Season of the Wolf

by Summers, Robin

  He dropped his keys on the counter, emptied his pockets, set down his gun, and poured himself a drink. He sank down into his chair. Same ritual, different night.

  The plan was coming together, but there was still so much to be done. He had finally called it a day around nine, telling Lawson to come back rested by five. Lawson had chuckled good-naturedly. A few hours at home weren’t exactly optimal for resting, but he was far too tired to complain.

  It was a good plan, Henry mused. It wasn’t perfect—there was no way it could be—but it was well thought out and it was their best chance. If everything went well, by this time tomorrow Billy Dean Montgomery would be locked in a cage, Devon would be free, and maybe Jordan could find happiness at last. Or maybe she already had.

  Henry smiled at what he had seen during their online meeting. The casual touches, the way Devon leaned into Jordan, the way Jordan kept glancing at Devon to make sure she was okay—Henry was no fool, but a blind man could have seen what was going on between the two of them. It looked to Henry a lot like love. He hoped he was right.

  I’m keeping my promise, Ella. There’s hope for her yet.

  Henry glanced at his watch. He could just e-mail Jordan to give her the update on their little plan, but he wanted to hear his partner’s voice. Something told him she wouldn’t mind.

  He stood and stretched, feeling the satisfying pop of a vertebra slipping back into place. He went to the kitchen and picked up the disposable cell, dialing the programmed number. He listened to it ring once, twice.

  Come on, Jordan, pick up.

  By the fifth ring, it was pretty clear his call would go unanswered, and that Jordan had not set up voice mail.

  As he listened to the seventh ring, his other phone began skittering across the counter.

  “What the hell?” he cursed, fumbling to grab the vibrating phone while wedging the disposable between his ear and shoulder. He managed to grab the other phone and was working to flip it open when the disposable started to slip. He juggled both phones for what felt like minutes but was probably only a few seconds. When he finally got a firm grip on the infernal devices, both calls had disconnected. Of course.

  He blew out a frustrated breath. “Stupid phones,” he groused. He looked at the caller ID on his cell. Coleman.

  About time he called back.

  Henry shifted both phones to one hand and pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it from the tap. He downed the water in two long swallows. The house phone began to ring.

  Now what?

  He took a step toward the wall-mounted phone but stopped. Something wasn’t right. He felt a presence, menacing and dark. The air trembled in its wake. There was someone behind him.

  Adrenaline coursed through him. His mind raced through the possibilities in milliseconds. His gun was on the counter two feet away. He could reach it. He had to.

  He took another step toward the phone, then whirled, reaching for the gun. The pain came before his mind registered the blade coming toward him. It was a strange pain, intense but fleeting, replaced by a thick, wet warmth, like slipping beneath the surface of a perfectly heated bath. He felt it again on the other side of his neck, but it barely registered. He was heavy yet light, leadenly weightless as he floated to the ground.

  Billy rose, standing over him, smiling.

  “Hello, Lieutenant Wayne. We meet at last.”

  Henry lay on the floor, his strength melting away. Billy swam in his vision. Henry clung to consciousness, but he knew he was losing blood. So much blood. He fought against it, but it was no use. He was done. His fight was over, but Jordan’s was just beginning. He only hoped when the time came, Jordan would put a bullet in Billy’s brain for him. With his last ounce of will, he prayed that God would watch over his friend and give her the strength she would need to finish this. Then the world went dark.

  Ella, baby…I’m coming home.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Billy watched the life drain from Wayne’s body, running down his chest, pooling beneath him. He found it satisfying that the cop’s last sight on this earth would be of the man who’d killed him.

  One down, two to go.

  The ringing stopped. The only sound now was Wayne’s faint, wheezing gasps. He had watched Wayne’s eyelids quiver, flapping like a bird with a broken wing as the man fought desperately to keep them open. Now they were closed.

  Billy had been careful to not go too deep; he didn’t want the blood spraying him in the eyes.

  Billy knew a dozen ways to kill a man, some painful, some less so; some fast, some excruciatingly slow. When he hunted, he didn’t care if he was covered in blood by the end. Wayne was different. Sally had been different, too, but for another reason. Sally had been a message. That kill had been wholly unsatisfying.

  Salinger, too, would be different, but he knew he would find it entirely satisfying.

  He turned his attention to what he had come for. Wayne’s cell phone. The disposable one.

  He had been intercepting Wayne’s calls for two days, but not one had been from Salinger. More than that, not one call Wayne had received or made in that time had divulged anything of importance. He’d realized fairly quickly that Wayne and Salinger had ditched their regular phones in favor of something that couldn’t be intercepted. Smart. That’s why he had gone to the police station, but he’d been foiled there. He wouldn’t be foiled this time.

  He retrieved the two phones from the floor, eyeing them in turn. He opened one, a fairly expensive model by the look of it, even if it wasn’t a smartphone. He scrolled through the menus until he found its phone number, confirming it was the one he’d been intercepting for the past two days. He set it on the counter.

  He eagerly looked at the other phone. It was a cheap plastic thing, nothing special. The screen was shattered, probably from falling to the hard tile. He hit a few buttons, but nothing happened. It was dead. He stared at it in disbelief. Then he threw it at the wall in a rage, smashing it to pieces.

  He had nothing now. He stumbled into the living room, sinking into the recliner he’d watched Wayne lounging in earlier. He closed his eyes and prayed.

  “That the Lord thy God may show us the way wherein we may walk, and the thing that we may do.”

  When he’d first arrived at the house, he’d searched it carefully but thoroughly. Every drawer, every cabinet. The computer, the trash. He’d found no clue as to where his Maddie had been taken.

  Billy repeated the prayer in his head, willing God to show him the way. He walked the house in his mind, the bedrooms, the bath, down the stairs, through the kitchen and den and into the living room. He searched his memory for something, anything, he might have missed. His thoughts returned to the closet where he had hidden.

  The closet.

  He stood and turned. The sleeve of Wayne’s coat hung mournfully in its final resting place. He approached it slowly, letting the anticipation build. He slipped his hands into the outside pockets. They were empty. His hope faded. He pulled one side away from the door, feeling for an interior pocket. He felt something square and firm. He reached inside and pulled out a small notebook.

  Billy cradled it in his palms like it was a fragile crystalline egg. He sat on the sofa and laid the book down on the coffee table. He flipped open the first page, then the next. Wayne’s handwriting was atrocious, but Billy could make out enough to understand the notebook contained some of Wayne’s notes from the investigation. The shorthand scrawl didn’t reveal much, though Billy could see they knew more than he had anticipated.

  As he neared the end of the book, he began to grow despondent. He had found nothing that would help him find Maddie.

  He turned another page. He stared at a name and phone number. Someone named Mel.

  He heard a buzzing from the kitchen. He found Wayne’s phone—the one he hadn’t smashed, the one that was useless to him—vibrating on the counter. It went quiet again, but a minute later a soft ding alerted that a message had been left. He picked up the ph
one, curious. He held down the one key.

  “Hey, Henry, it’s Carl. I tried your home phone, too. Maybe you’re sleeping. I’m sure you need it by now. Listen, everything’s in motion. We should be there about eight tomorrow. That should give us enough time to coordinate everything. I’m bringing the whole team. Once you tell us where we’re doing this, I’ll send most of the team on to set up their positions. I’ll keep a few guys back for the press conference. We can line ’em up in their FBI jackets, put on a good show.”

  The man on the phone chuckled.

  “This guy is a goddamn psycho. I’ve got at least sixteen unsolved murders matching the MO and signature over the last twelve years, spread out across the country. Plus we’ve got a couple more up in Wisconsin that date back further—hikers stumbled upon the bodies after some mudslides. I bet we find a whole bunch more, and that shack. No one caught on to the penny before, but we’ve got his ass now. There’s DNA from Wisconsin. We’re going to string him up from the rafters. Call me if you’re still up. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The message ended. Billy stood frozen in disbelief. They were putting it together. There were more for them to find, more from his early days when he’d been far less careful about DNA or other physical things. They knew. And they were laying a trap.

  Billy looked down at Wayne. There was no more wheezing breath. They would come looking when Wayne didn’t show up to work. He set the phone back on the counter. He was running out of time.

  Billy entered the den and moved the mouse of Wayne’s computer, waking it. He opened a web browser and searched the phone number. A single entry came up.

  Mel’s General Store.

  Billy leaned back in the chair, his mind racing. His sight fell on the framed photos on the corner of Wayne’s desk. An older woman, presumably Wayne’s dead wife, smiled at him through dusty glass. Next to it sat a picture of Wayne, Salinger, and that damn dog on a porch. A porch of a rustic-looking cabin.

  The signs were always there, if you only looked. They had always been there, all the way back to when he was thirteen, the night his pa had brought him out to the field. It might have been different had he not seen the sign. He’d had no idea that night, when Pa had brought him to the others in their resplendent white robes, what he was in for. Then they’d brought the man out from the car trunk, his hands bound behind his back, his bare torso as black as night, and Billy still had not understood. Two men helped Pa into the deep crimson robe of the Exalted Cyclops, his face gleaming in the light of the bonfire.

  “Billy, it is your time,” his pa had said. “Time to join us in the brotherhood. Time to take your rightful place by my side.”

  Pa had held out a large hunting knife, so big Billy could barely close his fingers around its hilt.

  “To earn your place, you must offer up a sacrifice to the Lord. You must hunt down the beast and deliver it to God.”

  Billy held the knife, still unsure. And then he saw it, the golden eagle atop the banner of his pa’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. It was the sign the Lord had promised him when he was eight, and Billy knew what he had to do, what he was called to do.

  Billy looked at the man on the ground, the man staring back at him, pleading silently, and Billy felt nothing except the power of the Lord flowing through him. The Lord wanted him to kill this man—and he was a man, not a beast, his father was wrong about that—and deliver him up to Him.

  Pa kicked the man to the ground and shouted at him to run. And after a moment, the man ran. But Billy was faster. He sprinted after the man, propelled by God’s will and grace, and he leapt onto the man’s back, bringing him down, the lion taking down the gazelle in darkest Africa. He rolled the man onto his back so he could see his face. Soundless words formed in the man’s throat, but Billy cut them out with a single swipe of his blade across the man’s neck.

  It was over so fast, Billy wasn’t sure if it was enough. Over the next few years, he honed his craft, knowing the Lord’s will of purification required more than simple death. It required patience, and fear, and eventually the end of physical life. Billy learned to hunt, learned to ensure that his prey suffered, not through torture but through the terror instilled by the hand of God. Suffering was the only way to salvation.

  Billy hit print and snagged the map as it came off the printer. He returned to the kitchen and picked up Wayne’s gun. Billy had never used guns in his work, but he made an exception this time. Salinger had that dog, after all, and it would help him keep control of the detective and Maddie once he found them. He liked the idea of using Salinger’s partner’s gun against her. He found it had a certain poetry.

  It was almost time. Time to help his Maddie find the salvation she had been running from all these years.

  He turned off the lights and opened the front door. He was surprised to find it snowing.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It was dark when Jordan awoke. She struggled to adjust, shapes slowly coming into focus. Her pillow. The nightstand. Max’s head.

  The shepherd’s muzzle was inches from her, and now she could feel his warm breath on her face. He looked up at her sorrowfully, in that way of his that said, Human, it’s not fair for you to ignore me this way. Look at me. I’m skin and bones or ready to burst or oh, so lonely and in need of love. You may commence with my feeding or walking or rubbing now. To emphasize his point, he whined pitifully.

  “Whazzit?” a sleepy voice mumbled behind her.

  “Nothing, baby. Go back to sleep,” Jordan said. She tried to slip from Devon’s arms without disturbing her further, but it was no use. Devon’s arms tightened reflexively as Jordan moved.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Devon murmured, her voice dropping to a sexy purr. Jordan shivered. She allowed herself to settle back against Devon’s body.

  “Max needs to go out.” A pang of guilt told her she was right. She had let him out once in the evening, but she’d missed his usual ten o’clock excursion. She’d been a bit…distracted and had forgotten all about him.

  Max sat back on his haunches, still eyeing her. He voiced his displeasure that she hadn’t yet gotten up. She was a very, very bad human, indeed.

  Devon grumbled something unintelligible, but Jordan got the gist. She wasn’t happy about leaving their bed, either. She lifted Devon’s palms to her lips, depositing tender kisses. “Sorry, baby, but I’ve been unfair to him. I promise I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Devon reluctantly acquiesced, though it was under protest. “He needs to learn to take himself out,” she said petulantly, echoing Jordan’s words from the previous morning. It made Jordan laugh.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not his fault you fucked me into a coma. Not that I’m complaining,” Jordan said, flashing Devon a wicked grin.

  She moved to get up but Devon pulled her back and rolled on top of her, pushing Jordan’s hands into the pillow above her head. Soft breasts danced centimeters above her skin, swaying seductively as Devon held her down. Devon’s thighs burned Jordan’s skin, the wet heat radiating between them setting Jordan’s body aflame.

  “You better not be, because I’ve got plans for you.” Devon kissed her, hard and deep. She tried to pull her hands free. She wanted to touch, to feel satiny skin and firm curves, but Devon was relentless. She tightened her grip, lacing her fingers between Jordan’s, pressing them deeper into the pillow.

  “Oh yeah?” Jordan asked breathlessly as Devon’s lips trailed down and up her neck.

  “Oh yeah,” Devon murmured. “I want to kiss you,” she said, punctuating her words with taunting brushes of her lips against Jordan’s mouth. Jordan raised her head, seeking to deepen the kiss, but Devon pulled away, just out of reach. Jordan flopped back against the pillow and Devon followed her down, her mouth against Jordan’s ear.

  “I want to suck you,” she whispered, sending chills racing along Jordan’s spine. Devon slid down Jordan’s body, releasing her hands, swiping Jordan’s breast with her tongue before wrapping her lips
around a hardened nipple. Jordan’s body went rigid, her back bowed, as Devon sucked. Her hands wove into Devon’s hair, pressing her closer, demanding more.

  But Devon was still in charge. She gave Jordan’s breast a final flick and then worked her way back up to Jordan’s ear. “I want to make you come so hard.”

  Jordan could barely remember her own name, let alone anything else. All she knew was Devon. Her mouth. Her body. Her breasts. Her tight, wet heat when she—

  “How long are you going to make poor Max wait?” Devon chastised, rolling off her lover and leaving Jordan confused and panting. Devon propped her head in her hand, a smug smile of satisfaction gracing her lips.

  Jordan shook her head, trying to clear the lust still coursing through her. She rolled to her feet, the chilly predawn air helping to cool her blood. “You are very, very naughty.”

  “You have no idea, Detective,” Devon said, greedily drinking in Jordan’s naked form.

  “That’s not helping,” Jordan accused, full of humor.

  “I know.” Devon’s grin was positively lascivious.

  Jordan didn’t bother with underwear. She slipped into her jeans and threw on a sweatshirt, glancing at her watch. “Seriously, babe, it’s way too early for us to be up. Why don’t you go back to sleep and I’ll join you soon.”

  “Okay,” Devon said with a yawn. She snuggled beneath the covers. Jordan took in the sight of Devon looking up at her, willful and wanting. She could never tire of this woman.

  Max was already out the door, and Jordan followed.

  “And Jordan?” Devon called after her as she reached the doorway. She turned. “I love you, too.”

  The last remaining brick in the wall around Jordan’s heart disintegrated, pulverized by the weight of her love. She had never felt so much peace.

  *

  As soon as she heard the front door close, Devon threw back the covers. She slipped into Jordan’s robe and went to the kitchen. She had just enough time to get breakfast underway before Jordan came back. They had certainly burned up enough calories through the afternoon and night to warrant a cooked meal. Besides, for what Devon had in mind, her lover was going to need her strength.