Undercover Hunter (16 page)

He pulled out one map, moved the stack to the side and unfolded the one he’d chosen.

“Did you get all your hikers safely out yesterday?” DeeJay asked.

He looked up from the map and smiled faintly. “We did. Those that wanted to ride it out are hunkered down in cabins we have here and there. Weren’t that many. Great skiing now, though, not to mention avalanche risk. I guess we just have to hope they aren’t too foolhardy.”

He pulled a mechanical pencil out of his breast pocket and pointed to a spot on the map. “This is where the guy hung the kids last time. Pretty dense forest, lots of rocks, lots of undergrowth. Not the kind of place some hiker might come on casually.” He looked up, meeting their gazes. “Not an easy place to get to with a body.”

“ATV?” Cade asked.

“Possible, but it wouldn’t be a straight line. What are you hoping for?”

“A direction he might have come from.”

Craig nodded and looked down at the map. “Considering we allow ATVs only on designated trails, he’d have been running a real risk coming that way.”

“He’s a risk taker,” DeeJay said. “He wouldn’t be operating here again otherwise.”

“I figured that. Well, I’ll be honest. There’s no real trail in that area, not close by anyway. And these maps don’t say much about what’s growing there, where the boulders are and so on. You’re going to be relying a lot on my memory here, unless you want me to go out there and ride over it. And if he came up over the property that the resort just brought...well, that’s private and never been my headache. After all they’ve done out there to put in the slopes and build roads, it would be pretty much impossible to tell anything now.”

Cade leaned closer. “So he could have come across the private property, then into the forest land?”

Craig nodded. “It would be my guess he did exactly that. Less chance of running into me or one of the other rangers, who’d have given him hell for driving off a designated trail. Nobody would think twice about him doing that on basically abandoned private property.”

DeeJay looked at the map. She was reasonably good at reading them—it had been part of her early training—but as a military cop she hadn’t often needed to rely on terrain maps. “There was a way to get up there on the private property?”

“Most likely.” He drew a finger down the map south of the forest boundary. “Lots of people have bought that land and sold it over the years, all of them with ideas for some kind of resort. None of them ever came to fruition until this last group. Luke Masters could probably tell you better than anyone what kind of access there was before the build started. I’m sure there was some. Maybe enough to get a pickup truck at least part of the way. Then an ATV? I don’t know. It’s pretty rugged out that way, but you’d either have to hoof it or use an ATV to get up that far. I’d bet on it.”

He pulled out a different map. As he spread it, DeeJay could clearly see it was a road map. “Here’s another part of your problem. At the bottom of the resort property, you have a couple of county roads spreading out, as well as the one that goes directly to town. I don’t think you’re going to get much help from direction, not unless there’s some evidence somewhere that he came from a different direction and came through the forest. I sure haven’t heard it.”

“Neither have we,” said Cade. “For whatever reason, the age of the site, or just not thinking about it, nobody seemed to show any official interest in how he might have gotten there.”

“Probably the age of the site,” DeeJay said, looking at Cade.

He nodded. “Yeah. Three years after the last boy disappeared means a lot of rain, a lot of winter, a lot of new growth and probably a million ways his tracks wouldn’t be clear.”

* * *

Craig left them with some maps, promising to keep thinking about access to the scene. DeeJay watched him ski off down the street. She thought she might have heard the rumble of a heavy engine, but if so it was faraway. A plow probably wouldn’t reach them soon. She figured this storm had taxed the county hard.

“Dead end,” she heard Cade say.

She turned to him. “So it seems.”

He arched his brow. “You don’t agree?”

“I’m not sure.” She returned her gaze to the snow-buried world outside. It seemed safer than looking at Cade right now. Crossing the line last night had been bad enough, but now every time she looked at him she felt a jolt of sexual awareness that bordered on serious arousal. One night wasn’t going to be enough. She wished she knew if he felt the same. If she had any wiles, she’d long since forgotten them, so she had no idea how to find out.

“Oh, well,” she said, forcing herself to turn from the window and face all the messes from the killer to blurred professional lines. “We knew when we went out there that we were looking at a Herculean task to get those bodies up there. Nothing’s really changed. I hate to think Craig came out in this just to tell us that we’re not going to find a Day-Glo arrow to the killer’s point of origin.”

“We have to try everything. You know that. Anyway, he was clearly looking for a good excuse to get his wife chocolate.”

She had to laugh. “That was cute.”

“And probably true.” He paused, then said, “If I don’t get some exercise, I’m apt to start climbing walls. Care to join me in some shoveling?”

She hesitated. “What about the phone? And do we have a shovel?”

“I’ll call Gage and tell him we’ll be outside. He won’t get here soon anyway. There’s a storage shed just back of the house. Maybe there are some shovels in there.”

“I’ll shovel with my hands if I need to. Better than chewing nails.”

* * *

Apparently a lot of other people had the same idea. An hour later the neighborhood had become a kind of beehive of shared work. Those with snowblowers were cheerfully clearing all the sidewalks. Other residents helped each other with porches and buried cars. DeeJay and Cade met a lot of people in a short time, and everyone wanted to know their impressions of the locality.

It was kind of like meeting a friendly PR committee. When they took breaks, it was an excuse to cluster and chat, and coffee and tea were coming out of all the houses in a stream. Share and share alike. DeeJay approved of this neighborhood.

At some point everyone seemed to decide that DeeJay and Cade weren’t there to do a hatchet job on the town, and conversation turned to the missing boys.

“It was bad enough that we went through this once and never caught the creep,” said a woman about DeeJay’s age. She held a cup of tea beneath her face, and every time she spoke a cloud of steam emerged. Small, she seemed almost pixielike. “I’ve got a boy myself and I won’t let him out alone anymore. I’ve had to become a guard dog, and that’s not good for either of us. Lots of parents are feeling the same way. And the families whose boys have disappeared...” She looked away and just shook her head. “I’d go out of my mind.”

DeeJay nodded her agreement, staring down the street, which looked a bit odd at the moment with so much of the sidewalks, driveway, porches and cars cleared while the street between remained buried in snow.

She’d been resolved from the outset, but her resolve was hardening. If she could turn herself into bait, she would. The only problem was figuring out how, and she needed to see photos of the female victims to know if she resembled them at all. If she did...

Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it?

The distant rumbling she’d been hearing for a while suddenly became loud. Heads swung around to see a big yellow plow turn onto the street.

“About time,” someone said. The party mood had vanished the instant the subject of the missing boys had come up. Apparently, fear and horror didn’t leave these people alone for long.

“Might as well get inside and warm up,” a man said. “We’re going to have a lot more shoveling to do when he gets done.”

Nods and goodbyes were passed around, then DeeJay and Cade joined the exodus, heading back into their house.

The phone rang just as they were shedding their outerwear. DeeJay answered to hear Gage.

“Had to move heaven and earth, but your street should be clear soon.”

“It’s getting done right now.”

“Give me about twenty, then. I’ll come over.”

* * *

He had fixated on the woman. Calvin knew it and quit making excuses. He ran the plow attached to the front of his pickup up and down his drive, even though the county plows probably wouldn’t reach his road until tomorrow. He’d grown up here and didn’t expect the impossible to happen.

But clearing his long drive gave him an excuse to clear a route to the barn, if anyone happened to notice, not that anyone was out and about. An excess of caution. Besides, from time to time he heard the helicopter for the emergency rescue team fly by. Not exactly overhead, but he didn’t want to stand out in anyone’s mind.

The woman. DeeJay, someone at the diner had said when he’d asked who she was. Odd name for a woman. It sounded more like a man.

But he wasn’t really thinking about her name. He was thinking about her, about the way she seemed to glow in his mind’s eye. He recognized that aura and knew what it meant. He’d settled on her. He had to take her.

Back inside for a break, drinking hot cocoa made with the instant mix—his mother would not have approved, but the small act of defiance pleased him in some way—he looked at his mother’s photo. It sat in a small frame along with other family photos, on a piece of furniture his mother had called a lowboy. To him it was just a table with drawers.

He picked up the photo, staring at it, wondering if her eyes had really been as dark as they appeared in the photo. He couldn’t recall them now, except flashes from the moments when she had been cleansing him, and then they had indeed appeared black as night.

A thin woman, with a severe face and a will of iron. Sometimes when he thought about her, he could understand why his dad had killed himself. Other times, he thought his dad was a rat for abandoning his wife and child.

But the woman, DeeJay, had those dark eyes. Short hair, like his mother, who had called hair a vanity and often took her shears to both of them. Kate Sweet had been tall, too, like DeeJay, as if life had stretched her out in some way, making her all lean angles. She had towered over him for most of his life. He hadn’t equaled her in height until he was almost eighteen.

Taking a woman would change his pattern, cover himself, but it didn’t quite answer the questions that loomed in his mind each time this happened. Maybe it was like the time he had finally turned on his mother and whipped her with his belt until she left him alone. Maybe he hadn’t felt his mother was pure enough to be cleansing him. It was possible. Certainly the two other women he’d fixated on hadn’t been pure, had probably been past purification.

He set down the photo and told himself to stop wondering. He was the person she had made him to be, a man with a mission. Whatever went on inside him that he occasionally needed to take a woman like her—well, she had made him. Maybe this was part of what she wanted, too.

But satisfying a dead woman was the least of it. The urges that goaded him came from deep within him, like an ebbing and flowing tide he could only ride. The tide was flowing strong in him again, and he had to find a way to meet this DeeJay.

Dreaming about it, he set out for the barn. He was stuck because of the snow, and the urges were riding him hard. Maybe spending some time with his boys would help. Especially if he climbed all the way up so he could look down on them.

Looking down always made him feel more powerful. It juiced him, to use a term he’d learned on city streets, although he meant it differently. It zapped through him like an electrical surge, making him feel big. Huge. Important.

Like a man with a mission.

* * *

Gage arrived in the late afternoon. Surprisingly, he walked through the door with a bag of takeout from the diner and began putting foam cartons on the table. “Emma’s making pizza for the boys. I’m tired of the sound of video games, and she’s been wearing headphones and listening to music to avoid it. I just decided to escape.” He was half smiling, though, and appeared to be enjoying himself.

“How are things otherwise?”

“What you’d expect after a storm like this,” he answered. “Some outlying ranches without any power, a couple of women who decided now would be a good time to have a baby, some injuries from falls, a few heart attacks from shoveling...” He trailed off. “Thank God we’ve got a great emergency response team. They’ve been flying those helicopters since the wind died down enough. So what’s up? Was Craig any help?”

“Maybe you’d better explain,” Cade said to DeeJay. “I wish we could get to Lew’s email. It would make everything clearer.”

Gage spoke as he opened containers. He’d brought disposable utensils and napkins, so all they had to add was mugs of coffee. “Lew who?”

“Lew Boulard. An FBI profiler. We had him do a little research. He called this morning, and promised to send an email with the information.”

Gage shook his head. “Might be tomorrow before we have the wireless back. They’re working on it—it’s a top priority, they tell me—but it’s tough out there. Getting to the repeaters, climbing towers in all that snow and ice...nobody wants a broken neck. Wonder why?” After he swallowed his bite of steak sandwich, he said, “Okay, what’s up?”

So they explained what DeeJay had noted about the guy’s method of displaying his trophies. For her, the worst of it was that what had sounded so brilliant when she first conceived of it now sounded stupid the second time around.

But Gage didn’t react that way. Instead, he asked to see the pictures, turned them the way she had and nodded. “I can see it. Now where did that take you?”

“That he lures his victims. He’s not snatching them, he’s getting to know them well enough that they don’t think twice about getting in a vehicle with him.”

Gage stopped eating, his gaze growing distant. “Makes sense,” he said after a moment. “They had to know him. It’s been kind of worrying me from the start. But the web?”

DeeJay let it slide. The web had been a key to her thought processes, but it wasn’t essential. Instead, she moved on to the other ugliness, including the part about him using a paralyzing drug on the victims. Now Gage put his sandwich down. He was looking more disturbed by the minute. “There’s more, isn’t there.”