Chasing Evil (Circle of Evil) (25 page)

Only half listening, Cam checked the screen, saw the number for Jenna’s cell. “Excuse me,” he told Jeffries and turned half away to answer it. “Prescott.”

“Cam, you’re going to want to head over to KCCT.”

“I am?” He took the crudely drawn map the manager handed to him. “Why is that?”

There was a shake to the normally level agent’s tone. “A news anchor received a written message that’s supposedly from Sophia. There’s a note with it that says if it isn’t aired today she’ll be killed.”

Luz Servantez, the pretty Hispanic anchor, looked distraught. The station manager and Drew Harper, the station’s attorney, seemed to take turns comforting her. At Cam’s questions, the newswoman drew a breath and repeated the story she’d clearly already shared with her co-workers.

“I go on the air at six AM and I’m always at work by 4:30 to get hair and make up done. But I was late. We have a new puppy, and it was raising heck in the middle of the night, so we were up for a while trying to settle it down. I went back to sleep and must have slept through the alarm. So,” she drew a deep shuddering breath and reached for the bottled water in front of her, “I was rushing around and got out to the garage to find someone had smashed the driver’s side window on my car. In a locked garage! There was glass all over the seat, and that,” she nodded toward the rolled up papers, “was on the seat, too. But I really didn’t pay attention to the papers. I was too upset about the car, and the thought that someone must have been in our garage. I got my husband up, and took his vehicle, while he cleaned up the mess and called the police. He unrolled the papers and thought they were trash. But when he saw the writing on them he figured I’d used them to jot down some notes, so he set them aside. It wasn’t until a couple hours ago when he finished dealing with the police and talking to the insurance company that he looked at them again.” She paused to take a long gulp from the bottle. Lowering it she added, “That’s when he called me and brought the papers here.”

“So he handled them?” Gonzalez asked the woman.

Servantez shot a guilty look at the lawyer. “He didn’t know what they were. But he read some of the writing to me on the way over here, so I told Drew and Molly right away. No one has touched them since.”

“That’s not exactly true.” Harper’s smile was as smooth as his muted silk tie. “I spread them out to read them after drawing on some driving gloves I had in my car. Clearly we weren’t going to make any other move until consulting with your agency.”

Clearly
the lawyer and station manager had taken the time to have a long discussion about their options before making that call, Cam thought, studying the note grimly. But he’d let Maria take care of that. He was more concerned with the words scrawled on a plain white napkin:

If this isn’t aired today Channing will be dead before dark.

He picked the papers up with gloved fingers and placed them carefully in a clear evidence bag. Sealed it. The lawyer cleared his throat. “Naturally we want to cooperate in any way possible. But we also have a clear interest in the public good, and our viewers deserve to be apprised of this development.”

“Will you excuse us for a moment?” The station employees looked at Maria in surprise. “Of course.” When neither she nor Cam made a movement toward the door, the manager tugged at the attorney’s sleeve and spoke to Luz. “Let’s get you somewhere you can relax before you go on again.” In a bustle of activity, they all left the room.

Maria walked over to the evidence bag. Looked at the papers inside it for a moment. “Is that Dr. Channing’s handwriting?”

“It looks like it. The lab will tell us for sure, but yeah.” He stared at the paper, as well, trying to recall the score sheets she’d written when they’d played gin that time. He’d been intent on keeping score another way, but she’d insisted on keeping track of points, as well. Once she’d trounced him, he’d figured out why. “I’ve only seen a few handwritten words before. But it does look like it could be hers.” He looked up, his gaze catching Maria’s. “It just doesn’t
sound
like her writing, if you know what I mean.”

“Possibly because the UNSUB was dictating it. She was merely writing down what he told her to.”

He nodded slowly. “Maybe. But the professional words used…those are more familiar. The phrases are similar to some she’d use in a profile, but…”

“The rhythm to the words seems off,” Gonzalez finished.

“Exactly. It looks like he was intent on having her correct the earlier profile that had been released about him.”

“I’m guessing that it wasn’t her idea to include the sympathetic portrayal of his intelligence.” The SAC read for another minute or so.

“What are you going to do with it?” Cam thought he knew the answer, but the question had to be asked. He’d thought he knew Maria as well as any colleague he had. She’d proved him wrong by releasing the first profile.

“I’m going to do exactly what the UNSUB wants us to do.” Her simple response had something in Cam’s chest easing. “I’m going to tell the station to have it read on the air.”

There were eleven Bryson drive-throughs in Des Moines and its surrounding suburbs, and it had taken Cam over two hours to get the warrants for the security footage at each. There was no telling how long ago the UNSUB had been at the restaurant. Or even if he’d gotten the food himself. But if he had, and if it were recent enough to still appear on the camera, they just might get lucky and get a picture of the offender.

One security company provided the surveillance packages to all franchises in the chain restaurant, Cam had learned, but each owner chose his own level of security. Gonzalez had reassigned extra agents to the case. Cam had promptly given them the task of picking up the copies of images from the cameras and taking them back to Headquarters for viewing. He’d turn over any images of drivers in white cargo vans that they found to the lab for image enhancement.

During that time he’d also fielded a call from Fenton relaying the news that the blood found in Sophie’s bathroom had indeed belonged to her. Turning his attention now to the emailed toxicology report, he scanned it swiftly, then slowed, as incredulity surged. He grabbed his cell, punched in a number. Then printed out the report, waiting for Franks to arrive.

When he did, Cam held out the pages for the man. It wasn’t long before the other agent looked at him, his expression as grim as Cam’s.

“Etorphine? It says that stuff is fatal to humans.”

“In veterinary strength,” Cam corrected. But the UNSUB would have to know how to lower the dosage to an appropriate amount for humans. A cold river of dread coursed through him. He’d held on to the fact that this offender didn’t kill right away. He found himself newly grateful for the appearance of the profile this morning. At least Cam wouldn’t have to torture himself with worries that Sophie’s abductor might have killed her with that drug.

“At least it comes with a human antidote,” the other agent muttered, still reading. “Have Jenna help you contact all the veterinary places in the area. Large and small animals. See if they’ve been targeted for break-ins for pharmaceuticals. Also get the names of their supply reps. If they’re anything like pharmaceutical reps that call on doctors, they often have samples of the drugs.” He didn’t know if they gave samples of the heavy-duty stuff, but he’d once had a doctor give him a new antibiotic to try in sample form.

“Then get a list from the licensing board of vets in the area and run them for arrests in their pasts.”

“I’m on it.” Tommy’s usually taciturn expression held a glint of excitement. “I’ll also check with DNE. See if they’ve got anything on thefts of the drug.”

“Good idea.” At one time narcotics had operated under the DCI umbrella, but several years ago the Division of Narcotics Enforcement had been formed, and they operated independently of DCI. When Cam had joined as an agent, he’d originally been assigned to the division. Years after he’d transferred to DCI, a long ago contact made in those earliest days had gotten him loaned out to DNE again for the federal multi-agency task force he’d worked a couple years ago.

The memory wasn’t one he welcomed, so he distracted himself by saying, “Let’s hope he didn’t buy it off the web.” There were sites on the Internet that claimed to sell pharmaceuticals without prescriptions. If the UNSUB had gotten the narcotic online, their chance of tracing it was minimal.

But with the threat of international narcotics enforcement, he had to hope that stealing the drug would be easier for the offender. He’d already proven amazingly creative at breaking and entering. What additional challenge would a vet clinic hold for him?

“I’ll keep you posted.”

When the agent left, Cam’s gaze fell to the copy of the new profile he’d made before turning the originals over to the questionable documents section of the lab. The analysts there would determine whether the handwriting belonged to Sophie.

He wanted it to be proof she was still alive. Wanted to believe she’d written it. If she had, Cam couldn’t imagine her wasting an opportunity to give them some sort of clue about her abductor. Or even where she was being held. He jotted down the first letters of each sentence. The last letters. Every other word in the profile. Every third word.

He came up with nothing.

Rubbing his forehead, he considered the fact that he might be wasting his time. Sophie was under duress. Possibly suffering. That thought twisted and tightened in his gut like a tangle of vicious serpents. Her primary concern would be pacifying her captor. Staying alive. That was a helluva lot more important than risking the man’s wrath if he suspected her of embedding a code in the writings.

And yet…the paragraphs contained some awkward phrasing the likes of which he’d never heard her speak, much less include in a profile. Like ‘markings of intellect’ and ‘mood lifter’… The choice of words was puzzling. Had she taken them from the UNSUB’s speech patterns? If so, they were interspersed with wording more commonly found reading Sophie’s professional work. It also included more casual language than she would normally use, and one near misspelling. The first time she’d written genius, she’d had an ‘i’ for the ‘e’, and had to correct by writing over it. And something about the sentence structure bothered him.

It is a sad penchant of society to knock a genius.

Clearly the profile had been written to inflate the offender’s ego. The almost misspelled words genius and intelligence each appeared more than a half a dozen times in the missive.

Knock a genius. The slang didn’t even sound like Sophie. Knock a genius. Knock a ‘ginius’.

Knock. Gin.

Barely breathing, Cam stared harder at the words, afraid to believe it. They’d played gin only the one time. Strip gin, as it happened, and she’d sandbagged him. The hell of it was, he hadn’t even cared. The game had been win-win, rules be damned.

Rules. It took a moment to re-focus. What were the rules of gin? Sets and runs. Ten cards dealt. Play to one hundred. A bonus of twenty-five points for declaring gin…

With renewed focus he bent over the profile, scribbling every tenth word from the profile in one column, every twenty-fifth in another.

Going through the writing on both pages, in the first column he quickly realized he had a jumble of meaningless words. But in the second he’d written the words con, markings, lifter, mouth, missing, bottom, right, bare, headed, color, blew, no, sketch…

Staring for a moment in amazement, Cam let out an incredulous laugh. “Dammit all, Sophie. You’re brilliant.”

Because she was alive. She had to be, this missive proved it. And even in the midst of the most dangerous situation of her life, the woman had had the guts to embed a description of her abductor in the profile.

It hadn’t taken long for Sophia to work the longer length of board loose from its moorings. Moving it back and forth with all her might, the rusty nails holding it in place gave a screech of protest. A few more tries and it was freed. She’d blinked in astonishment at the board in her hand for a moment, before setting it aside to tear off the other piece.

It proved tougher to release than the first. She kept trying, moving it up and down, then pushing and pulling on it. Sweat slicked down her back, the effort sapping her strength. Finally, it gave with a suddenness that had sent her stumbling back across the stall and sprawling on her back.

The aches from her injuries last night set up a howl of protest. Slowly, determinedly, she rose to her feet and picked up the prizes her hard work had wielded.

Here, at last, were the wedges she needed to pry an opening in the wire above her.

She took one of the boards and climbed the gate as high as the wire would allow. Then stuck it in the narrow opening where the ceiling of wire met the gate, and pumped it up down like a handle in an old fashioned well.

Her heart lifted when she saw the wire overhead move as it was forced to bend upward and back with the leveraging motion. She labored over an hour before she had an opening she thought she could slip through. Then Sophia propped the board atop the gate, holding the wire up and stationary before moving halfway down the gate to do the same there.

Only then did she allow herself to look at the dim slivers of light allowed into the structure. Her heart sank when she realized that it wasn’t as bright as it’d been earlier. She refused to consider how much time it had taken to get this far in her escape plan.

Or how many hours she had until the monster returned.

Before she made her attempt, she had the forethought to retrieve the comforter and stuff it through an opening in the gate. Then, focusing on the passageway she’d created in the wire, she decided there was only one way through it. She’d have to snake through the gap headfirst and try to descend the gate on the opposite side, supporting her weight on her hands.

It didn’t bear considering that for a woman for whom power walking was the height of athletic accomplishment, this feat would take more than strength and dexterity.