The Unwilling
shiloh walker
chapter one
Slumped in a beach chair, a bottle of beer in his hand, Colby Mathis was on his fifth mantra of, This is the life.
Early retirement from a government job. He had very few responsibilities and most of those were centered around running an already thriving bookstore. That was a walk in the park compared to his old life.
Nobody’s life depended on him.
He didn’t have to worry about somebody dying if he fucked up.
He got to spend his days on a sunny beach.
He got to stare at pretty ladies in small bikinis.
A far cry from working on some task force in the FBI where most of the agents were as fucked up in the head as he was—even if the rest of them hadn’t screwed up the way he had.
Dez…
Brooding, he tipped the bottle of beer back and let it run down his throat. Twenty-three months earlier, he’d made a judgment call that had nearly ended with one of his fellow agent’s death…and the death of a child. Dez—Desiree Lincoln had survived. The child had survived. No thanks to Colby. He’d quit the FBI, and no force on earth, including his former boss, could make him go back.
No, he had a good thing going here. The beach. Girls in bikinis. Beer.
He didn’t quite believe it. But he had another two hours to convince himself of just how good his life was before he had to head in for his afternoon shift at his dad’s bookstore. The store that would be his in a few years—well, technically, a third of it was his now. He’d ring up books. He’d point tourists to good spots to eat, drink, fish. Whatever they wanted. It was Wednesday, it was June, and it was gorgeous out. They’d be busy until around nine thirty that night and then it would slow down.
After work, he’d head home, have a quiet night. Actually, he planned on having a quiet night, accompanied by copious amounts of Jack Daniel’s. He was brooding too much and that meant he was about to start with the nightmares again. He’d rather drown them out with alcohol.
If he didn’t wake up with a hangover, then tomorrow, he’d get up and go fishing again.
Thursday was his day off. He could take the boat out.
He could relax. Forget all about his failures. About the job, the people he’d failed. Forget about all of it…
He needed to do just that. He’d left that life behind. It didn’t involve him anymore—
Abruptly, his heart started to race. A weight landed on his chest, all but crushing him. Blood roared in his ears. The bottle in his hand started to feel awful damn heavy. Black dots swarmed in front of him for a minute and then they faded out, his vision taking on a startling, surreal clarity. The weight in his chest grew heavier and he could feel every brutal, pulsing thud of his heart—it felt like that thing was trying to come out of his chest. It didn’t exactly hurt, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.
Anybody else might have thought they were having a panic attack, maybe even a heart attack.
Colby knew better. It wasn’t a heart attack. He almost wished it was, though.
Because this was the last thing on earth he wanted. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t do this anymore. Fuck no—
Colby had been a teenager when the psychic gift came on him, and it had come on him strong. Sometimes, the visions were intense. Others, not so much.
This one was almost enough to suck all the air right out of his lungs.
Slamming up the shields in his mind, he shook his head. “No.” He reinforced the shields, drew a deep, steady breath. “No.”
That wasn’t for him—it couldn’t be.
NOT FOR ME—
It took most of the next two hours to throw off the heaviness of the attack. He could have gone home, fallen into bed, and slept for ten hours. It often hit him like that, the first initial waves of warning. Hell, sometimes it hit him like that when he was working, unless he had his anchor—another psychic to keep him grounded. It flat-out left him exhausted and sleep was the best thing for him.
His dad would have understood.
But that would have been admitting something had really happened. And Colby was damn determined to not do that. So he finished his not-so-relaxing morning at the beach and walked the mile to the store.
By the time he got there, his legs felt like jelly, but that was good—very good, because it gave him something to focus on besides that sense of impending doom. He was good with having something else to focus on.
Although maybe what he should have focused on was finding a way to keep his dad from really looking at him. One glance was all it took for the older man to realize there was a problem.
“You okay, Son?”
“Yeah.” He forced himself to smile. “I’m fine.”
He lied. His dad probably knew. But he’d fake it until he was fine. “Fake it until you make it,” that was the saying, right? Whatever it was, it would fade, and it would fade without him doing a damn thing.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Shoving it aside, Colby looked at his father, held his gaze. “Yeah. Just didn’t sleep very well.”
The look in his dad’s eyes was measuring. “It’s starting again, isn’t it?”
“No.” Colby cleared his throat and wished to hell he could have sounded more convincing. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t starting again, because he was done. He was done. “No, it’s not.”
chapter two
She screamed as he came closer. Begged. Pleaded. “Please…can’t you just stop?”
“Stop?” He smiled, amused. “No. I can’t stop until I’m done. And I’m not done.” He wouldn’t ever stop.
Her broken sobs were like music in his ears as he got to work, singing under his breath as he laid out his tools. He already knew what he was going to do to her. It was going to be…unique.
Would this be the one to break her?
As he made the first slice, he sang softly, “Would you dance…”
Her body jerked as she screamed.
“…if I asked you to dance…”
Carefully, he wiped away the blood, waited for her screams to fade. He wanted her to appreciate his song, after all.
“Would you run and never look back?”
He made another slice, listened as she screamed again. And he smiled.
By the time he got to the chorus of the song for the first time, she was all but mad with fear, and screaming so steadily he couldn’t hear himself sing.
It didn’t matter…He knew the lyrics. He knew them by heart. And as he continued his work, he sang.
* * *
“WHAT IN THE hell did he do to her?”
Lieutenant Mica Greer stood over the body, vaguely aware of the fact that two of the officers—younger guys, she thought—were fighting the urge to puke. It was hot out, too. Heat and death were a bad, bad mix.
Although she’d slept only a few hours, she was clear-eyed, focused on the ruin of the body in front of her.
Focused on the fact that there was now a third victim.
There will be another one, a slippery little voice murmured in the back of her mind. An echo from her dreams. Dreams that had been interrupted that night by a call—this call. She left dreams of death to come and face it.
Her belly was steady, but her heart ached as she stared at what had been done to the woman.
She’d been pretty once.
Not that one could tell by looking at her. But he always picked the pretty ones. Sick fuck. The media was calling him the Surgeon, although they would change their supposedly clever nickname if they got any idea what he’d done this time.
The surgical precision might be there, but the rest…? This didn’t even resemble any sort of surgery, macabre or otherwise.
Her gut knotted.
“We sure it’s the same guy?”
She didn’t look away from the victim. Every second was focused on memorizing the details. Although, seriously, how could she forget this?
“Greer?”
 
; “It’s the same guy,” she said quietly. They hadn’t found the calling card yet, but they would. She didn’t need to see it to know it was the same guy.
She just knew.
She’d been trapped in dreams she couldn’t understand. Visions of white. Dark blooms of flowers. A wash of crimson blood. And the hideous music of screams. And everything tried to fade the minute the telephone jerked her into wakefulness. But she’d known. Even as the sleep had struggled to clear from her mind, she’d known.
You knew sooner.
She shut off the quiet, sly little whisper in the back of her mind. It had no bearing on the case. Dreams, an incomprehensible knowledge, none of it had any bearing. The only thing that mattered was finding this fucker. Nailing this fucker.
“Well, if it’s him, we’ll find whatever shit he left for us. Where do you think he left it?”
“I don’t know.” She angled her head and crouched down to study the woman’s dead, sightless stare. “We’ll find it.”
Her partner, Barry Phillips, echoed her, kneeling down. He had an unlit cigarette dangling between his lips. He hadn’t smoked in three months. But sometimes he still had one on him—claimed it helped him to think.
“You mean you will find it,” Barry said, keeping his voice low.
She wished she could pretend she hadn’t heard him. Wished she didn’t know what he was talking about. Bile churned in her throat. The endless lines carved into the woman’s body hadn’t made her ill, but thinking about that…
So I won’t think about it. She resolutely pushed it aside. “I wonder if she was a dancer or something. Our first vic, she used her mouth. Phone sex operator.” She’d had her tongue cut out. “The second one, she did massages.” Her hands had been cut off.
“And other stuff,” Barry interjected.
Mica slanted him a narrow look. “Possibly other stuff. But her clients found her through the massage place—he took her hands.”
“Did a nice, neat job, too. There’s nothing nice or neat about this.”
“Yeah, there is.” She studied how the victim had been carved up. There was blood, but not much. Most of it came from where she’d struggled against the ropes. She’d been killed here, and although she had to have bled, a lot, there wasn’t much other than where she’d struggled against her restraints.
Carefully, Mica eased the body up, noticing the dark, mottled flesh where the fluids had pooled after death. She hadn’t bled out. Although her throat wasn’t bruised, Mica suspected the woman had asphyxiated somehow, smothered perhaps. “She should have bled from this. A lot. But there’s not much blood here. He took his time to clean her up as he went.”
Phillips grimaced. “That’s…fucked up.”
“Yeah.” She blew out a breath, aware of the stink of decay and death. It hung in the air, a cloying stench that seemed to line the inside of her nose, the back of her throat. “But what did you expect? Decency?”
Phillips just grunted under his breath and continued to study the body. After a minute, he said, “A dancer. So why not a prostitute?”
“Because a prostitute gets her money by selling something other than her body, but he tore her body up to hell and back,” Mica replied. She didn’t want to think about what the killer would cut up then.
“Huh?”
“Sex,” she said. “A hooker sells sex.”
Mica didn’t bother to wait for the picture to connect. Instead, she started to roam around the deserted warehouse. It was a busy enough part of town during the day. But come nightfall, not too many people hung around these parts. Had the killer known that?
She tried to ignore the voice as it whispered, Yes…
Hard, though, because she wasn’t able to completely shut the voice out right now. She needed to find it—that calling card. It was here. She knew it. And that voice…
Closer.
Closer.
She was almost to the window now. A smudged, dirty gray window. It had an arrow on it. Frowning, she followed the direction the arrow pointed—east. It pointed east. “What are you trying to tell me, you son of a bitch?”
She didn’t know.
And that was a puzzle she’d have to figure out later.
A few levels down, she found what she was looking for.
His calling card. It was his victim’s clothes. Neatly folded. On top of them was a flower. People into gardening would probably know that it was called a Queen of the Night. It looked like a tulip to Mica. She knew the name of it only thanks to the reports from the previous victims. When she was able to examine it closely, she’d see that it was a dark, dark purple, almost black. Almost but not quite. Their expert would tell her the same thing she’d heard before—it was a fine specimen. But nothing exotic. Nothing that a hundred, a thousand, a million people couldn’t grow in their backyards.
She would also find the victim’s ID, more than likely, her purse, whatever she’d had with her. The guy wasn’t much into keeping trophies.
He doesn’t want trophies. He wants their fear—he wants to hurt them.
“Shut up,” she muttered.
“Greer? You okay?”
She glanced up, biting back a curse as she realized that Phillips had come up behind her and she hadn’t heard him. Damn it. Way to look like a basket case. “I’m fine. I think we found his calling card.” She pointed out the window. “There’s an arrow, too. Points off to the east. Wonder if it’s from him?”
It is. He’s showing you something.
Mica steadfastly refused to acknowledge that quiet whisper, just as she refused to acknowledge her dreams. She’d figure it out on her own. She was a damn good cop—she didn’t need help.
“WE NEED HELP, Greer.”
“Captain, if we go to the media, it’s going to be a disaster—”
Captain Alice D. Kellogg held up a hand. The captain had played basketball in high school, all throughout college, and she ran four miles a day, rain or shine. She stood six foot one in her bare feet, and she had a fondness for high heels and sleek suits. Mica wasn’t short, but when she stood next to the captain, she felt like a small, grubby child.
“We’re not going to the media. I want you to make a call.”
Mica’s gut went tight. She knew exactly what the captain was going to say. Exactly.
No. Oh, hell no.
As Kellogg reached into her desk, Mica stared at a point on the wall past the other woman’s shoulder, working on focusing her breathing, her vision, her temper. I’m not doing this. I’m not doing this. I’m not—
The captain held out a card. Mica accepted, staring at the card. Oh, hell.
“I realize you may be resistant to the idea.”
Resistant. She shifted her gaze to the captain. “Why would you think that?”
“The fact that I can see a vein throbbing in your forehead is one reason. The other reason? You are standing there looking like you want to kick my ass.”
“Captain, I don’t want to…” She scowled and turned away. “I have no desire to kick your ass.” Even if she had the desire, she doubted she could. Mica was used to being able to win the fights she got into—she fought mean, she fought dirty, and she fought hard. Somehow, she suspected the captain would trump her on all levels.
“You have connections that might prove useful.” Kellogg stared at her, her hazel eyes penetrating, deep. “You and I both know that.”
“I disagree. I don’t know that.”
“Then that’s because you’re being obtuse.” She continued to study Mica with knowing eyes. “You have connections. You can cut through red tape.”
“If we call the FBI, they’ll just string us along. There’s no reason for them to help us.”
“Officially?” Kellogg nodded. “You’re right.”
“They have no reason to talk to me.”
Nobody owed her any favors. She didn’t even know if anybody who knew her still worked in the unit. Except the head guy, of course. Taylor Jones would be the last one standing. But the o
thers…She’d heard Taige Branch was gone. The others she’d trained with…and the one man she tried not to think about. Ever.
Colby.