Hunting Fear (13 page)

“So you’ll be reading tonight?”

“I thought I would.”

Needles clicking, her hazel eyes fixed on Samantha, Ellis said, “You think he’s coming back, don’t you?”

“Maybe you should be the one doing the readings.”

“No, I don’t have your gift for reading strangers. I read people I know. And I know you. Why do you think he’ll come back here, Sam?”

“Because he likes carnivals well enough to have been here at least twice; much as I love this place, one visit usually satisfies anybody over the age of twelve.” With a shrug, she added, “And because he doesn’t know about me yet.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve mentioned that to Luke.”

“It didn’t come up.”

Ellis shook her head slightly. “Sam, we’ve had reporters nosing around here the last couple of days. Leo took down your posters, but even so a few photographers got pictures. What if this maniac sees you on the six o’clock news? He’ll definitely know about you then.”

“I don’t think he watches the news. I think he watches Luke.”

“Willing to bet your life on that?”

Samantha shrugged again. “The life of a cop I happen to like can be measured now in hours. If Lindsay isn’t found by late tomorrow afternoon, she’ll be found dead. The other cops are doing their thing. Luke is doing his, or trying to. The only thing I can do is what I can do. Open my booth and do readings, and hope he shows up.”

“For a reading? Would he be that reckless?”

“Depends. He might be curious, the way most people are. If I’m for real. If I can sense what he’s up to.”

“And if you can?”

“Then I’ll do my damnedest not to let him know I know while I memorize his face and try to gather all the information I can from him.”

“Dangerous.”

“Not if I keep my wits about me.”

“Even if. And do you really believe he’d leave someone he kidnapped alone while he visits a carnival?”

“Yes.” With a frown, Samantha added, “I don’t know why I believe that, but I do. If Luke hadn’t pulled me out of that car, I might have seen more, heard more, picked up something to tell me who the bastard is.”

Reading between the lines—something she was good at—Ellis said, “Ah. So the frostnip is from the steering wheel?”

“Yeah.”

“And since Luke pulled you out of the car—”

“I won’t pick up anything by touching it a second time, at least not for a while. Somebody explained it to me once. Something about tapping into and releasing electromagnetic energy. It’s like static. Touch something metallic once, and you get shocked; touch it again right away and you don’t, because the energy’s already been discharged. You have to walk around on the carpet in your socks and let the static build up again.” She frowned. “Or something like that.”

“You don’t really care how it works, do you?”

“Not so much. It is what it is.”

“Mmm. But you did pick up enough to believe the kidnapper likes carnivals.”

Samantha looked down at her hands, absently moving them in the water. “I think he likes games. And right now, we’re the only other game in Golden.”

“The other one being Catch Me if You Can?”

“I don’t think it’s even that. I think it’s I’m Smarter than You Are.”

“Than who is?”

“Luke.”

“I hope you told him that, at least.”

“I did. He wasn’t happy.”

“I can imagine. Word is, this kidnapper has more than a dozen victims to his credit, all but one of them dead. If it’s all just been a game . . .”

“Nightmarish, yeah.”

“Certainly not easy to live with. Even if it was beyond your control.”

Samantha frowned and lifted her hands out of the water. “The water’s cooling. And my hands are tingling and itching like crazy.”

Ellis put her knitting aside and went to refill the pot with fresh warm water, saying, “Once more, and then you should be okay. Your hands’ll probably tingle and itch for a while, though.”

Sighing, Samantha plunged her hands back into warm water. “You don’t seem surprised that I got frostnipped by a vision,” she commented.

“I’ve seen enough over the years to know that your visions are pretty damned real. So, no, not very surprised. But what was cold in the vision? Where she’s being kept?”

“No. She wasn’t cold at all. But almost the instant the vision snapped into focus, I was freezing.”

“Why, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“The universe trying to tell you something, maybe?”

“Well, he’s not holding her at the North Pole, I know that much.”

“Stop being so literal-minded.”

“I’m always literal-minded, you know that. It comes from a lack of imagination.”

“You do
not
lack imagination. You just have a practical streak about a yard wide, that’s all.”

Samantha shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Think about it, Sam. If she wasn’t in a cold place, then what caused the frostnip? When you think of that sort of bone-deep cold, what else do you think of?”

“I don’t know. Something empty. Bottomless. Something dark.” She paused, then added reluctantly, “Death. It felt like death.”

Lucas would have been the first to admit that what they were doing was searching for a very fine needle in a huge haystack, but that didn’t stop him from trying to find it.

Her.

All afternoon, as they sifted through property records and rental agreements supplied by local realtors, he tried to reach out mentally and emotionally, to connect with Lindsay.

Nothing.

“I knew she had a lot of self-control,” he told Jaylene as the late afternoon grew gloomy and thunder rumbled in the mountains all around them. “She’s the type who won’t want to show any fear at all. Which means that as long as she’s hiding it from him, she’s also hiding it from me.”

Jaylene, knowing what was on his mind without any need of psychic ability, said, “There’s no way we could have known she’d be taken, Luke.”

“Still. If we’d told Wyatt and Lindsay about our abilities—mine, at least—then maybe she’d be trying to reach out to me instead of damping down the fear.”

“Maybe. And maybe not. Chances are they’d never have believed us anyway. Wyatt’s still convinced Sam makes a living conning people.”

“The badge makes a difference. You know that.” His mouth twisted. “Credibility.”

“I say it was the right call at the time.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“Look, we’re making some progress here.” Jaylene tapped the legal pad on the table in front of her. “The list of likely properties is fairly long, but at least it’s manageable. The question is, can we cover them all before tomorrow afternoon? And how do we persuade Wyatt that having his people storm these places is not the best way to go?”

“He won’t do anything to further endanger Lindsay.”

“No, I won’t,” Metcalf said as he came into the room. He looked a bit haggard, but calm. “What is it you don’t want me to do?”

“Storm these places,” Lucas replied readily. “They need to be checked out, one at a time, but quietly, Wyatt. If we get lucky and find him, we can’t forget he has a hostage he could use to hold us off for a long time. We have to be careful, approach every area with all possible caution so he isn’t alerted. That means we can’t send your deputies searching on their own unless you’re very, very sure they know what they’re doing and will follow their orders to the letter.”

The sheriff considered, then said, “I have, maybe, half a dozen people I’m absolutely sure of. They have the training and experience to do this right, and none of them will panic or jump the gun. They’ll follow orders.”

“We’ve got a lengthy list of possibilities,” Lucas told him. “All of them remote properties with plenty of privacy.”

“Because Zarina says that’s where he’ll be.”

“Because common sense says she’s right. He might have taken advantage of abandoned property somewhere, but it would be risking someone showing up and discovering him, and I don’t believe he’d do that. If he doesn’t have a connection to Golden—and right now, that’s all we’ve got to narrow the search—then chances are good that he leased, rented, or purchased property sometime before Mitchell Callahan was kidnapped and since the victim just before him, two months ago in Georgia.”

Jaylene murmured, “Unless he’s been planning this a lot longer than we know and got the property anything up to a couple of years ago.”

“Oh, hell, don’t even suggest that,” Lucas said, so immediately that it was obvious he’d been thinking along similar lines. “We have to go with the most likely possibility, and the most likely is that he got the property fairly recently, over the summer.”

“We move a lot of property in the summer,” Metcalf noted.

“Which is why the list isn’t a short one.”

Jaylene checked her watch, then listened to yet another rumble of thunder. “It won’t be easy if the weather’s against us, but I say we get started whether it storms or not. We don’t have much daylight left either way—but I don’t think we should wait for dawn.”

The sheriff had brought in a large county map, which Lucas unrolled on the conference table, and all three bent over it. Within forty-five minutes, they had all the properties on their list marked in red on the map.

“All over Clayton County,” Metcalf said with a sigh. “And some of these places are remote as hell. Even with all the luck we can muster, we’ll be hard-pressed to check out every location by five o’clock tomorrow.”

“Then we’d better get to it,” Jaylene suggested. “Wyatt, if you want to call in the deputies you trust to help, Luke and I will start dividing up the list. Three teams, I think?”

He nodded and left the conference room.

Jaylene watched her partner as he frowned down at the map. “Getting anything?”

His eyes moved restlessly from red mark to red mark, and half under his breath he murmured, “Come on, Lindsay, talk to me.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than Jaylene saw him go pale and suck in a sudden breath, his eyes taking on a curiously flat shine. It was something with which she was familiar, but it never failed to send a little chill down her spine.

“Luke?”

Still gazing at the map, he said slowly, “It’s gone now. But for just an instant I think I connected. It was like . . . she felt a jolt of absolute, wordless terror.”

“Where?” Jaylene asked.

“Here.” He indicated a handsbreadth area in the western part of the county. “Somewhere here.”

The area covered at least twenty square miles of the roughest terrain in the county and held nearly a dozen of their red marks.

“Okay,” Jaylene said. “That’s where you and I start looking.”

“I just want to know if he’s going to ask me to the homecoming dance.” Her voice was so nervous it wobbled, but it was determined as well, and her blue eyes were fixed on Samantha’s face with desperate intensity.

Samantha tried to remember what it felt like to be sixteen and so desperate about so many things, but even so she knew she had nothing in common with this pretty teenage girl or her ordinary life. There had been no homecoming dance for Samantha, no high-school rituals or worries about the right dress or who the football team’s star quarterback would ask out on Friday night.

At sixteen, Samantha’s worries had included putting in long hours to earn enough money so she didn’t starve, preferably without selling her body or soul in the process.

But she felt no resentment toward this girl, and her voice—lower and more formal than her usual speaking voice but with no fake accent—remained calm and soothing. “Then that is what I will tell you. Concentrate on this boy, close your eyes, and picture his face. And when you are sure you have his image in your mind, give me your hand.”

She had been using her crystal ball earlier in the evening, but for some reason tonight it had bothered her eyes to stare into it, so she had abandoned that prop for the less dramatic but more direct and often more accurate palm reading.

The teenager sat with eyes closed and pretty face screwed into fierce concentration for a moment, then opened her eyes and thrust out her right hand.

Samantha held it gently in both of hers, bending forward over it to seemingly peer intently at the lines crisscrossing the palm. She traced the lifeline with a light finger, more for effect than because she was “reading” the actual line.

She knew a bit more about palmistry than the average person—but only a bit more.

Her own eyes half closed, she was seeing something far different from the girl’s hand. “I see the boy in your mind,” she murmured. “He is wearing a uniform. Baseball, not football. He is a pitcher.”

The girl gasped audibly.

Samantha tilted her head to one side, and added, “He will ask you out, Megan, but not to the homecoming dance. Another boy will ask you to the homecoming dance.”

“Oh, no!”

“You will not be disappointed, I promise you. This is the boy you are meant to be with at this time in your life.”