Acquired Motives (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 2) (9 page)

     
"I've got to talk to you." His voice was a hoarse whisper. He still gripped her shoulder. She looked into his eyes—they were light blue with pinprick pupils. They were the eyes of someone who suffered from sleep deprivation, caffeine overload, and maybe something more ominous. Sylvia had seen speed freaks more relaxed than Special Agent Dan Chaney.

     
"What's this about?"

     
"We can't talk here." Abruptly, he let go of her shoulder.

     
Sylvia felt infected by the federal agent's profound unease. His anxiety was palpable. "Have you seen Matt? We heard you were—"

     
"I know about last night," Chaney interrupted sharply.

     
"You were up at the crime scene, where Anthony Randall was murdered. . . ." Sylvia's voice trailed off.

     
Chaney nodded once. He said, "Sylvia, I know what's going on. I know who assaulted you." For an instant, his face softened, and the old Dan Chaney appeared like a ghost. Curious, diligent, oddly gentle. Then he was gone, buried under this taut mask.

     
"You know who broke into Matt's trailer?" Sylvia surrendered to Dan Chaney's urgency. Her instinct to help Matt's old friend was shoved aside by the pressing need to hear what he had to say about her attacker. Chaney might be functioning on emotional overload, but he had always been an excellent federal agent.

     
"Sylvia, you've got yourself a problem." He gestured to a tan Lincoln Town Car double-parked on the street. "Follow me."

     
Sylvia was two cars behind Dan Chaney's Lincoln, driving south on Cerrillos. They were headed to his motel instead of the Santa Fe office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Chaney had insisted on an informal meeting. Sylvia guessed he was working a stakeout.

     
As she passed Siler Road, a cloud cleared the sun, and the light became brilliant. Luminous. This was the high desert's familiar and legendary summer light: crystal clear and achingly beautiful. For the past few weeks, the sky had been hazed by smog and the residue of wildfires.

     
Sylvia braked at a red light. Forty years earlier, Cerrillos Road had been a dirt lane fronting farms and orchards. Now, because it connected downtown with the interstate, a hodgepodge of fast-food joints, franchises, and minimarts lined its shoulders. The light went green, and traffic crept forward. Just ahead Sylvia saw Chaney turn off to the right. She followed and parked in the lot of the Rode Inn.

     
Elbowed between Burger King and Carpet World, the Rode Inn rented by the week or the month. The interior hallway smelled of cigarettes and soiled laundry. The frayed carpet was a sorry clash of orange and red. Sylvia took a shallow breath. Special Agent Dan Chaney was definitely living on the fringe these days.

     
Uneasy, she followed him down the hall. He kept his body erect and butt flat; Sylvia noticed the right shoulder canted slightly. She hoped he hadn't been trying to bust through doors. When he reached Number 222, he used a key.

     
Inside, Sylvia squeezed past Chaney. The odor of sweat and apprehension hit her dead on. She stepped over a T-shirt, between stacks of what seemed to be files, newspaper clippings, official reports. A map of the Western states lay open on the bed.

     
The only window in the room was curtained. Straight ahead, the television was on, humming softly, but the screen glowed blue. The agent had placed a framed photograph of Nina Valdez on top of the TV. Sylvia felt wooed by the high cheekbones, deepset eyes, and wide mouth; she knew how the woman's lovely face must haunt Dan Chaney.

     
Now Sylvia was also certain that Dan Chaney wasn't working a case—at least not officially.

     
And that made her feel worse. Her heart sank. She paced the room, glanced out the curtained window for a view of the parking lot, Chaney's Lincoln, and her Volvo. The motel windowpane was cracked. In the tiny open closet, one shirt hung limply over a hanger. The bathroom's fluorescent lights revealed cheap tile and fixtures. Chaney fit right in.

     
She turned to face him now. "How did you know about last night?"

     
He ran a thick hand over his stub-cut hair and shrugged. "Shit, Sylvia, I'm an agent. It was all over the scanner." In the next room, a door slammed and the plywood and plaster motel walls vibrated. Chaney's body went rigid.

     
Sylvia fought her own instinct to tighten up. The man was behaving like a crazed alcoholic coming off a binge, not a law enforcement professional.

     
She faced him, and her dark eyes explored his limpid blues for a moment, but that particular entrance to his soul was closed. Her voice was gentle when she said, "Dan, does anybody know you're here? Can I call someone?"

     
He ignored her questions, hunkered on the edge of the bed, and eased a photograph from a dog-eared file. "See if this reminds you of anything?"

     
The photo was an enlargement. The subject was a corpse. The victim had been bound and burned, just like Anthony Randall. Sylvia said, "Where did you get this?"

     
When Chaney saw the fear in her eyes he gave a quick nod of approval. "California law enforcement raided a ranch south of Mojave earlier this year. They found Polaroids of two other victims—both adult males—and they found home movies of the murders."

     
She sat wearily on the bed. "So are we talking about a serial killer? Vigilantes? I don't understand what's going on."

     
Chaney leaned toward Sylvia, took the photograph from her fingers, and lowered his voice until it was sensual in its intensity. "The dead man in this particular photograph was a child molester until he met up with our mutual friend Dupont White."

     
Although the name sounded only vaguely familiar, Sylvia knew that Dupont White must be Chaney's enemy—the man responsible for Nina Valdez's death. Then instinct was bluntly shoved aside by facts.

     
"Dan, this man—this Dupont White—he was the gunrunner who was killed in Las Cruces. In the warehouse blowout. I remember now."

     
Without moving a muscle, Chaney pulled himself back, reined in his emotions—almost invisibly, but Sylvia saw the transition.

     
"Dupont White's death"—Chaney stood and cocked fingers to sign quotations around "death"—"his death is an official lie. The Bureau has no proof. All the evidence went up with the warehouse."

     
Dread ran through Sylvia's body like a chemical. She didn't know if Chaney was delusional or a whistle-blower. The mattress springs dug into her buttocks. She was hot and sweaty. And she wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. But she also wanted to hear what proof Dan Chaney had—if any.

     
It was a hard sell, and Chaney sensed his narrow window of opportunity. He paced a few steps andcontinued quietly. "Dupont White hawks black-market hardware to skinheads in Idaho, the Aryan Nation in California, and Lone Star Nazis. It's all part of his paranoid mission to fuck over the cops, the feds, his daddy—everyone who fucked him over first." Chaney stopped moving, rubbed his neck with short, thick fingers, and studied Sylvia for an uncomfortably long time. She refused to veer her eyes under his gaze. Finally he sat down next to her, and his lips turned up into a crooked smile. "For your own safety, you really should believe me, Sylvia."

     
"Believe you? Jesus, Dan, you're talking about a dead man." She took a breath and set her palms on her thighs, fingers spread. Apprehension pushed her to act, to get out of this room, this motel. She didn't move.

     
In a quieter voice, she said, "It's been two months since the warehouse blowout. Hasn't the F.B.I. completed DNA tests? Don't they have proof of Dupont White's death?"

     
Wearily, Chaney ran a hand across his temple to ease a throbbing pain. "It's more complicated than that. The Bureau won't release their findings. They don't want any of this made public."

     
"Oh, come on, why the hell not? Are you suggesting this is a federal conspiracy?"

     
"Don't forget, I was there," he answered quietly. Sylvia was startled when an image appeared suddenly on the television screen.

     
"When they raided the ranch in California, they found this footage." Chaney nodded toward the screen.

     
The camera panned, jumped, and a grainy image pulled into focus: a desert moonscape.

     
Sylvia glanced at the agent. His mouth hung open—eyes glommed on film he'd seen a hundred times—his hand gripped the remote. Sylvia's attention was drawn back to the video. The quality was poor, black-and-white and grainy, but watchable.

     
The camera's eye slid to the ground and closed in on something long and white. Rope. Sylvia swallowed uncomfortably as the camera moved again, jerked along, as if it were a hound following a ripe scent.

     
The camera stopped on a man's face. Eyes stared blindly out at the viewer. His mouth was open, he was breathing hard and fast. Then there was blurred motion as if the camera had been dropped. For what seemed an interminably long time, the screen was gray. When the camera finally pulled roughly back to reveal the captive's naked body, Sylvia heard herself groan. He was on his back, arms and legs outstretched, lashed between four metal stakes. His skin was wet.

     
She could hear Chaney's drawn breath; but it wasn't Chaney, it was her own quick inhalation. Nothing else. There was no soundtrack to the homemade video as it became a montage of horrific images: a hand gripping a burning flare, an arm extending over the man's naked body, the flare dropped.

     
And then, in an instant, flames exploded from the prisoner's gasoline-soaked belly, chest, face.

     
Sylvia put her hand to her mouth, but she couldn't take her eyes from the burning man—not even when the camera pulled in for a blurry close-up. The body became alive and breathing with flames. Chaney leaned forward on the bed.

     
Abruptly, the camera pulled back, refocused on a pair of black combat boots, panned up the legs of the killer.

     
Sylvia knew this must be Dupont White.

     
He was wearing army fatigues. He had his back to the viewer. A dark ponytail spilled over his broad shoulders.

     
As he turned toward the camera, Sylvia realized she was holding her breath. Her lungs hurt, she was aware of sharp pain along her ribs.

     
His face is smeared with mud or paint
. Black pigment circled the whites of his eyes and spread up over his broad forehead. Dark stripes had been smudged along his cheeks. His thick, flat lips—smeared with black—pulled into a grin.

     
Like the face of her attacker.

     
He was arrogant, grandiose, a dark pagan god.

     
Chaney froze the image.

     
Sylvia felt numb with fear. She forced herself to speak. "If he's alive, if he's doing this, the authorities—"

     
"I
am
the authorities," Chaney said tersely. "My superiors didn't believe me, and they won't believe you."

     
Her fear exploded into anger, and she bolted up from the bed. "That's not good enough! You bring me here to tell me this crazy s.o.b. broke into Matt's trailer after he murdered Anthony Randall? You're telling me I was kicked by a dead man? If you really believe your story, let's talk to Matt, and then we'll go back to the F.B.I. and we'll deal with this in a sane way."

     
"It's too late for that."

     
"Well, come on, dammit." She was angry and she was scared. It was bad to think that Chaney might be on the run, paranoid, obsessed with a dead man. It was worse to think he might be telling the truth.

     
Chaney wiped sweat from his forehead. His eyes were bloodshot. The stubble of his beard shaded the lower half of his face. He shoved a thick manila file folder into Sylvia's hands. "Read this if you want to know more about Dupont White."

     
Sylvia stared down at the folder.

     
Chaney's voice dropped to a whisper. "Everyone Dupont touches turns up crazy or dead. Violet Miller—his girlfriend—ended up in a California hospital for the criminally insane. His partner—a killer named Cole Lynch—he's at the pen."

     
Sylvia shook her head. "Why would Dupont be after
me
?"

     
"You'll have to answer that one—you're the shrink. But my guess is he doesn't like your clients."

     
Chaney grasped Sylvia's hand, and he steered her across the room. When they reached the door, he said, "I brought you here to scare you, to warn you, Sylvia. We tracked Dupont to Santa Fe right before he came to Las Cruces for the deal at the warehouse. He was here—now he's back. He's alive. I hope to God you listen to me."

     
Her voice was soft when she asked, "What about you, Dan? Do you need money, a place to stay? You need help."

     
"Me?" Chaney stared at her vacantly. "I'm going to find the sonofabitch, and I'm going to kill him."

     
Sylvia felt his eyes on her back as she retraced her steps down the motel hall.

     
In a daze, she pulled out into traffic on Cerrillos Road. Her car radio was on, playing an old Righteous Brothers tune, but she did not hear the words. She couldn't shake the images of Dan Chaney or Dupont White.

     
Five blocks beyond the Rode Inn, she turned into the parking lot of a paint store. An old man driving a fat Pontiac swerved to avoid a collision with her Volvo. She didn't see the other driver's fist raised in anger because she was already dialing Matt's pager on her cell phone. She entered her own number and hung up immediately.