Kay Hooper - Hunting Fear

Reading between the lines-something she was good at-Ellis said, "Ah. So the frostnip is from the steering wheel?"

"Yeah."

"And since Luke pulled you out of the car-"

"I won't pick up anything by touching it a second time, at least not for a while. Somebody explained it to me once. Something about tapping into and releasing electromagnetic energy. It's like static. Touch something metallic once, and you get shocked; touch it again right away and you don't, because the energy's already been discharged. You have to walk around on the carpet in your socks and let the static build up again." She frowned. "Or something like that."

"You don't really care how it works, do you?"

"Not so much. It is what it is."

"Mmm. But you did pick up enough to believe the kidnapper likes carnivals."

Samantha looked down at her hands, absently moving them in the water. "I think he likes games. And right now, we're the only other game in Golden."

"The other one being Catch Me if You Can?"

"I don't think it's even that. I think it's I'm Smarter than You Are."

"Than who is?"

"Luke."

"I hope you told him that, at least."

"I did. He wasn't happy."

"I can imagine. Word is, this kidnapper has more than a dozen victims to his credit, all but one of them dead. If it's all just been a game…"

"Nightmarish, yeah."

"Certainly not easy to live with. Even if it was beyond your control."

Samantha frowned and lifted her hands out of the water. "The water's cooling. And my hands are tingling and itching like crazy."

Ellis put her knitting aside and went to refill the pot with fresh warm water, saying, "Once more, and then you should be okay. Your hands'll probably tingle and itch for a while, though."

Sighing, Samantha plunged her hands back into warm water. "You don't seem surprised that I got frostnipped by a vision," she commented.

"I've seen enough over the years to know that your visions are pretty damned real. So, no, not very surprised. But what was cold in the vision? Where she's being kept?"

"No. She wasn't cold at all. But almost the instant the vision snapped into focus, I was freezing."

"Why, do you think?"

"I don't know."

"The universe trying to tell you something, maybe?"

"Well, he's not holding her at the North Pole, I know that much."

"Stop being so literal-minded."

"I'm always literal-minded, you know that. It comes from a lack of imagination."

"You do not lack imagination. You just have a practical streak about a yard wide, that's all."

Samantha shrugged. "Whatever."

"Think about it, Sam. If she wasn't in a cold place, then what caused the frostnip? When you think of that sort of bone-deep cold, what else do you think of?"

"I don't know. Something empty. Bottomless. Something dark." She paused, then added reluctantly, "Death. It felt like death."

Lucas would have been the first to admit that what they were doing was searching for a very fine needle in a huge haystack, but that didn't stop him from trying to find it.

Her.

All afternoon, as they sifted through property records and rental agreements supplied by local realtors, he tried to reach out mentally and emotionally, to connect with Lindsay.

Nothing.

"I knew she had a lot of self-control," he told Jaylene as the late afternoon grew gloomy and thunder rumbled in the mountains all around them. "She's the type who won't want to show any fear at all. Which means that as long as she's hiding it from him, she's also hiding it from me."

Jaylene, knowing what was on his mind without any need of psychic ability, said, "There's no way we could have known she'd be taken, Luke."

"Still. If we'd told Wyatt and Lindsay about our abilities- mine, at least-then maybe she'd be trying to reach out to me instead of damping down the fear."

"Maybe. And maybe not. Chances are they'd never have believed us anyway. Wyatt's still convinced Sam makes a living conning people."

"The badge makes a difference. You know that." His mouth twisted. "Credibility."

"I say it was the right call at the time."

"We'll never know, will we?"

"Look, we're making some progress here." Jaylene tapped the legal pad on the table in front of her. "The list of likely properties is fairly long, but at least it's manageable. The question is, can we cover them all before tomorrow afternoon? And how do we persuade Wyatt that having his people storm these places is not the best way to go?"

"He won't do anything to further endanger Lindsay."

"No, I won't," Metcalf said as he came into the room. He looked a bit haggard, but calm. "What is it you don't want me to do?"

"Storm these places," Lucas replied readily. "They need to be checked out, one at a time, but quietly, Wyatt. If we get lucky and find him, we can't forget he has a hostage he could use to hold us off for a long time. We have to be careful, approach every area with all possible caution so he isn't alerted. That means we can't send your deputies searching on their own unless you're very, very sure they know what they're doing and will follow their orders to the letter."

The sheriff considered, then said, "I have, maybe, half a dozen people I'm absolutely sure of. They have the training and experience to do this right, and none of them will panic or jump the gun. They'll follow orders."

"We've got a lengthy list of possibilities," Lucas told him. "All of them remote properties with plenty of privacy."

"Because Zarina says that's where he'll be."

"Because common sense says she's right. He might have taken advantage of abandoned property somewhere, but it would be risking someone showing up and discovering him, and I don't believe he'd do that. If he doesn't have a connection to Golden-and right now, that's all we've got to narrow the search-then chances are good that he leased, rented, or purchased property sometime before Mitchell Callahan was kidnapped and since the victim just before him, two months ago in Georgia."

Jaylene murmured, "Unless he's been planning this a lot longer than we know and got the property anything up to a couple of years ago."

"Oh, hell, don't even suggest that," Lucas said, so immediately that it was obvious he'd been thinking along similar lines. "We have to go with the most likely possibility, and the most likely is that he got the property fairly recently, over the summer."

"We move a lot of property in the summer," Metcalf noted.

"Which is why the list isn't a short one."

Jaylene checked her watch, then listened to yet another rumble of thunder. "It won't be easy if the weather's against us, but I say we get started whether it storms or not. We don't have much day-light left either way-but I don't think we should wait for dawn."

The sheriff had brought in a large county map, which Lucas unrolled on the conference table, and all three bent over it. Within forty-five minutes, they had all the properties on their list marked in red on the map.

"All over Clayton County," Metcalf said with a sigh. "And some of these places are remote as hell. Even with all the luck we can muster, we'll be hard-pressed to check out every location by five o'clock tomorrow."

"Then we'd better get to it," Jaylene suggested. "Wyatt, if you want to call in the deputies you trust to help, Luke and I will start dividing up the list. Three teams, I think?"

He nodded and left the conference room.

Jaylene watched her partner as he frowned down at the map. "Getting anything?"

His eyes moved restlessly from red mark to red mark, and half under his breath he murmured, "Come on, Lindsay, talk to me."

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than Jaylene saw him go pale and suck in a sudden breath, his eyes taking on a curiously flat shine. It was something with which she was familiar, but it never failed to send a little chill down her spine.