Hunting Fear (29 page)

“Oh—right. I’m closed up. ‘Tight as a drum,’ I think you said.”

“That’s what I said. Want to deny it?”

“Samantha, I’m investigating an abduction. A series of them. I’m doing my job. Either help me, or else get the hell out of my way.”

Samantha allowed a long moment to pass, then said simply, “Okay, Luke.” She turned around and left the storage room, and the garage.

He didn’t follow her.

She wasn’t crazy about walking through the sheriff’s department unescorted. None of the cops had said anything to her directly that was openly hostile, but she could feel the stares and the simmering anger. The few who believed she might actually be psychic were angry because she couldn’t instantly tell them where their sheriff was, and the majority were convinced she was somehow to blame for all of this. They didn’t know how, but she was a handy target.

Samantha didn’t really blame them for that reaction; she had seen it before, time and time again; being someone who could always be classed under the heading of “different,” she had learned through bitter experience that people were seldom rational when bad things started happening in their lives.

But understanding that didn’t make it any more comfortable to walk through a building knowing stares and muttered comments lay in your wake. It was only a matter of time, she knew, until the hostility became open. Unless, of course, she proved herself. Unless she helped find their sheriff.

Samantha thought about that as she worked her way through the building and back upstairs. In the vision that had brought her here, she didn’t think this had happened, the sheriff being taken. So the question was, why had it happened this time, with her in the . . . game?

And what could she do about it?

She paused at the conference-room door only long enough to speak to Jaylene. “I’m headed back to the carnival.”

Surprised, the other woman said, “Alone?”

“Looks like. I’d stay if I thought I could help, but the only thing I seem to be doing around here is making all the cops even more tense.”

“Most of them won’t be here much longer,” Jaylene pointed out. “Search teams. We still have that list of remote places to check and double-check.”

“Still.”

“There’s media camped outside. Even more than before, with news of the sheriff’s abduction out.”

“I know.” Samantha hesitated, then said, “I may stop and have a word with them. Luke and I might have been spotted this morning, coming in together, even though it was early. If it comes to that, he could have been seen at the carnival last night, hanging around my booth.”

“And you think you can head off speculation?” Jaylene was skeptical. “Sort of doubt it, Sam.”

“I’m just a bit curious to find out what’s in their suspicious little minds—before the next edition of the newspaper hits the streets, or the six o’clock news on TV.”

“Throwing gasoline on a fire.”

“Maybe. Or maybe water.”

“Luke won’t like it.”

“He’s so pissed at me right now he won’t notice. Unless somebody points it out.”

The two women gazed at each other for a long moment, and then Samantha smiled and retreated.

Staring after her, Jaylene murmured, “So I need to trust you too, huh, Sam? I wonder if I do? I wonder if I even agree that shaking up Luke might be the best thing for him and the case.” She got up, adding under her breath, “Shake nitro, and it blows up in your face. Something to keep in mind.”

Then she went in search of Luke.

Caitlin had considered leaving her small motel room several times that morning, especially when one of the “local” channels she was almost watching broke the news of Sheriff Metcalf’s disappearance and probable abduction. But the most she had done was drive to the nearby café to have coffee and one of their huge cinnamon buns while her room was being cleaned.

The two deputies still watching her—or quite likely a new pair on the day shift—kept within her sight but didn’t go into the café, and she had to wonder how upset they were over having watchdog duty when they undoubtedly wanted to be in on the hunt for their sheriff.

She could sympathize, at least with having to sit around and basically do nothing. It was not fun.

She returned to her room, which now smelled strongly of antiseptic, and resigned herself to a boring day. Dumb soaps on TV, or movies so old they could only be scheduled in the morning dead zone, or news or weather—those seemed to be her main choices for entertainment.

“I need to go to a bookstore,” Caitlin said aloud. “God knows how long it’ll take the cops to let me back into the apartment so I can do what I have to do there. If I’m going to be stuck here for much longer—”

The television abruptly went out.

Caitlin sat there frozen for what seemed like minutes, then said tentatively, “Lindsay?”

The surprise she felt in that moment, oddly enough, had less to do with the possibility that her dead sister was trying to communicate with her than it did the timing. For some reason, she had it in her head that the spirits were abroad in the wee hours of the night or at least after dark, not in the middle of the morning.

Which assumption, she thought, might not be so far off, as the minutes passed and nothing else happened.

“Lindsay?” she repeated, beginning to feel foolish. And beginning to wonder how soon she could get her only line to entertainment repaired.

Quite abruptly, the lights went out. And since Caitlin had drawn the heavy drapes over the single wide window, the darkness was complete.

“What the hell?” she muttered. She got up out of the chair, hesitated, and took a step toward the nightstand and the dark lamp.

Something touched her shoulder.

Caitlin whirled around, trying to see—and seeing nothing. “Lindsay? Dammit, Lindsay, you got my attention, you don’t have to scare the shit out of me!”

She stood there in the darkness, half mad and half scared, and wondered suddenly if she had imagined that touch. Surely she had. Surely.

Because there was nothing after death,
nothing,
and wishing there was didn’t make it so. Lindsay couldn’t be trying to communicate with her, because Lindsay was dead, dead and gone, with all the rest only a figment of her guilty and grieving imagination—

She heard a faint scratching sound that made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

Long seconds passed, only the soft scratching disturbing the silence.

Then, abruptly, the lights came back on. With a click, the TV also came back on. The very normal sound of human voices filled the silence.

Caitlin stood frozen, blinking for a moment in the sudden light before her gaze focused on the nightstand. Even without moving closer, she could see that the notepad lying there had something written on it.

Before the lights went out, it had been blank.

She drew a breath and went over to the nightstand, picking up the notepad with shaking hands.

HELP THEM, CAIT
HELP THEM FIND WYATT
YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU THINK

“Miss Burke, is it true you helped the police locate the body of Detective Lindsay Graham?”

“No, it is not true,” Samantha answered the reporter calmly. “Solid police work located Detective Graham.”

“Not in time to save her life,” somebody muttered.

“The killer meant her to die. That’s what killers do. It’s obviously a mistake to think of this . . . person . . . as anything other than a cold-blooded murderer.” Again, Samantha was calm, her tone even. She stood on the top step of the front entrance of the sheriff’s department and looked at the small herd of media eager to hear whatever she had to say.

No TV media, thank goodness.
She wondered how long her luck on that would hold out, how much time she had before she found herself starring in the six o’clock news. It had only been avoided this far because the “local” TV stations were nearly a hundred miles away in Asheville, and they’d had a few major crimes of their own on which to concentrate in the past few weeks. They had sent a reporter to cover the murders and kept fairly up to date on the facts of the investigation, but so far hadn’t ventured into speculation about the carnival or Golden’s visiting seer.

Heavy local coverage that
did
speculate in the print media was bad enough, but Samantha was prepared for that. If the regional television stations started paying real attention to the story, then it would be only a matter of time before everything hit the national spotlight—and the fan.

She was gambling that wouldn’t happen, even knowing that with every abduction and murder they were moving closer to a much larger and very unwelcome spotlight.

“Are you helping the police now, Miss Burke?” the first reporter asked. She had her little cassette recorder held high, and avid green eyes fixed on Samantha.

Aware of the door behind her opening, Samantha said deliberately, “That appears to be a question open to discussion, at the moment.”

“
How
could you help?” another reporter demanded, rather aggressively. “Look into your crystal ball?”

Samantha opened her mouth to reply just as Luke grasped her arm and turned her toward the door, saying to the reporters, “Miss Burke has nothing more to say. And you’ll be updated on the facts of the investigation when the sheriff’s department has information to share with you.”

A barrage of questions were yelled after them, but Lucas merely pulled Samantha into the building and around a corner to be out of sight of the reporters before demanding, “What the
hell
did you think you were doing?”

He was pissed. And it showed.

Samantha eyed him for a moment, then held up her right hand to display the palm. If anything, the marks burned there by a steering wheel, a ring, and a spider-and-web pendant were even clearer than they had been before.

“Pity you stopped me,” she said mildly. “I was just about to show them this.”

“Why?” Lucas demanded.

She shrugged. “Well, the killer’s already watching me; I just thought it was time to give him some idea of what I can do.”

“Are you out of your mind? Jesus, Sam, why not just paint a bull’s-eye on your back?”

“And why not rattle the son of a bitch if we can? Why not make him wonder if maybe, just maybe, he’s not quite as in control of this little game of his as he thinks he is? Everything’s been going exactly as he planned so far, so maybe it’s time we changed that. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in chess to a wild card, but that’s me. And I say it’s time we let him know the rules just went right out the window.”

Lucas was about to say something in response to that—what, he wasn’t sure—when he realized, abruptly and belatedly, where they were. In the doorway of the bull pen.

He looked away from Samantha to find that every cop in the place was staring at them with open interest. And even though he felt some embarrassment over losing control, and more than a little anger at the moment, he also noticed that a few faces that had shown open hostility toward Samantha now appeared at least as thoughtful as they were unfriendly.

“When are the search parties going out?” he asked the chief deputy, whose desk was nearest the door.

Vance Keeter looked down at the clipboard in his hand as if it would answer, then said quickly, “Ten minutes, and everybody should be ready to go.”

“Good,” Lucas snapped, and headed down the hallway to the conference room, pulling Samantha along with him.

She allowed herself to be towed, a little amused and more than a little interested in this definitely less-controlled side of Lucas. Not that he needed to know that. So the moment they were in the conference room, she jerked her arm away.

“
Do
you mind?”

Jaylene, bent over a map spread out on the table, looked up at them in mild surprise, then sat down in the chair behind her. “Hey, Sam. Thought you were leaving.”

She was good, Samantha thought admiringly, even as she was saying, “I got hauled back in here—
and
got scolded like a kid in front of the entire sheriff’s department. Which I don’t at all appreciate, by the way.”

“You’re damned lucky I didn’t arrest you on the spot,” Lucas retorted. “I can make an obstruction charge stick, Sam, and you’d better keep it in mind.”

“You might make it stick as far as court, but you’ll play hell proving it,” Samantha snapped right back. “I’m not an employee of the sheriff’s department
or
the federal government, which means I’m free to speak my mind to the press if I so desire. And I have done nothing, absolutely nothing, that a rational person would define as obstructing this investigation.”

“You had no business saying
anything
to the press about the investigation.”

“I didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.”

“That’s beside the point, Sam.”

“No, that’s entirely the point. All I did was finally stop a minute and answer a few of their questions about me. Me, personally. Which is totally my business. And will probably increase my business, now that I think about it.”

Lucas refused to wander from the point. “About you? What the hell did you tell them?”