Full Circle (32 page)

Alex gulped and ran up the stairs.

Agent Coulter turned to the head investigator for the State. "Change both those warrants to suspected murder."

"What is it?" Jack demanded.

Agent Coulter handed the book to the head of his forensic team. "It's the journal of a serial killer: dates and details," he said seriously.

"How did Josie get it?"

"I don't know, and I don't know why she wouldn't have turned it over to us," Agent Coulter said. "Especially if she suspected she was a target. She has an excellent record and it doesn't make sense."

"She wouldn't have kept that kind of evidence from you," Jack said. "She's too good a cop for that. There must be another explanation."

"Agent Coulter," the head of the forensic team interrupted with the book open as she and two others were reading it. "The killer has a den. He refers to it as '
my plac
e.' It's not unusual for a serial killer to burrow in somewhere, find a place where he feels safe, a place where he can play with his victims. According to this journal, AJR has one."

Jack's head came up as his mind was putting the facts together. "I sold off most of the furniture from my parent's house, but I kept a few of my mother's pieces and put them into storage. If this AJR person was using my parents' old house, he was probably comfortable enough to keep his journal there. About a week ago, Buck and I brought some of my mother's furniture over here. We probably brought the journal in with us hidden in the furniture. Everyone knows I sold off the contents of the house. I don't think I told anyone except Josie that I kept some of my mother's favorite pieces." Jack's eyes met the Agents.

"The mayor asked me several times where I'd sold the furniture. He said he wished I'd asked him first before selling it, because there were some antique pieces he would have bought. He said he remembered the pieces from having visited my father's house when he was younger and that he is a collector of antiques. He might have been trying to find out where I'd shipped his journal off to accidently. He was also here early yesterday morning before Buck arrived.  I was re-stapling a loose tarp over the library window, he came over and interrupted me. He said he wanted to talk to Josie, but I told him she'd already left for work. He was able to see my mother's furniture in the library through the broken window before I got the tarp fixed. Aiden was here, but according to Sheriff Tucker, he hasn't been seen around town or shown up for work in days. I didn't know that yesterday morning."

"This is a small town. The killer must know we're here, and searching for Ms. Raintree," Agent Coulter surmised.

"If he believes she has the journal, there is no reason for him to keep her alive," Jack said.

"That may not be the reason he took her," the profiler inserted. "This killer's been going about his business for two decades with no one noticing. He hasn't been suspected, questioned or charged. Even though the scenario has changed lately, and his victims have been discovered, there's no reason for him to suspect we've uncovered his identity. Psychopaths have huge egos. They never believe they're going to be caught. Sometimes they're so disturbed, they don't believe they're doing anything wrong. He might still be playing his game. He's snapped, there's no doubt about that, but unless he is directly challenged, he won't know that anyone is onto to him. He probably still thinks he still has everyone fooled. It's possible, the identity of the killer may be either of the men you suspect. It's possible that it's neither of them. We're going to have to run these initials through our database of all the townspeople. We'll probably come up with a half dozen matches for these particular initials.

"There's also another scenario you're ignoring. This could be a set-up. If the initials are a clue, Ms. Raintree could be the killer," one of the computer technicians offered.

"That's ridiculous," Jack snapped.

"It's a possibility, but highly unlikely," Agent Coulter agreed. "I'm going to continue working the idea that she is somehow connected with the killer through an obsession. The similarities of the victims to her can't be ignored. Both of the missing suspects have known her for most of her life."

The profiler nodded. "It doesn't matter who the killer is at the moment. It's more important to find the den of the murderer. That's where Ms. Raintree and Ms. Blackcrow will be. It's somewhere no one will notice, somewhere well hidden and probably close to the property where the other victims were buried for ease of mobility."

Agent Coulter turned to Jack. "How many buildings were on your property originally?"

Jack closed his eyes for a few seconds. "The main house, the barns. It was a working ranch until my father died. There were large sheds for equipment, corncribs, silos and smaller barns for storage. There was a chicken coop when I was a kid, a windmill, a woodshed and a washhouse behind the house, but none of those structures had basements or storage underneath them. They had dirt floors. Those buildings have been gone for decades. At one point there was a bunkhouse—I don't know when that was torn down. Hell, I've been gone for twenty years. The main house and most of the buildings were built after the land rush in the late 1890s, that's been over a hundred years, there could have been dozens of buildings built and torn down. If someone was or is there on the property, won't that dog you've sent for find them?"

Jack went to the side door and stared out over the lawn down towards the end of the property by the tree line. That was where Josie wanted to build a small four-horse barn and put in a two-acre corral. This was Josie's property, not his. He hadn't been back to his property since the discovery of the bodies. He looked over at the pile of debris still waiting for them to clear it from the property. It was mainly downed branches from the small patch of trees planted at the edge of the property. He turned around suddenly.

"There's an old cottonwood grove about a half-mile from my parents' place. Back in the day, the government granted homesteaders more land if they agreed to put in forty acres of trees. When I was a kid, a homeless guy lived back in those cottonwoods in a sod house dug back into the hill. I remember he put a roof on it because he stole the shingles from one of our sheds. My Dad was threatening to go after him with a shotgun full of rock salt. Old Sid went around talking to himself all the time and lived out of people's trash. Some people tried to help him, but he didn't want help, he wanted to be left alone. He disappeared sometime during my teens. I vaguely remember the sheriff searching the grove in case he died back there, but I have no idea what happened to him."

"Can you find this place?" Agent Coulter demanded.

"Yeah, Old Sid would occasionally steal a cow and my father would send me to bring it back. If it's still there, I'll find it," Jack said.

"Take one of Daniel Dooley's dogs and give it the scent of something of Josie's, he'll lead you right to it and her if she's there," Buck offered. "Those dogs of his are good trackers, and they've been trained by professionals, so they don't go baying and barking—they are trained to be quiet. He hires them out to the county and state people all the time when someone comes up missing."

"It's worth a try," Agent Coulter agreed. He barked off the names of several of his team leaders who began to prepare and gear up for the assignment.

"I'll give Daniel Dooley a call and stay here with the boy," Buck volunteered.

"Thanks," Jack said with a nod. "Keep track of him, Buck, don't let him out of your sight."

Josie knew she had blacked out for a while. She had no way of knowing how long she had been there. Being alone was terrifying. Her arm hurt so much that bile from her stomach kept rising up into her throat, bitter and burning. Her legs and feet were numb, and they hurt with every movement.

She closed her eyes, flashing back to that other time when she had realized she was on her own.

Her team was not going to come in after her. It was more important for them to record, gather information and evidence. She had been the bait, and the hook for the sting operation, one lowly agent was not worth toppling multi-millions of dollars spent in months of surveillance. There was a chance for promotions for the higher-ups, commendations and positive press. At those levels, higher-ups ignored the age-old agent code of helping their own. Rescuing her was not worth losing what they would gain politically. She was expendable.

Josie shook her head to clear it of bad memories. She had fought her way out before, and she was not going down this time either. She started rocking and inching her body off the cot. She landed with a thump on a hard surface, swallowing a cry of agony from her broken arm. She maneuvered her way into a sitting position. Slowly she began to inch her way across the floor. Her hands were tied behind her back, and she was feeling for anything with the fingers on her good hand. She needed something, anything. Minutes—hours, she couldn't tell how long it took, but she eventually found a bottle. A flat bottle, she surmised as her fingers sized it up. It was probably a pint-size liquor bottle, intact, but she couldn't use it intact. She fumbled with it in the pitch darkness, lost her grip and it skittered away. She had to find it again. She found it and continued to inch her way until she was against the stone wall. She shattered the bottle against a hard edge of the stone. It cut her fingers, but she picked up a piece of the broken bottle and began the tedious process of trying to saw through the duct tape binding her hands together. She worked at it, bending her good hand upward and painfully holding the shard of glass between her fingers and hacking at the tape. Her hands were slippery and blood-soaked, but the wetness of the blood helped loosen the tape. Minutes—hours, she didn't have any way of knowing. At long last, her wrist broke free, and pain from her broken arm seared through her, taking her breath away as the break shifted. She bit down on the inside of her cheek; she would not blackout again! She would not! She would use the pain to stay awake. She would use the pain to stay alive.

With her freed hands, she found the bottom of the hood and pulled it off her head; she clawed her bloody fingers into the tape over her mouth and pulled that off too. It was dark in her prison, not pitch black but dark and the hovel stank of body odor, sweat, semen and damp earth. She grabbed a larger piece of the broken glass, slicing it through the tape around her knees and her ankles. She dragged herself over to a single chair where she rubbed her feet and legs trying to get some feeling into them, some function back into them, and painfully tried to pull herself up into the chair. It took a while; her legs were numb and rubberlike. She rubbed her legs some more, let the pain come as she stomped her feet, and flexed her good arm and hand. She dragged herself upright and staggered over to one of the narrow windows, tried to wipe the glass to get more light into the room. She only managed to add blood to the blackened filth.

She staggered back over to the cot and picked up the dark pillowcase that had been used for a hood. She wiped the window again. This time she gained a little more light. The room was not any wider than ten feet by ten feet. It contained the cot where her abductor had left her, and another cot with a camping mattress on it, the chair, the dinette table and a case of bottled beer. Crates were overflowing with men's magazines, not upscale publications, but the kind found behind the counters of men's shops-the kind that were hidden in disgusting holes like this prison where she'd been dumped. She tried the door although she knew it was a waste of time. She searched for something to use as a tool to pry it off the hinges, but found nothing.

Limping back over to the case of beer, she started breaking bottles. If she had nothing else, broken glass would be her weapon. When she had several long, jagged pieces from the necks of the bottles, she used her teeth to rip through the cloth of the pillowcase tearing strips of cloth from it and wrapping them around the three bottlenecks with their long jagged edges. Whoever, whatever walked through that door, they would find out Josie Raintree did not quit. For the first time in her life, she had found love. Love for Jack. Love for Alex and Buck. No one was taking that away from her. No one!