Allison Brennan - Fear No Evil

Dillon walked to the screen. “Which one is Trask?”

“Neither,” Kate said. “He won’t show himself on camera.” She paused. “I’m the only one who has seen him and lived.”

Dillon turned to her. “Did you work with a sketch artist?”

“You don’t understand.”

“You didn’t tell anyone? What if we can get his picture out?”

“The man I saw is a chameleon. Of course I gave a description, even while I was on the run from my own government. Do you think I’m so callous that I would let women die in order to protect myself? Because of me they have his fingerprints. Because of me they have a description. Lot of good that did catching him!” Kate turned to the screen, jumping when one of the men slapped Lucy across the face.

“And because of me my two best friends died.”

Dillon almost didn’t hear what Kate had said. He tore his eyes away from Lucy on the screen and touched Kate’s arm. All muscle. In her midthirties, her shortish hair was so blond it was nearly white, pulled into a haphazard hair band with loose strands falling out, tucked behind her ears. Her face was devoid of makeup, fresh and clean, worry lines creasing her forehead, her red lips dipping into a frown. This woman had so much pain and sadness in her face, taking the crimes of others as her own personal cross to bear.

Her computer beeped as Dillon was about to question her. Connor, Patrick, and Jack filed into the room. Jack remained at the door, on alert. Patrick sidled over to the computer system.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A message.” She clicked on it. “From Quinn.”

We’re still checking your data. Hold.

“What is he checking out?” Patrick asked.

“The coordinates I sent about thirty minutes ago. But I think it’s a trap.”

Dillon asked, “What coordinates?”

Kate tensed, obviously feeling a touch of claustrophobia with all these men, these Kincaids , in her personal space. Dillon glanced around the functional room. It was large, but sparsely furnished. A bed in the corner. A nightstand. No personal effects anywhere. Two doors probably led to a closet and a bathroom. There was a whole wall of weights. And another full wall of computers and computer screens. Systems he didn’t understand, but by the expression on Patrick’s face, his little brother was impressed.

“Kate?” Dillon said softly.

In a move that surprised Dillon, Jack said, “I need to check on my men.” He walked out, shutting the door behind him.

“Who did you bring?” Kate asked, panicked.

“Jack-” What could Dillon say about his brother when even he didn’t know the truth? Dillon didn’t even know if Jack still worked for the government, or if he was truly a mercenary. “Jack’s a soldier down here. I contacted him and he and his unit helped us get up the mountain.”

“The terrain is dangerous,” Kate said, “but it’s safe this far up. The observatory is university property, and they pay handsomely for the land.”

“So what coordinates did you come up with?” Dillon repeated his question.

Kate motioned toward her computer. “Have a look.”

Patrick sat down almost before she finished the invitation.

“I’ve been pinging constantly, trying to get a lock on the coordinates of the originating feed,” Kate said.

“Pinging?” Dillon asked.

Patrick translated. “It’s where one computer can see if another on a network is online. A ping is sort of like calling a phone number and hanging up when you get an answer. You know someone is there, but you don’t want to talk to them.”

Kate smiled at the analogy. “Trask is good-very good,” she said. “He has the feed going through numerous routers, using legitimate servers to mask his signal. I’m also working on the delay-there’s a full minute-thirty-second delay, I think. But again, it’s almost impossible to tell. The delay could be caused by one of the servers he’s moving data through. He’s sending the transmissions through a variety of hubs and nodes-virtually everything is a dead end.”

“Wow,” Patrick muttered. “Where’d you get this trace program? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I wrote it.”

“You?” Patrick was impressed.

“More or less. I improved it, I should say. The less you know the better. Quinn already told you I’m wanted by the government. Since they already want me for high crimes, a little hacking isn’t going to increase my jail time.”

Her words were light, almost self-deprecating, but there was a wistful quality that Dillon caught.

Connor spoke up. “But you think you might have found Lucy. Why are we standing here doing nothing? Let’s get off this damn mountain and find her.”

“Because I think it’s a trap,” she said.

“Why?”

Kate didn’t answer.

“You have coordinates, but you don’t want to do anything about it?”

“Do anything? What do you think I’ve been doing for the last five years? Trask killed my partner. He’s been killing women for sport for years. He’s a genius and he’s not going to let me find him until he wants me to, unless I can somehow outmaneuver him. He wants me to walk into a trap so he can kill me. He’s gone underground because we have his prints-because of me . We have a physical description, and I think he’s too vain to change his appearance. He’s vindictive and powerful. He’s not going to simply let me find Lucy, or any of his prey.”

Patrick said, “But here you have your program-unbiased-tracing the feed through dead ends and nodes and landing at a live spot. The trace looks exactly the way it should look.”

“I know the program seems to have found the live feed, but Trask plays a game of cat and mouse. The coordinates are the cheese.”

“We have to do something!” Connor stared at the screen, watched Lucy helpless and fearful.

Dillon spoke. “Kate, she’s our little sister. We have to follow every lead.”

“By the time you get to that island, it’ll be too late to get back here and retrace the steps. If it’s a trap, or a phony lead, we’ve lost all the time we have. You can do what you want. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You don’t have to. She’s not your sister. But we’re going.” Connor looked from Dillon to Patrick. “Right?”

Dillon was torn. He wanted to go to the island the coordinates pointed to. Lucy had said she was on an island.

But Kate was the one with experience tracking this killer. She’d seen his face, been inside his head. Could Dillon trust Lucy’s life to Kate’s instincts?

Kate spoke up. “I sent the information to Quinn. He’s looking into the data now.”

“We can’t wait for the FBI to act,” Connor said. “Not when we’re this close. What if he rushes it? What if this Trask knocks time off Lucy’s clock, doesn’t give us the full forty-eight hours to find her?”

Dillon glanced at the countdown.

33:50:02. 33:50:01. 33:50:00. 33:49:59.

His heart raced twice as fast as the countdown. He didn’t want to wait, but he trusted Kate’s instincts-on this, on understanding this killer.

“He won’t jump the clock,” Dillon said. “The countdown is part of the thrill.”

“And you’d bet Lucy’s life on your psychoanalysis? You haven’t even met him!” Connor shouted.

Dillon took the jab, understanding his brother’s frustration. “It’s the anticipation. He’s working himself up toward the final act.” He turned to Kate. “Has he ever changed the countdown?”

“Only Paige,” she said quietly. “She had twenty-four hours, not forty-eight. But that was a completely different situation. He…he had another girl, killed her when he captured Paige. We were close and he knew it. So the countdown was the same, he just killed two women.”