by Cassie Miles
Flynn hoped and prayed it wasn’t already too late for Grace, that Bud might be able to give them a clue.
Marisa approached him. Back at the safe house, she’d changed into jeans, a zippered black sweatshirt and a snug green tee. The emerald color looked good with her hair.
She planted herself directly in front of him. “There’s something I want to say.”
“Nobody’s stopping you.”
“Back in the truck when we were chasing after the subject, I was a little hard on you.” In the reflected light from the hospital parking lot, her pale blue eyes seemed nearly opaque. “I shouldn’t have said that you were incompetent.”
“An apology?”
“I’m capable of admitting when I’ve overstepped.”
Her lips seemed to be smiling, but he knew better. That curve was the natural shape of her mouth, not an expression of pleasure or approval.
As far as he could tell, her only reason for being here was to twist the knife she’d stabbed in his back two years ago. He wished that he didn’t care, that her opinion meant nothing to him. But he could never erase the good memories of their time together. The hours they’d spent in bed. The clean fragrance of her auburn hair when he’d held her in his arms. The real, contented smile that spread across her heart-shaped face after they’d made love.
“You weren’t wrong,” he said. “I screwed up and lost a protected witness. Worse than that, I lost Grace Lennox. A fine woman. A person I respect.”
“There was nothing you could do.”
“My professional reputation doesn’t much concern me right now. I’m thinking about Grace. She doesn’t deserve what happened to her.”
“We’ll get her back. Every resource has been mobilized.”
He was well aware of the response. Motivated by a missing witness and the death of one of their own, the FBI had descended on this area like a vengeful horde. A senior agent had been called in to coordinate and mobilize the search, using specialists who ranged from GPS technicians to agents with tracker dogs. This was a wider effort than the recent manhunt for Russell Graff because the abductor might have transported Grace to another part of the country. All the local airports had to be monitored. Every checkpoint. Even the Mexican border.
Flynn was only too glad to hand over the authority to someone else. Dealing with all that bureaucracy made his head spin. For right now, the center of operations was his safe house. All of the five bedrooms in the house and the seven cots in the bunkhouse would be full tonight.
Ironically, this search worked to Flynn’s advantage by showing off the safe house facilities in a good light. A couple of agents had already complimented him on running an efficient operation.
None of that mattered.
Only one thing was important. Finding Grace.
“She has two grandchildren,” he said. “Her daughter went to law school. Her son is in hotel management in Chicago.” He didn’t know why he was telling her this—it was all in Grace’s file.
“While she was in witness protection, she must have missed them.”
“A lot.” He’d bent the rules for Grace, allowing her to use a phone routed through FBI headquarters to call her family once a week.
Impatiently, Marisa shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She’d never been a patient woman. “Do you think we’ll get useful information from Bud?”
“Right now, he’s our only hope.” And he was hoping for a lot. An answer to the question of why the pilot had taken the chopper down. An explanation of what had happened. And, most important, a description of Grace’s abductor.
A nurse in raspberry scrubs stepped outside and motioned to them. “The doctor says you can see him now.”
As Flynn held the door open for Marisa, she turned to him. For a moment, her gaze softened and she reached toward him. He thought she might pat his shoulder or touch his cheek. But she pulled her hand into a fist and turned away. All business, she charged down the corridor of the small, bustling hospital with an authoritative stride.
Bud had been given a private room near the nurse’s station, with one of the local deputies posted outside his door as a guard. In the hospital bed with his head bandaged, the wiry little snitch seemed very small and frightened. Gone was his brash attitude.
Flynn stepped up beside him. “How are you feeling?”
“Like crap.” His voice creaked. This needed to be a brief interview.
“Tell me what happened. Why did the pilot hover and bring down the chopper?”
“He got a message through his headset. Told us we had to make an emergency landing. I didn’t like it, and I told him so. But you Feds never listen to me. Everything’s a great…” he sighed “…big secret.”
His strength was already fading. Flynn needed to keep Bud on track. “After you landed?”
“There was a guy on the ground. Waiting. The pilot got out and went toward him. He got shot. Handgun with a silencer. Poor guy. They told me he didn’t make it.”
Flynn gave a quick nod. “That’s right.”
“That’s a shame, a damned shame. And what about Gracie?”
“She’s missing, Bud. That’s why I need for you to concentrate. Anything you can tell me will help find her.”
“She’s a nice lady. Hate to see anything bad happen to her.”
“You’ve got to help me,” Flynn said. “Tell me what happened next.”
“The guy with the gun came to the chopper and ordered us to get out.”
He cringed, and Flynn guessed that his pain was more than physical. No man liked to be reminded of being helpless. “It’s okay, Bud. There wasn’t anything else you could have done.”
“Damn right. I mean, the guy had a gun.”
“What did he look like?”
“Average height. Average weight.” Bud’s mouth trembled. “A baseball cap. Wasn’t until I got closer that I saw he was wearing one of those clear plastic masks that makes everybody look alike. When I saw that, I thought I was dead for sure.”
“And then?”
“As soon as we got out of the way, he slapped something onto the chopper. A package about the size of a shoebox. Maybe C-4 explosive. You think?”
“Maybe.”
“And then, ‘kablooey.’ It blew.” His eyelids slowly closed and opened. He was fading fast. “I’m tired.”
“You were hit on the head,” Flynn prompted him. “When did that happen?”
“The explosion knocked me flat. I got back up. The guy with the gun was standing over me. He said he had a message for you.”
“Me?”
“He said to tell you one word: aloha.”
Behind his back, Flynn heard Marisa gasp. The word had significance. For both of them.
Bud continued. “Then he said something crazy about the hour of judgment being near. Does that help?”
“Thanks, Bud. You rest now.”
As Flynn moved away from the bed, his percep tions sharpened. Every detail in the sterile hospital room came into focus. He saw through different eyes, a hunter’s gaze.
He knew what had happened to Grace Lennox.
She hadn’t been grabbed by criminals who wanted her testimony silenced. Her abduction was part of a different scenario. She’d been taken hostage by a serial killer. A man who was supposed to be dead. The Judge.
Chapter Three
Marisa sat opposite Flynn at a small café in Cortez. Though it was only five minutes after nine o’clock, few other customers occupied the booths that lined the wall beneath a Southwestern mural of cacti, mesa and mountains. It was quiet. The streets rolled up early in a small farming community on a Thursday night.
She stared down into the herbal tea in her turquoise mug, wishing it was a double shot of vodka.
The word aloha meant hello and goodbye…and so much more. When she and Flynn had been investigating the Judge, he used that word as a sign-off in his last two notes. Goodbye and hello. His inference was that they would hear from him again, that he wasn’
t done killing. The aloha sign-off hadn’t been strictly privileged information, but very few people knew about that signature. Was the man who abducted Grace Lennox the Judge?
Logic wouldn’t allow her to draw that conclusion. She set down her mug on the tabletop. “It can’t be him. He’s dead.”
“Or not.” Flynn leaned back in his chair and regarded her with his sexy squint. Her long-denied hormones weren’t making it any easier for her to think straight. “Seems to me that we’ve had this conversation before,” he said.
Two years ago in San Francisco, they’d been closing in on the Judge when the ViCAP team had been called to a house fire. Inside, they’d found a female victim, tied in the manner used by the Judge, and the charred body of a male who was identified as a career criminal, a sexual predator wanted for rape. His profile fit the Judge.
Everyone but Flynn was willing to believe that the Judge had died in that fire. The killings had stopped. There were no more notes from the Judge. No contact at all.
But Flynn had insisted on keeping the investigation active. He wouldn’t give up, couldn’t believe that the Judge had been careless enough to accidentally be caught in the fire. Nor could he accept that the Judge had committed suicide in some belated act of remorse.
The recent murders near the Mesa Verde safe house seemed to prove Flynn right. The man who’d died in that San Francisco fire was not the Judge. Current evidence pointed to Russell Graff, the young man who had died only a few days ago.
“Tell me about Russell Graff,” Marisa said.
“Age twenty-four. High intelligence. A graduate student in archaeology. Psychopath. You read the profile.”
She nodded, recalling details from the evidence reports. The pattern for the Judge murders had been followed with great precision by Russell Graff. His victims were under thirty-five, with long dark hair. They were abducted and held captive for three days before death. Physical abuse was suggested but unverified because, on the fourth day, he killed his victims and burned the bodies, destroying most of the physical evidence.
However, one of the women abducted by Graff had escaped. Dr. Cara Messinger provided a great deal of information about her captivity. Though Dr. Messinger had been drugged, she’d been able to tell them about ritual objects in the room where she’d been held, including candles, a ceremonial pipe, a knife and eagle feathers. He’d seemed to be testing her, daring her to escape. When she had, he’d become obsessed with finding her. Fortunately, the FBI agent on the case—Dash Adams, who was also from the San Francisco office—had been equally motivated to protect Dr. Messinger. After Graff died, the two of them had ridden off into the sunset together. Good for them.
“Russell Graff was in the right place at the right time to be the Judge,” Flynn said. “He lived in San Francisco at the time of the earlier killings. Then he came here for college. When he contacted Cara Messinger, he referred to himself as the Judge, and he followed the same behavior.”
Marisa toyed with the handle of her mug. “In San Francisco, the Judge was on a power trip. He taunted us, baited us. It was one of his key character traits. He wanted to prove that he was smarter than the FBI.”
“Graff pulled similar stunts,” Flynn said. “Leading up one path and down another.”
“He was always one step ahead.” A knot tightened in her belly. “And then he sneered at us for being unable to catch him. I still don’t know how he got all that inside information on us. He even had my private phone number.”
“And mine,” Flynn said. “I can still hear his whispering voice in my sleep, telling me that I’m a fool, that I should go back home to east L.A. with my degree from a second-rate law school tucked between my legs.”
The Judge had ridiculed Flynn without mercy. In his notes to ViCAP, he’d written about Flynn’s inferior upbringing, his alcoholic mother and absent father. In his youth, Flynn had been at risk—one step away from a life of violence and crime. His younger brother was serving a twenty-year sentence for manslaughter.
Likewise, the Judge had known things about Marisa’s life that she hadn’t shared with anyone. Like a sinister conscience, he’d delighted in taunting her with veiled references to secrets only she should have known.
“At first,” Flynn said, “I figured Graff was a copycat. A psychopath who obsessed about the Judge and tried to be like him.”
“What changed your mind?”
“He left references that led to the discovery of one of his victims. Her burned remains were buried within eight miles of the safe house. Right on my doorstep. I knew that victim had been killed by the Judge.”
“But he didn’t contact you.”
“Not a word. Not a note. Nothing.” He sipped his coffee. A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Forensics determined that the victim had been killed two years ago, which coincided with my arrival at the Mesa Verde safe house. We assumed the killer was Graff. We were wrong.”
“Wait a minute.” She clung to a tenuous thread of logic. “You’re saying that the first victim here was killed by the real Judge? The San Francisco Judge?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s a serial murderer,” she said. “Only one vic in two years?”
“There are more,” Flynn said darkly. “We just haven’t found the bodies. He was presumed dead, nobody was after him. He could kill with impunity.”
A twinge of regret went through her. She’d been duped along with the rest of the ViCAP unit. “We didn’t erase him from the books. His profile and methods are still in the database. That’s why Agent Adams was sent to Santa Fe when a body matching the Judge’s victims turned up.”
“And Graff was the presumed killer. Don’t get me wrong, Marisa. Graff was a monster. He killed that girl in Santa Fe and at least two others. But he wasn’t the Judge.” His voice rasped with barely suppressed rage. “I should have known.”
“How could you?”
“Hell, I did know. I should have stuck to my first instinct about Graff being a copycat. There was evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“The paperwork on the Graff investigation included a report by Dr. Alex Sterling—a forensic anthropologist who was working on a dig site where Graff was also employed.”
“I remember seeing that report.”
“Sterling was a hell of a lot more incisive than most of the medical examiners.” His jaw clenched. His lips barely moved when he spoke. “He noted differences between the remains left near the safe house two years ago and Graff’s victims.”
“Evidence of two different killers: Russell Graff and someone else.” With a mental click, the pieces fell into place. “The Judge from San Francisco came here two years ago and started killing. Graff was a copycat of those killings.”
“More than that,” Flynn said. “Russell Graff had information only the Judge could know.”
“They were working together.”
His brow furrowed. “If I’d been smarter, I might have been able to stop him before he abducted Grace.”
She recognized the dark tone in his voice. Guilt. His overdeveloped sense of responsibility led Flynn to blame himself. “Don’t go there.”
“I can’t help it. He’s made this personal.”
His inner tension manifested in his white-knuckled grip on his coffee mug. His light brown eyes burned with a fire that ignited a similar flame in her. There was a predator on the loose—a serial killer who would not die no matter how many times they destroyed him.
Marisa reached toward him, her fingers closing around the steel tendons of his wrist. “It won’t happen again, Flynn. We won’t let him get away again.”
“Are you saying that you believe me? That the Judge still isn’t dead?”
“Yes.”
An unspoken moment passed between them. Two years ago, they had been on opposite sides of this question. She’d accused him of being obsessed and depressed. He’d accused her of being disloyal for not believing in him.
“This time,” he said, “we’ll be w
orking together.”
“God help me, I guess so. Right now, I need to file a report on our conversation with Bud Rosetti, and I’m not sure what I should say.”
“We’re looking for the Judge. Again.”
“Nobody is going to believe me. I’ll sound like a lunatic.”
“Welcome to my world.”
When he grinned, his lips were so appealing that she vaguely considered dumping the entire investigation, grabbing him by both shoulders and kissing him until they were both limp. Or hard. That might be better.
“Ideas,” she said instead. “I need ideas.”
“There’s an expert,” he said. “A psychologist, Dr. Jonas Treadwell. He advised on the Graff investigation, and he’s still in the area.”
“Treadwell.” The name rang a bell. “We’ve used him on other investigations. Isn’t he based in L.A.?”
“He came out here to work with our witness and to profile Graff.” Flynn took a cell phone from his jacket pocket. “I can call him.”
Slowly, she nodded. With a respected expert on her side, she could make a more convincing case for restarting the investigation on a killer who was supposed to be deceased. “What do you think Treadwell will say?”
“I don’t know, but we need to make something happen fast.”
Every minute Grace Lennox was in captivity, the threat to her heightened. “Okay, Flynn. Make the call.”
AFTER A FORTY-MINUTE DRIVE, they approached a simple log cabin near the Dolores River, where Dr. Jonas Treadwell was taking a fishing vacation. Flynn was sure they had the right place because this was the only cabin where all the lights were on.
Earlier, when he’d put through the call to Treadwell and told him they had reason to believe the Judge was still active, the psychologist had reacted with disbelief, then enthusiasm. The constant shape-shifting of this serial killer defied the psychological profiles, and Treadwell seemed anxious to hear more.
As Flynn parked outside the cabin, Marisa leaned forward in the passenger seat. The glow from Treadwell’s porch lamp highlighted her cheekbones and the enticing lilt of her mouth. He knew she was nervous, but she hid her tension well.