by Jordan Dane
I stared down at Josh, her odd neighbor, the one who had always taken an interest in the men she brought home—a man she trusted.
“What the hell?” I whispered. “He’s…your neighbor.”
Justine shook her head and said, “I don’t get it. What about Matson?”
I had the same question. What about Matson? He’d clearly ransacked Applewhite’s cabin. I’d seen the aftermath and heard it with my own ears. The poacher had run from Justine and stalked us. I’d fallen victim to one of his illegal bear traps and he had a known grudge against Nate—a fixation on him—and a history of breaking the law.
“Could Josh have been working with Matson?” I asked.
“That’s the only explanation.” Justine shook her head. “But isn’t it unusual for two serial killers to work together?”
I reached for the Glock, wiped the blood off as best I could, and shoved the weapon into the waistband of my pants.
“It’s not an original notion, but it could explain why our profile had been off.”
If there were two killers with different patterns—or one killer with help who could seem to be in two places at once—that would change everything. Two killers sharing the blood lust, one could’ve tracked us into the mountains while the other held Ben and carried on with his torture.
Ben had been flown from Seattle to Alaska, part of his abduction and the first half of a round trip. After the Totem Killer finished with Ben, he’d be flown home in pieces like choice cuts of grocery store chicken. Seattle was the Totem Killer’s dumping ground, but given the slivers of my memory about a four-wheeler, the odds were good we were still on the Prince of Wales Island. Two killers, working in tandem, weren’t common, but there was precedent.
“If there are two of them, it means something else, too.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It means the second one is still out there,” I said. “We gotta get out of here. Now.”
I hobbled up the stairs and peered out the door—our only means of escape. I had to see where we were.
Outside the open doorway stretched a hazy tunnel that looked more like an underground sewer. It smelled of stale air and damp earth. Dim light bulbs flickered as if there was a storm approaching and the surreal lyrics of “What a Wonderful World” blasted over crudely wired speakers, hung with connections exposed. The music made a mockery of our deadly predicament and grated on my nerves.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I muttered under my breath.
“What?” Justine asked.
“I thought we were in a…basement. I was wrong.”
Our prison had been a simple design like a survivalist’s storage bunker, hastily set off of drainage tunnels. I stared down the murky passageways that snaked beyond where I could see. There was no clear decision on which way to make our escape. Ben could barely walk and with my injured ankle, I couldn’t carry him, but something else weighed heavily on my mind. It came at me in a rush, like the simmering start to a blistering migraine.
“I’m cutting Ben loose.” Justine went for the knife and approached Ben who was still tied and helpless on the Totem Killer’s table. I only caught the shadowy blur of her moving in the room when I was seized by something I’d never felt before.
Oh, God. What the hell?
An ache in my head almost doubled me over as a sudden flash of a hallucination assaulted my mind like a razor slicing into tender flesh. It happened so fast, it should’ve shocked me, but the vision had been a familiar one.
What are you doing, genius? Don’t. Not now.
I’d lost it. As I stared into the shadows of the tunnel, I sensed an odd presence. The once blaring music faded and had been replaced by an ominous low rumble in my head. I’d heard it before in my dreams. Out of nowhere a distinctive scent came to me—the heady brine of seawater. My belly tossed as if I’d been caught in a strong ocean rip current that would drag me to the depths of oblivion.
The whale returned to haunt me once more. The beast’s distant quake swept through me and brought the feeling of being watched. In a rush I’d been thrust back to the Cascades again.
“No…can’t be h-happening.” My lungs burned and a crushing weight squeezed my chest.
“What’s wrong with you?” Justine called out to me.
I couldn’t answer her. Vivid flashes assaulted my brain with greater intensity. Memories of visions I had since I’d arrived on the island ticked through my mind one by one. As they slowed, I found it harder to breathe. Open your eyes. Stop this. I had to fight the urge to break off my connection and strained for every glimpse.
The waking nightmare had to be important.
Images spiraled like the seductive dance of black ink in water and took shape. When one final image settled into my mind, chills crawled over my skin like a legion of roaches. Another truth welled up in my fertile imagination, taking root from seeds planted by the many nightmares I’d had since coming to the island.
No. It can’t be.
I pulled the Glock and winced as my vision cleared. I crept down the stairs, hurting with every step.
“Don’t go near him.” I aimed my weapon at Justine. “Drop the knife. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
It was too late. By the time my eyesight cleared, Justine had grabbed Ben and yanked him to her chest. The kid shook, with eyes wide, and tears streaked his face. She had a handful of his hair and the blade at his throat.
If I didn’t do something, he’d be dead.
***
The dark passageway under Josh Getty’s shack led to a split. With her back to a wall, Lucinda cut off the Kel-Lite—not wanting to become a target—and peered down each branch. Crudely wired light bulbs were strewn high and sputtered on and off as if there were a storm outside. The power could flick out any second.
Only one thing distinguished the split in the tunnel.
A melody blared in a disturbing and surreal echo—a strange Ray Charles song—and she could’ve sworn she heard voices, but couldn’t tell where they came from. Lucinda flipped the Kel-Lite on again and held it high as she aimed her Glock down the tunnels.
The music played over and over in a torturous loop. She couldn’t imagine the horror of the killer’s victims. Their bodies would be carved into for days as they were forced to listen to the same song.
She had to block that from her mind. She had a job to do.
Her heart pounded and sweat trickled from her temples as Lucinda felt the pressure of deciding which way to go. She strained to listen beyond the loud music for anything to help make up her mind until she finally heard the murmur of voices. At first she thought she’d imagined them. The sound rose and fell, masked by the music.
She couldn’t wait any longer. Despite not knowing where the voices came from, Lucinda aimed her weapon and made her choice.
Please, Ryker. Please be okay.
***
Ryker Townsend
“It wasn’t Matson. It never was. You’re the Totem Killer.”
I clenched my jaw and waited for Justine Peterson to deny what I already knew. She didn’t bother and her amusement showed.
“I fed you what you wanted to hear. I didn’t need you to tell me anything about your case because I knew exactly what would pique your interest. I teased you with choice morsels and you ate them up.”
I saw the cold-blooded stare of the killer I’d been hunting—the clever one who knew how to hide in plain sight by wearing the uniform of an Alaska State Trooper. The corner of her lips crooked into a merciless smile.
I knew she wouldn’t think twice about slitting Ben’s throat, just to see my pain at watching it happen. I had to keep her talking until I had a clear shot.
“Statistically speaking, you are a rarity, especially with you taking on a partner.” I fixed my eyes on hers and forced a blank expression. “You’re the artist, aren’t you?”
Justine only smiled.
Even as late as 1998, famed FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood was quoted at
a conference as saying there were no female serial killers. He’d been wrong. Such uncommon women operated under the radar and were less likely to have criminal history. They killed those closest to them and usually did it through more passive means, such as poisoning or smothering.
The overkill with a knife and the torture had been different. Justine Peterson had set an unusual standard in deviance.
“Drop the knife.” I shifted the barrel and aimed at her face. “Step away from him or I’ll shoot.”
“I thought she…was a c-cop?” Ben’s lips trembled. His whole body shook.
“She’s the reason you’re here, Ben.” Without taking my eyes off her, I said, “What else are you responsible for, Justine? Were you the one who…”
“Had sex with him?” She smiled and kissed Ben’s cheek, not taking her eyes off me.
“Raped him. Why lie now? You’re not a coward. The least you can do is be honest and tell the truth.”
Justine licked her lips and smirked.
“You’re right. I dressed like a guy to take what he wouldn’t normally give to a man,” she said. “I took what I wanted, but Ben got hard. He wanted it.”
Although the woman had finally let down the mask she’d been wearing, she truly believed what every rapist did—that the victim wanted to be violated.
“No. No!” Ben jerked in her grip—unraveling—and I couldn’t help him.
I had to keep the focus on me and off Ben. When I inched nearer, she countered and gripped him tighter. I clutched the Glock tight in my hands and edged for a better shot, but I had to keep her talking.
“Did the poaching incident ever happen between Matson and Nate?”
“They had friction, but I may have played a hand in making things worse. I wanted to see what would happen.” She grinned. “Nate and I got real cozy because of it.”
“Did Matson taunt him with butchered animal carcasses?”
“Nope. Me again. You should have seen Nate’s face. I scared the shit out of him and milked it, especially when he thought his kid was in danger.”
“The illegal bear trap that got me, did you…?”
“Did I know it was there? What do you think?” She raised an eyebrow and smiled.
Her smug expression told me all I needed to know. Justine had sent me down a trail she knew had traps and hoped I’d be injured enough for her to gain the upper hand. I’d trusted her and she’d played me. It took all my composure to stay cool.
“What did Josh do for you?” I asked. “What was his buy-in?”
Justine looked down at the dead man and laughed.
“He loved me. He took care of me. I gave him a good fuck whenever he wanted it. For that, he rendered the meat and did what he was told. Hallmark doesn’t make a card for what we had.”
“Very touching. That earned him two bullets.” I shook my head. “You’re…poisoned candy. Enticing on the outside. Lethal where it counts.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“When I found out you were coming to the island, I nearly panicked,” she said. “I’d seen you in the Cascades and watched you process the scene. At first I thought you’d followed me back to the island for a reason, but I gave you too much credit.”
I let her ego spew. She was talking and I wouldn’t stop her. I didn’t take comfort in being right. I’d been watched in the Cascades and because of Justine, the odd premonition had lingered when I came to the island.
My gift had tried to warn me. The severity of my escalating visions had never happened to me before. Not the way they’d turned into waking nightmares. I should’ve listened to what those visions had tried to tell me.
“There wasn’t a renovation at the motel, was there?” I asked.
“I wanted you close to me, lover. That’s when I started drugging you with Ketamine, a veterinary medicine. It was in your hot tea and in the canteen water, Golden Boy. After that, you were easy to play.”
She gave me the litany of symptoms I’d experienced, from my worsening hallucinations and nausea to my blurred vision. As she dosed me more, I’d even had body tremors, convulsions, and an extreme irrational fear. She’d played me like an expendable pawn.
“What happened to Matson? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
She grinned and ran a hand through Ben’s hair. The kid gasped and cringed. There was nowhere for him to go. He couldn’t stop her and neither could I.
“Talk about good luck,” she said. “Not for him obviously, but when he ran, I went with the flow. I couldn’t pass up the good karma, especially when it came to you.”
Justine told me everything and bragged about it. Matson’s body was in the mountains near Applewhite’s cabin. She hadn’t buried him. She left him for the animals he poached. Nothing much would be left behind. Exposed as he was, within days he’d be nothing but a pile of bleached bones.
“I tied him up and gagged him the first night. I wanted him to know it was me and sweat over what I’d do with him. The bastard was a macho pig. He never saw me as a threat…until I gutted him. That was Matson’s blood you found. The cut boot heel was mine. You trusted me and never checked my story. After you got hurt, you were an easy mark, Ryker.”
After I realized Justine had caught Matson in her foot chase on our first night at the cabin, I knew she had been the one to double back and steal my cell phone. She’d seen me use it in the mountains and hell, I’d told her it could be a beacon for my team to find us. I’d even told her how to take it offline. She’d isolated me by taking my only lifeline.
Justine made me second guess everything she’d told me. She’d lied to me about hunting Matson. She told me she’d dosed me with meds and staged the gunfight, using the different rifles to make me believe someone else had shot at the cabin. In my drugged state, she’d set up the whole scenario and faked her death to toy with me more.
“Josh had stayed with Ben while I messed with your head at Nate’s place. You really lost it. The Special K did a number on you and I loved every minute. I believe you even developed a bit of a crush on me. When you passed out on the trail heading back to Point Baker, it was party time. You were a Christmas present, waiting to be opened.”
I ignored the smug look on her face.
“Were you the pilot or was that Josh?”
“We both have licenses. Well, had. Dead men don’t fly, but I own the plane. I keep it in the cove behind my cabin. Convenient. Private. That’s where the tunnel goes, between Josh’s shack and the cove. Did I tell you how much I love my job…the independence of it? No one questions anything I do. People here believe me. Trust me. I’m Teflon.”
“You pretended to be a prisoner. Why? You could’ve stuck with the plan and killed us.”
She hesitated. For the first time, she looked unsure. Justine clenched the knife tighter and jerked Ben’s head back. The kid was barely hanging on.
“I wanted to walk away from this, right under the nose of the FBI and the state troopers. Do you have any idea how empowering that would feel? If that happened, I could’ve done anything and gotten away with it. You were my ticket out. No one would’ve blamed me if I quit my job after my terrible ordeal, packed it up and moved away. I could’ve started over somewhere new, but you spoiled everything….with your psycho bullshit hoodoo.”
“So you killed Josh to place the blame on him and Matson. No one would’ve disputed you. Hell, I’d been a witness to it, thanks to you.”
She glared at me.
“No one would’ve known about me. You would’ve bought anything I told you because I’d been a prisoner, too. You were willing to believe Matson and Josh were working together. I planted the seed and you nurtured it with me.”
Her voice grew louder in her excitement. She got off on telling me everything.
“I only had to kill Josh, the only one who knew the truth,” she said. “I couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut.”
Her gaze shifted down the length of my body and back, sizing me up. I didn’t want to know what for.
&
nbsp; “It took a lot for me to give up on you. I wanted you on my table, Ryker. Even as I slept next to you in Nate’s cabin, I dreamed about carving into you. I wanted to cut a scream loose, over and over. You would’ve fought against the pain, but I would’ve won.”
Her eyes rolled in ecstasy.
“Even now I can hear your cries. I actually dreamed of seeing your soul leave your body. That’s what happens, you know. Dying has nothing to do with a blinding light and angels, not when I have a knife in my hands. That kind of power is…intoxicating.”
Oh, God. The thought of her lying next to me as I slept made me cringe.
“Why Nate? Why did you keep him whole?”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know what love is. Never have. Never will, but that bastard told me he loved me. How could someone physically perfect, be so stupid when it came to women?” She glared at me, yet from the somber look in her eyes, I knew she thought of Nathan. “He had a pathetic way of showing how he felt about me. Josh did what he was told, but not Nate. He always put his kid first. I got tired of it.”
“He was a good father, Justine. He loved his boy.”
Her eyes flared in anger and her face flushed red.
“I wanted to butcher his kid in front of him. I swear I would’ve done it. Every time we had a fight, I hunted and perfected my art, but Nate pissed me off one too many times. He earned his special place on my last masterpiece. I got tired of being second on his list. He ended up on my table, listening to Ray Charles while I worked on him. That song was the one his ex-wife picked for their wedding. I love irony.”
I tried not to demonize the human beings I hunted, but Trooper Justine Peterson challenged my objectivity. She’d killed fourteen young men and all because Nathan Applewhite had been a devoted father and didn’t put her on a pedestal at the expense of his child. In truth, nothing would have pleased her. Nate’s days were numbered because he’d crossed her path.
“You wanna hear another bit of irony? You truly remind me of him. I didn’t lie about that,” she said. “It’s the only reason you’re still breathing.”