“Is this guy’s DNA on file anywhere?” Kenzie suddenly asked. “Like because he had any surgeries, or ever gave blood for any reason. Maybe there are some lab tests on file somewhere.”
Kenzie realized that she was just shooting in the dark but maybe, just maybe, she could hit something that would yield answers.
Hunter turned to look at Kenzie. “What are you getting at?”
She took a breath, trying to sound coherent and doing her best not to get ahead of herself. She had a tendency to do that and she knew she had to be clear.
“Those severed heads we found in the outhouse,” Kenzie began. “This woman’s ‘uncle Cameron’ might have been her first victim. Maybe he takes her up to the cabin, their ‘special place,’ and this time his niece fights back. She snaps and in her rage doesn’t just kill him, she carves him up.” She could see that she had both their attentions. “What do you want to bet that his head is in that collection? If we have his DNA on file, that’ll give the ME something to use as a comparison when he runs his tests.”
Hunter slowly nodded. “It’s a long shot,” he warned her.
Kenzie didn’t think so. “You were the one who brought up Son of Sam and the parking tickets, remember?”
Valri looked from one detective to the other, lost. “Say what now?”
“Long story,” Kenzie said, putting her cousin off for now. “I’ll tell you when we have more time. Meanwhile, Brannigan and I need to talk to Doc Rayburn about running those DNA tests, then see if we can track down Camille Bishop.”
“Or Sheila Gibson, Dorothy Wilson, Penelope James, Colleen Alexander, Sally Marco, Miriam Howe and Rebecca Robertson,” Valri said, reading the woman’s other aliases from the list she’d made for them. She raised her eyes to meet Kenzie’s. “Those were just the current aliases I could come up with.”
“She might be using a new one by now,” Hunter pointed out to Kenzie.
“Just a little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” Kenzie quipped. “No matter what she calls herself, she’s still that damaged little girl, Camille Bishop, underneath it all.” She headed toward the doorway, then glanced back at Hunter. “Let’s go talk to Rayburn.”
* * *
“Don’t ask for much, do you?” Rayburn grumbled after he had heard Kenzie and Hunter out.
“Then you can’t run the tests?” Kenzie asked in surprise. “I thought I heard you say that you prided yourself on specializing in doing the impossible.”
“I didn’t say that,” Rayburn denied. “The difficult I can do. The ‘impossible’ takes a little longer—as long as you can get me that sample of Cameron Bishop’s DNA.”
“Working on it even as we speak,” Hunter told the medical examiner.
Before coming here, he’d given the assignment to Valdez, who was currently in the process of digging up any and all medical records pertaining to Cameron Bishop.
“Okay,” Rayburn announced. “Get out of my morgue. I’ve got work to do.”
The two detectives left the room and went down the hallway to the elevator bank.
“Okay,” Kenzie said as she pressed the elevator button to get them aboveground again, “now all we need is a way to track down our black widow. Any suggestions?” she asked Hunter.
He thought for a moment. “What is the one thing she keeps doing?”
“Hacking up the men she lures into her cabin,” Kenzie answered dryly.
“Besides that,” Hunter said, waving away her response. As they rode up to their floor, he leaned in to her, creating an incredibly intimate space that contained just the two of them. “C’mon, Kenzie. You know the answer to this.”
Irritation flared in her eyes. She didn’t have time to play any guessing games—and then it dawned on her. “The black widow is bringing her victims back to the cabin. Her uncle’s cabin. I think she’s killing her uncle all over again. What do you think?”
“Looks like it,” Hunter agreed. “All her victims are older men.”
“And to top it off,” she cried, feeling as if she was on a roll, “before she even kills them, she steals their money.”
“Just like her uncle stole hers,” Hunter declared.
Now that they had laid it out, it all seemed so obvious. He couldn’t help wondering how they could have missed it.
Kenzie realized what Hunter was thinking. “You want to stake out the cabin,” she guessed.
“She’s bound to come back there,” he told her. “It’s the one pattern she keeps repeating. Killing those men at the cabin completes her need for revenge.” He looked at her to see if she agreed with his take. “Like you said, her uncle probably brought her there, promising her an outing, and instead he took her innocence from her. She needs to bring her victims to the cabin to satisfy her desire for payback.”
They got out of the elevator. Kenzie shivered at Hunter’s interpretation.
“She had other recourses,” she insisted. “She could have called the police, told child services the truth when they came, anything but stayed where she was, enduring his repeated abuse.”
“It was complicated, Kenzie,” Hunter countered. “Cameron was her only family after her parents died. She found herself in an ongoing love/hate kind of relationship that she couldn’t extricate herself out of.”
“Maybe,” Kenzie allowed. “But she still didn’t have to kill those other men,” she maintained.
“No, you’re right, she didn’t,” Hunter agreed. “But by then she was pretty damaged. Who knows what was going on in her head.
“Okay,” he said, clapping his hands together. They’d come a long way and he felt as if they were about to start on the homestretch. “Why don’t we tell the chief of Ds what we’ve found out so far and get him to approve this stakeout. We’re going to need at least two teams, maybe three, of two people each to watch that cabin those two hikers stumbled across until our black widow brings her latest victim there.”
Hunter had a point, she thought.
“I know this sounds terrible, but I hope it’s soon. And I hope that we’re the ones who are there to bring her down.” She saw Hunter looking at her in silence. He probably thought she was a little crazy, Kenzie guessed. “There’s nothing I want more than to stop that woman cold,” she told him. And then she searched his face for some sort of a sign that he understood. “Does that sound bloodthirsty?”
Her heart practically leaped up when she saw a quiet smile curve his lips. “No,” he told her. “That sounds like me.”
That gave them something in common, Kenzie thought. She found that infinitely comforting.
* * *
Brian Cavanaugh was quick to approve the stakeout and the request for extra teams to relieve the ones on watch duty.
“Great work so far, you two. Keep it up,” he told Kenzie and Hunter as he sent them out of his office. “I had a feeling putting you two together would help solve this thing.”
With Valdez tracking down Cameron Bishop’s available medical records, that left Choi and O’Hara to form the other stakeout team. Initially, there were to be two twelve-hour shifts. If it took the black widow longer than a week to find and bring back her new victim, more teams would be tapped to join stakeout duty.
* * *
“Camping out is seriously having less and less of an appeal for me,” Kenzie told Hunter as they sat in his car, watching the cabin from high ground. From this vantage point, they were able to see anyone approaching the cabin from either direction.
Sucking in air, she slapped the side of her neck, killing another insect. “I don’t know which is worse, the bugs or the heat.”
“And here I thought my company would get you to forget about all that,” Hunter said.
“You forget, I can’t exactly ‘do’ anything right now with your ‘company,’” she reminded Hunter. “We’re on a stakeout, not at a lovefest.”
“
Well, if we remain alert, we could probably do both,” he told her with a laugh.
Kenzie had no idea if he was kidding, or actually serious. All she knew was that when she was in his arms, nothing else in the world existed for her.
Which was why she couldn’t risk making love with him while they were on stakeout. Never mind that doing it out in the open in the forest had myriad minuses to it.
She could feel herself growing progressively more restless. “We’ve been on stakeout watching her damn cabin for almost a week now. I’m beginning to think our timetable is off. Maybe the black widow’s decided to change things up a little. Or maybe she’s decided that twelve victims are enough.”
“Thirteen,” Hunter reminded her. “You’re forgetting about John Kurtz,” Hunter pointed out. “We found his head away from the collection.”
“I’m forgetting nothing about this case, especially not how itchy it’s making me,” she said, trying to reach the far side of her left shoulder blade. She shifted in her seat, leaning forward.
And then she stopped.
“Hunter, look down there,” she told him excitedly, pointing to the far side of the cabin. “Someone just pulled up in a Jeep.” Her eyes widened as she stared at the figure emerging from the driver’s side of the vehicle. “It’s her.” The words came out in almost a hushed gasp. Kenzie’s eyes widened. “And she’s got another one with her.”
Hunter had already zeroed in on the two people. “Well, he’s still walking on his own power, so that’s a good sign.”
“If she’s running true to form,” Kenzie said, “he won’t be for long.”
They watched as the woman whom they were still referring to as their suspect linked her arm through the arm of the unsuspecting man who had accompanied her to the cabin.
If they didn’t know what they did about Camille Bishop, the two people they were watching looked like a typical couple, Kenzie couldn’t help thinking.
Camille whispered something in her intended victim’s ear and he seemed to pick up his pace. They walked into the cabin together.
“Now!” Kenzie whispered into Hunter’s ear.
He didn’t have a chance to respond. Kenzie was already heading down the incline, all but sliding straight down. He hurried so that he could catch up to her. Hunter had a feeling Kenzie was going to go in like gangbusters if he didn’t stop her.
Though it almost seemed ludicrous to think in these terms—and he knew she’d resent it—he wanted to protect Kenzie. The woman he had come to know so well in the last few weeks was far from helpless, but for all they knew the black widow could have a gun with her. There was no question in his mind that a gun, pulled out and discharged at the right moment, could render anyone helpless in an instant, no matter how damn clever and able they were.
He reached the bottom at the same time that Kenzie did and together they sprinted toward the cabin.
With Kenzie taking the front entrance and Hunter taking the rear, each of them took a door and on the count of “Three!” they entered at the same time, kicking the doors in.
The doors gave easily. Their hinges were completely rusted.
They immediately realized that they had made their entrance at just the right moment. If they’d waited for even a couple of minutes longer, the knife that Camille had in her hand would have severed her latest victim’s throat.
“Put it down, Camille,” Kenzie ordered. “That’s not your uncle. You killed him a long time ago.”
Stunned beyond words and looking incredibly frightened, Camille’s latest victim seemed to suddenly realize just how close he had come to death. With a horrified cry, the man stumbled away from Camille and practically dived behind the muscular shelter that Hunter’s body provided.
An anguished, enraged guttural shriek escaped Camille’s lips. Frustrated because she was robbed of her latest kill, Camille looked wildly around at the two intruders with eyes that were filled with hatred and didn’t quite appear to be human.
Kenzie thought she had managed to disarm the woman by wrenching away the knife from her. She didn’t see the hidden gun tucked into the back of her waistband until it wasn’t hidden anymore.
Cursing loudly, Camille pulled out the weapon and aimed it at Kenzie. Seeing the gun, Hunter lunged for Camille, putting his body between the other woman and Kenzie. The gun discharged while he was grappling with the black widow.
The gun discharged twice. The second bullet narrowly missed Kenzie and she could only assume that it whizzed by her body. Still grappling with Camille, Hunter grabbed her arms and pinned them behind her.
“Cuff her, Kenzie,” he ordered in a voice that sounded oddly hollow and strained.
Kenzie happily did as he ordered, cuffing their serial killer—she couldn’t bring herself to refer to Camille as a suspect any longer—then pulled out her cell to call command for backup.
“It’s over,” she announced to the chief the second he came on the line. “We got her. Send in the B team,” she said with a laugh, as she turned to look at Hunter. As she did, she saw Hunter sinking down to his knees. The next second, he keeled over. “Hunter!” she cried out, suddenly more terrified than she had ever been in her life.
Her terror instantly escalated when she saw the blood that was soaking into his shirt.
“Omigod!”
“Kenzie, what is it? What’s going on?” Brian’s deep voice rumbled against her ear. “Talk to me,” he ordered sternly.
“Send an ambulance,” she heard herself saying. “Hunter’s been shot. That bitch shot him!” she accused, turning to look at the woman who was lying facedown on the ground, her arms cuffed behind her. “Forget the ambulance,” she amended. “Send in a medevac,” she said, referring to the helicopter transport service they used. “I don’t think Hunter can wait for an ambulance. And, Uncle Brian,” she said in a voice grew stone-cold, “if the B team isn’t here before the helicopter arrives, I just want you to know I’m not leaving that woman alone here to wait for them. I’m shooting her.”
“Kenzie, don’t do anything you’re going to regret,” Brian told her.
“Don’t worry, I won’t. I’m not going to regret shooting her at all,” she told her uncle. Her hands were shaking as she terminated the call.
“Kenzie, you can’t,” Hunter said weakly. He’d managed to overhear her call to the chief and struggled to rally, to try to talk some sense into Kenzie’s head.
“Yeah, I can. She shot you, I shoot her. I’ll say it was self-defense.”
“You can’t say that. She’s handcuffed,” he pointed out in between sucking in air.
“I’ll take the cuffs off.” She fought to keep from crying, terrified that Hunter was going to wind up being the black widow’s collateral damage. “And you, don’t make things any worse by talking. Save your strength. Although your brain is gone, you know. That was a stupid stunt to pull, getting in between her gun and me.” Her throat felt as if it was closing up. “That bullet was meant for me, not you.”
“I know.”
“You’re an idiot, getting shot like this. You know that, don’t you?” she cried, losing the battle she was fighting to keep from crying.
Hunter was having a great deal of trouble sucking in air now. “A simple...thank-you...would be...nice.”
Kenzie’s tears were falling freely as she sat there, cradling him in her arms. “I’m not going to thank you for getting shot on my account. And the second that you’re better, I’m going to beat you senseless for being so dumb, you hear me?”
The last thing Hunter managed to say to her, albeit in a hushed voice, before passing out was, “I...look...forward...to...it.”
“Idiot,” she retorted before breaking down in gut-wrenching sobs.
Chapter 25
Kenzie felt as if time was moving by on the back of a tortoise, and she was terrified that Hunter was going to die in her arm
s.
The medevac finally touched down ten minutes after she had called the chief of Ds. It was a frantic ten minutes that she’d spent begging Hunter to open his eyes and stay with her.
By the time she heard the helicopter landing outside the cabin, Kenzie was convinced that she had lost Hunter.
And then she thought she felt a movement. Hunter’s fingers weakly brushed against her wrist. Joy mingled with paralyzing fear. Kenzie could hardly breathe.
“Hunter, don’t give up, you hear me? They’re here. The medevac is here! You can’t give up now,” she ordered the unconscious detective.
She tried to move him, but there was no way that she could get him out to the helicopter. The medical attendants were going to have to come into the cabin to carry him out.
“We’re in here!” Kenzie yelled at the top of her lungs, trying to be heard above the noise and the whirling helicopter blades.
“I’ll go get them,” Donavan Reese, Camille’s almost-victim quickly volunteered.
Caught up in trying to keep Hunter alive, Kenzie had almost forgotten all about the other man, the one who had almost been slain.
“Hurry,” she cried, nodding.
Within less than a minute, Reese was back. With him were two medical attendants and Murdoch.
Her brother was at her side immediately. “What happened?” he asked, looking at Hunter’s pale face.
“The big dumb jerk got in the way of a bullet saving me,” she told Murdoch. She was crying again and she didn’t even bother wiping the tears away.
“He’s going to be all right, Kenz.” Wrapping his arms around her, he eased his sister out of the way so that the medical attendants could do their job. “He’s too ornery to die, you know that,” Murdoch told her.
Kenzie blinked, trying hard to stay focused and not give in to the hysteria growing in her chest. “He better not, if he knows what’s good for him.” Her words came out in a shaky whisper.
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