by Lisa Gardner
He straightened, blinking his eyes against the rain while the wheels of his mind started to turn.
Kincaid had spent his first three years as a trooper working along the coast. It amazed him how many of his reports had started with the discovery of an abandoned vehicle. The ocean seemed to draw people, speak to them one last time. So they’d drive out to the coast, catch that final glorious sunset. Then they’d lock up their vehicle, head into the woods, and blow out their brains.
But in all of Kincaid’s years, he’d never seen anyone walk away from a car like this—engine idling, windshield wipers beating, headlights beaming.
Deputy Mitchell had been right. The scene was too Hollywood. It felt wrong.
“All right,” Kincaid said. “Let’s pop the trunk.”
Tuesday, 1:45 a.m. PST
She has stopped paying attention. She knows this is a bad thing. Once upon a time, she was a small-town deputy, and God knows she’s seen exactly what can happen when, even for a second, a person’s eyes stray from the road.
But she is very tired now. How long has it been since she’s slept? Hours, days, months? Fatigue has eroded her motor skills. Her short-term memory is shot. She tries to remember what she did yesterday, but the image that swims in front of her mind could have easily been from last week. She can’t track time anymore. Her life exists in a vacuum.
The windshield wipers thump, thump rhythmically. The rain beats against the roof of her car. The headlights sway in the night.
When she was younger, fourteen, fifteen, in the days before her mother was shot, she’d had a boyfriend who loved to go out on nights like this. They would find a back road, cut the headlights, and soar the dark.
“HEEEE-hawwww!” he would roar, before taking a swig of Wild Turkey.
Later, they would screw like minks in the backseat, a blur of whiskey, sweat, and condoms.
Thinking about those days, Rainie feels a pang. It has been so long now since she’s felt young and wild and free. It has been too long since she’s trusted herself to drive blind in the dark.
And then her thoughts veer, taking her to a place she doesn’t want to go.
She thinks of Quincy. She remembers the first time they were together. The way he touched her tenderly. The way he held her afterward.
“Rainie,” he assured her softly, “it’s all right to enjoy life.”
And now she hurts. She hurts beyond pain, she cannot draw a breath. Seven days later, it’s still as if she’s been punched in the solar plexus, and her lips move, but she can’t find any air.
The road bends. She’s too distracted to react. Wheels spin, brakes squeal. Her car whips round and round and she releases the steering wheel. She takes her foot off the gas. She finds herself letting go, a solitary version of Thelma & Louise, waiting to sail into the Grand Canyon, grateful to just get it over with.
The car spins to the side, whips back to the middle. Old instincts take place, muscle memory from the days when she was an adept, capable policewoman. She catches the wheel. She turns into the spin. She applies the brakes more carefully and eases over to the side of the road.
Then she has a nervous breakdown. She places her forehead against the steering wheel and bawls like a baby, shoulders heaving, chest hiccupping, nose running.
She cries and cries and cries, and then she thinks of Quincy, the feel of her cheek against his chest, the sound of his heartbeat in her ear, and she starts sobbing all over again. Except beneath her tears is no longer sadness, but white-hot rage.
She loves him, she hates him. She needs him, she despises him. That seems to be the story of her life. Other people fall in love. Other people are happy.
Why is it so difficult for her? Why can’t she just let go?
And then the images appear once more in her mind. The porch steps, the opening door, the beckoning gloom …
Rainie reaches reflexively for her gun. To fight back, to lash out, to shoot … what? She has met the enemy, and it is herself. Which, in her own crazy way, makes her hate Quincy all over again. Because if he had never loved her, then she’d never have to know what she had lost.
Her fingers caress her Glock. And just for a second, she finds herself tempted …
A rap on her window.
Her head jerks up.
The universe explodes in white light.
Tuesday, 3:49 a.m. PST
Deputy Mitchell didn’t understand the contents of the trunk at first. Kincaid could see the awareness finally penetrate as the deputy turned various shades of green.
“What the hell …” The deputy stumbled back, his arm going up as if to block out the image.
Kincaid reached in a hand and carefully lifted the first page of photos. His gaze shot to Sheriff Atkins. “You don’t know the name?”
“No, but I just started the job last month. That’s really what I think it is?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Sweet Jesus.” She stared at the abandoned car. “This isn’t gonna end well, is it?”
“Not likely.”
Kincaid got out his phone and made the call.
2
Tuesday, 4:05 a.m. PST
Thunder outside.
Quincy woke up too fast. His breath caught, his hands grabbing the mattress, his body steeling for the blow. In the next instant, he rolled fluidly onto his side and was up out of the bed.
His chest was heaving. He had to force himself to look at the heavily floral wallpaper, to remember where he was and how he’d gotten here. The conclusion of those thoughts took the rest of the fight right out of him. His shoulders sagged. His head came down. He leaned heavily against the window and watched the rain slash hard diagonal lines across the glass.
He’d been in the cute country bed-and-breakfast for seven days now, which was about seven days too long. The owner was kind, at least. She didn’t comment on a lone man renting a room in an inn obviously intended for lovers. And she didn’t pry when each morning he quietly asked to extend his reservation one more day.
Where was this leading? When would it end? He honestly didn’t know anymore. And that thought left him tired. It made him feel, for the first time in his life, very, very old.
Quincy was fifty-three, at the stage of his life where his dark brown hair held more salt than pepper, where the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes had dug in deep, where he felt more and more distinguished and less and less handsome. He still ran twelve miles four times a week. He still trained each month at the firing range. Twice in his lifetime he had dealt with serial predators up close and personal, and he wasn’t about to go soft just because he’d passed the half-century mark.
He wasn’t an easy man. He understood that. He was too smart, spent too much time living inside his head. His mother had died young and his father hadn’t been a talker. There were entire years of his life that had passed in silence. A boy who grew up like that was bound to turn into a particular kind of man.
He’d joined law enforcement on a whim, starting his career with the Chicago PD. Then, when it turned out he had a natural gift for pursuing unnatural minds, he’d joined the FBI as a profiler. He’d logged the miles, working over a hundred cases a year, traveling from motel to motel, always studying death.
While his first wife left him. While his two daughters grew up without him. Until one day, he’d looked around and realized that he’d given so much to the dead, he had nothing left.
He’d transferred to some internal projects within the bureau after that, tried to be home more for his girls. He’d even worked on repairing the fractious relationship with his ex-wife, Bethie.
Maybe he’d made some progress. It was hard to know. It seemed the next time he blinked his eyes, he was receiving a call from Bethie. There had been an automobile accident. Mandy was in the hospital. Please, come quick …
His oldest daughter had never regained consciousness. They’d buried her shortly before her twenty-fourth birthday, then Quincy returned to his windowless office at Quantico,
once again wading through photos of death.
That had been the hardest year of Quincy’s life. Worse had been the horrible realization that someone had killed Mandy, and that that same someone now stalked Bethie and his younger daughter, Kimberly. He had moved quickly then, but still not quite fast enough. The killer had gotten to Bethie first, and maybe would’ve succeeded in killing Kimberly as well, if not for Rainie.
Rainie had fought that day. She had fought for Kimberly, she had fought for herself, and she’d fought simply for the sake of fighting, because that’s what she did and that’s who she was and he’d never met anyone quite like her.
He had loved that Rainie. He had loved her big mouth, her wiseass manner, her quick-fire temper. He loved the way she challenged him, provoked him, and infuriated the living daylights out of him.
She was tough, independent, cynical, bright. But she was also the only woman he’d ever met who understood him. Who knew that he remained at heart a secret optimist, trying to see good in a world that delivered so much bad. Who knew that he really couldn’t give up his job, because if people like him didn’t do what they did, then who would? Who knew that he honestly loved her even when he seemed quiet and withdrawn; it was just that the emotions he felt most strongly were not the kind he could put into words.
When Quincy and Rainie had finally married two years ago, he’d considered himself embarking on a new, healthier chapter in his life. Kimberly had graduated from the FBI Academy and was doing well as an agent in the Atlanta office. They spoke, if not as much as some fathers and daughters, at least enough to satisfy both of their needs.
And he’d done the unthinkable—he’d retired. Or pseudo-retired. Retired as much as a man such as he could.
Now he and Rainie worked only a handful of cases, offering profiling services as private consultants to the law enforcement industry. They’d moved to Oregon, because Rainie had missed the mountains too much to ever call anyplace else home. They had even, God help him, looked into adopting a child.
Imagine, becoming a father at his age. And yet he had.
For a brief three weeks, after the photo had come in the mail, he’d even been excited about it.
And then the phone had rung. They’d gone out on the call.
And the bottom had fallen out of Quincy’s life for the second time.
He should probably start finding an apartment.
Maybe tomorrow, he thought, but already knew that he wouldn’t. Even a brilliant man could be stupid when it came to love.
A soft rapping sounded at the door. The owner of the B&B stood on the other side, looking frazzled. There was a police officer downstairs, she said. The policeman was asking for Quincy. He was saying it was urgent. That they had to speak right away.
Quincy wasn’t surprised.
He had learned a long time ago that life could always get worse.
Tuesday, 4:20 a.m. PST
Kincaid retired to the relative shelter of his car, cranking up the heat and working the cell phone.
First, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Portland office. Waking a feebie in the middle of the night was never a great thing, but Kincaid didn’t have a choice. The trunk of the abandoned vehicle had yielded a particularly disturbing find: photos of an eviscerated female body, all stamped “Property of the FBI.”
He reached Jack Hughes on the first try. The FBI SAC confirmed that Lorraine Conner was a private-practice investigator, who had worked as a consultant for the Portland field office in the past. To the best of his knowledge, she wasn’t handling a case right now, but maybe she was working with another office. Hughes passed along the name of Conner’s partner for follow-up, asked to be kept updated, then yawned several times before returning to his nice warm bed.
Kincaid had the same luck with his next two calls. He reached the crime lab supervisor and reported their find. Weather was too bad, conditions too wet to warrant sending out a primary examiner, the supervisor reported back. They’d talk again when the car was in a dry, secure location. And then Mary Senate went back to bed. Ditto Kincaid’s call to Latent Prints—you can’t print a wet car, so hey, when it dries out, give us a buzz. Good night.
Which left Kincaid alone, soaked to the bone, and wondering why the hell he hadn’t become an accountant like his father.
He stepped out of his car long enough to touch base with Sheriff Atkins. The sheriff was organizing her local deputies to do a little bushwhacking. In the bad-news department, the rain continued to pour and visibility was about nil. In the good-news department, the November night hadn’t fallen below the low fifties. Still damn chilly if you were wet, but not immediately life threatening.
Assuming Lorraine Conner was out in those woods, stumbling around.
What would make a woman get out of her car on a night like this? Particularly a trained member of law enforcement, on a road this dark, this remote, this daunting? Kincaid could think of some answers for those questions, but none of them were good.
He called the towing company. If the scientists needed the vehicle safe and dry, then by God, he’d get it someplace safe and dry.
The flatbed tow truck came, driver stepping into the deluge, looking at the muddy swamp surrounding the vehicle, and promptly shaking his head. Car was dug in now. Trying to pull it out would spray mud everywhere and destroy what little trace evidence was left.
Car wasn’t going anyplace for at least another few hours.
Kincaid cursed, shook his head in disgust, and finally had a bright idea. He found a local deputy with an easy-up tent and sent him home for the canvas. Thirty minutes later, he’d erected the makeshift shelter over the vehicle and its immediate surroundings. Any impressions evidence was no doubt long gone, but hey, a guy had to try. Besides, beneath the cover of the tent, he could at least get to work.
Kincaid started snapping digital photos, getting halfway around the vehicle before Trooper Blaney returned, followed by a second car.
Kincaid watched as the second vehicle parked behind Blaney’s cruiser and a man stepped out into the downpour. He wore a London Fog coat that probably cost half of Kincaid’s monthly salary. Expensive shoes. Sharp-pressed slacks. So this was Pierce Quincy. Former FBI profiler. Lorraine Conner’s husband. Obvious person of interest. Kincaid took a long, hard look.
Quincy didn’t waste any time coming over.
“Sergeant Kincaid.” The man stuck out a hand, rain already molding his hair to his skull.
“You must be Quincy.” They shook. Kincaid thought the profiler had a strong grip, lean face, and nearly crystalline blue eyes. A hard man. One used to being in control.
“What happened? Where’s my wife? I’d like to see Rainie.”
Kincaid merely nodded, rocking back on his heels and continuing his assessment. This was his party. Best to make that clear now and save them both a lot of pissing wars.
“Nice coat,” he said at last.
“Sergeant—”
“Like the shoes, too. Bit muddy though, don’t you think?”
“Mud washes off. Where’s my wife?”
“I’ll tell you what. You answer my questions, then I’ll answer yours. Sound like a plan?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Actually, since this is my scene, no, you don’t.”
Quincy thinned his lips but didn’t protest. Kincaid allowed himself one moment to puff out his chest. Score one for the state guy.
He still should’ve stayed in bed.
“Mr. Quincy, when was the last time you saw your wife?”
“Seven days ago.”
“Been out of town?”
“No.”
“Don’t you two work together?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Live together?”
A muscle ticked in Quincy’s jaw. “Not at the moment.”
Kincaid cocked his head to the side. “Care to elaborate?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well, okay, if that’s how you wanna
play it, but see here, Mr. Quincy—”
“Sergeant, please.” Quincy held up a hand. “If you really want to make me dance like a puppet on a string, then by all means, you can spend the next few hours putting me through my paces. But right now, I’m asking you, investigator to investigator, where’s my wife?”
“You don’t know?”
“Honestly, Sergeant, I don’t.”
Kincaid considered the man for one more minute, then caved with a faint shrug of his shoulders. “A local deputy found her car shortly after two a.m. No sign of her, however, here or at her residence. I’ll be honest—we’re concerned.”
Kincaid saw the profiler swallow and then, just slightly, sway on his feet.
“Would you like a moment?” Kincaid asked sharply. “Can I get you anything?”
“No. I just … No.” Quincy took a step. Then another. His face appeared pale in the glow of the searchlights. Kincaid started to notice the details he’d missed earlier. The way the London Fog coat hung on the profiler’s gaunt frame. The way the man moved, jerky, tight. A man who hadn’t slept well in days.
As grieving husbands went, the former feebie put on a pretty good show.
“Maybe you’d like a cup of coffee,” Kincaid stated.
“No. I’d rather … May I see the vehicle? I can help you determine … maybe some things are missing.”
Kincaid considered the request. “You can look, but don’t touch. Lab hasn’t been here yet.”
He led the way to the abandoned Toyota. He’d closed the driver’s-side door after photographing and recording its original position. Now he opened it back up.
“You’ve checked the local establishments?” Quincy asked. He sounded clearer now, an investigator turning to task.
“Not really much around here to check.”
“And the woods?”
“Have some deputies going through the surrounding area right now.”
“All the vehicles, of course,” Quincy murmured. He gestured toward the glove compartment. “May I?”
Kincaid went around to the other side of the Toyota and, with his gloved hand, opened it. He already knew the contents from checking it before: half a dozen McDonald’s napkins, four maps, and the owner’s manual for the vehicle, with the vehicle registration tucked inside. Now he watched Quincy intently study the contents.