Jayne Krentz - In Too Deep

Footprints told part of the story. Isabella had entered the cabin. He could see her small, muddy prints on the floor. Two people in running shoes had entered through the back door, gone down the hall to the bathroom and then returned to the front room.

He went out through the kitchen into the backyard. Fresh tire tracks yielded more information. Walker did not own a car. The heavy tread belonged to an SUV.

He had missed something, he was sure of it. The fever searing his blood was making him careless. He had to stop and think or he would not stand a chance in hell of helping Isabella.

He went back into the cabin and stood quietly for a moment, opening his senses without trying to focus. The residue of some familiar currents of energy shivered in the atmosphere. He recognized them. One of the missing Victorian gadgets. That was how they had grabbed Isabella.

He saw the corner of the business card sticking out from under the rug. He picked it up. The name on the card confirmed his theory of the case.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered again.

He finally became aware of the small crowd forming on the front porch of the cabin. He looked through the open door and saw that half the town had followed him.

Henry stepped forward. “What’s wrong, Jones? What happened to Isabella and Walker?”

“They’ve been kidnapped,” Fallon said.

The knot of people stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Who would want to kidnap Walker and Isabella?” Marge demanded. “It’s not like they’re rich. There’s no one to pay a ransom.”

“This isn’t about money,” Fallon said. “It’s about those damn Bridewell curiosities. Walker must have seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. I think Isabella was in the wrong place at the wrong time, so she was taken, too.”

“It wasn’t an accident that they took her,” Patty said. “She had a feeling that Walker was in trouble. That’s why she came here today to check on him. She thought maybe he was ill.”

“What do we do now?” Violet asked. “Call the cops? It will take hours for them to get here, assuming they will even take a missing persons call seriously.”

“I know who took Walker and Isabella,” Fallon said. “Odds are they are still alive and will stay that way until nightfall. The person who is behind this has been very careful about not leaving any evidence. There’s no reason she would change her pattern now. She’s got a companion, someone to do the heavy lifting. They’ll wait until dark and then they’ll do what we plan to do with Lasher’s skeleton.”

“Dump them into the ocean?” Marge asked, horrified.

“Yes,” Fallon said. “They won’t want to drive far with a couple of kidnap victims in the back of an SUV. Too much risk of being pulled over by a cop. They’ll stash Walker and Isabella somewhere until it’s safe to get rid of them.”

Marge looked at him, her face deeply shadowed with anxiety. “You keep saying she. You think that a woman took Isabella and Walker?”

“Her real name is Dr. Sylvia Tremont,” Fallon said. “She’s a curator at the Arcane museum in L.A. Everyone thinks she’s on sabbatical in London. She’s not. She’s working real estate over in Willow Creek under the name Norma Spaulding.”

Spaulding Properties was housed in a quaint, weathered commercial building on the main street of Willow Creek. The “Closed” sign showed in the window. Fallon walked past the entrance without pausing, as though he were headed to the drugstore on the corner.

When he reached the narrow strip of muddy grass that separated the premises of the real estate business from the restaurant next door, he turned quickly and went around to the back door of Spaulding Properties.

The rear door was locked, but that did not come as a surprise. Fallon reached inside his jacket and removed one of the electronic lock picks that he handed out like candy to J&J agents. It took less than three seconds to open the door. Whatever secrets Sylvia Tremont was hiding, she was not concealing them inside the office.

The back room of Spaulding Properties was remarkably uncluttered. There were no reams of paper, no stacks of printed brochures or any business machines. It had taken less than two minutes on the computer to discover that Norma Spaulding had not closed a sale in the four weeks that the office had been open.

He moved into the main room. The lack of sales had not stopped a few desperate homeowners from listing their properties with Spaulding Properties. Unappealing photos of a handful of aged cabins and the old Zander mansion adorned the wall.

He disregarded the mansion because, although it was no longer an active crime scene, it had become a grisly attraction for tourists and thrill seekers. It would not make a good place to hold Isabella and Walker.

He slipped into his other senses and studied the half-dozen featured listings with the cold-blooded logic of a killer. Swiftly he calculated distances from Walker’s house, the degree of geographical isolation offered by the various properties and the proximity to the two locations in the area that provided the kind of powerful, reliable currents required to drag two bodies out to sea and make sure that the evidence disappeared.

Tremont would not use the Point, he concluded. It was too close to Scargill Cove. There was a serious risk that someone in town would see her and her companion, even in the midst of a storm. That left the second location, the blowhole site. The surf was violent there, and the currents were extreme. In the summer it was a popular tourist attraction. There was a convenient turnout.

In the end, one cabin stood out as the obvious choice. Certainty whispered through him.

He yanked the listing sheet off the wall and headed for the door. Although he was ninety-nine-point-two percent sure of his calculations, there was a small, but very real, possibility that he was wrong. He had to cover all the bases. Isabella’s life was at stake. He opened his phone.

Henry answered halfway through the first ring.

“Six possible locations where she might be keeping Isabella and Walker,” Fallon said. “I’m taking one. I’ll read you the list of the other five properties. They’re all empty cabins along the bluffs. You and the others check them. No one goes alone, understood?”

“Guns?” Henry asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Fallon said. “Take guns. And the dogs. They know Isabella. If she’s in one of those cabins, they’ll tell you.”

“Those dogs love Isabella. They’ll rip out the throat of anyone who tries to hurt her.”

Isabella dreamed . . . She was waltzing with Fallon, wearing her lovely midnight-blue gown and her black crystal shoes. Fallon was resplendent in his black-and-white tux, the ultimate power suit.They circled the glittering ballroom to the strains of the relentless beat. She should have been deliriously happy, but everything seemed wrong.The ballroom was painfully bright, lit up with paranormal radiation from the most disturbing sectors of the spectrum. The senses-dazzling glare made it impossible to see the other dancers or the musicians. On top of that, the music was extremely annoying. She found herself wishing that it would stop.And Fallon was not being at all lover-like. He looked at her with eyes that were hot and dangerous with psi fever.“I’m on my way, Isabella. You do whatever you have to do to stay alive until I get to you. Do you hear me?”“Yes,” she said. “I hear you. But what about the music?”“Find the source and turn it off.”“How do I do that?”“That’s your problem. You’re a J&J agent. You’re supposed to figure these things out on your own.”She frowned, thinking. “But you’re not really here with me, are you?”“No.”“Then how can you be talking to me? There’s no such thing as telepathy.”“True,” Fallon said. “But you know me well enough to know what I’d be saying to you if I were there with you.”“Right.”She looked around, trying to bring the ballroom into focus, searching for the source of the music. She could do this. She had a talent for finding things.