The Trophy Hunter (17 page)

But, why? Why take pictures of me?
The
vision of her surgical scar, now dimmed in comparison to what it
had been, constricted her throat like a snake. She gagged, and then
swallowed several times to clear the sensation.

Jess returned to find her still hunkered
down, trying to figure out a motive. “Can we move to another room,
if you don’t mind?”

In the kitchen, the first stray wisps of dawn
filtered through the opaque honeycomb blinds. “There’s nothing
around or under the house. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t something
there. It just means that the peeper was careful,” said Jess.
“Could be the monitor was in his vehicle. That limits his range to
maybe a couple of miles.”

“Could the range be longer than that?” asked
Diana, alarm in her voice.

“Maybe three. Why? What’re you thinking?”

“That Greenwood Village is practically next
door. Joe Flannigan could be sitting in his living room, watching
me in the bathroom. But that makes no sense. It also seems out of
character.” Diana paused at the realization. “Flannigan hates my
guts. I doubt that my naked body and toilet habits would interest
him.”

Jess seemed to consider this. “Revenge can
take some pretty circuitous routes,” she mused.

“Like what?”

“Posting you on the internet to embarrass you
… on the john or whatever.”

“Jessie, that’s sick!”

“We agreed that Flannigan’s a sicko. But I
don’t think it was him either. You sure about the truck you saw
being a Ram?”

Diana sat on a kitchen stool and cupped her
head in her hands. “As sure as I can be about anything right now,”
was her muffled reply.

“Then I need to find that HUNTER 2 Ram,” said
Jess. “And you need to file a police report.”

Diana picked up the phone and pressed in the
non-emergency number for the Cherry Hills Police Department.

“They’re on their way,” she said after the
brief conversation.

Jess rolled her eyes upward, as if she was
recalling something. “Didn’t you and Greg have a security system
installed when you moved in?”

Diana gritted her teeth. “Don’t ask.”

“I know you did. Why wasn’t it working?”

Diana screamed at her, “Because Greg is an
idiot when it comes to anything mechanical. He broke it.”

Jess seemed to consider this. Then Diana
watched the sly twitch at the corners of her friend’s mouth. “Well,
there are
some
mechanics he sure had a handle on,” Jess
began.

“Like where to shove his prick? Ha! I beat
you this time,” gloated Diana.

“Just get the damn system fixed.”

Chapter 29

Back in his old studio, the Hunter curses as
he plays the video disc he retrieved from the recorder in the crawl
space under the redhead’s house. She had finally turned on her
ceiling fan, dispersing the clouds of steam. But his disappointment
is so intense that he smashes the little piece of plastic. She’s no
collector’s item. Damaged goods. Flawed beyond belief. He only knew
about the miscarriage, hadn’t a clue that she’d had surgery.

But her friendship with the black─and that
one he wants─could prove troublesome. They tell each other
everything. Almost everything. This hadn’t seemed a problem before.
Now, if he wants the black, he’ll have to make sure the redhead is
out of the picture. In her line of work, the bitch has probably
made lots of enemies. Should she suddenly disappear, his will not
be the first door they knock on. If they knock on his door at
all.

Anger is never his friend. It holds the
potential of making him careless. To feed his need, he relives the
processing steps he performs at his new studio. He can almost feel
the touch of the cold stainless steel table on which he beds each
in her turn. The picture evoked sends tingles through his
fingers─then, elsewhere.

The redhead fades from the center of his
focus. What’s one bad apple? There will be many perfect ones, each
unique in ethnicity and physical attributes that he finds
aesthetically pleasing. He realizes that many who know him would be
surprised that he has aesthetic tastes. This amuses him.

When he discovered
the process
, he’d
been wise enough to practice first. Throw-aways he’d plucked from
dark bars and seedy street corners. Though these were women nobody
looked for, he’d carefully burned his mistakes. Another attribute
of his new studio: the crematorium.

The process
had felt strange the first
time it mattered, with someone he knew so well. And his meticulous
plans had nearly been thwarted.

As he was collecting her after the one fatal
shot, Larry had appeared unexpectedly. The Hunter had quickly
eliminated that problem. Realizing the serendipity of the event,
he’d left Larry behind the shack and put the body of his beloved in
Larry’s truck where he removed her little gloves and placed her
dainty fingers around the truck’s steering wheel. Then, wearing
gloves of course, he drove the silver Ram a short distance and hid
it where it would surely be found, before removing her body and
carrying it back to his own vehicle. In his ecstatic state, he’d
found her virtually weightless.

In the privacy of his new studio, he’d washed
her gently, as one might a sick child, feeling a stealthy relief.
No more worries over losing her.

As her body stiffened, he’d commenced a
tender massage to loosen the effects of rigor, knowing there’d be
no uttered protest no matter what he chose to do to her. And as her
body relaxed, his had stiffened. A part of it, that is. He’d made
his choices. Again and again. While she lay silent beneath him, he
groaned with pleasure.

Then he hooked up the plastic tubes and
watched them darken as her blood spilled through into the drain
below. A deep calm blanketed him as his hands kneaded her still
form.

He replaced her leisurely departing blood and
body fluids with a mixture of formalin, alcohol and thymol. This
first successful procedure had taken four days to complete. The
next phase, molten paraffin immersion, had taken considerably
longer.

As he’d labored to make her conversion a
perfect work, he concluded that the small bullet hole at the base
of her throat was a flaw he wouldn’t repeat on his next
project.

A wise decision. When he’d last checked on
the Asian project in her paraffin dip, he marveled at her
unblemished beauty.

Almost done.

Then he remembers the black’s proclivity for
rare meat and smiles at the irony. Soon she’ll be well-done.

Chapter 30

Diana’s news about Rogart’s having the
missing Strickland girl gave Jess the excuse she needed to pay
another visit to Westcliffe. A visit to the widow Strickland on the
pretext of bringing news of Patty might get her a line on what
happened to Larry’s HUNTER 2 truck.

In the uncharted waters of deep thought, she
drove I-25 south, with its usual weekday morning traffic.

Jess tried to mentally dissect what she knew.
Make some use out of this fucking boring drive.
The camera
that she’d jerked by the roots out of Diana’s ceiling was generic.
The Cherry Hills cops weren’t too happy with her handling the
evidence, but what the hell. When they said they’d do their
best─whatever that meant─she’d warned Diana not to hold her
breath.

She hadn’t shared this with Diana, but
installing surveillance stuff was more up an ex-cop’s alley than an
all
man’s. Diana could have figured this out for herself if
she wasn’t so hung up on Darren. But Jess had to admit, Flannigan
made sense. He was angry enough about losing his grandkids to go
after both of the women he held responsible. The bulky, faceless
man behind the wheel on Colfax couldn’t have been Darren unless he
was wearing Santa Claus padding. But the license number on the
Colfax truck was wrong for Flannigan. Jess had saved the picture on
her cell and looked at it a dozen times.

What was missing was a motive for the
bathroom surveillance of Diana. And neither Joe nor Darren had any
that was apparent.

For the first time since they’d met in
college, Jess was worried about her friend. Diana used to be the
rational one, the perfect one who always had her shit together. But
since the baby thing and the Greg thing, Diana just hadn’t gotten
back in gear. It was like something had sucked all the good sense
out of her. Why in God’s name should Diana be cooking candlelight
dinners for the likes of Darren Rogart and simpering about his
innocence in this unholy, fucking mess? Jess shuddered, the Camaro
strayed left, barely missing a semi in the next lane. She quickly
corrected.
Gotta straighten up. Her shit’s rubbing off on
me.

Finally the junction of I-25 and Colorado 96
loomed in front of her. As Jess headed west out of Pueblo, into the
mountains, the traffic was sparse and the weather was with her. Her
little Glock rode comfortably in the ankle holster inside one of
her smart-but-sensible black leather boots
that fit.
The
Halloween boots had gone the way of the trash.

How the hell did Darren get her to play the
fool like that? She knew damn well how and it was really making her
want to get him big-time. Was part of it jealousy over his
attention to Diana? Jess shivered at her own vulnerability.

But no matter how she twisted the picture, it
still came back Darren and Death behind the wheel of HUNTER 2 on
Colfax. No good reason. Just a flash of intuition that had
one-eightied her away from that truck. Sometimes you just had to go
with your gut.

Westcliffe lay between the Sangre de Cristos
and the Wet Mountains, in the Wet Valley. It all looks pretty damn
dry to me, thought Jess. In a town with a population under four
hundred, Larry Strickland’s home wouldn’t be hard to find. Good
chance to try out her new GPS unit.

Just to sow some seeds of good P/R, she
stopped off at the sheriff’s station to exchange pleasantries. She
parked in the one and only guest slot and entered the weathered
wood-sided building, noting the light-skinned brother behind the
front desk. She’d met him before on her original visit.

“Hey, Jessie,” he greeted her.

Must’ve made quite an impression. Guess
the fact that we’re the only black faces for miles has something to
do with it.
Jess smiled, straining to read the name on the
kid’s badge.

“Hey, umm, Trent. How’s it going?”

“Troy,” he corrected.

Goddamned if I’m going to get glasses.
Contacts, maybe …
She glanced at his surname.
Flick? Plick?
Flack?
Then, decided to keep things on a first name basis.
“Anything new on the Strickland case?”

“You still working for Joe Flannigan?” The
Plick’s tone was guarded, not nearly as chummy as his initial
greeting.

“Why do you ask?” Jess smiled broadly.

“Flannigan’s a person of interest. Which
means, much as I’d like to,” here the kid batted long, almost
girlish lashes at her, “can’t share.”

“Didn’t stop you my last pass through here.
My recollection is that Flannigan was a person of interest then,
along with a few others.” Jess’s brow wrinkled in a frown. “And for
the record, I don’t work for Flannigan, so you can share all you
like.” She raised an eyebrow invitingly.

“What’s your interest in the case?”

“A family friend hired me to look into Patty
Strickland’s disappearance. Can’t be a coincidence. What do you
think?”

“The Feds are on Strickland ‘cause it
overlaps the Rogart girl kidnapping. They fill us in on what they
want us to know … when they want something from our end. And for
the record, they’ve eliminated some names from the list, including
Patty Strickland. Flannigan and his daughter now top it.”

“No shit? How about Darren Rogart? Did he
make the short list?”

“He’s been dropped. That’s about all I can
tell you.”

Jess shrugged to deflect any red flags. Too
much interest in Rogart could lead to unwanted questions from Troy
and perhaps shut down their communication. She’d have to pursue
other means of finding out why Rogart was dropped as a suspect.
“So, I don’t recall seeing anything in the report about a vehicle
for Strickland. How’d he get to the cabin?”

Troy the Plick shuffled some papers on the
counter.

“Look, Troy, I know Strickland drove a Dodge
Ram. What happened to it? What possible harm could it do to tell
me?”

“It went back to the widow after the Feds
finished with it.”

“Finished with it?”

“Collecting the evidence.”

“Evidence?”

“You know. Like fingerprints, DNA, the usual.
Jessie, you playin’ me?”

“Course I’m not playin’ you, Troy. How come
there was no sheet on the truck in the stuff I got the first
go?”

The kid looked hard at her. “Shouldn’t be too
hard to figure. DNA results takes time.”

And the fact that you’re so reluctant to
give me anything says a bunch.
“Were there any conclusive
matches found? Besides the obvious─family and maybe hunting
buddies? Joe Flannigan might be expected to have left DNA in
Strickland’s truck. They’d been hunting together. What’s so─”

“Brandi Rogart’s is a tad harder to explain.”
Troy whispered the words, after looking around to make sure they
were still alone.

“Whoa, Troy my man, you shittin’ me?” Jess
lapsed into dialect and put a hand on Troy’s shoulder. “You mean,
like somebody sliced Strickland, threw Brandi in the truck and made
off with her?”

“No.” Troy frowned. “Do I have to spell it
out for you?” He looked around again, nervously. Jess could hear
muffled voices coming from another part of the building.

“So, spell.”

“Nobody made off with Mrs. Rogart. Her prints
were on the steering wheel. Her DNA all over the place.”