The White Lily

by Susanne Matthews

  Jacob nodded and listened as Rob filled them in on the information the techs had on the bomb specifications. When another five minutes had passed and Lilith hadn’t shown up, he excused himself. Let them think what they would. He was worried and couldn’t get past the notion something was wrong. Some of what they’d seen at the farm this morning had bothered her, especially the dormitory and the tethers under the tables in the dining room. She was very good at hiding her feelings until she was either alone or they boiled over on her. He hurried down the hall and knocked on the washroom door. No answer. He turned the knob and found it unlocked.

  Poking his head inside, he called, “Lilith, are you in here?”

  She didn’t respond, nor did anyone else. Closing the door, he retraced his steps to the bullpen. Her office door was ajar. Maybe she was inside. He knocked on the door and pushed it open. “Lilith?”

  The small room was empty, but her purse was on the desk. He turned to leave, saw the note on the desk beside her bag, and let out a shaky breath. She’d just gone down to see Amos. It was odd the ME had asked to speak to her specifically, but since Jacob wasn’t a regular member of the team, he really didn’t know what the protocol for such things was.

  He pulled out his cell phone and speed dialed her number. It rang, followed by a loud ring tone from her purse. Damn. She’d left her phone here. He picked up the note and returned to Trevor’s office. He could call downstairs and find out how much longer she’d be.

  “I was wondering if you two had gotten lost,” Rob said as Jacob reentered the room. Scowling, he craned his neck as if he could see around the wall into the hallway. “Where is she? Trevor’s ready to start the briefing, and we need to make a few calls concerning those properties in Vermont.”

  “She’s gone down to see Amos.”

  “Amos?” Tom crinkled his forehead as he usually did when something made no sense to him. “Are you sure? He’s not due back until Monday. He and his team are at a seminar in Washington.”

  Acid chewed at Jacob’s gut. “I found this on her desk.”

  Rob looked over his shoulder. “That’s not Amos’s writing. His chicken scratches are almost impossible to read, but I do know whose it is—Pierce.”

  Jacob was out of the room, his gun drawn, with Rob, Trevor, and Tom running behind him. As soon as he got to the elevator, he pounded on the call button, but the light indicating its location remained stubbornly at the sub-basement level where the morgue was.

  “He must have blocked the door to keep it from closing. Come on. We’ll use the stairs,” Rob said, flying back down the hall and going down the fire escape two steps at a time.

  “I’ll send a SWAT team down to assist you,” Trevor shouted at them as they raced down the first flight.

  Jacob followed closely on Rob’s heels, being careful not to knock the man down in his haste. His heart pounded painfully, and his breath came in gasps. This was his fault. He was her partner. He shouldn’t have left her, not for a minute, let alone almost twenty-five minutes now. That long in the hands of that monster was an eternity. In his mind’s eye, Jacob felt her terror, crippling in its intensity.

  When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Rob was panting as loudly as he was. Jacob reached for the handle of the fire door, but it wouldn’t open.

  “It’s locked,” he said, the two words filled with despair and frustration. He tugged again, as if he could force it to open by sheer will.

  “Get back,” Rob said, aiming his Glock at the handle mechanism. He fired five rounds into the area, and then, raising his foot, kicked with all his might. The door splintered at the frame near the lock and opened into a hallway as black as a tomb.

  “He’s flipped the breaker,” Rob said. “I’ve got this.” He pulled a penlight out of his pocket. “Never leave home without it. Come on, and be careful. There are lots of places to hide down here. With this on, he can pick us off one at a time, like apples on a tree. Stay low.”

  “He won’t still be here,” Jacob said, convinced he was right and hating it. “He’s either killed her already or grabbed her and run.”

  “Well, be careful, anyway. You can’t be sure he hasn’t set a trap for us.”

  Using the LED glow from his small flashlight, Rob led the way down the hall to the main reception area. Jacob saw the chair jammed in the elevator doorframe, preventing it from closing and answering the call.

  Rob spoke into his cell phone. “I’m sending the elevator up to you. Get someone to check the power box. He’s turned off the lights down here.” He ended the call.

  Jacob couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Lilith had come down here, he was sure of it. But if she’d seen this darkness when the doors opened, would she have gotten off the elevator? She hated the dark, and he’d have to get used to sleeping with the lights on, but for that to happen, they had to find her—they had to find her alive. Pierce must’ve been waiting for her like a hunter in a blind, patiently letting the minutes tick by until his prey appeared, and then he’d have pounced, catching her by surprise and incapacitating her, because otherwise, she’d have fought like the devil himself to get away.

  “This way,” Rob said, turning left. “The main autopsy area and Amos’s office are over here.”

  They hurried into the darkness and turned the corner. Something on the floor snagged Jacob’s gaze. He bent down and picked it up. It was the navy, polka-dot, canvas espadrille Lilith had worn this morning. He’d joked about her shoes, how she chose her footwear to match the rest of her wardrobe.

  She’d grinned and shrugged. “What can I say? I love shoes.” She’d bit her lower lip the way she did when she was uncertain. “I have a lot of them, you know.”

  “When we go home, I’ll take you to a little place in Manila. You’ll love the selection there. It’s called Imelda’s.”

  He’d kissed her, long and deep, but the knock at the door had announced their escort, and he’d let her go. The reality of the situation struck him a heavy blow as he stared at the shoe.

  “He’s got her,” Jacob whispered, his voice filled with agony. “The bastard’s got her.”

  The lights came on at the same time the elevator doors opened, and he heard men rushing out.

  “Be careful,” Trevor yelled at those with him. “He may have rigged the place.”

  Jacob continued to stand there holding the shoe, and looked up only when Trevor touched his arm. “We’ll get him. We know what he’s driving, and we know where he’s going.”

  “What do you mean you know what he’s driving?”

  “We installed cameras all around the building. I called up the feed, and we’ve got him putting her inside a dark green SUV. He’s wearing a ball cap and has shaved the beard, but facial recognition software nailed him in seconds. He turned left. We’ll pick him up on the traffic cams, but for my money, he’s heading to Vermont and one of the three places we short-listed. We’ve got a chopper in the air.”

  “I shouldn’t have left her. It’s all my fault.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jacob. You can’t blame yourself. We never anticipated he’d pull a stunt like this. I never thought he was this ballsy. He had to know Amos and his team were away and this place would be deserted. Since it’s an FBI seminar on autopsy practices, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to get that information. It’s been booked for months. The man takes advantage of opportunity, as we well know. We can monitor the chase from my office.”

  A police officer in riot gear stepped over to them. “Agent Clark, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. We need to evacuate the building. We’ve found a couple of trip wires and the bomb squad’s on its way. The fire alarm should go off at any second.”

  Trevor nodded. “This way. I can access the feed from the computer in my car. I parked out front this morning for a change of pace.”

  The shrill sound of the alarm went off, almost deafening him. “You know what he did to her the last time he had her, don’t you?” Jacob asked loudly to be heard over the scream
ing siren, praying Lilith was unconscious, so she wouldn’t be as terrified as he was.

  “I don’t know it all,” Trevor said, at the top of his voice, “but I know enough. Jacob, if he wanted her dead, we’d have found her body by now. As long as she’s alive, there’s hope. We’ll find her. You have my word on that.”

  Pierce wouldn’t kill her, of that Jacob had no doubt. That wasn’t what the bastard wanted.

  “I know everything he did to her, every sick, perverted thing the son of a bitch did. He’s not only a sadist, he gets sexual pleasure from inflicting pain. We have to get her before he makes it to Vermont. We can’t leave her with that bastard a second longer than we have to.”

  They climbed the stairs to the main level and exited the building with the steady stream of employees. Rob and Tom stood over to the side talking, their faces as grim as his own must be.

  “They lost him,” Tom said without preamble.

  “What?” Jacob yelled. “Where? ... How?”

  “He went into a parking garage three blocks away and switched vehicles. We’ve got traffic cams replaying the footage, and if we have to, we’ll track down every car, van, and truck that came out of the place. We know what he looks like ...”

  “Bullshit,” Jacob said. “You know what he wants you to know. Anyone could’ve driven a car out of that garage with him and Lilith in the backseat. Searching the registration for each car’s owner will take time, and as you learned in Vermont, he doesn’t care if he gets the vehicle willingly.”

  “I’ve got someone pinging her cell phone,” Trevor said.

  “Don’t bother. It’s in her purse on her desk.” Jacob ran his hand through his hair. “So, as of right now, we don’t know what he’s driving or where he’s headed. Can you at least tell me he doesn’t have the bodies?”

  “He doesn’t. Amos transferred them to one of the hospital morgues for safekeeping. He was afraid someone would show up in his absence with forged credentials and walk away with them. It’s happened before—not here, but in other cities.”

  Jacob nodded. He hadn’t broken his vow to Eloise, but he’d failed Lilith. He’d promised to have her back, and he hadn’t. My God, he hadn’t even had time to tell her how he felt about her—he’d barely had time to acknowledge it to himself. He loved her. It made no sense, it was far too soon, but he couldn’t deny it. They needed time to get to know one another, time to heal the wounds they’d both suffered, but time was the one thing they didn’t have now. Lilith was brave and strong, but everyone had a breaking point and being in Pierce’s hands again would be it for her.

  Tom interrupted his thoughts. “We do know where he’s going—well, maybe not know because we can’t be certain—but we’ve narrowed the search to Vermont. We suspect he might be going to an abandoned sanitarium near Bennington. It used to house tuberculosis patients in the sixties. For a while, it was a drug rehab center, but the property was acquired by a numbered company three years ago, around the same time as those in New Hampshire and Slocum. If he isn’t there, we’ll check out a convent near Newfane that closed ten years ago and was bought a year and a half ago by a Mr. Smith who traces back to another numbered company. Our last option is a camp and conference center that belonged to a now defunct service organization. It’s up near Rockingham and changed hands last spring. It’s got a similar obscure ownership. We have aerial surveillance watching the highways ...”

  “But you don’t know what he’s driving, or even if he is driving, and his won’t be the only damn vehicle on the road with two passengers or possibly three—that is if your surveillance plane reads heat signatures. You bloody well have nothing. Which one’s closest?” he asked, trying to rein in his panic and think like the trained police officer he was.

  “The convent near Newfane,” Tom answered, “but for my money, the camp and conference center is the best bet. It suits his purposes better, has more space for outdoor training.”

  “That may be true, but he’d want to be as close to Boston as he could be, especially if he’s behind the plagues. He’d need to be able to get in and out quickly before we set up roadblocks. He’s going back and forth, and the farther he has to drive, the longer it would take him. Each time he fuels the vehicle is another chance to be seen and recognized. Trevor,” he said, turning to the team leader, “it’s your call, but I’ve had experience tracking serial killers in the outback. They make their nest in the closest spot available to their kill zone. If this convent is closest, then that’s where we have to look first, and the longer we stand here with our thumbs up our arses arguing the point, the farther he gets and the safer he feels.”

  “Either way we have a 33 percent chance of being right,” Trevor said. “So far, Pierce has stymied us at every turn. He knows us better than we know ourselves. We can’t risk Lilith’s life on the chance we’re right this time, because if we aren’t ... If you think you can predict where he’ll be better than we can, so be it. I’ll order the helicopter. The weather doesn’t look promising, but these chopper pilots can fly in almost anything. We’ll go to Newfane and check out the convent first. If Pierce and his students are there, we’ll call in the reinforcements. I know you want to go in guns blazing, but Lilith may not be the only hostage in the place. If the children are in that facility, we can’t risk one of them getting hurt. A poorly planned raid is one doomed to failure. Let’s get the show on the road.”

  • • •

  Half an hour later, the helicopter touched down in a field on the edge of town. They’d flown into the storm about ten minutes out of Boston, and the weather had gotten worse as they’d moved north. From the air, Jacob had seen the speed of the rushing water as the rivers overflowed their banks. He’d seen similar storms in Australia and knew how treacherous that water could be—even if there weren’t any snakes and crocodiles in it. The local sheriff stood waiting for them, dressed in raingear that offered little protection against the downpour.

  “Agent Clark, gentlemen, welcome to Newfane. I’ve had my men set up roadblocks as you requested, but with the storm, no one’s driving into town or getting out of it,” he said as they got into the SUV.

  “How close did you get?” Trevor asked.

  “The edge of the access road, as you ordered. If they’re there, we don’t want to spook them.”

  Fifteen minutes later, soaked to the skin, the six men stood in front of the convent gates. Jacob had been wrong, and what little hope he’d had that they’d rescue her tonight crumbled into nothingness. Rockingham was another thirty-one miles from here, minutes by air, but in this storm ... Every instinct had told him Pierce would be close, but Jacob had misread the man. Stepping out of the vehicle, he stood there with Mother Nature’s fury lashing around him. Well, at least Tom hadn’t said, “I told you so.”

  The red brick building with the boarded up windows and crumbling steps hadn’t been used in years. The heavy padlock on the gates was rusted shut, further proof they were in the wrong place. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. The rain soaked through the jacket he’d been given, but he scarcely felt it. A dead end. They’d lost time, precious time, and it was his fault. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut? His heart ached, the pain almost enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  Lilith, I’m sorry, darling. Hang in there. I will find you.

  Jacob looked over at the other task force members. Rob and Tom were standing huddled under an umbrella having a heated discussion, no doubt focused on how he’d made a mess of it. He’d been cocky and so sure of himself. Just because something worked that way in Australia didn’t mean it would work here, and the proof of that was right in front of him.

  Trevor was speaking to the sheriff. Probably trying to borrow a vehicle to drive back to Boston. If they were going to drive anywhere, it should be north to that damn camp Tom had suggested.

  “It looks like we’re stuck here for a while,” Trevor said. “The FAA has grounded all flights. The sheriff would gladly lend us a couple of vehicles to get back to Boston,
but flash floods have made Route 30 impassible.”

  “Going back to Boston is a waste of time,” Jacob said, his frustration making his voice sharp. “We need to go on to the next place.”

  “I agree, but we can’t,” Trevor said, his tone betraying his annoyance at this turn of events. “There’s only one highway in and out of this town, and at the moment, it’s a raging river. I’m sorry, Jacob, but we’re stuck here until the storm passes. As soon as that bird can get back in the air, we’ll head for Rockingham. We’ll be there in ten minutes at the most.”

  “There’s a motel just down the road where you can spend the night. The storm’s expected to blow itself out by morning,” the sheriff said. “Wish I could help you, but there’s nothing more you can do now.”

  “Thanks,” Trevor said as the wind whipped the rain around them. “Can you drop us there?”

  Dejected, Jacob got into the vehicle with the others. There was no way they’d find her until tomorrow at the earliest, and that was assuming Pierce had her in one of the other two places Tom had suggested.

  Once they were checked into motel at the county’s expense, Jacob grabbed a candy bar and a soda from the machine and headed toward his assigned room.

  “I’m sorry,” Trevor said, stopping him before he left the office. “This isn’t your fault. The closest place was as good a suggestion as any other. You didn’t make the choice. I’m the team leader; I made the call. When it comes down to it, Lilith is in this mess because of me. I brought her on the team, and I put her in front of those cameras.”

  “I’ll never blame you for that. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met her. I can’t believe fate would be so cruel as to do this to her, to us. I have to believe we’ll find her, because not finding her isn’t an option.”

  “We may not know where he is right now,” Rob said, “but we do know the weather will be as bad for him as it is for us, and it’ll slow him down, buy her some time ... the time we need to find her. He’s probably holed up in a motel similar to this one, waiting for the storm to pass.”