Hunting Fear (20 page)

Staring down at it, Samantha heard herself ask, “How do you know it didn’t belong to Lindsay?”

“Because she was terrified of spiders.” Caitlin grimaced. “Dumb for a cop, she said, but she’d been that way since we were kids. The last time we talked, she told me she had her apartment exterminated once a month just to make damned sure none of them got in. It was a real phobia, believe me.”

“Still,” Samantha said, “this isn’t a real spider.”

“Doesn’t matter. Lindsay couldn’t bear even a picture of one, and she would never—
ever
—own a piece of jewelry with a spider on it.”

“Could have been a gift.”

“She wouldn’t have kept it. Samantha, I’m absolutely positive this didn’t belong to Lindsay.”

“Where did you find it?”

“On her nightstand, of all places. She
really
wouldn’t have had anything like this near her bed. That would have totally freaked her out. When she was just a toddler, a spider got into her crib. Our mom was downstairs, and it took her a few minutes to get up there; Lindsay always said it was the longest few minutes of her life and that she could remember every second vividly, how she was so terrified she couldn’t even move. The spider wasn’t poisonous or anything, but she’s had nightmares about it ever since.”

“So you think . . . somebody put this in her apartment?”

“Lindsay wouldn’t have touched it, I know that much.”

“If the sheriff gave it to her—”

Caitlin was shaking her head. “From what I gather, they’d been lovers for months and worked together much longer than that. He’s not the sort of man to consider something like this a joke, especially since he’d know what she was genuinely afraid of. Lindsay would have told him. Hell, it was practically the first thing she told anybody she met, especially socially. ‘Hi, I’m Lindsay and I hate spiders with a vengeance.’ Didn’t she tell you?”

“As a matter of fact, she did,” Samantha admitted slowly. “When I was staying at the sheriff’s department, she came down and had coffee with me a couple of times. Sort of jokingly asked if I could look into the future and promise she wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t be bitten by a spider and die,” Caitlin finished steadily. “When we were kids, Lindsay was afraid of two things, and only two things: spiders and water over her head. She overcame her fear of water by learning to swim. In fact, she was on a champion swim team in college. But she was never able to conquer her fear of spiders.”

To herself, Samantha murmured, “Spiders would have been impractical, maybe impossible. No control there. Just seeing them would have caused her to panic. Not the slow, dawning realization he wanted. The gradual buildup of fear. So he had to use water.”

Grim, Caitlin said, “When they told me he’d drowned her, all I thought at first was how horrible it was for her to die that way. The way she’d once feared she would. And what a coincidence that he’d pick that. When I found this on her nightstand . . . It wasn’t a coincidence at all, was it? He didn’t just want to kill her, he wanted to scare her.”

“You’re assuming he put this in her apartment.”

“Aren’t you?”

Samantha nodded slowly. “The question is, did he do it before or after he took her?”

“Had to be after,” Caitlin said immediately. “Or at least after she left home that morning. I wasn’t kidding when I said she wouldn’t have something like this near her. If she’d seen it, it wouldn’t have been left there. A pair of kitchen tongs and a paper bag, probably.”

“If that’s the case,” Samantha said, “then this wasn’t left for Lindsay to find. It was left for someone else.”

“Me? Knowing I’d clean out the apartment?”

“I don’t think so. He sent the ransom note to Metcalf. I’m willing to bet he expected the sheriff to be the one to check out her apartment. In fact, I bet he did, right after she disappeared. But she didn’t disappear from home, so it wasn’t a crime scene and wasn’t sealed—and he was extremely upset. Probably just charged in and looked around quickly. He must have missed this.”

“I don’t get it,” Caitlin said. “Why try to alert the sheriff—her lover—to the fact that he wanted to scare her?”

Samantha drew a breath and rubbed her hands together briefly, then reached out for the pendant. “Let’s find out,” she said.

When Lucas reported the conversation with Wyatt and the sheriff’s suspicions of Samantha and the carnival, Jaylene thoughtfully asked, “Think he might be right?”

“No. I don’t believe there’s any conspiracy here, not to commit the crimes and not to hide them. One man. One kidnapper. And he’s a loner. An observer. He’d never be a part of any average group, let alone a carnival.”

“So you and Bishop still agree on the profile.”

“The basics, yeah. That our kidnapper is an older man, thirty-five to forty-five, and probably lacks a criminal record. He’s careful, compulsive, highly organized, and goal-oriented. Likely to be single, though he may be divorced or widowed. He could be gainfully employed but is just as likely to be independently wealthy through some inheritance—even before the ransoms he’s been paid so far.”

“You didn’t agree with the boss even in the beginning, though, about the reason why this guy kills his victims. Bishop was by the book: the psychological probability is that a kidnapper kills his victim to avoid identification.”

Lucas frowned and, almost as an aside, said, “Odd, that. He so seldom goes by the book in profiling.”

“Well, it looks like you were right to suspect another motive. The kidnapper still may be killing them to avoid identification, but it looks a bit less likely now. And Sam
was
right about broken minds not really working the way we expect them to.”

“Yeah.” But Lucas was still frowning.

“You’re worried about her.”

He shrugged that off, not entirely convincingly. “Sam can take care of herself.”

“Doesn’t stop you worrying.”

“I’m just thinking we might have missed something very important.”

“What?”

“As unlikely as his theory is, Wyatt may be right about one thing. The kidnapper may well be connected to the carnival or the route they took.”

Jaylene waited, brows raised.

“It’s just a feeling I got while he was talking, laying out this carnival conspiracy he can’t get out of his head.”

“It’s not going to be pleasant,” she murmured.

Lucas nodded with a grimace. “If we can’t find a more legitimate target for him to focus on, he’s going to waste time and energy, and shine a very unwelcome and hostile spotlight on the carnival.”

“And on Sam.”

“Yeah. No telling whether the town will remain simply curious or become unfriendly once they see where their sheriff’s suspicions lie. Especially now that a cop has died, and a female cop at that.”

“You could see it in the faces of all her fellow cops at Lindsay’s funeral. They’re taking it hard. And they want someone to blame just like Wyatt does.”

“I know.” Lucas shook his head. “Still, when it comes to that sort of thing, as long as it stops short of violence, Leo can take care of the carnival and, like I said, Sam can take care of herself. That’s not what worries me.”

“Then what? If the kidnapper isn’t involved with the carnival, how could he be connected with it?”

“Ever since Sam dropped her bombshell about this guy playing his little game with me, we’ve considered the possibility if not probability that the kidnapper could have been observing us while we followed along behind him these last months.”

“Makes sense, if Sam is right and he sees this as some twisted competition with you. The note we found in that old barn certainly seems to point in that direction. That was a very personal taunt, directed at you by name.”

“Yeah. But what if he hasn’t just been watching me, you, the investigation? Sam thinks he’s a natural profiler, that he’s done his research on me and on the SCU. If that’s true—”

“If that’s true,” Jaylene finished, “then he might know about your past relationship with Sam.”

“It was in the newspapers, some of it,” Lucas said. “The case, the carnival. Sam. Just the local papers, but still. Everything’s available now, stored digitally or on the Internet, ready for anybody to look it up. Somebody who knows how could find those stories easily, read between the lines and learn . . . quite a bit.”

“Then we have to assume he knows all about Sam.”

Slowly, Lucas said, “And about the carnival. About their seasonal route, just as Wyatt suggested. Jaylene . . . I think we’d better compare that route to the series of kidnappings ourselves. We can find any correlation faster than Wyatt and his people will be able to; we have more background info on all the other kidnappings.”

“Okay, but . . . are you thinking the kidnapper
made
Sam part of his game? Somehow controlled her appearance here, her involvement? How? How could he have done that?”

“It’s not impossible, if you look at it from another angle. He could have done what Wyatt’s doing now. Researched the carnival’s route, maybe even followed them from town to town last season or even earlier. You said yourself, we don’t
know
he hasn’t been planning all this for much longer than the eighteen months he’s been active. He could have begun setting all this up—setting us up—two or more years ago.”

“You really believe that’s possible?”

Lucas said, “It hit me while Wyatt was talking. I know every member of the carnival, and none of them is the person we’re after. I’m positive of that. But if the kidnappings do coincide with the nearby presence of the carnival for eighteen months, all across the East and Southeast, that
can’t
be a coincidence. What isn’t coincidence is planned.”

“By the kidnapper.”

“Part of the game somehow. Or the setup for the game. Getting all his chess pieces on the board. Arranging everything to his liking. Playing God. We have no way of knowing how many goddamned sets of puppet strings he’s pulled.”

“That would be . . . diabolical, Luke. To involve the carnival, Sam, to pull you in. To spend all that time planning and kidnapping and killing all those other victims, all of it designed to get you here, now, under these circumstances. It’s elaborate as hell.
Complicated
doesn’t begin to describe it.” She paused and stared at him. “Something like this doesn’t just happen, we both know that. There’s always a catalyst. A trigger. If he went to all this trouble, then something set him off.”

“Yes.”

“Something personal. He’s out to prove to you that he’s better. Smarter, stronger, faster—whatever. Just like Sam said. But not because of any media attention focused on you. Not because he just happened to notice how good you were and decided to test your abilities. He’s doing this because, somewhere in your past, in his past, you stepped on his toes.”

Lucas nodded. “If we’re right about all this, I know him. So part of the game will be figuring out how I know him. And what, if anything, I did to him to put him on this path.”

“Sam was right about something else, you know. No matter what, you didn’t create this monster.”

“Maybe not, but I seem to have created the game, however inadvertently. Inspired it, at least. And so far, more than a dozen people have died.”

Jaylene knew better than to offer either logic or platitudes, so she merely said, “Sam said she was certain you couldn’t win the game without her.”

“Yeah.”

“And if this guy has been investigating you, tracking you, and does know about you and Sam, then you’re probably right about there being nothing coincidental in her presence here. However he did it, he must have deliberately included her in the game, somehow maneuvered her here. And while your psychic abilities haven’t been publicized since you joined the unit, hers are posted outside the carnival on a marquee every night.”

Lucas nodded slowly. “The thought had occurred.”

“Do you think that’s what Sam’s been hiding from us? The fact that she knows the kidnapper is fully aware of who and what she is?”

“Another thing I think we’d better find out. Because in the wrong hands, Sam could be an unbeatable advantage.”

“And in the right hands?”

“An unbeatable advantage.”

Getting to her feet as he got to his, Jaylene said, “Am I wrong, or isn’t the queen the most powerful piece on the board in chess?”

“You’re not wrong.”

“Um. Have you told Bishop yet? About Samantha being here? Being involved?”

“He knew, more or less. The news reports.”

“Did he say anything about this chess game?”

“Yeah,” Lucas replied rather grimly. “He told me not to lose.”

As soon as Samantha picked up the small silver medallion, it started.

The black curtain swept over her, the blackness thick as tar, the silence absolute. For an instant, she felt she was being physically carried somewhere, all in a rush; she even briefly felt the sensation of wind, of pressure, against her body.

Then stillness and the chilling awareness of a nothingness so vast it was almost beyond comprehension. Limbo. She was suspended, weightless and even formless, in a void somewhere beyond this world and before the next.