“I was ten,” Lynn Fairchild said. “I lived in Arcata.”
He stared at her, thinking he must have heard wrong.
Must
have.
“You knew the Grangers?” he said. His own voice sounded far away, and he wasn’t entirely sure he could move.
She shook her head. “I rode at the same stables as Terry Granger.” He stared at her in silence and she looked back at him in disbelief. “You don’t think I… that the Reaper…”
“I’m sure there’s no connection,” he said firmly, and hoped he sounded sure enough for her to believe him. “Now go upstairs. Pack enough clothes and essentials for a few days and we’re going to take you and the children out of here, someplace safe. We’ll pick up your husband at the airport and bring him to you. Go.”
Lynn moved toward the stairs in what looked like a trance, but when she hit the bottom of the stairs she climbed them with resolve.
“What the
hell
is going on?” Epps asked, as soon as she was out of sight. There was a tinge of outrage in his voice.
“It’s not that strong a connection,” Roarke said, hoping to make himself believe it.
“Jesus,” Epps said. And Roarke felt that familiar vertigo; the sickness of reality shifting, like quicksand under his feet.
After a consultation with Lieutenant Tyson it was decided to take the Fairchilds to the town of Crestline, lower down the mountain, where there was a cabin the sheriff’s department sometimes used as a safe house. They could be safely guarded, but would also be close enough for questioning. Roarke intended to take Snyder with him and go over Lynn Fairchild’s Arcata memories with a fine-tooth comb.
Detectives Aceves and Lambert conferred with Roarke and Epps. “We’ve got deputies out waking up school officials and the boys’ teachers,” Aceves said. “The killer could have been watching Tanner Fairchild at school. He could have seen Robbie Cavanaugh there, too.” Roarke agreed it was a place to start, and Lieutenant Tyson had been right, local law enforcement were much more useful than the agents at that task. They could more quickly sort out locals from strangers.
Lam and Stotlemyre arrived, with Snyder, and Epps took the techs out to the patio. Roarke could see him through the glass doors, pointing out the spot on the patio where the cat had been found. Unfortunately the husband had thrown away the animal’s mutilated corpse rather than bury it. There was no way to examine it for clues.
Other deputies started to search the perimeter of the house for any signs of the watcher. Forensics would have to process the outside to see if there were any signs of the Reaper there. But given a recent snow, the possibility of trace evidence turning up was not good.
“We’ve got more chance of evidence surfacing at the Cavanaugh house.” Roarke paced in the living room while Snyder looked over the photographs of the Fairchild family. “What we need is a forensic hit. Something to ID this guy.”
Syder turned and regarded him silently. Roarke continued to rail. “He’s angry that he missed the Fairchilds. What if that caused a snap and he goes from stalking to a spree?” It had happened with Ted Bundy and Richard Speck.
“Let’s just focus on the facts,” Snyder said with maddening calm.
Roarke moved explosively. “All right, here’s a
fact
. Lynn Fairchild is from Arcata. She rode at the same stables as the Granger boy.”
Snyder was still for a moment, processing this. Roarke couldn’t wait for an answer. “He came after her specifically. He had to.”
The profiler finally turned to him. “Did he?”
The question inflamed Roarke. “What else could it be? What are the chances?” he demanded.
Snyder lifted his hands. “What are the chances of Cara Lindstrom killing your agent, Greer? Not just killing your agent: killing your agent in front of you?”
Roarke stopped his frentic pacing and stared at him. “What are you saying?”
“There may be a tangible connection based in Arcata, yes. Did the killer recognize Lynn Fairchild? Did he pursue her?” There was a strange calm to the profiler’s voice. “Or was he drawn to her in some way, in the same way that you were drawn to Cara, or she to you?”
“What the hell…”
“There does seem to be some vortex to this case. The Reaper was drawn to Mrs. Fairchild. Was it conscious? Or was it perhaps in some way we may never understand?”
Roarke felt his whole body tensing in instinctive resistance. “I don’t get what you’re saying at all.”
Snyder gave him a brief glance that said he was a liar, but he didn’t say it aloud. “I think we need to focus on what we can solidly pursue in this case, but not ignore signposts that we may not immediately understand.”
He looked out through the glass wall into the forest, the tops of trees moving in the night wind, under stars. “We’re going to be here for some time, I think. Do you have hotel rooms yet?” he asked.
They didn’t.
“Then I’d suggest we set up camp.”
Chapter Thirty-two
The Arrowhead Lodge was a Triple-A accommodation right at the gateway to the central village, a five-minute walk from the lake down a hushed, meandering path through the forest. Across the parking lot was a shopping complex with a 7-11 and a large neon sign advertising psychic readings.
“Just what we need,” Epps muttered from the seat beside him, but Roarke felt a wild secret urge to walk over and ask for a consultation.
The main lodge was a historic building. “Built in nineteen seventeen,” the desk clerk told the agents as they checked in and stood in the firelit lobby looking around the two stories of rock walls and staggered dormer windows, molded ceilings, modern lighting wired into the original gaslight fixtures, an octagonal bar in the lounge.
Epps nodded at the period detail with satisfaction. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“As long as you’re happy,” Roarke said dryly.
Outside the main lodge the complex also had several dozen standalone cottages with mini-kitchens. There was a warren of them between the tall pines, all connected by wooden bridges over dry creek beds.
Weddings
, Roarke thought.
Just perfect for weddings and tracking serial killers
.
The swollen moon was high above the trees as Epps parked their vehicle in the space assigned to their cabins. Roarke got out of the Jeep. A hulking shadow loomed beside him and he startled back… then realized he was facing an enormous chainsaw- carved sculpture of a standing bear.
He shook his head at his own jumpiness and followed Epps down stepping stones laid between cabins.
He and Epps had two cabins, one above the other on the walkway, with secluded porches; Jones was across the way. Lam and Stotlemyre had remained at the Fairchilds, but Epps had booked them a two-story unit in the next row, and Snyder a fourth cabin below them. Another walkway led out to a gazebo lit by strings of white lights.
Roarke turned to face Epps, Jones and Snyder. “Let’s try to get an hour’s rest and meet back here in an hour-fifteen.”
He walked in through the door of his cabin and found a much bigger space than he’d expected from the outside. A bathroom connected the living room with a bedroom. A kitchenette on the other side of the living room led out to a second entrance.
The bedroom had wood paneling halfway up the walls and fleur-de-lis-patterned wallpaper above that. The slanted ceiling was probably cozy in below-freezing temperatures, but also claustrophobic; he felt too enclosed. On the bright side there was a spa tub in the tiled bathroom. He stood looking down on it, but knew his mind would never let him rest if he didn’t settle something first.
He stripped off his coat and suitcoat and found his phone, then, not trusting himself to lie on the bed, he took a seat in one of the armchairs in the dim sitting area, facing the window and the light of the moon, and dialed Rachel. She had called twice during the day without leaving a message, and he dreaded speaking with her, but he owed her much more than that for his behavior.
The phone rang and rang and he thought he might have been reprieved… just before she picked up.
“Hello,” she said, and despite everything, her voice was a sexual charge.
“I wasn’t sure I was going to get you,” he said. “How are you?”
“Doing okay,” she said, but he could hear the wariness in the words.
“I’m glad. I’m sorry I haven’t called before now—”
“I understand,” she said, cutting him off.
“I don’t think you—”
“I understand about work,” she said.
Silence crackled through the line between them. She finally spoke. “I called for a reason. You know I have two of Danny’s girls with us at the house, now, besides Jade. I showed them the police sketch of that woman.”
Roarke felt a sudden twist in the pit of his stomach. “Yes,” he said.
“Shauna, one of the other girls, saw her too. She says she saw her beat up a john, smash his head against a brick wall in an alley. Hurt him pretty badly, it sounds like. I thought you would want to know.”
“When was this?” he asked, too sharply.
“Three days ago, she said.”
Before the pimp was killed
.
“In the Haight?”
“Yes, just a few blocks away from here.”
Which means that Cara probably is staying somewhere in the Haight. Which means
…
“Look, I want you to be careful,” he said abruptly. “Don’t go out alone at night. Report anything that seems suspicious.”
There was a beat of silence before Rachel answered. “What do you mean? Why?”
He found he had no answer.
Because Cara might feel possessive of me and slash you to pieces on a whim
? It wasn’t what she did. Unless it was.
“Just be careful. Please.” He felt emotions spiraling dangerously out of control. “How is Jade?” he asked, to steady himself.
“Still here,” Rachel said. “Terrorizing the others.” She was joking, but Roarke imagined there was truth in it, too. “I don’t know for how long, but she seems to have settled in for the time being. Sometimes they get tired of running. Maybe she has.”
“That’s good,” he said.
So we have a witness after all
.
“I’ll try to find out where she’s from,” Rachel said, before he could ask.
“I appreciate that.” He was suddenly rabid to get off the phone. She seemed to sense it, because after a few beats of silence she spoke before he could.
“I don’t want to keep you.”
“I should get some sleep, really,” he admitted. “I just wanted to see how you were.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said, and he thought there was an ambiguous tone in her voice, but he was too suddenly drowsy to tell.
“Be careful,” she said again, quickly, and disconnected.
He punched off the phone and sat in the moonlight. So Cara had been busy, following a track of her own. He found it ironic, and humbling, that they’d been fishing for her with the wrong bait. She had her own unpredictable yet unrelenting agenda, and he had no doubt there was more to be revealed about what she’d been up to.
And despite his to-the-bone fatigue, he sat for a long time.
In his own cabin, Snyder shut the door behind him and locked it, breathing in as he tried to release the images from the Cavanaugh house.
The profiler had long had his own means of coping with horrors, the investigation of which was his life’s work. Detachment was key. Detachment was not the same as peace, the spiritual goal cultivated by Buddhists. Snyder was too much a product of his Protestant background, even long abandoned, to find that kind of comfort. His own detachment was merely a hard-won ability to look at acts which other cultures had no qualms about calling demonic, and reduce them to quantifiable statistics, characteristics, probabilities.
This
has happened in seventy percent of cases with variable X and factor Y, so there is a seventy percent probability that it will happen here.
But lately, as he felt his own death draw inexorably closer, he had become more interested in those cultures’ more layered views of life and death, good and evil, and he sometimes found himself wondering what truths he may have been overlooking in his rational approach to his work.
The carnage at the Cavanaugh house was enough to give the most hardened rationalist pause.
He stepped to the window and drew back the heavy drape to look out. It was going to be an icy night; the wind was whispering through the trees, swirling leaves on the ground. He shivered, turning away.
As he moved around in the excessively quaint cabin, lighting the gas logs in the fireplace, hanging up his coat, he felt an agitation, a sickness somewhat like fear. Revulsion, he thought of it. There was a revulsion triggered by the sight of human evil, or its aftermath. The smell of death was still on him; even the frigidity of the Cavanaugh’s unheated house had not been able to cut that stench, and he was thinking that a shower would wash away the anxiety aroused by the lingering smell, a nearly palpable presence in the room.
He turned toward the bathroom…
A blond woman stepped out through the door.
And he realized the anxiety he felt had not been a reaction to the smell of death. Not at all.
He looked into Cara Lindstrom’s fine, pale face, as she stood very still in the half-light, looking at him.
“Hello,” he said softly, and tried to breathe through the jolt of adrenaline to his heart. He had no idea what this visit might be about, but he knew he was not the one who had control over it.
***
In his cabin, Roarke finally stood and moved for the bedroom, but stopped in the bathroom, looking down at the Jacuzzi tub.
“Fuck it,” he mumbled, and reached to turn on the jets.
***
Snyder could not keep his eyes off her. She was quite beautiful, though not in any conventional way: the sharp curves of her bone structure, and the intensity, almost hyper-focus, her body still, yet seeming to vibrate with tension. She was
present
.
“I’m Chuck Snyder,” he said, throught a mouth gone perfectly dry. “But I imagine you know that.”