Hunting Fear (21 page)

As always, all she could do was wait for the glimpse into whatever she was meant to see. Wait while her brain tuned in the right frequency and the sounds and images began playing before her mind’s eye like some strange movie.

Flickering images at first. Passing so fast they were a blur. Echoing sounds and voices. Everything distorted until, finally, it snapped into place.

It wasn’t at all what she had expected.

She found herself looking down on a scene that seemed ordinary enough. A little family. Father, mother, two small children, a boy and girl. They were gathered around the dinner table, apparently for their evening meal.

Samantha tried to concentrate on what they were talking about, but there was a kind of pressure in her ears, as though she were going up in an express elevator or a plane, and all she could hear now was a distant, muffled roaring. She tried to shift position so she could see their faces, but no matter how hard she concentrated she couldn’t seem to stop hovering above them.

The scene dimmed before she could begin trying to memorize details, and she found herself once again in the dark, dark emptiness.

It was getting colder.

And it seemed an eternity before another scene brightened and steadied before her. This time, only the little girl was there, or
a
little girl, maybe a different one, huddled in a corner of some unidentifiable room, cradling one of her arms with the other in a protective posture that struck Samantha as jarringly familiar.

It’s broken. Her arm. Why doesn’t she tell someone? Why is she afraid?

In a blink there was another scene, a woman sitting on a bed in a neat bedroom, her hands folded in her lap, feet together on the floor, the posture oddly stiff. And across from her was—

Cold. Dead. Cold. Dead.

That’s what she’s thinking. Feeling.

Waves of the woman’s fear pushed Samantha away, carried her swiftly to the next scene. A little boy in his bed, visibly shaking, his eyes huge with terror as he stared at the window. And outside, lightning, the rolling boom of thunder, rain pounding.

It’ll get me. Get me . . . get me . . .

Another scene, and this time Samantha didn’t see another person, just spiders, hundreds of them scurrying toward her across a wood floor, and she tried to back away, looking down, seeing her feet, except they weren’t her feet at all—

And then she was in a dark, stinking forest, nearly smothered by the stench of the damp rot all around her, trying to get away from all the snakes that were slithering toward her, grabbing for a limb to try to beat them back, surprised to see a man’s hand instead of her own—

Once again, before she could note further details, that scene was gone, this time replaced by a dizzying stream of them, like a slide show revved up to high speed. She thought she was in some of the images, strangers in others, but all of them were filled with terror.

She couldn’t take in one image before the next one flashed by. And the confusion of dozens of conversations all going at once nearly deafened her.

Fear pushed at her, washed over her, waves and waves of it battering her, cold and wet and black. She could feel pressure building up, outside and inside, steadily increasing until it was painful, until she knew it was dangerous, until she was almost numbed by the force of it.

And then, abruptly, she was back in the absolute silence, the cold, dark emptiness so lonely that—

What are
you
afraid of, Samantha?

She opened her eyes with a start and a gasp, her ears dimly registering the thud of the pendant falling onto the table. Her open hand was burning, and she stared at it, at the white imprint of a spider and its ghostly web overlaying the much fainter line and circle that already marked her palm.

“Sam . . . Sam, you’re bleeding.”

She looked across the table at Caitlin’s white, shocked face and felt a tickling beneath her nose. Reaching up with her left hand, she felt wetness, and when she held the hand out saw that it was smeared with scarlet.

Samantha stared at both her hands, one marked with icy fire and the other with her own blood.

“Sam?”

“What are
you
afraid of,” she whispered to herself.

“Me? Heights. But it isn’t really a phobia.” Caitlin grabbed a handful of paper napkins from the dispenser on the table and handed them across the table. “Sam, the blood—”

Absently accepting the offering and holding the slightly rough paper to her nose, Samantha murmured, “Thank you.”

“What the hell did you see?”

“How long was I out?”

“About twenty minutes. I was getting worried. In case you don’t know, it’s very spooky watching you do that. You go as still as a statue and as pale as one made of marble. Except this time you started shivering toward the end. What did you see?”

Slowly, Samantha said, “Maybe what he wanted me to.”

“Who? The kidnapper? But you said he probably left the pendant for Sheriff Metcalf to find.”

“I did say that, didn’t I?” Samantha looked at the other woman. “Know anything about chess?”

“Not much, no. How about you?”

“I know pawns are sacrificed. And I know that a very good chess player is able to think several moves ahead of his opponent.”

Baffled, Caitlin said, “So?”

“So I think this guy might just be several moves ahead. Ahead of the cops. Ahead of Luke. Ahead of me. And no matter which way you look at it, that’s not good.”

It was later that afternoon when Lucas stood in a storage room of the sheriff’s department garage, studying the large glass-and-steel tank where Lindsay Graham had died.

The old mine was so inaccessible, it had been impractical to transport CSI officers up and down the mountain the numerous times that would have been necessary for a thorough investigation of the tank. Though trucking it down the mountain had required an entire day and half the department working on the transport. There had literally been no better way, since the heavy forest made any kind of airlift impossible.

Not that having the tank had helped them, as far as Lucas could tell. No useful forensic evidence to speak of had been recovered. Only Lindsay’s prints had been found inside the tank, and none whatsoever had been found on the outside.

A few hairs had been found in the tank, at least two of them black, so not Lindsay’s. Lucas had sent the lot to Quantico for analysis, along with a request to Bishop to do what he could to hurry things up.

The kidnapper had apparently left the area before the afternoon rains that had washed away any track. Either that, Lucas thought savagely, or he had sprouted wings and flown his ass out of there, leaving no trace behind.

Dramatic, but hardly likely.

Lucas circled the tank slowly, studying it, trying to get a feel for the man who had built it.

They’d had no luck in finding where the glass and steel had been purchased or when, but it was clear the painstaking work had taken time and concentration. There was no way this had been constructed after Lindsay was taken. In fact, experts consulted offered their opinion that the tank could have required a week or more to build, depending on the skill of the builder.

And then there was the careful piping that had connected this tank to the old mine’s water supply, an old reservoir replenished by rainwater in the years since the mine had closed. The simple but lethally efficient clock timer that had opened the valve to flood the tank at the appointed time.

Lucas had never seen anything like it. Never even heard of anything like it.

“Almost like those campy old superhero TV shows, isn’t it?”

He turned quickly, disturbed that she had managed to approach without his knowledge.

Stepping into the room, Samantha said, “Glen Champion let me in, and Jaylene told me you were down here. The rest of them studiously avoided me.”

“You know cops,” he said.

“Yeah. They can’t logically blame me—not yet anyway—but they don’t like me.”

“What do you mean, not yet?”

“Come on, Luke. I don’t have to be told that Metcalf is moving heaven and earth to try to find some connection between these kidnappings and the carnival.”

“Will he find one?”

Instead of answering that, Samantha turned her gaze to the tank and moved closer. “Weird, isn’t it? And a lot like those old TV shows. Remember? The colorful villain would capture our heroes and tie them to some absurd Rube Goldberg contraption designed to kill them—but not until next week’s episode. I always wondered why, once he got his hands on them, he didn’t just shoot them.”

She looked at Lucas steadily. “Why didn’t he just shoot them?”

He glanced at the tank briefly. “There was a timer. If we had gotten there soon enough . . .”

Again, Samantha asked, “Why didn’t he just shoot them?”

“Because it’s part of the goddamned game. If I’m fast enough, nobody dies. Is that what you want to hear?”

Samantha didn’t back down in the face of his ferocity. She didn’t even flinch. In the same level, calm voice, she said, “But why is it part of the game? Don’t you see? He’s deflecting the responsibility, Luke. Certainly with this, with Lindsay. Maybe with all of them. It’s not his fault because he didn’t kill them, not really, not with his own hands. It’s the fault of the police, the investigators, because if they’d done their jobs, no one would have died.”

“You’re making a giant assumption just because we found one timer.”

“That’s not why I’m making it. It’s what I heard him begin to tell Lindsay. That
he
doesn’t kill. He never kills, not with his own hands, not directly. Partly to deflect responsibility. But for another reason too. Kill somebody quickly and all you have is a dead body. There’s little suspense, little chance for fear to build until it becomes terror. But show somebody how you mean to kill them a few minutes or a few hours from that moment, and then walk away . . .”

Lucas was silent, frowning.

“The other victim from Golden, Mitchell Callahan. He was decapitated, wasn’t he? I heard there was something strange about that, something the ME was surprised by.”

Slowly, Lucas said, “He appeared to have been killed by a very sharp blade, in a single stroke. Maybe by a machete or sword.”

“Or maybe,” Samantha offered, “by a guillotine?”

Lucas’s first reaction was disbelief, followed immediately by anger that he hadn’t seen it before now. “A guillotine.”

“It’s obvious the kidnapper knows how to build. Easy enough to build a guillotine. Set on a timer, the way this . . . machine was. With the victim—with Callahan probably fastened in, looking up. Seeing the blade hanging over him. Knowing it would drop. Maybe he could even hear the timer ticking away the minutes he had left.”

“Fear,” Lucas said. “Bait for me.”

“Maybe. Maybe he’s creating the fear to lure you. And maybe . . . to punish you.”

Lucas wasn’t very surprised, but said, “So you’ve reached that conclusion too, huh? That I know this bastard, crossed paths with him somewhere?”

“It makes sense. To go to all this trouble, build this sort of . . . of murder machine isn’t something a man would do just to win a game. Even a crazy man. Unless the game was personal. It has to be personal, and that makes it more likely than ever that he’s done his homework on you. He must know how you’re able to find abduction victims, that you feel what they feel. Right up until the moment of death, you suffer along with them.”

After a moment, Lucas shook his head. “In the last year and a half, we’ve arrived on the scene early enough for me to feel anything at all in less than half the cases. If he wants me to suffer—”

“He’s doing a damned good job. You might not feel the fear and pain of the victim when you get there too late, but in that case you probably suffer even more. And anyone who’s ever worked with you or watched you work knows it.”

Lucas fought a sudden impulse to reach out to her, saying only, “
Suffer
is a relative term.”

“Not with you it isn’t.” Her smile was small and fleeting.

“Why did you come here today, Sam?” he asked, changing the subject. Or not.

“I left something with Jay,” she replied readily. “A pendant Caitlin Graham found on Lindsay’s nightstand. We both believe it was put there the day she was taken.”

“Why do you believe that?”

Samantha pulled her right hand from the pocket of her jacket and held it toward him, palm out. “I’m on a roll.”

The room where he worked was small and, he liked to think, cozy. The place was remote enough that nobody bothered him, and since no neighbors were close by, his comings and goings were pretty much his own business.

Which is how he liked it.

He bent forward over the table, moving carefully. He wore gloves as he cut words and letters from the Golden local newspaper, from the inside pages no human hand would have touched. A fresh sheet of white paper lay nearby, and glue.

He had to chuckle. It was hokey, of course, as well as completely unnecessary to use newsprint. But the effect, he knew, would be much greater than an ordinary computer-generated, ink-jet-printed note could command.