Haunted, Page 3

  Hollis looked at him with interest. “I hadn’t thought of that, either. Sounds like a lot more trouble than just carrying extra gas for a rugged Jeep or something.”

  He nodded immediately. “Agreed. I’d be surprised if he’s on horseback. Which means he must have some very rugged vehicle, and must be familiar enough with this part of the Blue Ridge that he was able to travel with fair speed and yet still avoid the main roads and trails, including the ones the rangers patrol.”

  Hollis frowned. “Which doesn’t give us much more information. We know he’s come this far south because this is where he left Sara’s and Jill’s bodies. Assuming he has Angela and Megan, they were abducted from an overlook about twenty-five miles from here. North of here. But he must have brought them back this way because Sara’s and Jill’s bodies haven’t been here very long. Which means he almost had to have all four girls for at least a brief period of time.”

  “Tough for one guy to control four hostages,” DeMarco noted. “Even if two of them have been beaten and starved into submission.”

  “Are we sure this is one guy? I mean, we all know how rare it is for a serial to do doubles, taking two victims at the same time or on the same day; every serial I’ve ever read about built to something like that, when the challenge of taking just one victim wasn’t enough. But this guy grabs two right off the bat?”

  “It’s one of the things that makes him unique,” Miranda noted.

  “Okay, but how likely is it that one man managed to abduct two young women, travel with them over miles of rough terrain, and torture them so badly that by the time he abducted Angela and Megan, Sara and Jill were—and I really hate to use the phrase—deadweight?”

  Miranda shook her head slightly. “I think we have to consider the possibility that he has help, maybe even a partner. Just for the logistics of travel and holding captives. But I can tell you that one person tortured and killed those girls; I knew it the moment I saw them. So if he has a partner, that person is a complete submissive, as much a prisoner of his will as the girls are.”

  “New possibility,” Hollis said. “Still, all this, and all we really know or believe we know is that he’s moving south.”

  “We know more than that,” Miranda said. But her gaze was on Hollis, and she didn’t continue.

  Hollis sighed. “I get to be profiler?”

  “Try,” Miranda said. “Experience is what teaches us.”

  Hollis glanced down into the ravine, and then averted her gaze from two terribly mutilated bodies that had once been pretty, vital young women being put into black body bags.

  That part, this part, never got any easier.

  She drew a breath and let it out, then began musing aloud. “Wherever he held Sara and Jill has to be close enough that he was confident he could get Angela and Megan there and still have time to dump the first girls.” She frowned. “Unless he does have a partner, and that partner set up a second location for the second set of girls. Maybe as a safety precaution; if Sara and Jill were found, which was always possible even if unlikely, he wouldn’t want them found anywhere near where he’s holding Angela and Megan.”

  “A possibility we have to consider,” Miranda acknowledged. “Now focus on what he did to his victims.”

  Hollis kept her voice as matter-of-fact as she could manage. “No rape, not even object penetration. He used his knife, but not to stab, not deep wounds, so probably not an indication he’s impotent; he just wasn’t sexually interested in them. At all. He didn’t cut their faces, but he did hit them, that’s clear from the bruises and small cuts, so he didn’t place any value on their beauty. All the slicing was overkill—but not in rage. He was careful, methodical, controlled.

  “Whether it was their terror, their blood, or their suffering, he got whatever he needed from them, and then he dumped them like garbage, trusting the animals to clean up behind him. Which is what likely would have happened if we hadn’t come this far south.”

  “Not bad,” Miranda said.

  “Yeah, but the only conclusion I can draw from that is that he’s a psychopath, and we already knew that. Partner or no partner, he’s the one killing. He’s too controlled to be on a spree, too deliberate. The victims seem more of opportunity than anything else, not stalked or watched beforehand, just grabbed because they were there and they were vulnerable. Not surrogates for somebody he needs to strike out at, at least if you consider that the only thing they have in common is race and rough age: two blondes, a brunette, and a redhead, all white and all in their early twenties. If that’s his type, it’s a broad one.”

  “Which tells us?”

  Hollis brooded a moment. “It’s not about a type. The victims don’t matter to him except in how they suffer. He must have some kind of goal. A plan. An ultimate destination. I just have absolutely no idea what any of those things are.”

  “Hey, Agent Bishop?”

  They all three looked around in surprise, all realizing in the moment that it was Miranda the ranger was addressing, and two of them at least thinking that there was, really, only one Agent Bishop—and he was on the other side of the country at the moment.

  “Something?” Miranda asked the ranger.

  “Beats the hell out of me.” He handed over a small plastic bag. “One of the crime scene people pulled it out of a girl’s mouth.”

  “Which girl?” Hollis asked.

  “Uh—the brunette. Jill Crandall.”

  “Right question,” Miranda murmured, frowning. “And probably another piece of the puzzle.”

  Something in the other woman’s voice made Hollis frown. “What is it?” she asked, never one to hesitate asking a question.

  “It’s a silver cross. A pendant for a necklace.”

  “Hers?” DeMarco asked.

  Without having to refer to a file or her tablet, Miranda shook her head. “According to family and friends, Jill Crandall never wore jewelry except for gold studs in her earlobes. And she was an atheist, so unlikely to even have a cross in her possession.”

  “Then,” Hollis said, “this is for us?”

  “A message of some kind. I doubt she put it in her own mouth.”

  “What message?” Hollis frowned again. “She was a good girl and I still did this to her?”

  “Or she wasn’t a good girl,” DeMarco said slowly. “In his mind, at least. Especially if he knew she was an atheist.”

  Hollis was still frowning. “I dunno. It doesn’t feel like . . . an insult or punishment to me. More like . . . consecration.”

  “He did that to her to make her sacred?”

  “He did that to her . . . and she became sacred.”

  —

  TRINITY HADN’T EXPECTED to find anything either surprising or suspicious at the church.

  She found both.

  The first surprise was that the double doors of the church—Trinity Church—were standing wide open. And from inside, even in the afternoon light, a glow was evident.

  Trinity got out of the Jeep slowly. She adjusted her jacket so that the gun on her hip was clear and unsnapped the holster for good measure. She was about to call Braden but found he had already left the Jeep and was at her side, his gaze on the church.

  His calm gaze.

  It reassured her somewhat; Braden, she had discovered, was very alert to trouble or danger, and very protective of her.

  Still . . . those doors shouldn’t have been open, and there shouldn’t be any light coming from inside.

  She walked steadily up one of the paths that led to the entrance to the church. Other than the stained wooden doors with their leaded glass inserts, the entrance was plain. The wide porch was shallow, only three steps leading up to it, with simple corbels rather than posts supporting the slight overhang of the roof.

  It had been built in a simpler time, her father had told Trinity. White clapboard and a brick foundation, the only ornamentation the stained-glass windows along each side depicting, of course, scenes from the Bible.

  Trin
ity, her dog at her side, went up the steps and into the church, moving slowly, her gaze roaming.

  The simple wooden pews gleamed dully from years and years of being polished by church ladies. The plank floor had, at some point, been covered by a dull red carpet worn noticeably thin in spots.

  There wasn’t really an altar. There was a podium where the preacher stood and delivered his sermon, and behind him was the section for the choir. Off to the right was a rather impressive organ. And behind the podium and the choir section, a glass window—covered by a red velvet curtain—concealed the baptistery. Above that on the wall hung a simple cross.

  Large. But simple.

  Trinity stopped only a few steps into the church, aware of the low growl rumbling from Braden’s throat. She had no way of knowing what his senses were telling him, but what hers were telling her was that something was very wrong here.

  She kept her hand on her weapon but didn’t draw it free of its holster.

  There was nothing to be deterred by a gun.

  From the organ, over the podium, and across to the other side of the church, there was a kind of rainbow arch of . . . light. It was like a sunbeam, except that there was, clearly, no source to call it that. It was light, and within the light was . . . sparks. That’s the only way Trinity could describe it to herself. Sparks, metallic sparks, inside that arch of light.

  Even as she thought about that, Braden’s growl grew louder, and she had the eerie feeling of pressure above her head, as if something hovered above her, just above her.

  Her head began to hurt.

  Trinity glanced down at Braden to see that his attention had shifted, that he was looking fixedly above her head, and now his growl showed the impressive teeth of a pit bull.

  Not at all the type to whistle in the dark or otherwise spook easily, Trinity tipped her head back suddenly and looked up.

  She had seen, in photographs, objects some people referred to as orbs, round outlines, sometimes fuzzy, almost . . . shadows of lights. Hovering above people, sometimes seeming to zip around the room, leaving a bright trail like the tail of a comet behind them. Many people believed they represented spiritual energy captured by cameras, the stark and unblinking lens seeing what the questioning human mind failed to see.

  But Trinity saw one now, hovering above her head.

  She saw it, and despite its gentle glow, despite its fuzzy whiteness, she knew without any doubt in her mind that what she was looking at was nothing good. Nothing positive. Nothing she could allow into her—mind.

  Because that’s where it wanted to be, she realized. It wanted in.

  It wanted her.

  “No,” Trinity said, her voice dead calm. “You don’t get me. Leave. Now. I know exactly what you are.”

  She wondered, later, where the words, the certainty, had come from. Wondered how she had known what to say even while her conscious mind had been trying its best to understand the extraordinary, to define the unknown, to label the uncanny.

  She spoke without thinking about it, commanded without wondering what gave her the will or the authority to command.

  But she was obeyed.

  As she gazed upward, the orb above her head floated several feet from her, toward the altar and the rainbow of light there.

  “I know,” Trinity repeated, “exactly what you are. Leave.”

  The faint sparkles within the orb brightened for a moment, and then, without warning, it went black—and the rainbow of light at the front of the church went black, starting at one side and rushing to the other, like a gush of oil through some invisible conduit.

  And then it was gone. The dark orb, the arch of darkness, the light that had been there before, all gone, everything gone with a suddenness that made Trinity’s ears pop.

  She stood there for several long moments, vaguely aware that Braden was no longer growling, aware that her sense of wrongness had faded—but not disappeared entirely.

  She forced herself to walk forward. To examine the podium, the organ, the entire front area of the church. Even opened the curtain to see the baptistery, empty of water.

  For good measure, she went back there and looked around, even opened the back door and looked out on trees climbing the mountain slope above the church. She studied the area for a bit, then closed and locked the door and went back to the front of the church.

  Braden never left her side.

  They walked steadily down the center aisle to the still-open front doors, and only then did Trinity turn and look back. A normal church, lit only by the light that found its way through the stained-glass windows, so that the interior of the space seemed almost to dance with soft colors.

  Peaceful. Pleasant.

  A holy place.

  Once, perhaps. No longer.

  Trinity left the church with her dog, closing the doors behind them after reaching around to flip the catch so that they would automatically lock. She tried them when they were closed, and they resisted her attempt to open them again.

  She stood on the porch for a long time, looking around. Looking at the small graveyard that lay between the church and the parsonage. Everything looked normal, undisturbed.

  But that wasn’t why Trinity decided to wait and check out the parsonage another day.

  She was not a woman easily shaken, but she felt she needed to think long and hard about what she had just experienced. Because although there had been many things in her life she had found difficult to explain, this was . . . something else.

  She had no memory of ever seeing true evil.

  But what gave her greater pause than that, what bothered her a great deal, was the fact that she had recognized it.

  She had recognized true evil because she had, somewhere in her life, encountered it before. She was certain of that, utterly certain.

  Even though she had no memory of when, or where, it had happened.

  —

  “WHAT’S SO DAMNED frustrating,” Hollis said that evening as she, DeMarco, Miranda, and Dean Ramsay, the fourth member of their current team, sat eating a very late supper at an all-night pancake house just off the interstate, “is that we can’t track this guy.”

  “So far,” DeMarco reminded her.

  “Well, yeah, but that means we have to wait for him or evidence of him to turn up again. Which means bodies or abductions. Am I wrong?”

  “No, unfortunately,” Miranda responded. “I doubt we’ll find anything in the autopsies that offers any new or helpful information. His comfort zone seems to be a wilderness even the rangers have trouble navigating at times.”

  “We can be pretty sure he’s heading south,” Dean Ramsay pointed out. “With or without an accomplice. There is that.”

  Hollis shook her head. “Even if he is, and even if he stays in the mountains, that’s still thousands of acres, all the way down into Georgia. He’s avoiding cities. He’s even avoided towns so far—that we know of, at least. So—what? We just trail along behind him, jumping from one off-the-highway motel to the next, collecting crumbs of evidence and hoping he makes a mistake?”

  “If that’s what we have to do,” Miranda said. “It’s how most serials are caught.”

  The restaurant was practically deserted, but Hollis nevertheless lowered her voice when she said, “You haven’t seen anything?”

  “Afraid not. You?”

  “I,” Hollis said, “haven’t seen a spirit in months. Not since that energy vortex at Alexander House.1 I know Bishop said it might change me to channel all that energy, but he didn’t say there was a chance I wouldn’t be a medium anymore.”

  Miranda looked thoughtful. “It wouldn’t be the first time one of us had temporarily burned out because of too much energy. Still, I don’t think that’s it—because you did see the spirit of Mr. Alexander after it was all over.”

  Hollis was honestly relieved—which rather surprised her. “You’re right, I did. I’d forgotten that.”

  DeMarco said, “Maybe the spirits are just giving you a break.” />
  “Spoken by someone who is not a medium,” Hollis said dryly. “Trust me, spirits are not that generous. They have things to do, unfinished business, unhelpful hints to drop here and there while the medium fumbles along in the dark.”

  Gravely, Dean said, “It doesn’t sound like you miss them all that much.”

  “Well, they can be annoying.”

  Miranda said, “I have a hunch they’ll be back. In the meantime, use your other senses and your mind. Those are tools as well.”

  “Tools to help find a murderer.”

  “Yeah. Preferably before he drops more bodies for us to find.”

  January 27

  Trinity smothered a yawn as she started her Jeep early on that Tuesday morning. She hadn’t slept well, which wasn’t surprising; she hadn’t slept well since a killer had begun roaming in the mountains far too close to home for her peace of mind.

  Especially now. The bastard’s body count was up to at least four dead—and he had abducted two more girls on Sunday, just two days ago.

  “I don’t know how he’s finding girls that age out alone at all with the news blaring warnings nearly every hour on the hour,” she said to her dog as she backed the Jeep out of her driveway. “I mean, they’re all being told this is not a situation where the buddy system works unless your buddies are a crowd—”

  Braden suddenly nudged her arm. Hard.

  Startled, Trinity slowed the Jeep. “What the hell?”

  The dog looked at her but didn’t move again until the Jeep had to stop at an intersection. Then he again nudged her arm.

  Trinity had known from the outset that her dog was unusual in quite a few ways, but this was something new.

  “You want me to turn left?” She guessed.

  He nudged her arm.

  “Well, let’s see,” she murmured. And turned the Jeep left. Two streets later, Braden grasped the arm of her jacket in his teeth and tugged gently.

  “Right it is,” Trinity said, shaking her head. “People would think I’m nuts, you realize that, don’t you?”

  Braden didn’t answer except to nudge her arm again, and Trinity turned obediently. She made several other turns, and frowned when at last she was turning into the small parking lot of an apartment building.