Got Thrills? A Boxed Set (A McCray Collection) (43 page)

He looked down at Fanny, who solemnly nodded. At least she appreciated it. Beauty was still pissed about the helicopter, but honestly, getting a zombie wasn’t on any of their radars. And Tomahawk was too busy screwing with his computer to care. Only Angela stood by Chad’s funeral pyre and held Fanny’s other hand.

A chill coursed over Rook. Too many times that burning pile of ash could have been any of them. He shouldn’t care about that. Emotions only slowed your reflexes, yet here he stood mourning a guy he didn’t even know yesterday.

“Rook,” Tomahawk said, “I guess Savage is over being pissed at us. The Cabal is sending me some streaming video of—”

Rook waved him off. He was bruised, battered and hungry. Whatever it was could wait. “Whatever. Just have Savage send us an airlift, with, preferably, a live pilot.”

A tree just over the ridge looked perfect for leaning against. He started to make his way there when Tomahawk taunted him. “Remember how you said we didn’t have a Virgin?”

Rook turned on his heel, still a little suspicious about what Tomahawk was talking about. “Yes…”

“Well,” Tomahawk stated as he turned to screen around for Rook to see. “They must be having a blue-light special on ’em.”

The screen showed a world map with tiny blue lights popping up all over the globe. The others gathered round to watch the spectacle.

“Each one represents a report of an immaculate conception.”

Rook struggled to take it in. “But there’s—”

“Hundreds, maybe thousands,” Tomahawk responded.

Beauty shook her head. “What could they possibly need with so many babies?”

“No,” Rook said, getting everyone’s attention. “There’s only one.”

Fanny pointed at the screen. “But look how many there are.”

“Rook’s right,” Tomahawk agreed. “I bet 99 percent of those are like Angela. A smokescreen.”

* * *

Angela’s hand went to her belly. She had so little time to get accustomed to her pregnancy, yet in some small way she missed it. Or at least the idea of it. To rebuild a family would have required it to have been a normal pregnancy. She was relieved not to be the center of the maelstrom they had just survived.

She looked down at all those blue dots. Each one represented a woman whose life had just been changed forever. Had they all experienced such loss as she did? Were all born of such tragedy?

And were they as lucky to have people like Rook, Beauty, Tomahawk, and Fanny to look out for them? Angela still understood perhaps a sliver of a fraction of a percent of what was going on, but she had seen with her own eyes how Rook stood between heaven and hell to protect humankind. That kind of made up for his more “difficult” personality traits.

Suddenly, Angela realized that all eyes were on her. She removed her hand from her midriff and pointed to the dots. “So they are playing ‘find the needle in a haystack?’ ”

“More like a Virgin-palooza version of Where’s Waldo?,” Rook replied. That look of mischief was back in his eyes.

“From what we know of Angela’s situation, I think I can write an algorithm that can weed out about 80 percent of the false-positives.”

Still, there were a lot of blue dots.

Tomahawk typed furiously but his laptop beeped loudly, his battery bar flashing red. He closed his computer. “Well, once I get power, I can. But we are definitely going on Virgin Vigil.”

“So we’re done with this mission?” Fanny asked.

They all looked at Rook.

“What,” he said. “Do I look like your boss?”

The others all responded, “Yes.”

“Fine,” Rook conceded. “Yes, Fanny, we are officially off the clock.”

“You know what that means?”

Angela watched Rook sigh his fake sigh for Fanny. “I have no clue.”

“S’mores!” Fanny shouted as she ran toward the smoldering helicopter.

Rook called out. “But we don’t have the supplies.”

“I betcha we do! I betcha, betcha, I bet!”

He went to go after Fanny, but Angela caught his arm.

“Let her go.” When Rook turned to her, Angela finished. “What is it you said? Have some faith?”

Fanny popped her head back out of the wreckage holding a box of graham crackers, a bag of marshmallows, and some chocolate bars.

The young woman beamed. “I told you Vlad still loved me!”

And if that were the case, Angela thought, maybe they all did have reason to have some hope.

EPILOGUE

 Rook

Rook warmed his hands on the fire they had stoked from the burned out helicopter. The rest formed a circle around the campfire as they waited for their extraction. He pierced another marshmallow for toasting as Fanny opened her mouth wide around a triple-decker S’more. She had chocolate drizzling down her chin, but he didn’t bother to tell her. She’d just say she was saving it for later.

For a moment anger rose again. Fanny should be able to eat all the S’mores she could handle without having to go through the dying and getting shocked back to life portion of her day. That they all had to risk their lives for people who would never know their names? Yeah, that part of the job kind of sucked.

Beauty seemed perfectly comfortable, however, as she ran everyone through their paces, getting them organized. She had a clipboard and everything.

“Tomahawk, are you confident that you will have the program up and running by morning?”

Tomahawk slowly rotated the stick with his marshmallow. “Yeah, there might be a few bugs to work out, but no later than midday.” He nodded to Angela. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but it would be very helpful if I could get some understanding of what led up to… Well… up to the events of the past twenty-four hours.”

Rook was about to step in when Angela readily nodded. “As long as you don’t expect me to understand it, sure.”

Beauty checked off a box. “Great. I’ll have to do some damage control at the mental institution on Dr. Lerhaven’s behalf,” she said pointedly at Rook, “But beyond that we should be ready to rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Nope!” Fanny announced. “We’ve got just one more thing to do!”

Beauty double-checked her form. “Fanny, we are set.”

Rook, though, looked at the young woman sitting next to him. Her eyes were bright and keen.

“And that would be?” he asked.

“Tell scary stories!” Fanny announced, as she cuddled up next to him. “Rook gets to start!” Everyone chuckled as she looked up into his eyes. “Tell the one about the guy with a hook for a hand and the teenagers in the car…”

With her eyes sparkling and her cheek against his shoulder, how could he refuse? And yes, many, many, many parts of his job sucked. This aspect, though?

Never.

“All right. On a stormy night—” Rook started.

Fanny popped her head up, and in all seriousness, told him, “Don’t make it too scary, though. I don’t want to get nightmares.”

Rook patted her hand as everyone settled in for a night of not-too-scary stories.

“On a stormy night… but not too windy,” Rook restarted as Fanny laid her head on his shoulder. “A man with a huge pointed hook, that wasn’t too sharp came up to a car…”

# # # #

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, places, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Rook

An
Off Our Meds Project
/published by arrangement with the author

FIRST EDITION

Copyright 2011 by Carolyn McCray

All rights reserved

Kindle Edition

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Any inquiries can be made to:

3524 South Star Lake Rd

Auburn, WA 98001

Email

Dark Lullaby

* * *

PROLOGUE

The man watched the people in the luxurious apartment through a crack in the door. Across the room, Carla Sutton sat with a rigid back, despite the extremely plush couch she sat on. Her husband, Raymond, instead leaned forward, listening intently to the police detective.

The woman was talking about many things, including him.

But the object of his true interest was not in the room. The man could see pictures of the young girl scattered across the high mantelpiece, along the coffee table, and high and low upon the wall. Her bright, young face shined out at him. She needed him.

No one else seemed to understand how desperately.

He imagined the months it took to find her. Following her from city to city. Hacking into her parents’ financial accounts. Disabling privacy settings.

Others, of course, had come before her. But she was the shining prize. All golden haired and ruddy of cheek. None other would do now.

The man felt his palms sweat each time he thought of her.

Soon, she would be in his hands.

CHAPTER 1

Dark Lullaby

Detective Nicole Usher glanced around the room. Everything seemed in order, yet something was very, very wrong. Still, she could not put her finger on it.

“Detective, I am still very worried about anyone interrogating Lyla. She’s been through so much,” Mr. Sutton said. Again.

Nicole gave a warm, reassuring smile before she answered. “We will only ask what is absolutely necessary.”

The husband did not seem satisfied by her answer. The mother was much harder to read. Like after this long ordeal, she had learned to just shut down rather than risk any more hurt.

Nicole could only imagine how these two parents felt. Already, a total of nine girls had gone missing. All blonde haired and blue-eyed. All from schools that Lyla had attended. To date, not a single body had been found. But no one held out much hope for the other girls. A child missing after forty-eight hours was usually a dead child.

Luckily, the Suttons had the means to move far, far, away, but the nightmare did not end. Instead, it followed them from New York to Washington, D.C., to Boston, and to here.

But the killer’s patience seemed to be wearing thin. Now his threats to Lyla were more overt. A letter, and now an email, sent to the school. Normally, Nicole tried to quiet the parents’ anxiety. In this case, their near panic was pretty damned justified.

“I do not mean to be rude, Detective Under—”

“It’s Usher. Detective Usher.”

“Yes, sorry. Detective Usher. But we were promised the nation’s exemplary profiler, Special Agent Harbinger. We have waited an entire week to schedule this appointment with him. And now he is over two hours late.”

Nicole squirmed. Yes, Kent Harbinger might be the leading profiler in the nation, but that did not make him exactly punctual. If anything, it made him the exact opposite. But how could she tell these worried parents that odds were Kent was at a comic book store or playing video games and calling it “generational assimilatory processing” and insisting that he was “on the clock”?

She glanced at her watch. Even for the profiler, this was pretty late. The last time Kent had been this late, she’d found him handcuffed in an unsub’s basement. She pushed that horrific night out of her mind as she turned to the parents again.

“While we are waiting, I wanted to go over your security measures again.”

Mrs. Sutton sighed. Her eyes shifted to the ornate window.

The husband sighed as well. How many times had they been over this information with how many jurisdictions, and how many other detectives?

“That window?” he nodded to the pane his wife stared at. “That window probably costs more than your car, detective.”

Nicole didn’t doubt it. To the naked eye, the window looked like any other upscale etched-glass pane. Beautiful, but commonplace in this part of town, with its mansions built in the Roaring Twenties. But Nicole knew that this glass window was impregnated with lead to interfere with any infrared and other video surveillance equipment. Plus, the pane was as bullet-resistant as possible, with a full four-layer thickness of alternating glass and polycarbonate material. To boot, it was one-way bullet resistant. Meaning that the beautifully etched window could stop an armor-piercing sniper shot, yet she could easily shoot out the window with her pistol. The technology existed, but it was just extremely expensive.

“I am telling you, detective, that our house is as secure as the White House,” Mr. Sutton declared.

“Really?” a voice came from behind them. Everyone in the room turned as the closet door creaked open.

“Well,” a man’s voice said as he stepped out of the closet. “Then the president might want to be a little worried.”

Mr. Sutton jumped from his seat and dove for a side table drawer. Nicole leapt up after him, slamming the drawer shut before the husband could find his gun.

“Don’t,” Nicole said as she gripped the husband’s wrist. “That is Kent Harbinger. The profiler you requested.”