“Not sure about the judge,” Jonah pointed out. “He walked to his fishing spot just before dark, and he was there long enough to catch a few. We don’t know for sure that he wasn’t taken before midnight, since he wasn’t missed until morning.”
“True,” Luke conceded.
“And Sean Messina disappeared before midnight too. The movie started at nine.” He frowned. “Why on earth did I decide a midnight curfew was early enough?”
Sam said, “The downtown area is practically deserted now, and it’s barely nine. You don’t have to be psychic to feel the tension and fear; once it gets dark, most people are very obviously going to stay home.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But all this time I’ve been thinking the dangerous hours were after midnight. Now, all we really know is that it’s either likely or certain that these six people disappeared sometime after it got dark, and before dawn.”
Robbie said, “In the dark. The dark can be a friend, if you’re bent on stealthy. Easier to hide. Easier to watch. And easier to make off, without attracting notice, with someone you’ve grabbed.”
“After first knocking them out?” Sam asked with obvious interest.
“Sure. I mean, lots of options. Just because we haven’t found a weapon doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. The traditional blunt instrument, something heavy he could easily carry. A Taser. Some drug in a hypodermic he could inject before they realized what he was doing. Even a choke hold, assuming he’s strong enough and quick enough and has the knowledge. We can’t check any possibility off our list as far as I can see.”
Dante said rather plaintively, “Aren’t we getting further and further away from finding things these people actually have in common?”
“We seem to be,” Sam agreed.
“What does that mean?” Robbie asked, adding, “I haven’t taken any of the profiler courses yet, remember?”
“As profilers, we need to ask the basic questions first,” Luke said.
Samantha said, “Why these particular people in these particular places at these particular times. Even if we haven’t figured it out yet, they have to share a common characteristic. Something that made each one of them a target.”
Brooding, Jonah said, “Two teenagers eloping, a judge doing some night fishing, a young wife and mother going to borrow baby food from a neighbor, a car salesman out on a movie date with his girlfriend, and a ten-year-old girl who got up sometime during the night to get herself a drink of water.”
“Are we sure about that?” Dante asked suddenly.
Jonah looked at him. “That she got up to get herself a drink?”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . . it was apparently a habit with her. The fridge in the kitchen dispenses cold water and ice, and that’s what she likes. The stuffed bear she always slept with was on the kitchen island, beside a glass half full of water, with her fingerprints on them.”
“She’s been printed?” Luke asked.
“No, the kids aren’t usually printed until they hit high school. Process of elimination. We dusted her room, eliminated prints belonging to her parents, and concentrated on objects they said she handled a lot. Pulled a clear set of kid-sized prints from a lacquered music box she apparently loved. The prints on the glass in the kitchen were a match.”
“Sounds like you have a solid crime scene unit,” Dante ventured.
“It’s a two-person team. And they are, unfortunately, getting better with practice.”
SEVEN
Nobody commented on Jonah’s grim statement. There was a moment of silence, and then Lucas spoke again.
“You’ve already checked into missings for a couple hundred miles all around Serenity, haven’t you?”
Jonah nodded. “Yeah. When Sean Messina was taken. I looked for missings that were in any way like those here. Came up dry. Within a five-hundred-mile radius, there were about a dozen reported missing. A few turned up as bodies, killed accidentally or otherwise; a few are still missing but didn’t just vanish into thin air, and the rest turned up more pissed than grateful that someone had reported them missing and gone looking for them.”
With a sigh, Sam crossed through some of her notes.
“Sorry,” Jonah told her.
“Don’t be. You’ve saved us needless work. And based on that, plus other indicators, we have to assume the guy is here in Serenity, probably grew up here or at least has lived here quite a while, long enough to not stand out as being a newcomer, and that he has a personal reason for taking these people. If you’re abducting people in or close to home, you aren’t taking strangers. It’s too high risk to take people who have or might have a connection to you, especially not just for the sake of taking someone.”
Dante said, “You also aren’t an experienced predator, right? Experienced predators never hunt where they live.”
Sam was nodding. “Almost always the case, yeah. If they’re stranger abductions, we’re dealing with a whole different kind of bad guy.”
“I just . . . I just can’t believe anyone local could be doing this,” Jonah said, still resisting. “How could somebody be this disturbed and go unnoticed? By family, friends, neighbors. By me. How could I not see it?”
“Evil hides,” Sam reminded him. “More often than not, behind something familiar, something nonthreatening. That’s its ace, being able to hide. And . . . most people don’t believe in monsters. So they aren’t looking for one, especially close to home.”
There was a brief silence, with Jonah obviously pondering the existence of human monsters while the feds looked at him with varying degrees of sympathy.
It wasn’t an easy thing to accept, that a monster could walk around in your town looking and acting just like everybody else.
Not an easy thing at all.
Finally, Lucas said, “Your people did very thorough interviews of anyone connected in any way with the missing people, right up to the latest abduction. I assume they’ve been working just as hard on Nessa Tyler’s abduction?”
“Yeah. Everybody I could spare canvassed the neighborhood all day and talked to as many people as we could find who even knew the family. Her teachers and other students at school, every parent who ever had her in their home for a play date. We even checked alibis on the out-of-town relatives who joined the family for support. No flags, no suspicions. Once it got dark, I didn’t want my people out knocking on doors, so they’ve been doing phone interviews all evening. So far, still no red flags. At all.”
Dante asked, “Besides those family members, are there any strangers in town?”
“The four of you. That’s pretty much it.”
Luke asked, “What about Mrs. Lang’s husband? Did family come to Serenity to support him?”
“His family lives in Serenity. His parents, brother, and sister-in-law have been trading off time so he’s never alone and has help with the baby. Neighbors have helped out too. Dave and Luna have always been a very well-liked couple.”
Samantha leaned her chair back, laced her fingers together over her middle, and turned her head to gaze steadily at her husband and partner. “Strike three.”
“What?” Jonah asked, baffled.
Luke said, “Everything we’re hearing, learning, just increases the probability that someone in this town is behind the abductions.”
“How is that possible?” Jonah asked after a moment, still struggling against a reality too painful to readily accept. “One of my neighbors just suddenly decides to abduct people? Someone smart enough or with some kind of weird ability to circumvent security systems, including cameras? And—the weird energy, the missing time, people vanishing into thin air. Plus the strangeness of those photographs Sarah took at the scene where Amy and Simon disappeared.”
He had shared those very odd photographs, and their bafflement over the open car doors not showing, the footprints not showing: seen by th
eir eyes, but not by the lens of a camera.
Samantha said, “No way to explain any of that yet.” But her tone was just a bit elusive.
Jonah looked at her. “All of you looked at those pictures, and all of you seemed as baffled as Sarah and me. Have you come up with a theory or something since?”
With a shrug, Sam said, “Just something I’m mulling in my mind. It may turn out to be worse than useless, so I’d rather make sense of it myself before offering it even as a theory.”
“Sam, you know profiling, investigating, is a collaborative effort,” her husband said matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, I know. I just . . . want to sit with this awhile longer myself. At this point, it’s just a cockeyed theory with absolutely no evidence to back it up.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Luke advised her.
“No, I won’t.”
Robbie said, “In any case, it’s pretty clear a stranger would stand out in Serenity, in the day or the night, especially given the likelihood that he watched the victims for quite some time before he put his plan into action.”
Lucas nodded. “Jonah, you and your people have talked to just about everyone in town, and you said it yourself: Aside from us and Tyler family members with alibis, there just aren’t any strangers here.”
Making a last-ditch protest, Jonah said, “You’re telling me someone I know is doing this?”
“Know in the broadest sense, probably,” Luke said. “Even in a town this small, there are bound to be people on the periphery of your life. Not friends or neighbors or coworkers. Maybe you’d recognize a face, or even know a name, but not really give them much thought because your life and theirs haven’t really intersected. There’s been nothing to make them memorable. Maybe they live a bit farther out, don’t come into town too often. Don’t get into trouble or otherwise draw your attention.
“We all have people like that in our lives. Vague recognition, but no interest. No real knowledge. What may be vitally important to them, an experience, an event, could easily be something that barely scratched the surface of your life. And whoever this is, he probably learned early how to go unnoticed. Maybe he grew up in an abusive home, and drawing attention meant a beating. He learned to be quiet, still. To blend in. At a guess, he’s in his thirties or forties; he’s too patient and too careful to be younger.”
Samantha took up the not-quite-musing, her voice as thoughtful as Luke’s had been. “The judge wasn’t a small man, and both Sean Messing and Simon Church were in good shape, athletic. So this guy has to be able to handle size and muscle, either with his own muscles or by some other means.”
“A gun?” Jonah suggested.
It was Robbie who said, “Six people . . . a child, a teenager, a young wife and mother; I’m betting at least one of them would have cried out, made some kind of commotion, if they’d seen a gun. The men probably would have struggled, one of them at least. Hunting is common in this area, right?”
Jonah nodded.
“Then so are guns. Especially these days. We don’t fear what’s familiar, as a rule, at least not quickly enough to react. Besides . . . the judge was out in the open. The two teenagers in a stopped car with no sign of damage to indicate someone forced them to stop. Luna Lang crossed through about fifteen feet of a security blind spot and vanished. Sean Messing in a theater. I just . . . I just can’t believe that every single one of them could have been taken by force, without any kind of a fuss and without leaving some kind of evidence of that behind.”
“It doesn’t seem likely,” Luke agreed.
“So,” Samantha said, “we’re back to trying to figure out what all these missing people had in common.”
With a sigh, Jonah said, “I thought we were doing that.”
“We were. But I’m reasonably sure all of us kept in our heads the notion that these people were taken by a stranger, because even though stranger unsubs are more difficult to find, let alone capture, it’s the monsters hiding in plain sight that frighten us the most, because we don’t know who to trust—even when the faces are familiar.
“Now we have to consider what a member of your community might have in common with these missing people when viewed by one of their own neighbors. Somebody they all know. Somebody who may have been watching them for years.”
Jonah was startled. “Years?”
“Without knowing what he’s doing to these people, it’s almost impossible to theorize. But given that we believe he’s a local, and somehow connected to these missing people, the chances are good that whatever’s driving him has been in him for a long time. Could be a mental disorder, but I would have expected that to manifest before now, and obviously; you or someone else would have noticed. So it could be simple resentment or hate.”
“Those kids didn’t do anything to make somebody hate them,” Jonah objected. “Not the teenagers, and certainly not Nessa Tyler.”
“It only has to make sense to him,” Dante spoke up to say. “A madman has his own mad logic.”
Slowly, Luke said, “The one answer we need as soon as possible is, for now, at least, the hardest one to figure out. We don’t know why he wanted these people. I’ve never heard of a serial abductor except for the few who abduct kids or teenage girls and keep them literally in bondage, for years.”
“Saw the most recent one like that on the news,” Jonah said, looking a bit queasy.
“There have been worse cases. When abduction or even slavery isn’t the goal, but murder is. Torture is. What really doesn’t fit here is the range of victims. We’ve got three men if we count Simon Church, two women if we count Amy Grimes, and a ten-year-old girl. I’ve never heard of any serial killer with tastes that broad in his victims.”
“Which,” Dante said, “is yet another argument that this is personal. These people were targeted.”
“Yeah,” Samantha said, “but for what? What did they do to get on this guy’s radar?”
Lucas said, “We don’t know if they’re dead or alive. If they’re dead, where are the bodies? If they’re alive, where is he keeping them? How is he controlling them? It’s been weeks for the teenagers; is he feeding them? Torturing them? In a town so tense the slightest sound draws instant attention, why has no one heard anything, or seen anything the least bit suspicious?”
Samantha said, “He has to have a fair amount of room, and it has to be a remote location . . .”
—
IT WAS THE strangest thing, Robbie decided. The room around her, brightly lit, just faded out, darkening around the edges. The darkness slowly crept toward her, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t ask the others if they couldn’t see what was happening.
Couldn’t help her stop it.
The darkness was going to swallow her up, she knew that, felt it, and watched helplessly as it swallowed up the others one by one, creeping up to them, over them, like some hideous black sludge, moving in terrifying slow motion, until they vanished and only the black was left. Only the darkness. She could hear her heart beating, but nothing else.
Nothing except the eerie sounds of that thick, smothering darkness flowing toward her, rustling softly as though it were whispering to her.
It was . . . almost seductive.
Wait for me.
Can you hear me? I know you can. You aren’t like the others.
We can . . . together . . . and we . . .
. . . belong together . . . you know . . .
. . . we do . . .
Listen to me . . .
She didn’t know where it came from, but Robbie was aware of the certain knowledge that if she listened to the whispers, if she let them in, she would die.
The blackness was creeping toward her, rustling, whispering, and all Robbie could think to do was slam her shields up as hard as she could, making them as strong as she could make them, because she couldn’t let it in . . .
—
“DANTE IS A medium,” Luke was saying. “Able to communicate with the dead. When they want to communicate, that is. And even then, they often have nothing helpful to say. Something else we’ve learned.”
What? We’ve already talked about this. Haven’t we?
Half nodding, Dante said, “The universe doesn’t like to make things too easy for us, apparently. Even with these extra senses of ours, we still have to work to get what we want and need.”
Wait a minute. I know we’ve talked about this. Because Jonah was curious and didn’t seem freaked out. Though right now . . .
Jonah nodded, more uncertain than anything else.
Maybe he’s more freaked out than he shows. Maybe he always was.
“Robbie is a telepath, able to read minds,” Luke said. “Not all minds, of course; even our strongest telepaths can only read sixty to seventy percent of those around them. Sort of like trying to tune in on a particular radio frequency; not all people are on a frequency a particular telepath can receive.”
What the hell . . .
Without any ability at all to stop it, Robbie heard herself saying, “Like all of us here, and most agents in the SCU, I have mental shields, so I can generally block out thoughts even on my frequency when I want to. And I usually want to, in case you were wondering. I believe it’s an invasion of privacy to read someone else’s thoughts without their knowledge or permission.” She sounded more than a little defiant.
Wait. I got over that. Got past it. Mostly. Didn’t I? Because it’s the work, just like Bishop said. It’s a tool I use in the work, to help put the bad guys away.
Luke said, “Robbie is our problem child; she’s still trying to decide if her abilities are a gift or a curse.”
No, I’m not!
Robbie felt weirdly detached from what was happening, and yet she knew she felt irritation when she said, that other Robbie said, “They aren’t a gift or a curse, they’re just abilities natural to me. And I just have to practice more to use them effectively. Miranda said so. And Bishop. Besides, Dante is the problem child. He really doesn’t want to talk to dead people.”