Authors: Iris Johansen
And the future was always what you made of it.
Beth was right. They had all the weapons they needed. They had a chance.
All they had to do was reach out and take it.
* * *
HIS CHAMBER HAD NEVER LOOKED
more beautiful.
Colby thrust his mop into the twenty-gallon cart and stepped back onto the stairs for a better look. The floor and walls were now coated with a thick coat of warm, dark tar, which seemed to capture and absorb all light. The cream-colored embalming table stood in stark relief, almost appearing to float in the void.
Beautiful. Simply beautiful.
He’d been working all night in his chamber, preparing it for his grand finale. It would certainly be the last time he’d ever use it, and he envisioned a spectacular end for a place that had served him well for so many years.
He touched the wall closest to the stairs. The tar there was already hardening and cool to the touch.
Perfect.
Just as the rest would be perfect.
Colby smiled. He had been patient, and now he would have his reward.
After all these years, it was going to happen.
All he had to do was reach out and take it.
Lynch House
8:35
A
.
M
.
“IT’S ABOUT TIME YOU WOKE UP,”
Lynch said from the foot of the staircase. “I was about to come up and get you. We have things to do and people to see.”
“It’s only been two hours,” Kendra said as she came down the stairs. “And I’m glad I slept. It’s not been happening very much lately.”
“No?” He nodded. “I noticed you were looking a little fragile. You’ve lost a few pounds. Sharing your nights with Colby?”
“More than I would like.”
His lips tightened, “More than I would like, too.” His fingers touched the dark circles beneath her eyes. “We’ll take care of that soon. I’m glad you slept. See, you should have been here from the beginning. You must have felt safer.”
“And you’re always right?” There might have been an element of truth in his words, but she wasn’t about to tell him that his fortress hadn’t been the sole reason she had been able to relax. Lynch was here, and that was security in itself. “What things to do and people to see?”
“We need to go to the field office and see Griffin. I want to get a complete report on the investigation into Stokes’s abduction and death. They must have facts and possible witness reports by now.”
Kendra nodded. “Griffin texted me that they thought Stokes was taken at his home. He was going to text me more later.”
“Then he can tell us in person. As well as anything else that’s come up.” He led her through the living room toward the kitchen. “Coffee, then we’re on our way.”
“Did you and Sam get together about how to track down Colby’s computer ace?”
“Sam has a sort of cult following in San Francisco that he’s tapping. Northrup does look promising, but no one’s seen him or heard of him since last November, when a source said he was doing a hacking job for a pharmaceutical company. He obviously likes money, so I put out feelers to a money-laundering operation with contacts all over the U.S. He’s clever, and he would need to get any fees safely out of the country.” He smiled. “Either way, we’ll find him. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Which we do not have.”
“Then we’ll find a way of hurrying it along. We’ve only just started the process of—”
“Hey, wait,” she interrupted as they were passing by the portrait in the living room. “I meant to ask you. What happened to your beautiful bikini babe?”
He paused and glanced up at Kendra’s portrait. “Maybe I’m becoming discriminating.”
“Nah.”
“Or maybe I like the way your portrait makes me think … and remember.”
She kept her gaze on the portrait. “How very sensitive. What did your gorgeous Ashley say?”
“She wasn’t pleased, but she understood that she has to be tolerant of other women who are less fortunate than she.”
“Is that what she said?”
“No, it was implied. Ashley is easy to read.”
“When did you buy the portrait?”
“Two days after we saw it together.” He grimaced. “The bastard held me up.”
“Then why did you give in?”
“Warren knew he had me. I wanted it.” He met her eyes. “So I took it.”
Heat.
She quickly looked away from him. “Or he took you.”
“No, that’s not the way it works. In the end, it belongs to me. I can look at it. I can touch it. I can care for it.”
“Or destroy it.”
He shook his head. “What a waste that would be. No, I believe you’re here for the long haul.” He took her elbow and nudged her toward the kitchen. “I really don’t think I could do without you…”
FBI Field Office
San Diego
9:50
A
.
M
.
KENDRA AND LYNCH STEPPED
off the FBI field office elevator and walked down the long corridor toward Griffin’s office. Kendra glanced around at the busy personnel and was immediately struck by the sense of urgency compared with her other recent visits.
Lynch obviously saw it, too. “There’s a psychopath on the loose, and it’s being perceived as partially their fault,” he said quietly. “They know how bad this has made them look. We can use this to get any amount of cooperation we need from them.”
“Spoken like the true Puppetmaster you are.”
“Hmm. I really need to stop sharing thoughts like that with you.”
“Don’t sweat it. I knew when Griffin visited me the day after Stokes was killed that we weren’t going to have a problem with them. If it gets us closer to nailing Colby, play whatever games with them you want. Whatever it takes.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. Manipulation doesn’t have to be a curse word. It can be just a matter of steering conditions toward a mutually beneficial conclusion.”
“Ha. If you dare say that the next time you try to manipulate me, I’ll slap you.”
He smiled. “I think you would.”
“Bet on it. FYI, you should probably keep that little rationalization to yourself.”
“Point taken.”
Kendra spotted Griffin and several other agents in a large conference room separated from the corridor by floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Griffin waved them in.
Stacks of file folders, reports, and photos covered the long conference table. Agents were hurriedly sorting through the material and pinning especially relevant items on bulletin boards.
Kendra went still when they spotted the hundreds of printed photos stacked in the center of the table.
Photos of
her
. The same photos she had seen papering ever square inch of Colby’s cell that day she’d visited him in San Quentin.
They’d made her ill then, and they made her even more so now. Colby had let it be known that he wanted pictures of her, and his numerous correspondents had obliged by sending printed photos from the Web. He’d known that her trail would eventually lead to his cell, and he surmised quite correctly that the collage would creep the hell out of her.
“Sorry you had to see those again,” Griffin said. “After Colby’s execution, we—”
“You mean supposed execution,” Kendra said.
“Yes. Supposed execution.”
She wished she didn’t take satisfaction from the barely contained anger and frustration that suddenly flashed across his face.
He continued. “We subpoenaed the contents of his prison cell, along with copies of all call and visitor logs. As you know, there was some thought that he might have been responsible for other victims not yet on our radar, and we wanted to have this stuff just in case we needed it down the road. We had it all brought up from our storage facility in National City.”
Lynch looked at the stacks of opened mail on the table. “Popular guy for a mass murderer.”
Griffin shrugged. “The culture of celebrity. He obviously had help with the computer stuff, so we’re still trying to identify as many of his contacts as we can.”
“Isn’t most of this in the copies and scans you gave me?” Kendra asked.
“Most, but not all. There are notes scribbled on the backs of some of these photos, and we’ve tracked some more info from the cell phones he was using in prison. We want to make sure we haven’t missed anything.” Griffin picked up a sheaf of papers from the table. “Your friend, Beth Avery, e-mailed me this fairly detailed memo outlining several possibilities for who may be helping Colby in this area. She zeroed in on Joseph Northrup but indicated there were a few more experts who might be suspect. It’s very impressive.”
“
She’s
very impressive,” Kendra said.
“Well, Sims, our computer forensics specialist in Quantico certainly thinks so. I understand he and Zackoff have been in cahoots since I requested help after Stokes’s death. But the director wants him to work more closely with Zackoff, so Sims is flying in this morning. He should be arriving around noon. Sims will drop in here first. He wants to see what both our local people and Beth Avery have come up with. Then he’ll take a look at the documents and have her explain how she sourced them for her memo.”
“It’s based almost entirely on this material you’ve had in your possession for months,” Kendra said.
“Okay, I can see you want to rub it in,” Griffin said. “And it’s your right. We’re playing catch-up, I admit that. You’ve been looking for Colby for months, and we’ve only been on this for forty-eight hours.” He gestured to the piled Colby info on the table. “But we’re making progress. You can see we’re trying like hell.”
“Yes, I can see that.” He wanted her to praise him, exonerate him. But there in the conference room, surrounded by Colby’s mementos, Kendra felt the walls closing in on her. She tried desperately to push the sensation away from her. She’d had the same reaction when she last saw the man himself at San Quentin.
She drew a deep breath, trying to steady her racing heartbeat.
Power through it. If she let this rattle her, then the monster wins.
She couldn’t let that happen.
Lynch did not glance at her, but he gave her arm an unobtrusive squeeze. She felt a rush of gratitude. He alone could see what she was going through, but he wasn’t about to blow her lack of control in front of this roomful of agents.
“Fine,” Kendra finally said. She pulled out her phone. “I’ll text Beth and ask her to be here at noon for the meeting and bring her docs and source materials.”
“Thank you.”
Lynch quickly turned to Griffin and changed the subject. “Do you know for sure where Stokes was abducted?”
“We have a pretty good idea.” Griffin jerked his head toward the doorway. “I’ll show you.”
They followed him to another conference room just a few yards away. It looked positively barren compared to the room they had just left, but the two bulletin boards were filled with photographs of a home and driveway.
“Stokes never showed up for work that morning, but he’d made a few calls from home between seven thirty and eight.” Griffin pointed to a photo of a silver thermal travel mug lying on the driveway. “It looks like he was taken here as he was getting into his car. Autopsy results show that he had a fast-acting muscle relaxant in his system, so it’s likely he was caught by surprise and injected with it.”
“Was there anyone else at home?” Kendra asked.
“No, he lived alone. Divorced. His wife and three kids live with husband number two in La Jolla.”
“None of the neighbors saw anything?” Kendra pointed to some of the other photographs. “These houses look pretty close together.”
“Yes, but the driveway at that point has limited visibility. Colby chose his spot well.”
“He always has.”
Lynch was staring at a pair of blurry photos of a white van. “What’s this?”
“Neighbors did report a white van on the street, and one of them even puts it in Stokes’s driveway that morning. Traffic cams captured these between 8:15 and 8:25 that morning, with this van moving away from Stokes’s neighborhood.”
Lynch’s eyes narrowed on the grainy photos. “Can’t read the license plates, of course.”
“Of course. I’ll be the first to chip in whenever the hell this city decides to invest in some HD traffic cams. We’re trying to round up some security-camera footage in the area to see if we can get a better look at it. It’s a Ford Transit with fifty/fifty rear cargo doors and a 130-inch wheelbase. Naturally, there are about a million of those around. And Stokes’s neighborhood was just as ordinary. We were lucky that anyone even noticed the van.”
Kendra fought back a wave of sadness as she turned back to look at Stokes’s modest home. She hadn’t known about his failed marriage, and she realized that she actually knew very little about the man. They had only met a few days before, at the scene of that domestic homicide case. It seemed like so much longer ago that she and Stokes had made their introductions and discussed her work on the Van Buren investigation. She’d never imagined that just a few days later he would—
The Van Buren case.
She sharply turned away from the bulletin board.
He’d been so impressed that her lip-reading abilities had blown the case wide open. Is it possible that he—?
“I need to see the video of Stokes’s death,” she said abruptly. “Right now, Griffin.”
Griffin wrinkled his brow. “Once wasn’t enough for you?”
“Once is too much for anyone. But I need to look at it again in your A/V lab. It may need to be zoomed in and sharpened. Can you arrange that?”
Griffin still seemed mystified by her request, but he nodded. “Zoomed in, sharpened, forward, backward, or upside down. Any way you want to see it. Do you mind telling me why?”
“It may be nothing, but there’s a chance Stokes might have been trying to tell me something. I can’t be sure until I look.”
“We can go downstairs and have one of the A/V techs pull it up on his console. It’s the same guys who are combing security-camera footage for more views of that van. I can pull one of them off for a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Griffin. It’s worth a shot.”
* * *