Кей Хупер - Out of the Shadows

"No. Not Alex."

Their eyes met, held, then Bonnie said, "You could ask them to send somebody else."

"I need him ." Bitterness had crept back into Miranda's voice, and reluctance, and something that might have been loathing.

"You're sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

"It's been a long time, Randy. Eight years—"

"Eight years, four months, and an odd number of days." Miranda's laugh held no amusement. "I know how long it's been, believe me."

"I only meant that things change, Randy. People change, you know they do. Even he must have changed. It'll be different this time."

"Will it?"

Bonnie hesitated. "You've seen something else, haven't you? What is it? What have you seen?"

Miranda looked down at her coffee, and her mouth twisted. "Inevitability," she said.

Friday, January 7

"I can't explain it," Dr. Shepherd said, his habitual cheery smile replaced by a baffled frown. "The dental records match, without question. What we found are the remains of Adam Ramsay."

"But," Miranda said.

"Yeah — but. The bones show all the signs of belonging to a man at least forty years old. The sutures of the skull were filled in. Calcium deposits and other changes in bone structure also indicate forty to fifty years of life." He paused. "This one's beyond my knowledge, Randy. Obviously someone with more training and experience in forensics, a forensic pathologist or anthropologist, should examine the remains. I must have missed something somehow, misread the results or performed the wrong tests — something."

Miranda looked at him across her desk. "Setting that aside for the moment, maybe we're losing sight of the point. The point is that we found the remains of a seventeen-year-old runaway. Do you know how he died?"

"Enough of the skull was intact to reveal evidence of blunt-force trauma in at least two spots, and I don't believe it was postmortem."

"Not accidental blows?"

"If you're asking for my opinion, I'd say not. For the record, a blow to the head probably killed him. Whether that blow was deliberate or accidental is impossible for me to state with any medical — or legal — certainty."

Miranda made a note on the pad in front of her. "I appreciate you coming into the office to report, Doc."

"No problem. I knew you had your hands full. Any word on Lynet Grainger?"

"Not yet. I've got all my deputies, Simon's bloodhounds, and every volunteer I could get my hands on out searching for her, but no luck so far. She left the library Wednesday night and vanished into thin air." Her mouth tightened. "If her mother hadn't been drunk that night and failed to report Lynet missing until yesterday afternoon, we might have had a better shot at finding her. As it is, with nearly forty-eight hours gone now, the trail is ice-cold."

Shepherd studied her. "You look like hell, if you don't mind me saying so."

"Thanks a lot."

"Did you even go to bed last night, Randy?"

Miranda drew a breath and let it out slowly. "Doc, I've got two teenagers dead and a third one missing, and no evidence to persuade me we're just in the middle of a series of tragic accidents and random disappearances. I also have no evidence pointing me toward the killer — or killers — of the two dead kids, and no clue to help me find Lynet Grainger. I spent half the morning arguing with the mayor and the other half fielding calls from terrified parents. Somebody in my nice, safe little town has apparently decided to start torturing, maiming, and killing teenagers. And I have a sixteen-year-old sister at home. What do you think?"

"I think you didn't go to bed."

She straightened in her chair as if to refute his accusation, then lifted a hand to rub the back of her neck wearily. "Yeah, well, I couldn't have slept anyway. I don't want to find another dead teenager, Peter."

"Do you think you will?"

"Do you?"

He hesitated for a beat. "Honestly? Yes. I don't know what's going on, Randy, or who's behind it, but I think you're right about one thing. Someone is after our teenagers. And that someone has some very strange ... appetites."

In an abrupt turnabout, Miranda shook her head. "We don't know that's what's going on."

"Don't we?"

"No."

"I see. Then I guess you have a reasonable explanation for why Kerry Ingram's body was drained of almost all its blood."

"Don't tell me you think the killer drank it," Miranda objected dryly.

"No — although that sort of thing is more common than most people would like to believe."

"I wonder why."

Ignoring the muttered aside, Shepherd went on, "I believe that the killer had some need for the blood, ndoubtedly one a rational person could never understand. And — not that you missed this detail, I'm sure — it's interesting to note that we actually found only a small percentage of Adam Ramsay's bones out there."

"The animals. Scavengers."

"Maybe. Or maybe he wasn't all there to begin with. Maybe the killer took his blood as well as the girl's. And a few bones to go with it. And maybe he took Lynet Grainger because he didn't get all he needed from the first two."

"Speculation," Miranda said firmly. "We don't even know that Kerry and Adam were killed by the same person, and Lynet's disappearance doesn't have to end with us finding her body."

"That's true enough." Shepherd got to his feet. "But here's something just as true: It's not like you to hide your head in the sand, Randy."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do." He smiled faintly. "I also think you're honest enough — maybe especially with yourself — to face up to it sooner rather than later. At least I hope so. I don't read tea leaves like Liz Hallowell, but I don't need to have gypsy blood to know there's something very strange going on in Gladstone."

"Yes. Yes, I know that."

"Nobody will think less of you for calling in help, not when something like this is going on."

"So everyone keeps telling me."

"And they're telling the truth." He paused. "We need to get an expert in to look at those bones, Randy. Tell me who, and I'll make the call."

She looked at him for a long while, then sighed. "No, it's my job. I'll make the call, Doc."

But she didn't pick up the phone after Shepherd left. Instead, she went through the case files one more time, studying every piece of information gathered on Kerry Ingram and Adam Ramsay. She fixed all her will on finding something, some tiny, previously overlooked clue, that would tell her these were ordinary murders, committed in anger or for some other perfectly tragic, perfectly human reason.

But no matter how many times she went over it all, the photos of a young, battered body and skeletal remains, the medical reports and the interviews with relatives and acquaintances, the traced movements of the two teenagers during the last weeks before they disappeared — no matter how many times she went over the information in the files, only the same unalterable, inescapable chilling facts jumped out at her.

Kerry Ingram's exsanguinated body.

The bones missing from Adam Ramsay's remains.

The aged condition of the bones they had found.

Miranda closed the last file and stared across the room at nothing. "Goddammit," she whispered.

Inevitability.

Some people called it fate.

He watched the girl as she lay in a drugged stupor on the cot where he had placed her. She was pretty. That was a shame. And she'd been trying to improve her lot in life, working hard in school, doing her best to keep her lush of a mother from driving drunk or burning down the house.

Definitely a shame.

But there was nothing he could do to change things.

He hoped Lynet would understand that.

Saturday, January 8