Vesper curled across her legs like a snoring blanket. Nana and Adi sat in chairs against the wall, eyes pinched with concern.
Hannah smiled weakly. “Is Sam okay?” she asked, swollen eyes so hopeful.
Sayer tried not to react, but her mouth contorted.
“Oh, no.…” Hannah read Sayer’s expression. Her face buckled into a mask of anguish as she realized what it meant. “He got Sam.”
Sayer nodded once, her heart breaking at the sight of Hannah collapsing in on herself.
Grief pulled the breath from Hannah’s chest. Vesper noticed her distress and stirred just enough to nudge her hand. Hannah’s knuckles whitened on Tino’s hand, grasping for something to keep her tethered in the vortex of sorrow.
Sayer touched Hannah’s shoulder and looked into her eyes. “I promise you, we will find Sam.”
Hannah nodded, not breaking eye contact for a very long time. Whatever she saw in Sayer’s eyes seemed to inject anger into the grief. Her eyes hardened. She nodded sharply. “How can I help?”
“I need to know everything you can remember,” Sayer told her.
“He’s taken Sam to the pit,” Hannah said, voice husky.
“To the pit,” Sayer repeated. “Start from the beginning. What happened?”
“Can Vesper and everyone stay?” Hannah’s eyes watered again.
“Of course.” Sayer scooted her chair closer to Tino’s.
Hannah looked up. “Did you find the little girl Grace? He said he would let her go.”
“You mean Grace Watts? We found her and Jillian.”
“That poor woman.…”
“Jillian Watts might actually pull through.”
Hannah looked up at Sayer, wonder in her eyes. “She’s alive? But I saw her…”
“Just barely, but the doctors are optimistic.”
Hannah sat back in bed, overwhelmed for a moment. “Oh, my god. He kept his word. He told me he would let her go.…”
“You keep calling your captor ‘he.’ Did you get a good look at whoever it was? Could you tell if it was a man or woman?”
“No, he was up in the control room, so all I could see was a shadow. And he only spoke through a loudspeaker that made him sound all … scratchy. I think it was a man, but I’m not sure. I’m sorry.”
Sayer gave her an encouraging nod. “That’s okay. Can you tell me what happened?”
Hannah grasped Tino’s hand again. He patted it gently. “I’m right here. Vesper is here.”
She nodded. “Sorry, I’m just feeling a little … I can’t…”
“It’s totally okay. Just take your time.” Sayer finally managed to flash her noncommittal interview smile. She found that staying emotionally neutral during an interview with a trauma victim usually helped the victim stay calm as well. “Start at the beginning. You left the gym with Sam.…”
“That’s right.” Hannah swallowed loudly. “I put Sam in her seat, and next thing I know, I woke up in a room.”
“Do you remember seeing anyone suspicious nearby right before you were abducted?”
“No.” Hannah frowned.
“Can you describe the room?”
“It was rocky.” Hannah shook her head, frustrated with herself. “I’m sorry, I can’t seem to think straight. I mean the floor was concrete but parts of the wall were rock, like it was built inside a cave.”
“Okay.…” Sayer prompted her to continue.
“Then Jillian came in. She looked beaten. Skinny. She … oh, I forgot, we both had shock collars on.”
“You still had yours on when we found you,” Sayer said gently.
“I did?” Hannah said, distraught. “I don’t remember any of that.”
“That’s okay. So you woke up in this room and Jillian came in.…”
“She cleaned me up. I guess I … threw up.”
“Do you think you were drugged?”
“I think so, yeah.” Hannah closed her eyes for a moment. “I blacked out, and when I woke up, I had that collar on.” Her voice rose with emotion and Sayer could see her spooling back up.
Tino gently patted her hand, bringing her back to the present.
“He shocked me once.” Her voice flattened, as she distanced herself from the horror “Before the test.…”
No one said anything, letting her carry on in her own time.
“He threatened to shoot Jillian if I didn’t smash my finger. So I did. I can’t remember exactly what the voice said.…” She trailed off.
“Do you want to stop, Hannah?” Tino asked gently.
“No, of course not. It was just all a game to him.…” She trailed off again.
Sayer decided to change the topic.
“Can you describe where you were? You called it the pit?”
“Yeah, yeah.… The voice called it the pit. It was some old mine dug down into a cave system. He always stayed up in a control room above us. Did I already say that?”
Confusion was normal in trauma victim interviews. Sayer tried to keep her focused. “What makes you think it was an old mine?”
“There was rusting equipment. I think we were kept in the old offices. There were tunnels that led down from the pit. One of them went to an underground river.”
“And that’s how you escaped?”
“Yes, I jumped in. After the fight with Jillian, he told me he was coming for Sam. I couldn’t just…”
They sat in silence for a few moments.
“What happened with Jillian?”
Hannah swallowed again. “The girl was in this … machine. With a big knife to the side ready to puncture her neck,” Hannah said in a jumble. “The voice set a timer for five minutes and then told Jillian to kill me. He kept talking about her becoming a monster. But she … it was awful. She … apologized to me.”
“Hey, remember, she’s going to be okay.” Tino squeezed her hand.
Hannah nodded, but she began to cry in earnest. “It was so horrible. She didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. She tried to attack me, but I just kept throwing her off. She was so scared for her little girl.” Hannah’s voice broke, and a sob shook her entire body. Face contorted with anguish, she continued, “When she realized she couldn’t beat me, she asked … she asked if he would let the girl go if I killed her.”
Tino let out an involuntary gasp. Sayer managed to keep her emotions in check, but bile rose up the back of her throat.
“I refused, and she went crazy. She attacked me and I pushed her and she … oh, my god. She ran herself into the wall. She tried to kill herself.” Hannah let out another shuddering sob. “And that’s when the voice said he would let the girl go so I would know he kept his word. Because he said he was going to bring Sam there. That it was my turn to become a monster.”
The woman completely broke down into uncontrollable sobs. Tino stood up so he could wrap his arms around her. Vesper curled closer against her body.
She shook, crying for a long time before she looked back up.
“And now he’s got Sam down there in that machine. I’m so sorry I can’t…”
“You’re doing great. I only have a few more questions, if you can keep going.”
Hannah nodded and wiped her face.
“Did he say anything else to you?” Sayer asked.
“Yeah, he told me that he was trying to prove that there’s a killer in all of us. He mentioned, what was it?” Hannah closed her eyes to think. “Something about how we all have monsters buried deep inside. That they’re beautiful. Something about Stanford prison and Nazis? I’m sorry, I don’t remember everything.”
“I think I understand. Is there anything else?”
The woman looked at Sayer with red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, wait. There was a weird stone table with a big red cloth draped over it. There was a skeleton on it. It looked all burned.”
“It looked burned…,” Sayer repeated. Their stolen skeleton.
“There were two words carved on the table, in Greek, I think.”
�
�In Greek?” Sayer sat up with excitement. This would be their first definitive link between the two sets of cases. “Can you remember what they looked like?”
“I think so.…” Hannah closed her eyes, remembering. “One word looked like capital E with a squiggly line at the top, then lowercase x l o v a, with another squiggle over the o.”
“Adi?” Sayer looked over at the young woman sitting against the wall. “I think I know what she’s describing, but could you try to write it down? I want to know if it’s the same word.”
Adi looked down her nose as only a teenager could. “I am Greek.… Does anyone have something I can write with?”
Nana pulled a pen and small notebook from her purse. Adi took them and thought for a minute. “Um, could it have looked like this?” She held up a page with Ἔχιδνα written on it.
“Maybe … I’m sorry I don’t know for sure, but I think so.”
“That looks right to me,” Sayer said.
Adi looked vaguely confused. “She-viper? You’ve seen this before?” She glanced with concern at Hannah, whose eyes were fluttering. The shock and exhaustion were forcing Hannah’s body to shut down.
Sayer could read the hesitation in Adi’s expression. “Let’s discuss it in the hall. Hannah, could you describe the second word?”
“Maybe capital X i u a i p a? But with some squiggles and a weird u. Sorry…” Hannah’s voice faded to silence. Her eyes fluttered again.
“That’s really helpful. You did a great job.” Sayer got up and whispered, “Vesper and the whole gang can stay with you as long as you like. Are you feeling up for seeing your wife?”
“Yes, please…,” she barely managed to say as she drifted off.
Sayer stared at the sleeping woman for a long moment, then waved for Adi to follow her. She gave Nana a quick hug.
“We’ll stay here until her family arrives. I think she just needs a posse making sure she’s safe right now,” Nana whispered.
“Thank you.”
“You know we’re always here.” Nana squeezed Sayer’s arm.
* * *
Max waited just outside the room, staring out a wall of windows at the silvery evening light. His face mirrored the threatening clouds churning low in the sky.
“How’s she doing? Anything useful?”
Sayer let her shoulders sag, exhausted and on edge. “She’s traumatized and beaten up, but I think she’ll be okay. She was able to describe an old abandoned mine she called the pit. She didn’t get a look at the UNSUB, but said she thought it was a man, though she wasn’t sure.”
“Which would mean that it wasn’t Cricket.”
“True, but I wonder if she’s just assuming it was a man, because she also mentioned seeing ‘she-viper’ carved in Greek above an altar there.”
“Hannah was held in a place associated with Ekhidna?” Max said.
“And she saw the charred skeleton that Cricket stole from the ranger station this morning.” Sayer let the excitement of the hunt course through her body. “Which is our first real confirmation of a connection between the two sets of cases.”
“Which also means that Cricket is most likely the UNSUB in both sets of murders!”
Adi gently shut the hospital room door behind her and looked back and forth between Max and Sayer, caught up in their excitement.
“We need to know more about the she-viper. Adi?”
“So, you’ve seen that somewhere before?”
“Yeah, it was carved on the handle of a kopis we found. She-viper is another name for a mythological monster named Ekhidna.”
Adi let out an exasperated huff. “Of course I know who Ekhidna is. One of the original, primordial monsters, she lived in a watery cave, feasted on innocent people. The mother of all monsters.…”
“Hannah literally just said that her captor talked about monsters. Said something about there being a monster inside us all! What else do you know about Ehkidna?”
“Basically, she was fierce and feared.” A wry smile crept across Adi’s face. “Kind of reminds me of you, actually.”
“I remind you of a primordial Greek monster that eats innocent people?”
Adi’s dark eyes sparkled beneath her fringe of light pink bangs. “She might’ve been seen as a monster by Greek heroes, but she also protected her monstrous children from all kinds of attacks from vengeful gods. In other words, she was feared by all and fiercely protective, just like you.”
“Ah…” Sayer was momentarily left speechless by what she took as a major compliment.
“I’m not sure about this second word, though.” Adi looked down at the word Hannah had tried to describe. “It could be a word in Greek that means something like chasing ghosts. I’m not sure what the English translation would be. I’ll noodle around with it, see if I can figure out something that makes sense.”
Sayer looked over at her ward. Despite her own recent trauma, Adi was there, face burning with the desire to help. Sayer was momentarily awed by her strength and she had the overwhelming urge to hug the young woman. Instead, she put a gentle hand on Adi’s shoulder. “Thanks for helping today. Are you doing all right?”
Adi’s calm exterior faltered slightly. “Of course. I mean, I know…”
“Yeah.” Sayer understood. If anyone could understand what Hannah was going through, it was Adi. She made a mental note to follow up later and make sure Adi wasn’t just putting on a tough façade.
“I’m fine, really. Why don’t I go look up Ekhidna and mess around with the second word? I’ll send along anything else I dig up.” Adi clearly didn’t want to dwell on her own past. “I’ll do that while we wait with Hannah for her wife to get here.”
“That would be great. Thanks, Adi.”
Adi gave her a quick hug and retreated into Hannah’s room. Sayer let out a sigh.
“Your kid’s pretty great,” Max said.
Sayer was momentarily startled. It was the first time anyone had mistakenly called Adi her kid. But then she supposed that wasn’t a mistake, since they were about to make it legal. The thought filled her with an emotion she couldn’t identify. Pride, maybe, that she would forever get to be part of this amazing human being’s life.
“Yeah, she is,” she said. The brief glow of love for Adi was followed by a wave of sheer terror at the thought of something happening to her. For the first time, Sayer understood what Hannah must be feeling about Sam. And what Jillian Watts felt for her child.
It made Sayer wonder exactly how far she would go to protect the ones she loved. Would she even hesitate to kill in order to protect Adi? The intensity of the emotion left her gasping. She had to find Sam before it was too late. “Let’s regroup back up at the station to figure out what’s next.”
As Sayer made her way to her motorcycle, a coal of violence burned in her chest.
SOUTHERN RANGER STATION, SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, VA
Sayer stood at the head of the conference table. Kyle, Ezra, Max, and Dana sat at attention, faces drawn.
“Where’s Piper?”
“There was some flooding up north,” Kyle said. “She had to go help evacuate campers from a flooding campsite.”
“Dammit.” Sayer needed her team here. It was ridiculous that she was investigating this mess of a case without a reliable team, let alone without a task force. She closed her eyes, trying to organize her thoughts. “All right, it’s almost”—she glanced at her phone, thinking it had to be almost midnight—“Jesus, it’s not even seven. It’s already been a long day, but let’s focus. We now have evidence directly connecting these two cases. Cricket clearly broke in here this morning and stole the charred skeleton. Hannah just told me she saw a similar skeleton in the pit, plus a stone table that spelled out Ekhidna. Let’s discuss the very good possibility that Cricket is not only connected to the old murders, but that she’s also our current UNSUB. Kyle, did you manage to get a look at the person who took Sam?”
“I couldn’t see her face. And she was a lot bigger than she used t
o be, but you know how you can just recognize someone by the way they move? I … think that was my sister.”
“Thanks, Kyle. Based on that, plus the fact that Cricket broke in here and attacked us this morning, I’m fairly comfortable saying that Cricket Nelson is our primary UNSUB in both sets of cases and that we just watched her abduct Sam Valdez.…”
Sayer watched Kyle’s reaction.
He nodded, head bowed with defeat. “I agree. I’ve spent the past few hours playing my life over in my head. I mean, my mom baked brownies for PTA fund-raisers and volunteered at the school library. I was really sick when I was a baby, in and out of the hospital with a bunch of surgeries, and she didn’t leave my side. My dad was a metalworker who coached soccer in his spare time. Hell, Cricket liked ponies and reading. How could she be a killer? And how could she have murdered my mom?”
“So you honestly didn’t see anything that made you suspect that there was something wrong with her?”
“She wasn’t violent or anything like that. No delusions or signs of criminal behavior.”
“And you have no idea who could’ve beaten her up the night she went to Max?”
“No clue. I know for sure it wasn’t my dad. He just wasn’t like that … and, hell, Cricket was his favorite. He would’ve done anything for her.”
“Anything, including covering up a murder?” Sayer pressed.
“Sure, while we’re at it let’s destroy my memories of my dad too.” Kyle closed his eyes, and no one spoke. “Yeah, I suppose maybe he would’ve,” he said with his eyes still closed. He finally looked at Sayer. “My dad was sweet, but maybe a little too worried about being seen as a down-to-earth good guy. Not much could’ve been worse in his mind than being embarrassed by something we did.…”
“You think Mr. Nelson covered up the fact that Cricket killed his wife? To protect his reputation?” Max asked Sayer.
“I think it’s possible. I’ve seen a parent covering for a child’s crimes dozens of times,” Sayer said. “But we’re still missing something.…”
Ezra’s computer let out a ping, interrupting her. He clicked the notification that popped up. “Uh…”
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