Kay Hooper - Hunting Fear

"Maybe. I don't really know, Caitlin. I generally don't think about it a whole lot. It's just something I can do. I can also juggle, I'm a fair shot-at least at pop-up targets-and I'm the carnival champ at poker."

Caitlin smiled, but said, "Less-troublesome abilities, I imagine."

"You've never beaten Leo at poker. He can be mean."

Her smile remained, but Caitlin's eyes were serious. "If I asked you to do something for me, would you?"

"I'd have to hear what it was first," Samantha replied warily.

"I want you to touch something."

Not very surprised, and still wary, Samantha lifted her brows and waited.

"I had to go to Lindsay's apartment. To… pick out what she'd wear today."

Samantha nodded, still waiting.

"I knew she'd been seeing Wyatt Metcalf, so I expected to find some of his things there. And I did see a few things I assume are his. But I also found this." She reached into her purse and produced a small object wrapped in a handkerchief. Placing it on the table between them, she unfolded the clean white cotton. "There really isn't room anywhere on it for a fingerprint, but I picked it up with my handkerchief anyway. It isn't-wasn't Lindsay's."

Lying in the center was a small piece of costume jewelry, a charm or pendant meant to be worn on a chain. A novelty probably intended for Halloween, it was a small black spider in the center of a silvery web.

Staring down at it, Samantha heard herself ask, "How do you know it didn't belong to Lindsay?"

"Because she was terrified of spiders." Caitlin grimaced. "Dumb for a cop, she said, but she'd been that way since we were kids. The last time we talked, she told me she had her apartment exterminated once a month just to make damned sure none of them got in. It was a real phobia, believe me."

"Still," Samantha said, "this isn't a real spider."

"Doesn't matter. Lindsay couldn't bear even a picture of one, and she would never-ever-own a piece of jewelry with a spider on it."

"Could have been a gift."

"She wouldn't have kept it. Samantha, I'm absolutely positive this didn't belong to Lindsay."

"Where did you find it?"

"On her nightstand, of all places. She really wouldn't have had anything like this near her bed. That would have totally freaked her out. When she was just a toddler, a spider got into her crib. Our mom was downstairs, and it took her a few minutes to get up there; Lindsay always said it was the longest few minutes of her life and that she could remember every second vividly, how she was so terrified she couldn't even move. The spider wasn't poisonous or anything, but she's had nightmares about it ever since."

"So you think… somebody put this in her apartment?"

"Lindsay wouldn't have touched it, I know that much."

"If the sheriff gave it to her-"

Caitlin was shaking her head. "From what I gather, they'd been lovers for months and worked together much longer than that. He's not the sort of man to consider something like this a joke, especially since he'd know what she was genuinely afraid of. Lindsay would have told him. Hell, it was practically the first thing she told anybody she met, especially socially. 'Hi, I'm Lindsay and I hate spiders with a vengeance.' Didn't she tell you?"

"As a matter of fact, she did," Samantha admitted slowly. "When I was staying at the sheriff's department, she came down and had coffee with me a couple of times. Sort of jokingly asked if I could look into the future and promise she wouldn't-"

"Wouldn't be bitten by a spider and die," Caitlin finished steadily. "When we were kids, Lindsay was afraid of two things, and only two things: spiders and water over her head. She overcame her fear of water by learning to swim. In fact, she was on a champion swim team in college. But she was never able to conquer her fear of spiders."

To herself, Samantha murmured, "Spiders would have been impractical, maybe impossible. No control there. Just seeing them would have caused her to panic. Not the slow, dawning realization he wanted. The gradual buildup of fear. So he had to use water."

Grim, Caitlin said, "When they told me he'd drowned her, all I thought at first was how horrible it was for her to die that way.

The way she'd once feared she would. And what a coincidence that he'd pick that. When I found this on her nightstand… It wasn't a coincidence at all, was it? He didn't just want to kill her, he wanted to scare her."

"You're assuming he put this in her apartment."

"Aren't you?"

Samantha nodded slowly. "The question is, did he do it before or after he took her?"

"Had to be after," Caitlin said immediately. "Or at least after she left home that morning. I wasn't kidding when I said she wouldn't have something like this near her. If she'd seen it, it wouldn't have been left there. A pair of kitchen tongs and a paper bag, probably."

"If that's the case," Samantha said, "then this wasn't left for Lindsay to find. It was left for someone else."

"Me? Knowing I'd clean out the apartment?"

"I don't think so. He sent the ransom note to Metcalf. I'm willing to bet he expected the sheriff to be the one to check out her apartment. In fact, I bet he did, right after she disappeared. But she didn't disappear from home, so it wasn't a crime scene and wasn't sealed-and he was extremely upset. Probably just charged in and looked around quickly. He must have missed this."

"I don't get it," Caitlin said. "Why try to alert the sheriff-her lover-to the fact that he wanted to scare her?"

Samantha drew a breath and rubbed her hands together briefly, then reached out for the pendant. "Let's find out," she said.

When Lucas reported the conversation with Wyatt and the sheriff's suspicions of Samantha and the carnival, Jaylene thoughtfully asked, "Think he might be right?"

"No. I don't believe there's any conspiracy here, not to commit the crimes and not to hide them. One man. One kidnapper. And he's a loner. An observer. He'd never be a part of any average group, let alone a carnival."

"So you and Bishop still agree on the profile."

"The basics, yeah. That our kidnapper is an older man, thirty-five to forty-five, and probably lacks a criminal record. He's careful, compulsive, highly organized, and goal-oriented. Likely to be single, though he may be divorced or widowed. He could be gainfully employed but is just as likely to be independently wealthy through some inheritance-even before the ransoms he's been paid so far."

"You didn't agree with the boss even in the beginning, though, about the reason why this guy kills his victims. Bishop was by the book: the psychological probability is that a kidnapper kills his victim to avoid identification."

Lucas frowned and, almost as an aside, said, "Odd, that. He so seldom goes by the book in profiling."

"Well, it looks like you were right to suspect another motive. The kidnapper still may be killing them to avoid identification, but it looks a bit less likely now. And Sam was right about broken minds not really working the way we expect them to."

"Yeah." But Lucas was still frowning.

"You're worried about her."

He shrugged that off, not entirely convincingly. "Sam can take care of herself."

"Doesn't stop you worrying."

"I'm just thinking we might have missed something very important."

"What?"

"As unlikely as his theory is, Wyatt may be right about one thing. The kidnapper may well be connected to the carnival or the route they took."

Jaylene waited, brows raised.

"It's just a feeling I got while he was talking, laying out this carnival conspiracy he can't get out of his head."

"It's not going to be pleasant," she murmured.

Lucas nodded with a grimace. "If we can't find a more legitimate target for him to focus on, he's going to waste time and energy, and shine a very unwelcome and hostile spotlight on the carnival."