Hunting Fear (39 page)

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing,” Wyatt said, even more grim. “On a hunch, one of your people just ran the prints we had on file for this deputy, who was calling himself Brady Miller and had absolutely no criminal record under that name. Only that isn’t his name. Turns out his name is Brady Gilbert. He’s Andrew Gilbert’s son.”

“Why were his prints on file?” Jaylene asked.

“Petty theft, out in L.A.,” Wyatt told her. “Couple years ago. He was barely old enough to avoid the juvenile system and got a slap on the wrist due to Daddy’s money. After that, not a peep from him. Until now. I’m guessing Daddy’s money also paid for his nice new name and pristine background.”

Jaylene looked at her partner. “He would have trusted his son, wouldn’t he, Luke? To do what he couldn’t?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said, feeling even colder. Some part of him had hoped against hope that Sam had merely left the sheriff’s department, maybe to return to her motel or the carnival. Had hoped that it had simply not been possible for Gilbert to get his hands on her. And it hadn’t.

But . . . he enjoyed killing by remote control.

He would have viewed his son as an extension of himself, particularly if he felt secure in his domination. So that tracked, that made sense.

And with the sheriff’s department nearly deserted, how difficult would it have been for a junior deputy to incapacitate an already fragile Samantha, perhaps with chloroform, carry her down to the garage, and drive away with her?

The box had already been prepared and ready for what Gilbert and his son had waited for—the chance to grab Sam. All Gilbert’s son had to do was put her in it, cover it over with dirt, and leave.

Leave her alone there. Buried alive.

“I’ve got an APB out on Brady,” Wyatt was saying. “And your boss made it federal as well, on the grounds that he was undoubtedly involved in the kidnappings.”

Lucas heard himself ask, “Gilbert’s death—is that out yet?”

Wyatt swore and said, “It went over the police radio that we got him. I’m sorry as hell, Luke, but . . . if Brady was still in his cruiser, then he knows.”

“And has no reason to stick around,” Lucas said. “They would have been prepared to run. Another car, maybe an SUV or ATV, probably already packed. He’d ditch the cruiser immediately and follow his father’s plans. He’s gone.”

Jaylene took her partner’s arm and turned him bodily to face her, an action so unexpected that Lucas found himself staring at her, seeing her.

“Which means you have to find Sam,” she said flatly.

“Jay, you know I can’t just—”

“We’re not going to find anything here, Luke. You know that. Quentin and Galen won’t find anything helpful back at the sheriff’s department. And we’re running out of time, Sam’s running out of time.”

“Goddammit, don’t you think I want to find her?”

“I don’t know, do you?”

He stared at her, literally feeling whatever color he had left draining from his face.

Jaylene pressed on, her voice insistent. “I don’t know what it’ll cost you, I really don’t. I don’t know what this block inside you is. But I know Sam was right in thinking you’ll never be able to use your abilities as they were intended to be used until you
get past it
. And if this won’t do it, if saving the life of the woman you love isn’t enough . . . then you’ll spend the rest of your life as a half-functioning psychic who can only tap into your abilities when you’re too tired to think. Is that what you really want, Luke? To be half alive? To lose Sam? Is avoiding your own pain really worth that price?”

No.

“No,” he said slowly. “It isn’t.”

“Then open up and reach for Sam,” Jaylene said, releasing his arm. “Find her, Luke. Before it’s too late for both of you.”

Lucas wasn’t even sure how to do this with deliberation, not with anger or out of exhaustion but to clearly and consciously tap into his abilities. He had never been able to do that.

But . . .

All he knew was that he needed Samantha and that he was
not
going to lose someone else he loved. He had to find her, had to help her. . . .

And a wave of icy black terror swept over him with such force that it dropped him, literally, to his knees.

Samantha couldn’t even pretend that she wasn’t terrified. She didn’t think she’d ever been so frightened in her life. Even though . . .

Memories of her stepfather and that tiny closet wouldn’t leave her alone, tortured her. She heard herself whimpering out loud, like that brutalized, terrified child had whimpered when, finally, late in the night, he had gone away and she could allow her terror to find its voice.

When he was angriest he had left her in there, for hours and hours, sometimes for days, loudly forbidding her mother from so much as talking to her. The house would get quiet, still. Dark. And she felt so utterly alone.

She had dreaded that “punishment” worse than anything else he had inflicted on her. Because she had been convinced that one day he would simply not open the door.

And she would die in there, terrified, hurting, and so alone there weren’t even words for the vast emptiness of the feeling.

Now Samantha fought the panic, or tried to, but those memories, those old feelings of helpless terror, kept swamping her. She heard herself sobbing, felt her hands begin to ache as she pounded on the rough wood above her.

A distant, rational part of her mind told her she was using up precious oxygen, that the tank’s hissing had grown quieter as it emptied its contents into her coffin, but the panic overrode everything.

Until . . .

Sam.

She went still, trying to choke back a last sob.

Sam, I’m coming.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

Near.

“There isn’t much air left,” she whispered again, realizing with another jolt of terror that it was becoming difficult to breathe.

Lie quietly, Sam. Close your eyes. I promise you . . . I’ll get there in time.

It was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do in her life, but Samantha managed. She closed her eyes and forced her throbbing hands to lie quietly at her sides.

There was just enough trust left in her to trust that Luke would reach her in time.

Just enough.

There were a dozen willing hands and shovels following him when, after more than an hour, Lucas stopped the Jeep suddenly on the road out of Golden and raced about twenty yards off to one side of the pavement. And he didn’t have to tell them where to dig, because the freshly turned earth, in its chillingly gravelike shape, was obvious.

Immediately, the men were frantically digging, driven by their own fears and by the ashen, haunted face of the federal agent who was using his hands to scrape away the dirt filling Samantha’s grave.

Other men were ready with pry bars, and the instant wood was uncovered, they were prying up the boards. And a collective gasp sounded when the sight of Samantha’s white face and closed eyes greeted their efforts; in that instant, most of them thought she was gone.

But Lucas knew better. On his knees beside the shallow grave, he reached down and grasped her wrists, avoiding the badly bruised flesh of her hands, and pulled her up.

She opened her eyes only then, blinking in the fading light of the day. Then, as he murmured her name, she drew in a deep breath of the clean country air and threw her arms around his neck.

“But I don’t want to spend the night in the hospital,” Samantha said.

“Because, of course,” Lucas said, “a few broken bones in your hands are nothing, right?”

She frowned down at the heavily bandaged hands resting in her lap. “You heard the doctor. The bones in the human hand can be fragile and easily broken. But they’ll knit. And I’ll be fine. So I don’t need to spend the night here.”

Bishop said, “Feel free to arrest her, Luke.”

“She’s staying put,” Lucas said. “I’ll be here all night to make sure she does.”

Samantha sighed and abandoned protest. “Well, if I have to be here, it’s a good thing they gave me a big room. If Wyatt and Caitlin hadn’t left to take Leo back to the carnival, you wouldn’t all fit.” She eyed the crowd of people around her bed, singling out Bishop to say, “I wondered when you were going to show your face.”

“I thought it was time,” he responded calmly. “Your being snatched wasn’t exactly part of the plan.”

Standing on the other side of the bed, Galen said, “And maybe that’ll teach you not to be so damned cryptic next time.
Wait for a sign. And don’t let it distract you.
Jesus.”

“Actually,” Bishop said, “the carnival thing didn’t figure into it at all. The sign we told you to wait for never happened. It was supposed to be a rather impressive fireworks display: a couple of crates of ammunition burned, we assumed, to distract all of you while Gilbert got away.”

Galen blinked, and said to Quentin, “He might have told us that before now.”

“He never does,” Quentin said.

“If that’s what you and Miranda saw,” Samantha said, “why didn’t it happen?”

“We saw that back in the beginning.” He smiled, the expression softening his very handsome but rather dangerous-looking face. “Before you began changing the future you’d seen. Once that happened, anything we’d seen before then became moot.”

“Might have told us that too,” Galen grumbled.

Lucas, who had been listening silently, spoke up then to say, “Just what was the plan, if nobody minds me asking?”

“Bishop broke one of his rules,” Quentin told him. “That whole some-things-have-to-happen-just-the-way-they-happen thing. I was shocked.”

Looking at Samantha, Lucas said, “Your vision.”

She nodded and said, “Everything I told you was true, I just didn’t tell you all of it. When Leo got the bribe, we both decided to pass, to not come to Golden. We didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it was didn’t look legit. Then, that night, after we’d made the decision to continue on, I had a dream. Only it wasn’t a normal dream, it was a vision. And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I had seen what would happen if I didn’t go to Golden.”

“That was when she called me,” Bishop murmured.

Lucas sent him a glance, then returned his gaze to Samantha’s face. “Why? What had you seen?”

“Murders.” She didn’t quite stop herself from shivering. “Murders going on for years, getting more and more vicious. Men, women—children. All of them dying in those horrible machines he’d built, and more like them.”

“Why didn’t you—” Lucas broke off and dismissed that with a gesture, saying, “Never mind. Go on.”

“Whatever had set Gilbert on his path, the murders themselves eventually destroyed whatever humanity was left inside him. He had—or he would—begin killing for the sheer pleasure of it. That’s what the vision showed me.” She sighed. “I knew when I woke up that there was only a . . . small window of opportunity to stop him. I knew that, without question. He had to be stopped here, in Golden. If he left here free, the killing would go on for years.”

“What else?” Lucas asked steadily.

“Might as well tell him,” Bishop said when Samantha hesitated. “Not many secrets in a group of psychics.”

“Except yours,” Galen muttered, mostly under his breath.

She sighed again, and said to Lucas, “In the dream, the vision, I also saw him kill you. He won his little game. And winning didn’t stop him.”

“She wasn’t prepared to let that happen, any of it,” Bishop said. “And neither were we. So we decided to intervene, to try to change what she had seen.”

Expressionless, Lucas said, “And I was kept out of the loop in order to minimize that interference?”

“You and Jay both. We were reasonably sure that the fewer people who knew what we were trying to do, and the fewer people actively trying to change what Sam saw, the better. The more control we would have. But . . .”

“But,” Samantha continued, “with the first change—the carnival and me arriving in Golden—the future I had seen began to shift. And except for a couple of constants, like my conviction that the only way to save you was to force you to use your abilities a different way, and Gilbert’s insane gamesmanship, everything was up for grabs. All I could do was follow the plan and hope like hell we were doing the right thing and not making the situation even worse.”

“And all we could do,” Bishop added, “was keep watch over all of you as quietly as possible. It was obvious Gilbert had done his homework and knew about the SCU; the last thing we wanted him to know was that you and Jay weren’t the only team members here.”

“Except that he did know,” Jaylene said, her voice dry. She looked at Samantha. “That was what Lindsay’s warning was all about.
He knows.
He knew about the watchdogs. Knew he’d have to draw them away in order to get to you. And by then, he really wanted to get to you.”

“Was that why the thing with the carnival rides?” Quentin wanted to know. “To draw us away from town?”

“Well, it worked,” Jaylene reminded him. “If you two had stayed in that little house you’d rented, you would have had a clear view of the back of the sheriff’s department. Brady would have found it a lot harder to get Sam out of the building unseen.”