For a moment everyone else in the room stared at her silently.
Then Kaminsky said, “Well, that sure clinches it for me.”
Michael gave a snort of amusement. Charlie shot Kaminsky an unappreciative look. Tony said, “I’m not willing to discount any psychic help we can get.” He looked at Charlie. “You got the grief counseling connection pretty much out of nowhere. How strongly do you feel about tracking the unsub down through the Buggs Island Lake connection?”
Charlie hesitated.
“I’ve got a hit on the girls.” The tension in Kaminsky’s voice was palpable as she looked up from her laptop. “Diane Townsend, Kim Oates, and Natalie Garza. All fourteen, all reported missing this morning from Twinbrook, a girls’ camp in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, that specializes in—get this—grief counseling. Apparently this week’s program caters to survivors of school shootings.”
“Looks like our guy was in a hurry,” Michael said. “Instead of cherry-picking ’em, this time he went straight for the all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“Notify the agents down there that we may have a lead on the girls,” Tony told Buzz, who nodded, then asked, “Should I tell them we’re on our way?”
Tony grimaced. “As I see it, we’ve got three ways we can go here. We can head for Roanoke and sit on Pelletier. We can head down to Rocky Mount and join the search there. Or we can take a quick trip to Buggs Island Lake and see what we can dig up.”
Buzz said, “Dr. Pelletier’s covered. If the unsub shows up there, we’ll have him.”
“Too late for the girls, though,” Kaminsky put in.
Buzz continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’m guessing that they’ve got half the Bureau, plus the state police and all available local law enforcement, on the scene in Rocky Mount.”
“We’d be the only ones looking at Buggs Island Lake,” Tony said.
Kaminsky looked up from her computer. “A friend of a girl who went missing at Buggs Island Lake five years ago reported that in the days leading up to her disappearance a man had been following them. She told police she could describe him, although if she ever did, it didn’t make it into this file. The witness still lives in the same house, near the lake.”
“We could go interview her, get a description, check out any local police records,” Buzz said. “If it doesn’t look like anything will pan out down there, we could move on.”
Tony made up his mind. “Sounds like a plan. Get packed. I want to be in the air in under an hour.”
Buggs Island Lake (as they call it in Virginia), which is also known as Kerr Reservoir (to the folks in the Carolinas), was a fifty-thousand acre swimmers, boaters, and fishermen’s paradise. Long and narrow, it ran along the Virginia/North Carolina border and was one of the most popular summer resort areas in both states. Erin Hill, the friend of the disappeared girl, who lived in the little lakeside community of Clarksville, was indeed able to give them a description: a dark-haired man, maybe in his early thirties, who had followed them around in a gray van. The part about the gray van hadn’t made it into the police report, and it sent a shaft of excitement through the team. The lead was promising enough that they turned Erin over to a local police sketch artist.
While they waited for the results, in an empty office off the small squad room, Kaminsky was busy checking out a map of the lake area that hung on the wall. Charlie, who like the others was acutely aware of the swift passage of time, was starting to realize that she hadn’t gotten as much rest the previous night as she had supposed. She was sitting in one of the hard metal chairs and chugging stale police coffee as she went over the missing persons reports that Kaminsky had thought might be relevant to the case, which the agent had e-mailed to her. Buzz was combing through the police files on the four supposedly-accidental-but-deemed-by-Kaminsky-to-be-suspicious deaths that she had identified in the area during the time period in question. Having stepped outside because the reception was better, Tony was on the phone, talking to agents at the scene of the kidnappings in Rocky Mount, and then to those assigned to conduct surveillance on Dr. Pelletier. Michael was on his feet staring out the window at the beautiful blue water of the lake. It was early evening by this time, but the sunlight was still strong enough to make the surface sparkle. Charlie could read in Michael’s body language his longing to be out there as part of the living world again, but he was still palpably angry at her and for the most part wasn’t talking. Under the circumstances, she wasn’t, either. What could she say? There was nothing in what she had told him that she would take back. And she badly needed to put him in his proper place in her life, which should probably be, as he had sneeringly described it, the ghost whisperer’s apprentice and nothing more. But the sad truth was, just letting her eyes run over him evoked feelings in her that were disturbingly sexual. One look at his broad shoulders and muscular back, at his tight butt and long powerful legs, and she was back in last night’s darkened hotel room with him again.
He makes me hotter than any man I’ve ever known.
That was the thought that was floating through her mind when Kaminsky glanced around at her and asked, “What did that psychic friend of yours tell you, exactly?” Charlie was caught off guard enough so that she had to think for a moment.
“She said I was in danger near dark water.” Which—Charlie had noted, to her relief—, Buggs Island Lake was not. At least at that moment, its waters were the approximate shade of Michael’s eyes.”She said the danger came from a gray house in the dark water. I’m wondering if maybe we’ll find our unsub on a houseboat.”
“You know I’m fluent in a number of languages, right?” Kaminsky said. “One of them is Algonquin. About fifteen miles from here on this side of the lake is Pocomoke Village. In Pocomoke Village is Pocomoke Street.” Buzz was looking at Kaminsky, too, at this point.”In Algonquin,
pocomoke
means
dark water.
”
At that, Michael also swung around to stare at Kaminsky.
“Oh, my God,” Charlie said. At the same time Buzz said, “Wow,” and Michael said, “Shit.”
“It’s probably a coincidence.” Kaminsky turned away from the map to head for her laptop, which rested on the desk. “But there it is.”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Michael said, and narrowed his eyes at Charlie. “You don’t go anywhere near that place.”
As Kaminsky plopped herself behind the desk and Buzz rose to look over her shoulder while she called something up on her laptop, Charlie gave Michael a hard look that could be roughly translated as,
You’re not the boss of me.
He folded his arms over his chest. “Babe, here’s a tip: don’t mess with me right now. I ain’t real happy with you.”
Bite me,
was what she silently replied.
“I’ve got it here on Google Earth. Pocomoke Street is dotted with what looks like little fishing cottages. They’re far apart, and the area seems really rural,” Kaminsky drew her attention by saying.
“Laura said the van smelled like fish,” Charlie said before she thought.
“Who?” Kaminsky frowned at her, while Michael, with a taunting smile, said, “Oops.”
“Somebody. It doesn’t matter.” Charlie covered her misstep hastily, and covered herself even further by refusing to look at Michael again. “The point is, someone said the van used in the kidnappings smelled like fish.”
“I think I heard that,” Buzz said.
“One of the cottages is painted dark gray.” Kaminsky got to the point. “What we have here, then, is a gray house on the equivalent of Dark Water Street.”
“There are a lot of gray houses on a lot of streets with Indian names,” Tony cautioned when he stepped back into the office after finishing his phone calls and Kaminsky’s discovery was explained to him. “Who owns it?”
Kaminsky tapped a few keys on her laptop. “Benjamin Motta.” Her tone was portentous.
I can’t talk right now, Ben.
That’s what Laura said she’d overheard the Gingerbread Man saying to someone on the phone.
“Let’s go check it out,” Tony said.
“Oh, no,” Michael said, pointing a finger at Charlie. “Not you.”
But she was already on her way out the door with the rest of them.
“Can you say ‘death wish,’ Doc?” Michael growled as they all piled into the car, a rental that had been waiting for them at the airport.
Charlie’s mouth tightened. She hated to admit it, but he had a point.
“What about Ms. Hill, boss?” Buzz asked from the backseat, where he and Kaminsky now sat as a matter of course. Ms. Hill was the witness who was at that moment working with the sketch artist.
“One of the locals can give her a ride home if we’re not back by the time she’s finished. We’ll pick up the sketch later.” From the little side street they’d been on, Tony pulled onto the main drag that ran along the lakefront even as he glanced at Kaminsky in the mirror and added, “Kaminsky.”
“Taking care of it.” Kaminsky pulled her phone out.
“You’re not really stupid enough to go to a gray house on dark water, are you?” Michael snarled at Charlie from the backseat, where he was sandwiched between Buzz and Kaminsky, his invisible presence making them both crowd toward their respective doors, which still left him with not near enough room. “Hell, I know you’re not.”
Actually, much as she might feel like annoying Michael, now that she had a chance to think about it, Charlie wasn’t. Reluctantly she said to Tony, “You know, I think I’m going to have to sit this one out. If you could drop me at a restaurant or something …”
“Smartest thing you’ve said all day,” Michael said.
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to take you anyway,” Tony told her reassuringly. “Even aside from the dark water thing, you’re a civilian, and if this pans out it could get ugly. In fact, I think we’re going to want the local police with us as backup. If we should need to go in, if there should be some indication that the missing girls might be at this location, we’re going to want to have a perimeter set up and plenty of firepower available. Kaminsky, check your Google map or whatever it is you check and find us a place where you and Charlie can hole up while this thing gets done.”
“I hate to say this, but I’m actually kind of liking Dudley right now,” Michael said.
“What?” Kaminsky screeched, then immediately moderated her voice to add, “I’m not sitting this out.”
“No, you’re not. You’re doing your job, which is to protect our expert.” Tony gave her a cool look through the mirror. “Get on it, Kaminsky.”
Charlie felt the sizzle of Kaminsky’s glare on the back of her head.
“The Bluefly Inn is a small hotel located right outside Pocomoke Village. They have a good, down-home-style supper buffet Tuesday through Sunday, clean, well-appointed rooms and two conference rooms available for family reunions or any larger groups.” Kaminsky sounded like she was reading the words off a virtual brochure. There was no missing the bitterness in her tone.
“Sounds good,” Tony said, then got on his phone to make arrangements with the local cops for what he needed.
The Bluefly Inn looked exactly like what it was: an old-fashioned hunting and fishing lodge. Built of dark, unpeeled logs with a green-shingled roof and a covered porch complete with rocking chairs that ran the length of the front of the building, it was set well back from the street in a gravel parking lot. There were a number of cars in the lot, and Charlie realized with a glance at the dashboard clock—it was almost 8:30, she saw with a sense of shock—that this was probably the tail-end of the dinner rush.
She also realized two completely disparate things: she was hungry, and the girls they were hoping to save were running out of time.
In the end, she felt like coming here was on her shoulders. The gray house on the dark water owned by Ben Motta was a good lead, but was it right?
There was no way to know. Only, if it wasn’t, those girls might very well die tonight.
Charlie sent a wordless prayer for their safety winging skyward.
“This is complete sexist crap.” Kaminsky glared at Charlie across the table as they both sat down to eat. Tony and Buzz had been gone maybe ten minutes, and Charlie and Kaminsky had elected to make the best use of their time by having a meal while they reviewed files that had just been updated by the support staff at Quantico on their respective laptops. (“Let ’em starve,” was Kaminsky’s reaction to Charlie’s suggestion that perhaps they should wait for the men to return before they ate.) Located at one end of the lodge, the dining room was dark, log walls, a long steam table set up down one side. The deepening twilight seen through the partially closed blinds covering the two large windows and the glass tops of the front and back doors didn’t help the gloom. The smell of fried chicken and fried fish, the main dish staples, was more than enough to make up for it: it was so appetizing that Charlie’s stomach growled. Their table was a small four-top pushed against the wall. The only illumination was provided by the steam table, a tiny candle in a small brown glass globe on each table, and the red glimmer of two signs that labeled the ladies’ and men’s rooms, which were down a short hall that opened up behind Kaminsky and which Charlie could see faintly sputtering as if their bulbs were about to go out.
There was also the light from their open laptops: the pale glow from Kaminsky’s made her look like something out of
The Walking Dead.
Not that Charlie meant to tell her so, and not that she had any hope that the glow from hers made her look any better. Anyway, except for Michael, and the waitress when she brought their drinks, no one was paying the least attention to either her or Kaminsky.