by Jen Blood
Ren’s gaze remained fixed on the dead woman. Bear noted tears in her eyes. He took her arm and steered her away from the scene.
“Don’t look,” he said. “You don’t need to see that.”
“I’ve seen a dead body before,” she said. She shook her arm from his grip and stepped away.
“Calm down and let me take a look,” Agent Juarez said to Dean Redfield. His voice was even, but there was no room for argument there. The old man started to fight him nonetheless, but Agent Juarez silenced him with a glance and moved forward, stepping carefully to keep from contaminating the scene.
“Your people are behind this,” Dean said.
Agent Juarez ignored him and remained standing, studying the body without ever making contact. Ren watched beside Bear, transfixed.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this again,” Agent Juarez said to Dean. “But you have to be realistic about what’s going on here. The whereabouts of the law enforcement involved in this can be verified—a lot of them weren’t even in the Bureau in ’09. We’ll find out who did this, but you have to let us work.”
“You’re a bunch of liars and thieves,” Dean Redfield said. “A den of degenerates. This is just like with Gordon. He’s got one of your people working as his henchman—mark my words. You honestly mean to tell me you think these sons of bitches are innocent?”
He was coming unhinged—Bear could see it in the wildness of the old man’s eyes, the tremor in his voice. Agent Juarez turned his attention from the body, seeming for the first time to notice the shift in power that had taken place. He held out his hands, no weapon to be seen, and spoke directly to the older man.
“We’ll figure it out, Dean.”
“Figure it out?” Dean parroted in disbelief. “Figure it out? You see what they did to my little girl? It’s identical to what happened to our sisters back in Mass. Ariel got away, but…that’s the only explanation. My brother might be in jail, but he’s behind this whole thing. I’m done keeping your secrets, done with all of you. It wasn’t my family who did this—it’s your goddamn agents.”
Bear was aware of his mother off to his right, trying to get his attention. Trying to draw him away from whatever was unfolding. Bear touched Ren’s arm. She looked at him, her dark eyes wide. Casper was standing at Bear’s side. For the first time since he’d rescued the dog more than two years ago, he heard Casper growl.
“Dean,” Jack tried again. This time, his voice was firm. Unequivocal. “We need to get the police in here. The one thing this does prove is that there’s a killer loose in these woods. We can’t send civilians out under those conditions.”
Bear took another step toward his mother.
Casper and Ren both stayed with him, but the thoughts on the air swirling around them were a maelstrom—too dark and too thick to even decipher.
And suddenly, Dean was in front of him. His face was dark, furious, twisted with grief.
Casper turned toward the man, hackles raised, head down low.
Off to his left, Bear heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet being chambered in a shotgun. Terror ran through him in a chilling wave.
“Bear—Ren. Come here,” Jamie said. There was a touch of panic in her voice, something Bear hadn’t heard in years.
When he turned, Bear saw that Dean had a gun—a pistol, a lot smaller than the rifle he’d been lugging around the woods before. It was leveled straight at Bear.
“What are you doing, Dean?” Agent Juarez asked. There was a threat implicit in the question. He had a hand on his own gun, but other people had materialized from the trees. Friends of Dean Redfield’s, Bear assumed. A lot of them armed. They were outgunned here.
“I’ve seen the way you people operate,” Dean said. “The way my brother operates. You forget, I was there start to finish last time. You’ve done this to me before. You dick around and double talk me and somewhere out there Ariel is alive, and hurt, and waiting to be found. You’re going to find some way to blame somebody here for this, and you’re gonna tear us to shreds all over again. I won’t let you do it.”
“Dean, this is a mistake—” Agent Juarez began.
“The hell it is!” Dean shouted. He closed in on Bear, that gun still leveled right at his chest. He took a step forward, his other hand out like he meant to grab Bear. Before he could, Casper leapt in the way. Bear could see the way the whole thing would play out—he could hear Casper’s agonized yelp before it ever sounded.
He pushed the dog aside, dropping Casper’s leash.
A sharp crack sounded in the stillness, shaking the ground beneath Bear’s feet. He saw Casper turn once, eyes terrified, before he shouted, “Go long, Caz!”
The dog raced away from them, a white streak in the darkening woods. It was only after Casper was gone and chaos broke out around him that Bear realized he was on the ground, Ren beside him. And he’d never before felt the kind of pain that was burning through him now.
* * *
Chapter 9
I WATCHED AS CASPER tore through the woods, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the terrifying noise that had just rocked our world. I wasn’t worried about the noise, though. I barely noticed it.
All I could focus on was Bear.
He lay on the ground, eyes open, stunned. Ren knelt beside him, her own eyes wide with fear. I started to go to him, and one of the Neanderthals with the Redfields was stupid enough to raise his gun to me.
“Get that thing out of my face,” I ground out.
“Get her away from here,” Dean Redfield shouted to Jack. Bear groaned. He tried to sit up, then cried out in pain. It was a visceral sound for me, something I felt go through me in a way I never felt anything before I became a mother.
“Jamie,” Jack said to me. He moved toward me and caught my arm. I shrugged him off and kept moving. A shell was chambered in one of the men’s guns. Jack caught me again. This time, he held on despite my fighting him.
“What’s your play here, Dean?” Jack asked.
“We’re taking the boy,” Dean said. He nodded toward Bear, now gasping in pain, his face the whitest I’d ever seen it. Meanwhile, the damned reporter—Angie Crenshaw—was taping the whole thing, whispering in her cameraman’s ear while he filmed. “I’m guessing by the look of you that this is the motivation you need to get this job done. You find Ariel. Talk to my brother, and figure out who he’s got working with him. I’m not going through this again. I’m not losing anybody else.”
Bear locked eyes with me. Despite the pain, there was that deeper level of calm that’s unnerved me since he was a toddler. That boy knows things, an old friend told me when Bear was no more than two. I’ve never seen anybody with eyes like that. He doesn’t even know, all that’s locked inside those old eyes of his.
“This is stupid,” I said to Dean. “You really want to take an injured kid with you? Do you have the time or the capabilities to deal with that? Take me instead.”
“We can handle the boy just fine,” Dean said. “You don’t need to worry about that. We’ll figure it out. I don’t care who you think might be in these woods—I need somebody to keep searching, and I need them focused on a good outcome. This is the only way I can think to make that happen.”
Dean bridged the distance to Bear. Ren knelt beside him on the ground, silent tears tracking down her dark cheeks. The man grabbed my son by his right arm—the one that hadn’t been hit. Regardless, Bear gasped in pain. I saw Ren flinch at the sound. With guns pointed directly at me and Jack holding me back, I’d never felt more helpless.
“Let me come too,” Ren said suddenly. Dean looked at her, clearly surprised.
“We don’t need two—”
“I have medical training,” she said quickly. She failed to mention that her medical training was limited to treating dogs and deer. “Please. I can help him. I won’t cause you trouble, but I can help keep him comfortable.”
“Ren, no,” Bear protested. She stopped him with a single glance, her ja
w set.
Dean looked confused. Overwhelmed. He hadn’t planned any of this, I realized—that wasn’t a good thing. This was a panicked decision, not well thought out, which meant there was no telling what the outcome might be.
“You don’t have to do this,” I tried with Dean again. “We’re committed to finding Ariel. There’s no reason to give us any more incentive. There’s a young woman missing who needs our help—this is what we do.”
“You mean to tell me you wouldn’t call off the search after finding Melanie like this?” he asked. He looked at Cheryl instead of me. The handler’s eyes gave her away—he was right. With an armed killer loose in the forest, there was no way we could in good conscience risk the lives of our searchers. “That’s what I thought,” he said.
“Please,” I said, pleading now. “Just let them go.”
Dean tilted his head and stared at me for a long moment, but I got the sense he wasn’t seeing me at all. Instead, he was listening to something. Or someone. The depth of fear I saw on Bear’s face stole the air from my lungs.
“Forget it—we’re taking them,” Dean said. He yanked Bear to his feet. Two other armed men came round to assist, while four others kept their weapons trained on us. Then, Dean looked at his watch. “It’s Friday, five o’clock now. I know it’s hard to look at night…and I know how big these woods are. You’ve got till noon on Sunday. If Ariel isn’t home with us by then…” He paused and took a breath. “Well, I don’t see that I’ll have a choice by then but to show you I’m serious. If Ariel’s not home by noon on Sunday, I will kill one of these young people. I’d hate to have to do that.”
The words made me sick to my stomach. This was happening—there was nothing I could do to stop it. Nothing I could say. Panic set in. It felt like I was drowning in ice water, like I had no say in my fate or anyone else’s. I fought to regain control at sight of Bear, whose eyes were intent on my face.
“You’ll be all right,” I said. Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them back. I forced strength into the words. “Just go with them. Do what they ask. Ren, make sure you get the bleeding stopped. Fast.” I swallowed past the pain in my throat and focused on Dean. “Keep them warm. Keep them safe. Because, so help me God, if something happens to them, I will come for you—”
Dean nodded. He looked strangely moved—kind, almost—when he spoke. “I know you will, ma’am. That’s why I’m doing this. Just find Ariel. The faster you do that, the faster your family will be back together again.”
Another couple of Dean’s men appeared at the edge of the forest at roughly the same time McDonough emerged from the trees with two of his agents and Wade Wright—I hadn’t even realized he’d left us. Casper was with the forest ranger now, held tight as the man took in the scene. At sight of Bear, the dog strained to get free.
Jack called to McDonough the moment they all came into sight. “Stay back,” he said. “We’ve got a situation. It’s under control.”
The hell it was. I heard the sound of an ATV coming closer, and the panic swelled in my chest. The men led Bear and Ren to the vehicle. I looked around wildly, waiting for someone to do something.
I just didn’t know what.
As they were leading Bear away, he staggered at one point and went down on one knee, and I heard a strangled cry come from somewhere. At a look from Jack, still standing beside me, I realized it had come from me.
“Just hang on,” he said to me quietly. “They’ll be all right.”
I looked away before I beat him.
The Vermont K-9 handlers stood together, McDonough and the other agents beside them. Cheryl and Wade had hold of Minion, Casper, and Festus, Bear’s pit bull the only one putting up any fuss. Angie Crenshaw’s camera man kept filming, and I noted that more reporters had arrived on McDonough’s heels. Jack and I stayed where we were. Only Dean and his people moved, hauling my son and Ren into the woods without another word.
When the armed men had gone and all I could see were occasional flashes of color in the thick trees, I yanked my arm from Jack’s grasp. I searched the clearing wildly, looking for any sign that someone knew what the hell to do next.
“Why is no one moving?” I demanded. Phantom shifted beside me, uneasy at my tone. “Two people have just been taken hostage under your noses—what the hell are we doing about it?”
The words seemed to pull everyone from their shocked silence. McDonough strode forward, his gaze fixed on Jack.
“What the hell just happened?” he asked, his voice a dangerously controlled whisper as the reporters continued to film the chaos.
“He just…lost it,” Jack said. He looked almost as bewildered as I felt. “Something’s going on with him—with Dean. I knew the man before, and he was never like this.”
“His family has a history of mental illness, don’t they?” I asked. “There was never any sign that something like this could happen?”
Jack shook his head, mute. McDonough took my elbow and tried to steer me away from the reporters who were rapidly converging on us. I shot him a glare that convinced him manhandling me at this point was a very bad idea. It was probably the menace in Phantom’s eye, the low growl in her throat, that convinced him to take a step back, though.
“Ms. Flint—” he began.
“We need to get out there and start looking,” I said, cutting him off. “We have to find Ariel.”
“You’re right, of course,” McDonough nodded. “Just give me a minute while I tend to something, and we’ll get things under way.”
I watched with relief as he left us and strode toward the reporters, shooing each and every one of them—including Jack’s blonde—out of the area. Only when all of them were out of sight did he return to Jack and me.
“That’s better,” he said grimly. “Now… What the fuck is going on?” he asked.
“Dean lost it when we found the girl,” Jack said. “He must have radioed the family, or one of the others up there must have been watching us—they all just showed up out of nowhere. What can you tell me about the people living up on the mountain with the rest of the Redfields? I thought you were keeping an eye on that whole thing.”
“Watch your tone, Agent,” McDonough said, his own voice sharp. “I was told they wouldn’t be a problem. Now that I know that’s not the case, I’ll have someone look into it. Have you checked the body?”
“Briefly,” Jack confirmed as he stepped closer. “I didn’t want to screw up the scene—we’ll need to get CSU in here.”
“If they have such a thing in this godforsaken place,” McDonough muttered. He approached Melanie’s still body with slightly less care than Jack had taken. I remained where I was, watching his every move. Phantom was perfectly still beside me, so close I could feel her warmth through my field pants.
In my line of work, I’m no stranger to death. Violent deaths, natural deaths, people who met their end long before their time or long after. This girl, Melanie Redfield… There was no question that hers had not been an easy death.
The girl lay naked on the ground at our feet. The flesh had been flayed from her breasts and her buttocks. I turned away at sight of the rest of her. It’s not my job to look at the dead; it’s my job to find the living. I’ve never been able to stomach the violence humans do to one another.
“This is the same thing you found in Adams?” I asked. I scanned the rest of the area while Jack knelt beside the body, McDonough looming over us.
“Almost identical,” he said. “You see this?” he asked McDonough. My back was still to them, but eventually curiosity won out. I stepped closer. Jack pointed to Melanie’s left ear, where her head lolled to the side.
I had to take another step to see what he was indicating: a single earring in the shape of a cross at the top of her right ear. It looked like pewter, the ear and the jewelry itself coated with dried blood.
“You think it’s the same one?” McDonough asked Jack.
“You’ve seen this before,” I said.
“On the
bodies in Adams,” Jack confirmed. “And the other victims we think Gordon killed.”
“So whoever did this leaves the earring?”
“Jams it through the top of the ear,” McDonough said. “And leaves it there. In the right ear of one of the victims, the left of the other.”
“There’s no chain, though,” Jack noted. I recalled what he had told me before about the murders: that the women were strangled with a chain, a purity ring left on the ring finger. “It looks like she was strangled, but there’s nothing with the body.”
McDonough studied Melanie’s neck, brow furrowed. He pointed at an imprint, still keeping a careful distance. “Look at the imprint, though,” he said. “I’d say she was strangled with a chain, no doubt about it.”
“So someone took the chain and purity ring?” I asked. “Ariel, maybe?”
Jack shrugged. “No way of knowing right now. We’ll have the crime scene guys look, see if they can find it.”
“How many people know about the signatures—either the chain or the earrings?”
“Us,” Jack said, indicating McDonough and himself. “And a couple of other members of the original team. Agent Paulsen, of course. The crime scene guys…”
“If Gordon Redfield wasn’t the killer, would he know about this?”
“At this point, a lot of people know about it,” McDonough said. “It’s in the transcripts of the trial, and I know at least a couple of rags picked up the story and ran with it.”
I was fading, barely listening to them any longer. This was their job—all I wanted to do was leave them to it. Right now, I had better things to do with my time.
“What are you doing about getting Bear and Ren back?” I asked McDonough, interrupting their conversation.
He nodded grimly and straightened, as though he’d expected the question. “I’ll put in a call to Washington, have them send out a negotiator. If Dean’s given us a window as long as he has—forty hours’ worth—that means he doesn’t want to hurt your son or his friend. He wants you to succeed, and then he wants to let them go; I’d stake my career on that. That’s the good news.”