Kay Hooper - Hunting Fear

"Do you trust him?"

"Yes," Samantha answered instantly.

"Even though he walked out on you last time? How is that possible?"

Slowly, Samantha replied, "I've trusted him from the moment we met. What I trust is that he won't lie to me and that he'd be there if I needed him."

Jaylene shook her head. "Then you're a better woman than I am. The last time I was dumped, it wasn't nearly as public as what you went through-and I very nearly got a buddy in the IRS to audit him for the previous ten years."

Samantha smiled, but said, "You wouldn't have done that."

"Maybe not. But maybe I would have, if more than my pride had been hurt."

Refusing to admit anything of her own feelings, Samantha merely said, "As your Bishop is so fond of saying, some things have to happen just the way they happen."

"Is fond of saying?"

Samantha lifted her eyebrows inquiringly. "Has he stopped saying it?"

"No," Jaylene replied after a moment.

"Didn't think so. I got the impression it was practically his mantra."

Jaylene eyed her. "Umm. Listen, getting back to the subject of you needling Luke, I gather your plan is to force him to break through whatever that barrier is and find out what's on the other side."

"Something like that."

"Yeah, well, my advice is to be careful. We build walls for reasons, and the reasons tend to be painful. Force somebody to deal with that pain before they're ready to, and you risk a mental breakdown. Force a psychic to deal with buried traumas, with all the extra electromagnetic energy in our brains, and you risk a literal short circuit that can put them-him-beyond anyone's reach. For good."

"I know," Samantha said.

Bishop had told her.

She found him in the storage room of the sheriff's department garage where the glass-and-steel tank was being kept. He was alone and in one hand held a copy of the taunting note the kidnapper had sent him that morning. His gaze moved from the note to the tank and back again.

Samantha came only a step into the room, and asked quietly, "What are they telling you? The note, the tank?"

"That he's a sick bastard," Lucas replied without turning to ice her.

"Besides that."

His gaze went to the tank once more, and he said in a distant tone, "We found several hairs inside the tank, at least a few of them not Lindsay's. I just checked with Quantico, and DNA tests confirmed they belonged to a victim killed in this part of the country some months ago. A woman of Asian descent. Drowned."

"I doubt he missed those hairs."

"So do I. We-I-was meant to find them."

Samantha glanced at the tank, then back at his profile. "What does that tell you?"

"That he used this tank before. Maybe here, or maybe he has some means of transport; there was certainly no evidence it was constructed up at that old mine. Wherever he used it, when his victim was dead, he removed her and left her where she was found-along a creek bed more than fifty miles from here."

"So… chances are Metcalf isn't being threatened with drowning."

"No. I haven't checked to be sure, but memory says at least three of the previous victims, counting the woman, were drowned. Lindsay makes four. I don't know if he had this tank all along or built it at some point in order to better control his victims."

"And to terrify them."

"Yes. And that."

"But now you have it. So maybe he's lost-or given up-one of his murder machines. What does he have left?"

His jaw tightening, Lucas said, "Mitchell Callahan wasn't the only victim to be decapitated. Two others were as well."

"So he has a guillotine."

"It looks that way."

"What else?"

"Three were exsanguinated. A very sharp knife to one or both jugular veins."

"I suppose one could build a machine to do that."

"Yeah, probably."

"By my count we've covered nine or ten of the victims. What about the others?"

"Three were asphyxiated. Not manually."

Samantha had spent too much time considering this not to have a suggestion. "The easiest way to smother someone, slowly, over a period of time, and inflicting the maximum amount of terror… would be to bury them alive."

"I know."

"So a box somewhere, a coffin, buried in the ground. Reusable."

"Probably more than one," Lucas said, still remote. "It's the easiest to recreate. Just a wooden box and a hole in the ground, nothing fancy. And no timer required. Just cover the box with dirt, bury it. Let the air run out. Put in a canister of oxygen if you want to extend the available air a bit."

"That leaves two or three victims. How did they die?"

"I don't know. In those cases, the remains were left out in the ements long enough to leave us very little; no cause of death could be determined with any certainty. They might have been asphyxiated or exsanguinated or drowned. We don't know."

Samantha frowned slightly at that distant tone, but all she said as, "So you know he has at least three machines-or methods- of killing remotely still available to him. That's assuming, of course, that he doesn't resort to quicker, up-close-and-personal methods, like a gun or a knife."

Lucas nodded. "Which, if we're correct, means that right now Wyatt Metcalf is either staring up at a guillotine, trying to claw his way out of a box in the ground, or trying not to get his throat cut."

"Where is he, Luke?"

"I don't know."

"Because you can't feel him."

He was silent.

"What about this kidnapper, this murderer? Can't you feel him? I mean, he certainly seems to have crawled inside your head over the last year and a half."

Lucas swung around to face her, his face tense. "You don't have to tell me that I've failed at every turn," he said, far less remote noW.

"That's not what I'm trying to tell you."

"Oh-right. I'm closed up. 'Tight as a drum,' I think you said."

"That's what I said. Want to deny it?"

"Samantha, I'm investigating an abduction. A series of them. I'm doing my job. Either help me, or else get the hell out of my way."

Samantha allowed a long moment to pass, then said simply, "Okay, Luke." She turned around and left the storage room, and the garage.

He didn't follow her.

She wasn't crazy about walking through the sheriff's department unescorted. None of the cops had said anything to her directly that was openly hostile, but she could feel the stares and the simmering anger. The few who believed she might actually be psychic were angry because she couldn't instantly tell them where their sheriff was, and the majority were convinced she was somehow to blame for all of this. They didn't know how, but she was a handy target.

Samantha didn't really blame them for that reaction; she had seen it before, time and time again; being someone who could always be classed under the heading of "different," she had learned through bitter experience that people were seldom rational when bad things started happening in their lives.

But understanding that didn't make it any more comfortable to walk through a building knowing stares and muttered comments lay in your wake. It was only a matter of time, she knew, until the hostility became open. Unless, of course, she proved herself. Unless she helped find their sheriff.

Samantha thought about that as she worked her way through the building and back upstairs. In the vision that had brought her here, she didn't think this had happened, the sheriff being taken. So the question was, why had it happened this time, with her in the… game?

And what could she do about it?

She paused at the conference-room door only long enough to speak to Jaylene. "I'm headed back to the carnival."

Surprised, the other woman said, "Alone?"

"Looks like. I'd stay if I thought I could help, but the only thing I seem to be doing around here is making all the cops even more tense."