Only . . .
Maybe a kid had been taken now. Maybe she had been taken.
In the awful darkness, alone even though she could hear others breathing, Nessa tried her best to remember being taken. She’d been so careful, just like everybody told her to be. Never alone, and safe inside the house her daddy had made safer. Daddy had talked about getting a dog, and she’d been excited about that.
And then . . .
And then . . .
And then she was here in the awful dark. Knowing it wasn’t a bad dream. Knowing there were others around her breathing, but knowing they couldn’t help her because they couldn’t help themselves. Sitting on a chair that felt hard but funny in some place that smelled like dirt and dead leaves and mushrooms and other things her mind shied away from thinking about.
She didn’t know how long she had been there, not really. She was hungry and thirsty and felt stiff from sitting for so long. Hours? Days?
Where was she when she’d been taken?
Where was she now?
And most important of all, couldn’t she escape?
Nessa knew the others couldn’t see her any more than she could see them. She even knew, somehow, that they were in an even deeper, darker place than she was, at least in their minds. It didn’t really make sense to her, because she heard breathing and knew they were nearby. And yet . . . they weren’t nearby at all. They were far away.
And even though she didn’t know where the knowledge came from, Nessa was absolutely certain that if she didn’t get away soon, very soon, while he wasn’t looking, she never would.
He? Who is he?
That question had barely surfaced in her mind when she became dimly aware of Something Else that was with her.
In her.
Inside her head.
She had a fleeting impression of puzzlement, of dawning uneasiness—and then she closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing.
Breathing slow and steady, like those around her. Thinking of nothing. Not allowing herself to be scared even though the darkness was heavy and pressing against her and Something Else was like a darker snake in the darkness, slithering around, all around, as it searched for whatever had alerted it.
Nessa breathed evenly and kept her mind still and blank. Because if the snake found her awake and aware, if he found her like that, she’d never escape. Never.
The dark, dark snake was slithering closer and closer to her, to her mind, and all Nessa could do was hide her terror and hope it—he—passed her by.
THIRTEEN
The owner of the Diner, Clyde Barrow, came himself just before eight A.M. to take breakfast orders from Sarah and the feds. He had already sent them coffee twice during the wee hours of the night, sending it by way of a couple of the cops still roaming—or patrolling—downtown. Clyde refused to be paid, the cops reported; he just wanted to do what he could to help.
The cops themselves, after what had apparently been some talking-to by Jonah, were not just polite to the feds; they were pleasant and even friendly.
Clyde was the same, though he hadn’t needed a talking-to from Jonah to be that way.
“Breakfast would be great, Clyde, thanks,” Sarah said. “We’re probably here a few more hours before we’re relieved by the others.”
“Want your usual, Sarah?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“What about you two agents? Whatever you want, I can cook.”
Robbie eyed him, this being the first time she’d actually met him. “Clyde Barrow? Any relation?”
He grinned at her. “Only cops ever ask that.”
“Well, we sort of specialize in crime. And study the history of it.”
“Yeah, I bet you would.” There was only the faintest emphasis on the you.
“So?”
“Well, family lore says yes, but I’ve never done the genealogy thing. And he didn’t have any kids, so no way I’m a direct descendant.”
“If you really want to know, there’s a technical analyst at Quantico that can get you your entire family tree in record time.”
Mildly, Dante said, “I doubt the Director would approve.”
“Maybe not, but we both know Bishop wouldn’t mind.” She returned her gaze to Clyde. “Our unit chief.”
“Ah. Well, I might take you up on that, Agent. Later. For now, what would you like for breakfast?”
Sarah, who had gone back to studying a file, said absently, “He makes great pancakes. And I don’t know what he does to eggs, but they’re to die for, no matter how you want them fixed.”
“I sing to my hens,” Clyde said without a blink.
Robbie believed him. “Someday I’d like to be there for that,” she told him. “I think I’ll try the pancakes. Butter, maple syrup, bacon crisp on the side.”
“Got it. And you, Agent?”
“Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast. And some kind of fruit if you have it. Just whatever you’ve got. Thanks, Mr. Barrow.”
“I’m just Clyde, son. Be back with breakfast in a bit.”
Dante stared after him. “I don’t think he’s enough older than me to call me son,” he said thoughtfully.
“He’s older than he looks,” Sarah said, still absently. “He’s also the mayor.”
Dante blinked. “Well, that was unexpected.”
Sarah glanced up with a smile. “In a small town like this, the mayor would have to have another job, or be retired with one paying a good pension, since the pay sucks. Clyde’s on his third term.”
“I feel like we’re on ours,” Dante said, surveying the stacks of file folders lined up down the center of the conference table. “I mean, it looks like we’ve been working, and it sure as hell feels like it. But do we have anything to show for it?”
He had joined the other two at the conference table to read through files, saying his eyes were crossing from staring at security video over and over again, especially since he’d found absolutely nothing they didn’t already know.
“Well,” Robbie said, “we’ve pretty much eliminated all the relatives and close friends of all the missing people; the only connections they have to each other, if connections exist, are reasonable and not suspicious. So there’s that.
“We’ll probably have a new batch of files to look over when the first shift gets through their canvass of the outlying areas. Most everything else we have here has been gone through by Sarah and at least one of us, which I think covers just about all the men in the age range we’re looking at who live inside the city limits.”
Tentative as he usually was when using his learning-stage profiling skills, Dante said, “He abducted six people. We’ve all been operating under the assumption that those people are still alive, right?”
“Right,” Sarah said, looking up from a legal pad of notes she’d been studying.
“Okay. Well, Luke and Sam are the experienced profilers, but if we keep assuming these people are alive, then he has to be holding them somewhere. And it isn’t in an apartment or condo here in the downtown area. Or a house. Somebody would have seen or heard something, surely, between his coming and going—and adding to his quota.”
“There have been cases of captives held in nice little neighborhoods for years with the neighbors none the wiser,” Robbie reminded him.
“Yeah, but most of those cases involved kids or young women being held captive as sex slaves.” He shook his head, adding a muttered, “Sick bastards.”
“We don’t know that isn’t happening here,” Robbie pointed out.
Sarah made a sort of choked sound. “Even the judge? Look, if it’s all the same to you, I’m clinging to the notions that they’re still alive, and that he didn’t take them for any sexual reason.”
“Well,” Robbie said, “no evidence to the contrary. So I say your notions make as much sense as anything else. The
thing is, the aerial and infrared satellite shots Bishop sent didn’t show anything unusual. No heat signatures showing a group in an odd place. We were able to identify virtually every structure, and all have been searched and cleared. So where is he keeping them?”
Sarah chewed on her bottom lip. “Six people held captive, some of them for weeks. We don’t know why, but we do know this unsub has planned his abductions skillfully, and covered his tracks in different ways, from tinkering with memories to altering security footage. He would have planned just as carefully where and how he keeps his captives.”
“If they’re alive,” Robbie felt duty bound to remind her.
“Yeah. But given that, Dante is right. The satellite shots didn’t show any unusual groupings, our searches haven’t turned up anything, and I can’t think of a place downtown where six people could be held prisoner. Especially if their captor couldn’t be standing guard all the time. And he hasn’t been. Unless he has a partner, his captives have been left unguarded multiple times.”
“Luke seemed pretty certain when he checked in last night from the hotel,” Dante noted. “One unsub.”
“So nobody to guard them when he’s gone,” Sarah said. “Whatever safeguards he has in place, locks, soundproofing, anything else you can think of, the one thing he definitely needs to hold captives with the best chance of no one finding him out has to be isolation. And any isolated building is going to be in the outlying areas.”
“Where there’s been nothing but a cursory search,” Robbie noted. “Because all the missings disappeared in or near the downtown area. Shit. We may not be even an inch closer to identifying this unsub. And that means we’re no closer to finding the missing people than we were when we got here.”
“There is another possibility,” Dante said.
Robbie looked at him, brows raised.
“Well, Luke hasn’t picked up anything from any of them, and you can be sure that at least the teenagers and Nessa would have to be terrified to find themselves captives. All of them, really. So why hasn’t Luke felt that?”
“He said he needed time,” Robbie said.
“Yeah. But what if it isn’t time? What if Luke hasn’t been able to pick up anything because the unsub is keeping them drugged? Out cold so they don’t need a guard—and too far under to be aware enough to be afraid?”
—
JONAH SLEPT FITFULLY, which didn’t really surprise him. He was almost literally too tired to rest, which always sounded so absurd when other people said it but was so real when it was you. The thing was, Jonah usually had no trouble falling asleep, so he’d never developed any little tricks or method of winding down.
Sarah claimed black-and-white documentaries on any war of the past put her out like a light within five minutes. But that never worked for Jonah, not because he found war fascinating but because he liked documentaries in general and tended to get interested.
Not that interest in anything was his problem. He needed to sleep and wanted to, so he wasn’t about to turn on the TV or pick up a book or magazine. He’d drawn his bedroom drapes; since he and Sarah rotated shifts and he occasionally worked a third shift just because, his drapes were blackout and turned his bedroom into a dark cave that mimicked night no matter what time it was.
That wasn’t the issue either.
Jonah had never lost anyone under his command before, not even to an accident. The fact that Annie Duncan had been careless in being out, alone and unarmed, on foot in the night when everyone knows that was dangerous didn’t make him feel any better.
She’d been one of his officers, his responsibility. Telling her devastated parents and younger brother about her murder had been the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do. And dealing with his other officers hadn’t been much easier. They were in shock, they were grieving, they were angry, and they wanted someone to blame.
He’d really had to come down hard on them to make damned sure none of them targeted their federal friends. Of course, none of them knew just why these particular FBI agents were so important, so necessary to the location and capture of the monster who had taken six people and killed one more.
The monster who might have killed them all.
They didn’t know, and he didn’t tell them. That was just the sort of thing a blindly angry cop might, oh, text to a news organization. Not out of malice, but . . .
Jonah thought that if they were lucky, they had maybe another twenty-four hours before national media descended. National media that had been very preoccupied during the last couple of weeks by, among other things, the hunt for a serial killer in the nation’s capital, several sensational trials, at least three political scandals, and another senseless mass shooting, this one at a mall on the West Coast.
Even with the Amber Alert on Nessa, the goings-on in little Serenity, Tennessee, hadn’t quite surfaced to the attention of the national media.
But they would.
Right now, he had a handle on the strangers in his town, a good sense of them. Once national media arrived, that one area of control would go out the window. And probably make it all that much harder to find this monster, this unsub, and capture or kill him.
He was leaning heavily toward the latter.
Jonah tossed and turned for probably a good two hours before exhaustion finally claimed him. He slept hard, which wasn’t all that restful, but then he hadn’t expected anything else.
He wouldn’t have a peaceful night’s sleep until this monster was no longer a threat to his town. And depending on the outcome, he might not have a peaceful night’s sleep for a long time afterward.
He had set his alarm, but woke with a start before it could go off at ten A.M. as he’d intended. He turned off the alarm and turned on the lamp on his nightstand, squinting in the abrupt light.
He felt as though he’d slept for years. Or about six minutes.
As usual, it took him some time to extricate himself from the tangled covers, and that hint of normality was strangely reassuring. A hot shower helped; shaving the stubble off his face helped more even if the face in the mirror seemed more gaunt than he’d ever noticed before, and by the time he was dressed and headed for the Diner for breakfast, he felt almost human.
The waitresses were bustling about, but Clyde served him hot coffee without comment, and only a couple of minutes later slid a plate with his usual breakfast order across the counter.
Jonah was about to ask him if something was wrong, then reminded himself that everything was wrong. And when he glanced around the Diner, it was to find it unusually packed for a Thursday morning just before lunchtime.
No wonder the waitresses were bustling.
Packed with citizens of Serenity who were mostly just looking at their chief of police, some trying to be casual about it and some unabashedly staring.
Before Clyde could retreat to the back and turn Willie back up, Jonah summoned him with a slight movement of his head, and Clyde rested an elbow near Jonah’s plate and leaned nearer, lifting an eyebrow.
“Clyde, please tell me nothing’s changed in some even more horrible way in the last eight or ten hours.” He kept his voice low.
“Far as I know, nothing’s changed.” Clyde’s voice was low as well. “Except maybe that those who didn’t know about Annie Duncan last night know about her now.”
“That’s why the stares.”
“I imagine so. Somebody goes missing, there’s room for hope. Dead is dead. And even with that tent hiding Annie’s body, the details have gotten out.”
“Goddammit,” Jonah muttered.
“Bound to happen, you know that better than anybody. And new details make the old look and feel worse. We had six missing. Now we’ve got six missing—and one murdered. So maybe some of them have been murdered too. Maybe all of them. Nobody’s really talking about it. But it’s like the whole town’s holding its breath.”
r /> “Yeah, I got that.”
“They know he’s a killer now. So it’s natural to wonder . . .”
“If he’s killed the people he abducted. Yeah, I don’t blame them for wondering. I am too.”
“They don’t feel safe anymore. It’s shaken them.”
“I know the feeling.”
Clyde half nodded, then said, “I took breakfast to Sarah and the two agents around eight thirty. They all looked tired, and not all that cheerful, even though the gorgeous blonde was curious about my name.”
Jonah frowned, and then said, “Oh. The Barrow bit?”
“Yeah. It’s only cops that ever ask about it.” Clyde shrugged. “There were files everywhere, but in fairly neat stacks. Sarah said it’d probably be a few hours before they were relieved by you and the other two agents. Ask me, they need to be relieved now. Even though it’s obvious you should have slept longer.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah, yeah. Eat your eggs, Jonah. Jean asked that you check in at the station before joining Sarah and the feds. I take it she’s fielded some calls this morning.”
“Great.”
“She didn’t sound too bothered, so maybe the worst hasn’t got out yet.”
Jonah nodded, though not with much hope. “Okay. Thanks, Clyde.”
Clyde returned to his kitchen, and Jonah concentrated on eating his breakfast, ignoring the holes being bored into his back. Nobody approached to question him, though he wasn’t at all sure that was a good thing. Maybe they were afraid to ask.
Maybe they were afraid he wouldn’t have an answer.
Or maybe they were afraid he would.
—
NESSA HAD NO real sense of time passing. She concentrated on keeping her mind still and quiet, so the blacker-than-black snake wouldn’t find her. Somehow, without really being sure how she was able to do it, she pictured a smooth, dark pond with no ripples at all in the black water, and made that the quiet, motionless surface of her mind.
And she slipped beneath that. Hid beneath that.
She didn’t know how long she’d have to hide, but she knew if she came out too soon, the black snake would find her. And if it found her, if he found her, she had an awful feeling that he would make sure she could never get away.