Cody McFadyen - Shadow Man

I have specific business with you here, Agent Thorne, but before we get to that, I must digress. You'll forgive me, I hope.

I am sure you have all wondered: Why am I challenging you so directly? Perhaps you already have a team of profilers, picking apart my motivations, trying to pluck the meanings from my actions.

"You wish," Callie murmurs.

This isn't an idle comment on her part. "They" are showing us something important here, part of what makes them tick. The thought of us investing time and resources to figure them out is an ego trip for them. It's part of their turn-on.

The answer, however, is not complex. Just as I am

not complex. My motivations are not arcane, Agent Thorne and Co. They are not hidden in murky waters. They gleam with the cool simplicity of the scalpel. Sterile and brightly lit.

I challenge you because you deserve me. You hunt the hunters, and, I feel certain, you have spent many years patting each other on the back. Filling the air with your mutual congratulations, your skill at putting those who kill into the cages you feel they deserve.

And so you deserve me. Because if these others you have hunted are shadows, I am darkness itself. They are the jackals to my lion. You feel you are skilled? Then hunt me, Agents. Hunt me.

I desire opponents worthy of me, Agent Barrett. Read my letters with care. Smell my scent. Catch a whiff of something deadly. You will need this, in the days to come.

Learn to live with the assumption of being under siege. You don't know what I mean, just now, but you will. Learn it, take it into your blood. And then use it to drive you in your hunt for me. Because I promise you, so long as you leave me free to cut and tear, you will live a life of peril.

This sends a shiver through me, against my will.

Now, back to you, Agent Thorne. Let's make this personal, shall we? While it is Agent Barrett I challenge face-to-face, I realize that any gauntlet I throw her way is thrown at all of you. And since we have a day before my package arrives into your eager hands, let's use that time wisely.

Agent Barrett lost her best friend. Let's see if we can use this time making sure each of you lose something equally important.

Alarm bells go off in my head at this last sentence. I don't know my prey yet, in the way I come to know all the killers we go after. I haven't soaked them into my bones. But I have absorbed one certainty that makes that sentence a chiller: I know they do not bluff. Here is a link to a Web site for you, Agent Thorne. Visit it, and all will become clear if you look hard enough. I think you will enjoy the irony.

From Hell,

Jack Jr.

There is a hyperlink embedded in the e-mail message, a line that says, Click Here.

"Well?" Callie asks.

I nod. "Go ahead."

She clicks on the link, and a browser window flies open. We wait as the Web site is contacted and begins to fill the screen. The background is white. A red logo appears. RED ROSE, it says, then, below it, in smaller letters, A TRUE REDHEAD AMATEUR.

The rest of the graphics fill in, and what I see makes me blink. Alan frowns. "What the hell? . . . Is that . . . ?"

The picture on the screen shows a tall, beautiful redheaded woman in her early twenties, dressed in red thong panties and nothing else. She's staring directly at the camera, smiling a seductive smile, so we have a very good shot of her face. I turn to Callie. She is bone white. Blood-drained. Her eyes are filled with unending fear.

"Callie--what does this mean?"

We are all looking at her. Because the young woman who calls herself Red Rose looks enough like Callie to be her sister.

"Callie?" Alan's voice is filled with alarm, and he moves toward her as she backs away from the screen, slamming into the wall behind her. She brings a fist up to her mouth. Her eyes go wide. Her entire body is shaking. Alan reaches out a hand to her.

And then she explodes. It's like watching a hurricane appear, full force, in the middle of a clear day. The fear vanishes from her eyes, replaced by a rage so intense that I flinch. She turns to Leo with a snarl, and he jolts backward. When she speaks, it comes out as a roar.

"Find her fucking address now! Now Now Now Now Now!"

Leo stares at Callie for only a split second and gets into motion, sitting down at the nearest computer terminal. Callie leans forward over the desk, grips it hard enough to whiten her knuckles. The air around her is charged. It feels like it should be crackling. James is the one who braves her rage. "Callie," he says, voice quiet.

"Who is she?"

She looks at him. Her eyes are lightning-filled.

"She's my daughter."

Then she screams and upends her desk, sending it and the laptop flying.

We stand back, open-mouthed, in shock. Not at the destruction, but at the revelation.

"Dead, dead, dead, he's fucking dead!" She whirls at me. "Do you hear me, Smoky?" It is a howl of agony.

And I see myself, pointing a gun at Callie those months ago, firing on an empty chamber. Yeah, I hear her.

"Get that address, Leo," I say, not taking my eyes from Callie. "Get it fast."

I AM INthe passenger seat of Callie's car, praying we'll survive getting to our destination in Ventura County. Callie is driving down the 101

freeway like a madwoman, breaking the sound barrier. I can only hope that the others are behind us. Leo had found the address belonging to the registered owner of the Red Rose Internet domain, and Callie had raced out the door before any of us could react. All I could do was run after her.

I look at her. She's terror and danger, all rolled up together.

"Talk to me, Callie," I say as I grip the armrest on the door.

"Look in my wallet," she growls. "It's in my purse."

I grab the wallet and open it. I know what she wants me to find the moment I see it. It's a small picture. A black-and-white, the kind of baby photo they take at the hospital. It shows a newborn, eyes squinched shut, head still a little bit cone-shaped from having fought through the birth canal.

"I was fifteen," Callie says as she makes a hairpin turn, tires squealing. Her voice is tight. "Fifteen and silly and stupid. I slept with Billy Hamilton because he managed to charm the skirt off me and he smelled so good. Isn't that funny, honey-love?" she says, bitter. "That's what I remember about Billy. He smelled good. Like sun and rain, mixed up together."

I don't reply. None is needed.

"Billy knocked me up, and it was a scandal like no other in the history of the Thorne household. Or the Hamilton household, for that matter. My dad almost disowned me. My mom went to church and stayed there for days. An abortion was out of the question--we were a good Catholic family, you know." The words are biting, full of sarcasm and pain. "The dads got together and worked it all out. That's how things went then in upscale Connecticut. Billy had a future, I might have one--though of course I was tainted now." She grips the steering wheel. "They decided I'd finish out that year being homeschooled, have the baby quietly, and it would be put up for adoption. The homeschooling would be explained with a cover story--I was going through treatment for severe allergies, which required a few months of isolation. That's what they decided, and that's exactly what happened. The timing was perfect. I had her over the summer, and I was ready to go back to school the next year like nothing had happened. Which is almost how it was. Like it hadn't happened." Another hairpin turn, more squealing tires. "I wasn't allowed to go out, and Billy was warned to keep his mouth shut under pain of death." She shrugs. "He wasn't a bad one. He did keep his mouth shut, and he never treated me badly after that. The whole thing just sort of . . . went away." She nods at the picture in my hand. "But even though I was stupid and silly, I knew it wasn't right to pretend it was just a dream. One of the nurses took that picture for me. I forced myself to look at it at least once a month. And I made some decisions." Her voice is low, earnest. I can imagine her, sitting alone in her room, taking a silent oath. "I was never going to be stupid and silly again. I was done being Catholic. And that was the last time that lifechanging decisions were going to be made on my behalf by anyone."