Snake Skin (24 page)

The gun was long since dropped. Ivan's
scream sputtered into a gurgle. Johnny cried, blubbering as her
team slammed him to his knees and cuffed him.

"We've got him, Lucy." Fletcher pulled her
up and off Ivan.

Lucy had to force her hands open, releasing
Ivan's mangled wrist. Her head hurt, her scalp burned, her hand
throbbed, and nausea knocked her jaws together.

Black spots dancing before her eyes reminded
her to breathe. She stumbled back as two agents hoisted Ivan to his
feet and dragged him out the door that now had a serious dent in
its center and hung crookedly on one hinge.

"Okay, people, this is a crime scene, let's
get to work," she said, tugging her jacket off, it was too tight,
too hot, too heavy.

Cameras flashed, notebooks came out. She
backed out the door, letting the evidence collection proceed.

"You okay?" Fletcher asked. "The medics said
Ivan's wrist is broken and he about bit his tongue in half. Good
thing we got him on tape while he could still talk."

He trailed after her as Lucy walked to his
SUV. Her hands trembled so much it was a strain to open the rear
door. She slumped onto the running board, just in time before her
legs gave out.

Twice in two days—what the hell had gone
wrong? There'd been no hint that either Pastor Walter or the
Canadians were violent, yet she'd almost gotten her team killed
twice in two days. Greally was going to flay her alive for
this.

"You got everything, then?" The words were
thick, her mouth dry.

"Crystal clear." He leaned against the
bumper, arms crossed, chest puffed as if he'd been in there with
her instead of just listening and watching through the camera
implanted in her choker.

"Good." With trembling hands she retrieved
her wedding ring, brushed it against her lips and slid it back
where it belonged. She reached for her bag, grabbed a water bottle
and drank half of it, almost choking in her urgent need.

"Your cell phone has been going nuts.
Again." His voice dripped with disapproval.

God. Megan. Or her mother. Her throat
tightened again and she spewed a mouthful of water onto the
pavement. "Give me it."

He rummaged in the back of the SUV and
handed her the phone. She punched the buttons for voicemail.

"Now, don't worry," Nick's message started,
and she had a terrible, gut-whirling feeling of deja vu.
"Everything's fine. Megan fainted while we were at Mass and the
ambulance brought us here to Three Rivers. The ER doctor is with
her now. Everything's all right."

Ambulance? Fainted? Megan had never, ever
fainted before. Everything was most certainly not all right.

Her jaw muscles clamped down hard, grinding
her molars together. Lucy hit the speed dial for Nick's phone but
there was no answer. She started to leave a message but instead
hung up. She had no message, she had no answers—only questions.

Fletcher was still there, making no excuses
for eavesdropping. Lucy really didn't care. "I need to get back to
the office anyway, I'll drop you at Three Rivers."

Lucy snatched the keys from him. "I'm
driving."

Lucy had long ago grown used to the feeling
that someone was jabbing ice picks in her ears. Anytime there was a
tough case, the constant pain lancing through her head and neck was
the price she paid.

Nick had tried hypnosis, her dentist had
tried a bite guard (which she had promptly lost), and she had tried
popping Advils like they were M&M's, all without relief.

Now her anonymous tormentor had taken a
sledgehammer to those ice picks and was pounding the hell out of
them, creating a roar of tympani echoing through her brain.

On top of it all, Fletcher was talking.
Hoping to distract herself from the shifting images of Megan
slumped on the floor, strapped to an ambulance, crying for her
mother as strangers poked and prodded her, Lucy stretched her mouth
into a yawn, popping her jaw joints, and allowing Fletcher's voice
to cut through the white noise of pain.

"My mom was in a hospital for a while," he
was saying. "Don't worry, she's doing fine now, but the doctors and
nurses, they're really good. I'm sure they'll take really good care
of your daughter. What's her name?"

"Megan." Megan with her smile like sunshine
and her sudden flashes of scarily sophisticated humor and her
freckles that looked just like her father's. "She's been sick. I
never should have left her." Lucy's grip on the steering wheel
tightened and she clamped her jaws shut.

"You had work to do," he said
self-righteously as if repeating a mantra. "Important work. I mean,
what if those perverts had gotten their hands on a real kid? Four
years old? I just can't understand anyone interested in sex with a
baby like that."

"Our job isn't to understand them." She
changed lanes, cutting off a little old lady hunched over the wheel
of a Buick and cursed the fact that the surveillance vehicle had no
lights or siren.

"But you do. Understand them, I mean."

She shot a glare at Fletcher. He ignored it,
pivoting his body to face her from the passenger seat, fumbling
with a small netbook computer plugged into the cigarette lighter.
He carried the damn thing with him everywhere, but she'd just now
noticed that it was a personal computer, not one of the ICE ones.
Way he clutched it, Lucy wondered if he spent his downtime surfing
for porn. Hoped it was legit—she was in no mood to arrest someone
on her own team.

She almost laughed at the thought. Nick
would have told her she was trying to deflect her anxiety or accuse
her of carrying her cop-paranoia too far. Both would be true.

"You know how they think, what they want,
what they're going to do next," Fletcher continued. "How do you do
that?"

Then why had she been caught by surprise
twice in two days? Dammit, how had she fucked up so badly?

"Believe me, that's not the same as
understanding them." Lucy spotted an opening in traffic and swerved
into it. "I don't give a shit why they do what they do, all I want
to know is what patterns they'll follow so I can stop them before
they hurt someone."

His head was genuflecting as if she had
quoted scripture. "But they follow patterns for a reason, don't
they? I mean, I can understand why a full-grown man would feel
attracted to a younger woman, happens all the time. But why a
little girl or boy?"

In her mind she was ticking off things she'd
have to delegate if Megan was seriously ill. Hated herself even for
thinking that way, for assuming the worst. Wasn't that like asking
for it to happen? But she was the boss, she couldn't just drop
everything. Lives depended on her team working at peak efficiency.
Lives like Ashley Yeager's.

Walden or Taylor would call her if anything
broke. Right now all they could do was keep working the street and
the cyber angle.

Which left her with a fifteen-minute drive
and too many worst-case scenarios to dwell on. So instead, she
answered Fletcher's question.

"It doesn't matter if you call it an illness
or a perversion or a compulsion," she told the eager specialist.
"You have to think in terms of the victims."

"But those guys, back in the hotel, they
weren't like serial killers or crazy people you see in the movies.
I mean the ones without the gun. They didn't think of the little
girl as a victim. They weren't trying to hurt her."

"They didn't think of her at all—other than
as an object to gratify their needs. If they did hurt her, they'd
wouldn't feel guilt or shame. But they would feel remorse."

"Remorse? Why?"

"They'd be upset because their object
wouldn't be available to them anymore. They'd be forced to rely on
the second best thing—their memories and fantasies. That's the real
trick to catching the worst of these guys. They're all driven to
experience the real thing."

He hummed a fragment of an old Coke jingle.
Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby
. "So to catch them
you give them what they want."

"Exactly." She steered the van onto the
Squirrel Hill exit and cursed at the backup at the red light. While
they waited, she flipped her phone open, called Nick. Still no
answer. Then she tried Walden. "Hey, anything shaking loose on
Ashley Yeager?"

"No and no. Lots of calls to the hotline
overnight. The Staties and Sheriffs haven't found any worth our
following up. We found the first bus driver but he didn't remember
her at all, no surprise. Haven't found any other drivers or
evidence that she took another bus."

"She had a plan. No way East Liberty was her
final destination before she just happened to end up at the Tastee
Treet."

"I know," he sounded as exasperated as she
was. "She could have walked to another bus stop, caught a ride with
someone, who knows."

"It's not important. We know she ended up at
the Tastee Treet. Any luck with Noreen's car?"

"No joy."

"What about Tardiff?" She didn't like the
idea of the photographer floating in the breeze, an unknown
quantity.

"Well now, there's an interesting story
there. He called the missus this morning."

"And?"

"And he's actually here in Pittsburgh. They
didn't talk much, Melissa shushed him and got him off the line
quick, but Taylor tracked him. He's been staying in a Shadyside
executive rental for the past week."

"You bring him in?"

"Wasn't there. I have Burroughs' guys
working on it."

"Don't let him drop through the cracks."

She inched forward in traffic, coming
alongside a girl who looked like Megan riding in the back seat of
an Explorer. The tympani returned, threatening to jar her brain
loose. Dammit, she needed a break. Ashley needed a break. And so
did Megan.
Please Lord...

"I'm not sure how long I might be held up.
Megan fainted at church and she's at the hospital."

There was a pause as if Walden started to
say something then changed his mind. "She gonna be all right?"

"I don't know yet. But call me if you guys
hear anything. Just because I'm out of the office doesn't mean I'm
out of the game."

"Relax, boss. We've got everything covered.
Burroughs is coming in and the H-Tech guys have been working all
night. Taylor thinks they might be close to something."

Traffic surged forward. "Call me. I mean it,
Walden. Call me if anything breaks."

She hung up and concentrated on driving.
Sunday morning deli-connoisseurs snarled traffic on Murray Avenue
before she made it to Negley.

"Want me to go help them with Ashley's
computer?" Fletcher asked. "These transcriptions can wait until
tomorrow."

"No," she said sharply, remembering his goof
yesterday. "Thanks, but I don't want to risk any hotshot lawyer
giving me grief about chain of custody or evidence tampering. You
drop me off and head back to the office, get everything documented
and secured."

"Sure, you're the boss," he said, but his
tone reminded her of Megan's favorite pouty whine. When she stole a
glance at him, he was settled back in his seat, staring out the
passenger window, his face a blank.

Whatever. She stopped herself from rolling
her eyes and channeling Megan. Having a pre-teen in the house must
be contagious. But she didn't have time to worry about bruised
egos. She had a helluva lot bigger things to worry about.

The brightly colored sign for Three Rivers
Medical Center appeared and she turned into the main driveway. She
threw the SUV into Park and grabbed her purse, her grip tight and
sweaty. She didn't even bother to say goodbye to Fletcher as she
sprinted into the building, its cheerful colors greeting her as if
she'd entered another world. No amount of paint or chirpy Disney
music could disguise the hospital from what it really was. As soon
as she took her first breath inside the lobby, she could smell the
truth.

This was a place of death.

Ashley's legs jerked as if to stop her from
falling. Her stomach kept tumbling in free-fall as her pounding
heart followed. She flailed her hands out, hit something metal and
grabbed onto it.

She was so dizzy she could barely raise her
head. Slowly, memories began to connect together. She'd been
running away, following Bobby's plan, they were going to escape
together.

But Bobby wasn't here. It was just her and
the rotting corpses of whoever or whatever stinking up the air.

She licked her lips, they were rough as
caked sand. The rest of her also felt gritty, dried sweat chafing
with every movement. Water, where was her water? She inched her
hands through the darkness, the knowledge that the bucket might be
gone raising a wave of acid up her throat.

She laughed. A frail and hollow noise that
echoed through the space. Guess she wasn't ready to die after all.
Her fingers brushed the bucket at her side. She raised it to drink,
careful not to waste any.

Nothing came.

She rubbed her hand down the side. Dry. A
little moisture remained at the bottom, not enough to do more than
coat her finger.

Gone. It was all gone.

Every muscle in her body felt braided with
pain, stretched beyond endurance. Her left ankle worse of all, now
swollen, it pulsed beneath the cable that restrained her—since she
was blind here, she had gouged it without her usual precision and
expertise.

All for nothing. Gingerly she stretched,
listening to joints crack and groan like an old woman's. How long?
How long had she been here? How long before he returned?

How long before he started?

Because if her silent yet stinky companions
were any gauge, the worse was yet to come.

Her eyes burned with tears but none came.
When she wiped them only small grains of salty residue rubbed
against her finger. Despite her thirst, she still had to pee. She
resigned herself to the arduous task of searching for the
commode.