FADE TO BLACK - Thrilling Romantic Suspense - Book 1 of the BLACK CATS Series

by Leslie A. Kelly

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Freed.” Stacey reached out to take the woman by the arm, almost afraid she’d fall down without support. “I have no news for you.”

  Winnie bit her lip. Beneath her hand, Stacey felt her body sway a little. Wondering if the woman’s sorry excuse for a husband ever even made sure she had a decent meal, she murmured, “Why don’t we go into my office and sit down.”

  “I made coffee, and we have fresh doughnuts.” Connie rose from her desk and hurried out from the receptionist’s cubicle.

  Stacey led Mrs. Freed down the hallway to her office, helping her sit in a visitor’s chair. She tossed her jacket and hat onto a wall hook, then sat down. “Are you all right?”

  The woman ignored the question. “You really haven’t heard nothin’ about Lisa?”

  Stacey shook her head slowly.

  “But you been lookin’?”

  “I have. I promised you I wouldn’t give up, and I meant it. I run Lisa’s name all the time. I make sure to keep her missing persons report active and updated.”

  Not, in Stacey’s opinion, that it was going to do any good. Lisa Zimmerman, Winnie’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, had apparently dropped off the face of the earth. The way Stacey saw it, that was how the wild young woman wanted it. If she ever did get hold of the girl, she’d be sorely tempted to slap her.

  Be fair. Breathing deeply, she forced the angry thoughts away, knowing they were inspired only by her sadness for Mrs. Freed. And because, once upon a time, Lisa had been a sweet child, and Stacey her favorite babysitter.

  Difficult to believe the pretty, smart little blonde had gone so bad. And hard to reconcile that used-up druggie with the nice kid Stacey had once tucked into bed.

  “She could be in a hospital in a coma, couldn’t she?” The woman’s lips trembled. “I see that on the stories sometimes. People get in comas and their kin can’t find ’em.”

  “I doubt that,” she said, her tone gentle but firm. Mrs. Freed had been making excuses for her daughter’s disappearance for months. She didn’t need more false hope.

  Nor, however, was Stacey cruel enough to be blunt. Telling the woman her daughter had probably skipped town with some dealer, not giving a damn about her mother’s feelings, would be beyond mean. So she skirted as best she could, making the efforts Winnie asked her to, holding out no hope that they’d lead to anything. Lisa would come back when she was good and ready, probably when she was broke and desperate.

  “But it’s possible, right? She could be hurt somewhere, not knowin’ who she is.”

  “Any hospital with a Jane Doe would be looking at missing persons cases.”

  Lisa’s mother let out a long, slow sigh, almost visibly deflating, even though she’d gone through this before. It wouldn’t have been the first time the young woman had run away and stayed out of contact. No, it had never gone on for this long, and she’d always at least left a note, but it was still the most likely story.

  “Do you think if I could come up with a few hundred dollars for a reward … ?”

  “No, Winnie. I don’t think so.”

  Some said Lisa had been wild from the cradle. Stacey didn’t remember her like that. In fact, she’d found her shy and affectionate on those summer days they’d spent together. Lisa had been so smart, inquisitive, bubbly.

  Then, when Lisa was twelve, her father had died. Her mother had remarried and Lisa had changed. She’d met the wrong guy with the wrong needle, and the smart girl with the big dreams had turned into a bleary-eyed waif with track marks up her arms.

  “Here you go, honey,” Connie said as she entered the room. She placed a foam cup on the edge of the desk and handed Mrs. Freed a napkin-wrapped doughnut.

  Winnie took the coffee and slipped the doughnut into her large handbag, squirreling it away as if wanting to hide it. Just like she hid these trips to the sheriff’s office.

  Stan Freed’s feelings toward his stepdaughter weren’t as charitable as Winnie’s. The hard-eyed man had written Lisa off for good. Which was why Winnie came in on Wednesdays: the one day of the week when she was off work and her repairman husband was not.

  “Thank you, Sheriff.” Winnie slowly stood. “I appreciate your not giving up.”

  Stacey stood and extended her hand across the desk, feeling the frailty of the other woman’s fingers. “You’re welcome.”

  The woman lurched out, carrying the weight of the world on her bony back.

  Sad. Most people had given up on Lisa long ago. Her mother never would. And, out of loyalty and because she was good at her job, neither would Stacey.

  That thought was on her mind throughout the day. It was a quiet one, no calls, not even any speeders racing through downtown. She mostly stayed in her office doing paperwork and keeping her promise to Mrs. Freed.

  Ignoring the futility of it, she once again checked online, updating Lisa’s missing persons listing. She checked NCIC’s latest crime reports, scanning for anything involving unidentified women of Lisa’s description, particularly drug arrests. As usual, she found nothing. But at least a week from today, she’d be able to say she’d tried.

  Late in the day she realized there was one more effort she could make on Winnie’s behalf. Lisa’s missing persons flyer had been on the board for a long time, and it showed. Printing off a new one seemed so minor, yet it was one small thing she could do to help.

  Opening the electronic file, she glanced over the pertinent details, again feeling the single flash of confusion she’d had since Lisa had disappeared. Lisa had been driving her stepfather’s company car that night, without permission. It had been found outside of Dick’s Tavern. But why had she left without the fifty dollars that had been lying right on the console?

  Stacey could guess why she hadn’t brought the cash into Dick’s. “You were saving it for a score,” she told the woman whose haggard face appeared on the monitor. “You feared if you brought it inside, you’d get drunk and spend it.”

  But why leave town without it? For someone like Lisa, the money should have been the first thing she’d go for. Hell, given some of the characters she’d hooked up with over the years, and Lisa’s well-known dislike of Stan Freed, it was a surprise she hadn’t stolen her stepfather’s car and sold it for whatever she could get.

  Then again, the young woman wasn’t stupid. The car was pretty damned distinctive, with that silly talking-laptop logo on the side of it. Still, leaving that fifty dollars didn’t seem like something Lisa would do.

  “Strange that you’d forget it,” she murmured, still staring at Lisa’s photograph, trying to find the pretty girl in the strung-out woman before her.

  Hearing a beep, she sent the document to the printer, then answered the intercom. “Yes, Connie?”

  “Sheriff, there’s a call for you on the private line.”

  The private line wasn’t exactly private. It was merely the phone number they used in-house, and for the rest of the law enforcement world. They kept it from locals, who’d tie it up with complaints about the trash man being too late, or too early. “Who is it?”

  “He says he’s from the FBI! Special Agent Taggert.”

  An FBI special agent. Not exactly an alert-the-media moment, but it was something different. “Put him through.”

  While she waited for the call to ring in, she grabbed the single white sheet coming off the printer. It was in her hand when the phone trilled twice.

  “Sheriff Rhodes.”

  After a split second’s hesitation he introduced himself, adding, “I’m calling about a missing person you reported.”

  Stacey stiffened, glancing at the flyer still in her hand. The FBI was calling about Lisa Zimmerman. What kind of trouble had the young woman gotten herself into this time? “Do you have information about her?”

  “You know who I’m calling about?” Surprise brought his deep voice up a notch.

  “I’ve only filed one missing persons report in the two years I’ve held this job,” she replied, her tone dry.

&
nbsp; “I see.” Some papers ruffled in the background, as if he were consulting his notes. “This young woman, Lisa Zimmerman, went missing in March of last year?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And nobody’s heard a word from her since.”

  Stacey’s breath slowed. Something in his tone, low and serious, tugged her thoughts in a different, darker direction. Everyone in this town was so used to Lisa causing trouble and victimizing others that it had almost never even occurred to Stacey to think of Lisa as a victim herself.

  Oh, God, please, no. That little-girl face, the sweet smile, the soft blond hair flashed through her mind. So did the image of sad Winnie Freed trudging out of the office, already anticipating the day, one week hence, when she’d hear good news.

  “Sheriff? Nobody’s heard from her?”

  “Not a word.” Her throat tight with dread, she asked, “Do you know where Lisa Zimmerman is, Special Agent Taggert?”

  “No, I don’t know where she is.” There was another hesitation. “But I might be able to tell you what happened to her.”

  CHAPTER 3

  ARRIVING IN HOPE VALLEY was like entering a 1950s TV show. Dean had heard of places like this; he just didn’t know they still existed. He’d been raised on the mean streets of Baltimore and now lived in D.C. He had never experienced towns with ice-cream parlors, free on-street parking, and community centers complete with signs for dances and bake sales.

  The main streets through downtown were lined with green trees that overhung the neatly swept sidewalks. Rather than antique shops and galleries designed to lure tourists on day-in-the-country outings, this place had normal businesses serving the people who lived here. A small grocery store was tucked between a bank and a pharmacy. A diner offered blue-plate lunch specials. Outside a barbershop stood an antique spinning pole that actually worked.

  There was no major shopping center in sight. Since leaving Front Royal, they’d passed only one weary, dilapidated strip mall with a Family Dollar as its anchor. Hope Valley truly appeared to be a self-contained little town that wasn’t merely an extension of some larger city’s urban sprawl.

  “Serial killer in a small town, much?” he muttered, talking more to himself than to Wyatt, who was driving the sedan.

  Dean had thought Wyatt would send him out with Mulrooney, but their team leader had insisted on driving out here to Nowhere, Virginia, with Dean this afternoon. As if he suspected, as did everyone else, that this case could be the key to bringing down the Reaper, whose crimes were the stuff nightmares and slasher movies were made of.

  “So you still believe the unsub’s actually from this area?” Wyatt asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  The man pulled into a parking place in front of a small, single-story building marked SHERIFF’S OFFICE. “If our theories are correct, that Lisa Zimmerman was his first victim, and that her killing might have been personal, then yes, I think it’s likely.”

  “The details fit. The physical description, identifying marks. We know the timing of her disappearance works, since Fletcher was able to determine within days when the murder occurred, given the lack of buds on the tree the vic was tied to.”

  A ghost of a smile crossed Wyatt’s mouth. They’d all been impressed by that one. Lily might be a quiet office type without much field experience, but she had a brain like a steel trap. Because even though Lisa Zimmerman had disappeared in early March, a month before the “freebie” video had gone up, that hadn’t meant she’d died right away. But the bare, sullen trees hinted she’d met the cold, steely blade very close to that time.

  “And,” Dean concluded, “the missing persons photo looks just like the woman on the tape.” To the untrained eye, it seemed irrefutable that Lisa Zimmerman had been their unidentified victim. Now they just had to get confirmation from someone who knew her.

  Dean stared out the window, wondering how the locals would react. The idea that the Reaper lived here in their small-town heaven would probably send most of them running for their basements.

  But it fit. If Lisa had, indeed, been the unsub’s first victim, it made complete sense that her killer was from here. And Dean wanted him. Badly.

  The murder had been hard to watch, but it hadn’t gone on as long as the others. The young woman had been tied to a tree, naked, with her arms extended above her. While the killer had been free with his blade, Brandon had estimated that she’d died within twenty minutes of the first cut.

  It had been brutal. But not quite as bad as some of the other victims, whose torture had lasted for hours. As Cole had said: There were different degrees of awful.

  “You said you had the feeling the sheriff personally knew the missing woman?”

  “Yeah.” Dean again looked around the town, all twelve inches of it. “I think so.”

  Sheriff Rhodes, whose young, strong-yet-feminine voice had surprised him for a moment on the phone yesterday, hadn’t given him any details about her relationship with Lisa Zimmerman, but he’d lay odds she’d had one.

  “Good thing we had Brandon capture some still frames,” Wyatt said. “I’d hate for anyone who knew Miss Zimmerman to have to actually watch that entire video.”

  “It’s hard enough to see it happen to a stranger.”

  “Fortunate that we didn’t have to get family members to ID any of the others. Or to make the pictures public in order to identify the victims,” Wyatt replied.

  “No kidding. Tipping off those Satan’s Playground bastards would have been suicide for the entire case. The unsub would have taken a deep dive straight into cyber hell and might never be found again.”

  They hadn’t needed personal identifications to determine who seven of the eight victims had been. There had been autopsy reports and police investigations to go on. Brandon had found the first; then they’d put names to six more. They had scoured reports and databases, matching unsolved murders to the videos. And in every other case, except the woman in the free preview, the victims’ bodies had already been found and ID’d.

  “Let’s hope this sheriff is as cooperative as the other agencies have been,” he said. Each murder had been stymieing the local police, so, for a change, none of them had minded the FBI’s intrusion. The cases were growing cold, some stretching back more than a year. Plus, they were unlike anything the small-town authorities had ever seen.

  If anybody had ever connected the killings, the FBI would likely have gotten involved long before now. But nobody had. The Reaper’s gimmick, auctioning off “means” but not victim, had helped him escape detection. There had been no common signature for anybody to stumble over. No similarity in the crimes, except that they were all unusually brutal. Or even in the victims, aside from the fact that they were all female and Caucasian. They ranged in age from seventeen to forty. Two were married, with kids, and three were young college students. A few had been sexually violated though not raped. Bodies had been dumped in wooded areas, a landfill, one in the bathroom of a rest stop. The crimes had been spread across four states, the only string tying them all together being a cyber one.

  Chilling to think the cases might never have been connected at all had Brandon Cole not stumbled into Satan’s Playground.

  “So, if the sheriff identifies Lisa Zimmerman as the Reaper’s first victim … ?”

  Wyatt cut the engine, and heat invaded the interior of the sedan so fast it might have been piped in. “Then you’ll be sticking around Hope Valley for a while.”

  Exiting the car, Dean waited for a rusty Ford to wind its way down Main Street; then he crossed, Wyatt behind him. He entered the sheriff’s office, no being buzzed in, no metal detector, and glanced around. A trio of folding metal chairs stood in the empty waiting area.

  “Notice something strange?” Wyatt asked, sounding bemused.

  Dean nodded. Not only was there no security; there was nobody, period. The lobby was silent as a church during confession. And the glassed-in receptionist’s cubicle stood empty, the rolling chair pushed far away from
the desk and turned, as if its occupant had hopped from it midslide.

  “Afternoon siesta?” he mumbled.

  As he began to wonder if they were going to have to go on a sheriff hunt, Dean suddenly heard raised voices coming from somewhere down a hallway marked, PRIVATE.

  “God damn it, Stacey, if you can’t use your job, give it to someone who will!”

  He and Wyatt exchanged a quick look. Both went on alert, as anyone would when it sounded as though a fellow law enforcement officer was being threatened.

  “When did it become my job to get you out of your own messes? It’s not my responsibility to keep you from getting fired,” a woman snapped back, crisp and in control. Her voice sounded calm, betraying none of the throbbing anger of the male one that had preceded it. “You don’t want to lose your job? Then convince your boss you didn’t have anything to do with the cash shortage. Kiss his ass, whatever you have to do.”

  Listening, Dean realized he knew the voice of the woman. That confidence had impressed him yesterday on the phone, especially since the strong, authoritative tone did not entirely disguise a slightly husky, sexy quality. Sheriff Rhodes, he had already decided, was one cool customer. Which was probably a good thing, if this morning’s argument was anything to go by. She apparently faced some crazy demands in her job.

  “You can go talk to him; Dad would have. Threaten him, tell him you’ll start enforcing the no-parking zone behind the dealership. Damn it, you’re my sister; isn’t that supposed to be good for something?”

  Ahh. He got the picture. This wasn’t some random townie making demands. It was a loudmouthed brother trying to browbeat his sister. He waited, wondering how she’d handle it, knowing he would already have thrown that sorry-ass sibling out.

  “Get out of my office.”

  Good.

  “I’ve been patient, Tim. We all have. But everybody’s getting a little tired of your bullshit. All you’ve been doing is getting drunk and getting into trouble with Randy like you’re still a couple of teenagers. It’s time to grow up.” Her temper was building; he could hear the sharpness of it, strung tight like a wire. If he knew what was good for him, the brother really ought to get out while he still could. He sensed the sheriff would be a formidable opponent.