by Kay Hooper
“I was just looking at those missing-persons files no more than a week or so ago, because unresolved cases bug the hell out of me.” He shrugged. “We’re far enough off the Blue Ridge Parkway to provide hikers with the same thing you were looking for—unexplored territory. Mostly federal land, lots of it, and pretty damned unexplored. As in remote and dangerous. The terrain aside, there are bears, wild boar, at least a couple packs of feral dogs, and even sightings of big cats have been reported. Which is why I’m glad you have a rifle. And thanks, by the way, for stopping in when you got here to let me know that. Most don’t bother.”
“Like I said, I don’t see the sense in making useless enemies; registering a firearm with the local police is a reasonable and sensible precaution.” Not that he had mentioned his handgun, of course.
“True. So is carrying a letter from your law enforcement back home declaring that you can be trusted not to panic when a twig snaps and shoot another hiker—or yourself in the foot.”
Navarro smiled. “I assume you called him.”
“Naturally. You got a glowing recommendation.” The chief paused, then added dryly, “And I got a warning that when you dig, you tend to find things you weren’t looking for. Like this, I suppose.”
“It’s happened a few times, I’m afraid. Maybe just because I tend to explore off the beaten paths.”
Maitland grunted. “Well, too many of the usual hikers in these parts set out to explore without being as prepared as you obviously are.”
“Maybe I should put a chapter about that in my book,” Navarro offered wryly.
“God knows we put it in all the guidebooks and on the maps. People just figure it won’t happen to them.” The chief turned his own gaze toward the remains of the unidentified young woman, and added slowly, “I don’t know, though. This one really doesn’t feel to me like a careless hiker.”
“Why not?”
“Two major reasons, the second one a lot more troubling than the first. Because she was apparently hiking alone, unusual for a woman, although we do get a few every year. And because there isn’t a scrap of clothing or equipment anywhere around her. Even out in the elements like this, we usually find some rotted cloth, the rubber or leather sole of a shoe or boot, part of a backpack. Something. But not this time. Not so much as a button off her shirt.” He shook his head, adding almost absently, “And if this was an accident, there should be, you know. There really should be.”
EIGHT
Emma didn’t sleep well. At all. Supper with Jessie had been strained, to say the least. Or, rather, Emma had been conscious of strain; her sister had appeared to be in a world of her own, and Emma had no idea how to join her there.
Or even if she wanted to.
More than once, she opened her mouth to at least attempt to talk about something serious, but in the end always stopped herself. The closest their conversation came to being serious was when they briefly discussed news of the poor woman found up on the mountain.
“I thought you said there hadn’t been any murders,” Jessie said abruptly.
“There haven’t been. I mean, obviously if that woman was killed…But it could have been an accident. In fact, it’s more likely than not. People die from falls in the mountains all the time. Well, often enough that all the trails are posted and any hikers warned. We even leave brochures in the guest bedrooms warning them about the dangers.”
“Discreetly, I imagine. So as not to alarm the guests who do want to go hiking.”
Emma frowned at her. “We do what’s required of responsible innkeepers, Jessie.”
Jessie looked at her sister, also frowning. And then her frown cleared and she shook her head. “Sorry. I guess my mind was up there on the mountain. I’ve investigated a few suspicious deaths. They tend to stay with you.”
“Are you going to—”
But Jessie was shaking her head again. “Stick my nose in? I don’t think so. Vacation, remember?”
“I remember. I was wondering if you did.”
Jessie’s gaze slid away from Emma’s. “And wondering if I’m still fumbling my way through fuzzy memories? Well, I am.”
“No luck clearing anything up?”
“Afraid not.”
Emma opened her mouth to ask where Jessie was spending so many hours away from the inn, but then closed it. If Jessie wanted her to know, she’d tell her, after all.
Clearly, she didn’t want to tell her sister anything of importance.
Emma went to bed with a headache.
She didn’t think she’d sleep at all, but eventually did, though the pounding in her temple followed her into dreams.
Nightmares.
SHE THOUGHT HE must have injected her with something, because it felt as if she had slept for a long, long time. When she woke, not even sure her eyes were open because it was so very, very dark, her throat was dry, her head pounding, and she felt sick to her stomach. In those first confused moments, she thought it was because of fear.
But then she realized…it was the smell.
Dirt…and blood…and death.
Until that moment, she hadn’t realized that death had a smell, a stench, but it did. It smelled of copper and rotten eggs and old leather and desperate sweat.
She tried to move sluggish limbs, only to hear a cold metallic rattle and feel something hard encircling one of her wrists. She managed to get her free hand moving, and felt around the other to discover what seemed to be a bulky metal cuff. She swallowed hard, and slowly moved her fingers up the heavy chain to where it was bolted to what felt like a stone wall.
Chained. Like an animal.
She grasped the chain and pulled as hard as she could, knowing she had little strength and probably wouldn’t have been able to free herself even if she’d had more.
She kept feeling around, trying to get some idea of where she was. Chained to a wall, yes. On some kind of small bed or cot, she thought. Cold iron frame, not wood. One hand was free, but her ankles were bound with what felt like duct tape, far too thickly for her to have any hope of breaking free.
It was dark, so dark. The kind of dark that human eyes could never get used to, a blackness that awoke a primal terror in her, born in ages past when only a fire kindled by primitive man kept the darkness and all its dangers at bay.
She had no fire. No light.
Only terror.
She thought she was underground, but it was only a feeling. She thought the space in which she lay chained was small—but it was only a feeling. She was cold, her skin clammy, and her stomach heaved so violently that she only just stopped herself from being sick.
In a small, still-sane corner of her mind, she told herself she didn’t want that smell added to the rest.
And in that same tiny sane part of her mind, all she knew for certain was that she was in trouble. Bad, bad trouble. She put her free hand down on the cot’s mattress, bent on pushing herself upright if possible, and felt wetness under her fingers. There was a lot of wetness, she thought.
She brought her fingers up to her face, and when they were still inches away, she could smell it.
Blood.
In the terrible silence of her prison, Carol Preston heard an animal-like whimpering sound, and realized it was coming from her.
EMMA WOKE IN a cold sweat, a sour taste in her mouth and terror black in her mind. She found herself sitting up in her bed, in her pleasant bedroom visible in the faint moonlight filtering through the windows’ curtains, the white-noise machine on her dresser softly playing the soothing sounds of ocean waves.
Home. Safe.
Gradually, her heart stopped pounding, and the sour taste in her mouth almost went away. She soothed Lizzie automatically as the dog whined, picking up on her owner’s emotions. Neither one of them was getting much sleep these days. Nights.
It was three a.m.
She threw back the covers and got out of bed, going to her dressing table across the room. She turned on one of the small lamps, and with shaking fingers
removed her journal from the top drawer, looking through several pages before turning to a fresh page and reaching for a pen to make a simple entry.
July 1
Another nightmare. But this time, she was still alive.
Being held captive…somewhere.
Terrified.
And this time, I have a name.
Carol Preston.
Emma closed the journal and smoothed her hand over the leather, frowning. Her mind kept telling her that it was just a nightmare, like all the others. Not real. There was no woman being held captive in a terrible, dark place that smelled of blood and death.
But…there was a name.
She’d never gotten a name before, maybe because in those earlier nightmares the women were virtually always enduring physical and emotional torture so horrific that they’d had no sense of self, of identity. All they had felt or thought about was agony and terror.
But this one…She hadn’t been tortured.
Yet.
A hiker ambushed, her attacker concealed so expertly he’d been on her before she could react to defend herself. The hot breath of a whispered warning, a razor-sharp knife against her neck—and then the tape over her mouth and binding her wrists and ankles, and the hood that had prevented her from getting a good look at her abductor and seeing where he carried her through the woods.
Emma kept telling herself it was just a nightmare, not real. It was like a mantra in her mind, probably because the alternative was so awful to contemplate. But she had to.
Because maybe there was a real woman out there, a real woman named Carol Preston, and she was being held captive in a dark, dark place that smelled of blood, chained to the wall like an animal.
Maybe.
Tell Jessie. Because Jessie was, after all, a private investigator of sorts. Tell Jessie, and then—
Emma’s mind shied violently. Tell Jessie and get her killed.
However experienced and effective Haven was, however experienced and well trained their operatives, the bald truth was that Jessie was here alone, on vacation, without backup of any kind.
Emma didn’t even know if she had a gun.
And however much she might have, must have, changed in fifteen years, what Emma had seen so far was a withdrawn, distant, and rather secretive sister preoccupied with troubling questions about her own past, most of which Emma had a hunch Jessie hadn’t reported to her boss, at least not in anything but the vaguest of terms.
Adding a possible killer into that mix…
No. Too dangerous.
However much Jessie’s secretiveness, moods, and attitude bothered Emma, she was more disturbed by the thought of her sister setting out to find a killer and his victim. Or to find out whether there really was anything to Emma’s dreams, his victims.
One body—or what was left of it—had been found up on the mountain, and though Emma had no way of knowing for certain if that poor woman had been one of those she’d dreamed about, the fact that she’d been found in the woods, reportedly with no clothing in the area around the remains, fit at least one of Emma’s dreams all too well.
A terrified, naked woman running for her life.
Emma stared down at her journal, trying to think clearly. Tell Dan? Tell him what—that she’d had another nightmare? Ask him to check all the police data banks for a missing woman named Carol Preston?
What little she’d told him about her dreams had elicited the same sort of reaction she’d gotten from her doctor. They were just dreams, just nightmares that were the last vestiges of trauma from the fall she had taken.
There, there. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.
Emma wasn’t anxious to see that reaction again. But she didn’t intend to do nothing at all.
But what could she do? Even assuming the woman existed, and was being held captive, Emma had no idea where or by whom; nothing she had seen during the abduction before the woman’s head was covered had looked at all familiar. And not a clue as to how to go about searching.
All she had was a name.
“Carol Preston,” she murmured. “Who are you? Where are you? And what kind of monster is holding you?”
JULY 1
“So no luck?” Maggie asked.
Navarro had quickly located the areas of downtown Baron Hollow that offered the best cell reception, and luckily one of them was outside a little café where umbrella-shaded tables and chairs occupied a side courtyard.
They offered a selection of very good sandwiches on the lunchtime menu, and he had just enjoyed one.
“It’s like I told you—the vibe of this place is really off. I’m sensing something, but it’s…diffused. Impossible to bring into focus. The longer I’m here, the worse it is. Thing is, every time I think about going back up into the mountains, it’s like coming up against a wall.”
“As if you’re not supposed to be up there?”
“That’s the way it feels.”
“Because something is blocking you, or drawing you elsewhere?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.” Navarro reached up to rub his temple. “And there’s a damned storm on the way, so that won’t help things.”
Not all psychics were strongly affected by storms, but Navarro, unfortunately, was.
“Look, don’t push yourself,” Maggie said. “Do whatever you can to minimize the effects of the storm and wait for better timing. You’ll be no good to anybody if you go down.”
“Yeah, copy that.”
“Have you encountered Jessie yet?”
“Not unless we passed in the street or at Rayburn House. I’ve been out and about or else in my room, and as far as I know haven’t seen either of the sisters.”
Maggie sighed. “I hate investigations when nothing seems to be happening. We almost always find out later that lots was happening; we just didn’t know about it.”
“That’s another of the feelings I’ve got,” Navarro told his boss. “That the victim I found yesterday wasn’t this killer’s first and won’t be his last.” And what he hated most was that, chances were, he’d learn the truth of that only by finding more bodies. Or remains.
“How’s the town reacting?”
“Well, the police chief did his job and got her down off the mountain without upsetting the tourists. His official report is accidental death until evidence proves otherwise—despite the lack of clothing and other personal effects up there. From what I’ve heard today, the gossip mill beat him and the body down the mountain, with most of the facts well-known by now. The townsfolk are accepting the accidental death theory. None of their own are missing, after all.”
“That’s a fairly cynical thing to say.”
“I’m feeling fairly cynical. And more than a little useless, which is not a feeling I like.” He paused, then went on. “With so little to go on, the chief couldn’t match up the remains with anybody on his missing-persons list. Plus, his ME agreed she died hardly more than a week ago, and there’s nobody on the list in that time frame.”
“Nobody on the national list, either, not that matches what little info we have. I checked. The state ME will give us the DNA results, and we’ll run those.”
Navarro was mildly surprised. “Give us?”
“John called in a favor.”
“Ah. Well, I’m glad. But it’ll still take weeks, won’t it?”
“Just to get the DNA through the lab, yeah, probably. But I’ve also tagged all the missing-persons databases, so if any woman fitting the parameters we have is reported missing, we’ll know about it.”
“Good.” He winced as his head throbbed suddenly.
“Storm close?”
Navarro had stopped asking how she knew things like that when she was hundreds if not thousands of miles away. “Yeah. I’m going to head back to the inn and wait it out. I’ll report again on schedule, sooner if anything here changes.”
“Copy that. I’ll be here.”
NAVARRO HAD QUICKLY realized that coming and going by his suite’s pri
vate entrance was practical only at night or very early in the morning. Since the entrance was at the back of the house and nowhere near the guest parking area—which, with thoughtful and artful landscaping, didn’t at all resemble a parking lot—using it by day seemed to him unnecessarily…stealthy.
Being known as a somewhat reclusive writer with his mind on a book-in-progress was one thing; he didn’t want anyone wondering why he felt the need to sneak in and out of his room during the day when the front door was much more convenient.
Of course, it also exposed him to the comings and goings of the other guests.
He hadn’t yet decided if that was a good thing or a bad one.
No more than three steps into the reception area, he had to detour around a jumble of luggage, and boxes that presumably held equipment of some kind. He chose to move toward the reception desk rather than the other way, which would have taken him into the middle of what looked like a quiet but spirited argument between three people—two men and a woman.
Innkeeper Penny Willis, looking faintly harassed, said to him in a low tone, “For God’s sake, don’t tell them you’re a writer. They’ll find out eventually, but let’s delay it as long as possible. I’m betting they have lots of stories to tell.”
He paused by the counter, lifting a brow. “What kind of stories?” He too kept his voice low.
“Ghost stories. Unless they’re the sort always looking for demons or evil forces instead of ghosts. These groups tend to lean one way or the other.” She sighed. “Paranormal researchers from up North. We get them from time to time.”
“So Chief Maitland mentioned yesterday.”
“Oh, yeah, this little group is all excited because of that body found yesterday. They’re trying to decide if they want to hike up into the mountains today or wait until tomorrow. You might not want to mention to them that you found the poor woman.”