, by accident, he wants to compare my brain to hers at autopsy.”

“June doesn’t know?”

“No. She has enough to worry about. After everything she’s been through, how can I tell her that she’s about to raise our child alone?”

Lucy didn’t agree—if it was her, she’d want time to prepare. But she didn’t know June and Seth, not well enough to interfere in their marriage. “Oshiro? Walden?”

“I told them. Made them promise to protect her no matter what. And my family—they don’t know I’m dying, but they love June, she and the baby will always have a home with them.”

She thought about it. Daddy’s perfect revenge on the man who dared to fall in love with his Baby Girl and wanted to raise her daughter. God, what a twisted, evil sonofabitch.

“How long do you have?”

“I started to have weird muscle twitches last week. Sometimes my arms or legs, they’ll just give out on me. And I’m weak—not just tired, physically weak.” He lifted his mug with both hands as if to demonstrate. “Maybe another week. Maybe just a few days. I can tell my brain is foggy, slow to react.”

He gave her a sad smile. “Funny thing is, that probably saved my life. When that guy pulled his gun and aimed it at me, I wanted to turn and run but instead my leg gave out and I ended up tripping and falling. Bullet went right past me.”

And into Oshiro. “You’re sure he was aiming at you, not Oshiro?”

Tactically it would make sense for the shooter to target the greatest threat first—Oshiro. But if Seth was right, he’d aimed first at the man least likely to be able to stop him.

“You don’t forget a big, fucking gun aimed right at you. When I fell, Oshiro was moving to intercept the shooter, ended up in the line of fire.”

“If Daddy already poisoned you and knows you’re dying, why would he want to kill you now?” Did they have two crazy ass factions out there gunning for June and Seth?

“The doctors said I should have been dead a month ago, but they bought me more time with new experimental therapies. Maybe Daddy is upset that I might be around to see my baby born?”

“Maybe he wants you totally out of the picture so he can move on June?”

“Or maybe he’s just playing with me.”

She jerked her head up at that. “Seth, have you been in contact with Daddy?”

“Yeah. I think. Not sure. But I get these anonymous messages—as soon as I read them, they vanish. I had the computer forensic guys check and they said they can’t trace them.”

“Maybe Taylor—”

He shook his head. “It’s too late. He’s here. I can feel it. And he’s coming after June. This is our last chance to stop him.”

Chapter 17

AS THEY PULLED
up in front of Gram’s house, Megan spotted a familiar car in the driveway.

“Taylor. What’s he doing here?” she asked, jumping out of the car before her dad had the parking brake on. She ran past the MiniCooper. She liked Taylor, he didn’t treat her like some stupid kid—truth be told, she kinda crushed on him, but he had a girlfriend. Plus he was old, like in his thirties. But cute, very cute.

Wait. She stumbled on the steps leading to the porch. If Taylor was here, did that mean something happened to Mom? A rushing noise filled her head and her mouth tasted of iron. She plowed through the door, fear propelling her feet.

“Taylor?” she shouted.

Her dad was right behind her, steadying her with his hands on her shoulders, just as Mom came from the kitchen. Not Taylor. Mom. “Megan, Nick. What are you—”

Fine. Her mom was just fine. Didn’t even remember Dad and her were coming. Obviously not happy to see them here either. Of course not. Why would she be happy to see her own daughter? Why would she even be worried about scaring her daughter about to death? Again.

Megan jerked free of her dad and stomped down the hall, not bothering to take her coat off. Her heart was still racing, fear and fury competing for her attention, making her desperate to just feel nothing.

Hard to do here, surrounded by memories of Grams. God, she missed her. Every day.

Megan opened the door to Grams’ bedroom and stumbled inside, banging it shut behind her. She let her coat and scarf fall to the floor but then realized there was a woman lying in Gram’s bed. The pregnant woman from the video.