Hunting Fear (28 page)

If psychic ability was possible, was real . . .

Staring into the darkness, facing his own probable death, Wyatt Metcalf wished he had more time. Because if the world did indeed hold such possibilities, then it was far more interesting than he had believed.

Abruptly, he saw a light flicker on, illuminating the face of a digital clock. It was placed in such a way that it was not only visible to him but was almost inescapable. And it wasn’t, he realized immediately, showing the time.

It was counting down.

He had less than eight hours to live.

He turned his head back so that he was staring up at that gleaming blade. He focused on it. And grimly began working his hands in an effort to loosen the straps tying him down.

“Why does he have to do this your way?”

Samantha looked across the table at Jaylene. “We both know that Luke’s biggest flaw at a time like this is his tendency to shut everybody out. Everybody. His concentration is so fixed, so absolute, that he can barely relate to anything or anyone except the victim he’s trying to find.”

“He relates to you.”

With a wry smile, Samantha said, “Not really, except on a very basic level. If this were his usual type of case, by the end he’d see me only as a warm body in a bed.”

“You mean, last time . . .”

“Yeah, pretty much. He was so shut in himself, so focused on the job in those last days, he barely spoke to me. You remember that much.”

Jaylene nodded, reluctant. “I remember. But we were all focused on the job, on finding that child.”

“Of course we were. But for Luke . . . it’s like his own ability to focus consumes everything else in him. I know you called it tunnel vision then, I guess trying to warn me.”

“For all the good it did.”

“Yeah, I suppose I could have been more understanding. But it’s not easy to find yourself falling for a man who doesn’t even seem to see you half the time. Most of the time, by the end.”

“Sam, his focus—that flaw—is also his strength.”

“Is it?” Samantha shook her head. “I’m no psychologist, but it seems to me that mental focus and concentration that intense can do a dandy job of holding emotion at bay, or even shutting it down entirely. The very emotion Luke needs to feel.”

“Maybe,” Jaylene said slowly.

“Haven’t you ever wondered, Jay, why he almost always has trouble sensing a victim until he’s worked himself to the point of exhaustion?” Samantha asked. “Until he’s skipped too many meals and too much sleep and tapped so many of his reserves that there’s almost nothing left? It’s only when he’s literally too tired to think that he finally allows himself to feel. His emotions—and theirs.”

“When his guards come crashing down,” Jaylene murmured, thoughtful.

“Exactly.”

“But when the guards do come down, and he feels what they feel, the sheer strength of their terror virtually incapacitates him. He can barely move or speak.”

“And maybe that’s one reason he resists feeling that for so long. But if he
could
open himself up sooner, before a victim’s fear has grown so intense and before his own exhaustion was so overwhelming, then maybe he could function. Maybe he could even function with some semblance of normality.”

“Maybe.”

Samantha looked toward the open doorway as though expecting someone to appear, but added, “It isn’t a conscious thing—it can’t be. No matter what it costs him, he wants to find these victims so desperately that he’d do anything he could. Consciously. Even incapacitate himself, if that’s what it took. So it has to be something buried deep, a barrier of some kind. A wall created at some point in his life when it was necessary to protect a part of him.”

“You’re talking about some kind of injury or trauma.”

“Probably. A lot of our strengths come from some hurt.” Samantha frowned again. “You don’t know what it is? What might have happened to him?”

Jaylene replied, “No—and I’ve been his partner for nearly four years. I probably know him as well as anybody, and I know almost nothing of his background. From the point that Bishop found him working as a private consultant on criminal abduction cases five years ago until now, yes. Before that, nothing. Don’t even know where he was born or where he went to school. Hell, I don’t even know if he’s a born psychic. How about you?”

“No. It all happened so fast before. There was so much intensity. The investigation, the media blitz, us. Then the tension of knowing his mind was someplace else even when his body was lying beside mine in bed. We couldn’t talk, not then.

“And then it all just stopped, the way those strangely vivid, aberrant periods in our lives tend to end. The investigation was over. And so were we. I . . . woke up in an empty bed. With Bishop waiting outside the motel to tell me why I couldn’t be a member of his Special Crimes Unit. That purple turban. Credibility.”

Jaylene hesitated only an instant. “I had no idea it ended quite that abruptly.”

Samantha hunched her shoulders more than shrugged. “Bishop said he’d sent you two off on another case, that it was vital you leave immediately and he hadn’t given you a choice in the matter. I imagine that was true. Also true that he felt moving Luke on to the next case as soon as possible would be best for him, after the way he blamed himself for that child’s death. And . . . I suppose leaving so abruptly gave Luke a good-enough excuse not to wake me even long enough to say good-bye.”

With a wince, Jaylene said, “I almost wish you hadn’t told me that.”

Seriously, Samantha said, “Don’t let your respect for him be affected by what happened between us. Thinking about it now, I don’t think he had much control over how he reacted to me—or how he left me. I think it’s all tangled up with that barrier inside him, that refusal to let himself feel until he has absolutely no other choice.”

“Those sorts of psychological barriers,” Jaylene said, “tend to be real monsters, Sam. The kind that claw us up inside.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“But it’s what you’re looking for in Luke. What you’re digging for.”

Her jaw firmed. “What I have to dig for. What I have to find.”

Jaylene studied her for a long moment in silence, then said, “I wish you felt you could tell me what this is all about. I get the feeling it’s pretty lonely where you are right now.”

“At least you see that. To Luke, I’m being stubborn at best and wantonly obstructive at worst.”

“But you understand why that’s his reaction. Did you understand that three years ago?”

“No.”

“So when he started giving you the third degree the morning after you’d first slept together . . .”

Samantha replied frankly, “It hurt, like I said.”

“I think it hurts a little now too. Even though you know where it’s coming from this time.”

“Knowing something intellectually is one thing.” Samantha’s smile twisted. “Feelings are something else again. Anyway, I’m not asking him to love me, I just need him to trust me.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Yes,” Samantha answered instantly.

“Even though he walked out on you last time? How is that possible?”

Slowly, Samantha replied, “I’ve trusted him from the moment we met. What I trust is that he won’t lie to me and that he’d be there if I needed him.”

Jaylene shook her head. “Then you’re a better woman than I am. The last time I was dumped, it wasn’t nearly as public as what you went through—and I very nearly got a buddy in the IRS to audit him for the previous ten years.”

Samantha smiled, but said, “You wouldn’t have done that.”

“Maybe not. But maybe I would have, if more than my pride had been hurt.”

Refusing to admit anything of her own feelings, Samantha merely said, “As your Bishop is so fond of saying, some things have to happen just the way they happen.”

“
Is
fond of saying?”

Samantha lifted her eyebrows inquiringly. “Has he stopped saying it?”

“No,” Jaylene replied after a moment.

“Didn’t think so. I got the impression it was practically his mantra.”

Jaylene eyed her. “Umm. Listen, getting back to the subject of you needling Luke, I gather your plan is to force him to break through whatever that barrier is and find out what’s on the other side.”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well, my advice is to be careful. We build walls for reasons, and the reasons tend to be painful. Force somebody to deal with that pain before they’re ready to, and you risk a mental breakdown. Force a
psychic
to deal with buried traumas, with all the extra electromagnetic energy in our brains, and you risk a literal short circuit that can put them—him—beyond anyone’s reach. For good.”

“I know,” Samantha said.

Bishop had told her.

She found him in the storage room of the sheriff’s department garage where the glass-and-steel tank was being kept. He was alone and in one hand held a copy of the taunting note the kidnapper had sent him that morning. His gaze moved from the note to the tank and back again.

Samantha came only a step into the room, and asked quietly, “What are they telling you? The note, the tank?”

“That he’s a sick bastard,” Lucas replied without turning to face her.

“Besides that.”

His gaze went to the tank once more, and he said in a distant tone, “We found several hairs inside the tank, at least a few of them not Lindsay’s. I just checked with Quantico, and DNA tests confirmed they belonged to a victim killed in this part of the country some months ago. A woman of Asian descent. Drowned.”

“I doubt he missed those hairs.”

“So do I. We—I—was meant to find them.”

Samantha glanced at the tank, then back at his profile. “What does that tell you?”

“That he used this tank before. Maybe here, or maybe he has some means of transport; there was certainly no evidence it was constructed up at that old mine. Wherever he used it, when his victim was dead, he removed her and left her where she was found—along a creek bed more than fifty miles from here.”

“So . . . chances are Metcalf isn’t being threatened with drowning.”

“No. I haven’t checked to be sure, but memory says at least three of the previous victims, counting the woman, were drowned. Lindsay makes four. I don’t know if he had this tank all along or built it at some point in order to better control his victims.”

“And to terrify them.”

“Yes. And that.”

“But now you have it. So maybe he’s lost—or given up—one of his murder machines. What does he have left?”

His jaw tightening, Lucas said, “Mitchell Callahan wasn’t the only victim to be decapitated. Two others were as well.”

“So he has a guillotine.”

“It looks that way.”

“What else?”

“Three were exsanguinated. A very sharp knife to one or both jugular veins.”

“I suppose one could build a machine to do that.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“By my count we’ve covered nine or ten of the victims. What about the others?”

“Three were asphyxiated. Not manually.”

Samantha had spent too much time considering this not to have a suggestion. “The easiest way to smother someone, slowly, over a period of time, and inflicting the maximum amount of terror . . . would be to bury them alive.”

“I know.”

“So a box somewhere, a coffin, buried in the ground. Reusable.”

“Probably more than one,” Lucas said, still remote. “It’s the easiest to recreate. Just a wooden box and a hole in the ground, nothing fancy. And no timer required. Just cover the box with dirt, bury it. Let the air run out. Put in a canister of oxygen if you want to extend the available air a bit.”

“That leaves two or three victims. How did they die?”

“I don’t know. In those cases, the remains were left out in the elements long enough to leave us very little; no cause of death could be determined with any certainty. They might have been asphyxiated or exsanguinated or drowned. We don’t know.”

Samantha frowned slightly at that distant tone, but all she said was, “So you know he has at least three machines—or methods—of killing remotely still available to him. That’s assuming, of course, that he doesn’t resort to quicker, up-close-and-personal methods, like a gun or a knife.”

Lucas nodded. “Which, if we’re correct, means that right now Wyatt Metcalf is either staring up at a guillotine, trying to claw his way out of a box in the ground, or trying not to get his throat cut.”

“Where is he, Luke?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you can’t feel him.”

He was silent.

“What about this kidnapper, this murderer? Can’t you feel him? I mean, he certainly seems to have crawled inside
your
head over the last year and a half.”

Lucas swung around to face her, his face tense. “You don’t have to tell me that I’ve failed at every turn,” he said, far less remote now.

“That’s not what I’m trying to tell you.”