A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  Vancouver. Early Sunday morning. The day before Thanksgiving.

  Dawn broke with a low, leaden sky and monsoon-like rain. It was the brunt of a series of storms blowing in from the Pacific and powering north, where it would dump as snow. Mac stood with his coffee in the doorway of Burton’s home office, fighting down a sense of guilt in being here. This was his buddy’s residence. Melody’s home. But Burton was not well. Possibly experiencing psychotic episodes. And he was their only person of interest in the Birkenhead River slaying so far. He had perverted motive, and opportunity. They needed to find him.

  “You’re gonna want to see this.” The forensic tech called him over to Burton’s computer.

  Martinello joined Mac. They peered over the tech’s shoulder.

  “Appears Burton was using a fake account to trawl adoption reunion sites. He’s been using the tag ‘Olivia West’—seems he’s been posing as a mother searching for her child surrendered in an adoption.”

  “What the . . . ?” Mac bent closer as the tech brought up another page from the system cache. “Bring it in,” he said crisply. “All of it. Computer from Burton’s deceased wife’s office, too.”

  He reached for his cell, hit quick dial.

  “Jerry, you got that trace on Burton’s phone yet?”

  “Negative. Either he’s out of cell range, or he’s disabled his phone.”

  Mac killed the call, looked at Martinello. But before he could speak, her phone rang.

  She listened, nodded. Then said to Mac, “They got an ID on the vic from her knee replacement. Recipient is a woman from the US, Washington State. Her name is Mary Sorenson. Age fifty-three. She and her husband, Algor Sorenson, were on a camper trip around the States. Part of their early retirement. Their kids haven’t heard from their parents in weeks—not since a photo of Mary Sorenson was sent from Arizona, via Algor Sorenson’s cell. The kids didn’t think this was unusual. Their parents often traveled a few weeks without calling in, so they never reported them missing.”

  “So how the fuck did Mary Sorenson end up gutted, partially flayed, and swinging from a tree on the Birkenhead River this side of the border? And where in the hell is Algor Sorenson now?”

  “And where is their camper and trailer?”

  “We need to speak to Border Services.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Sunday morning. The day before Thanksgiving.

  Tori woke early. She got up onto her knees on the bed and peered through the blinds. It was a barely dawn outside, low cloud. Tiny crystals of snow wafted on the wind. She snuggled back into her bed and powered up her e-reader. As she started to read, the tick tick tick of the branch against the window grew more insistent. And so did the black beast of questions prowling around her mind. Her heart hammered faster.

  “Tell me what it was like during the first days in the shed?” the journalist said, speaking with a measured calm, so as not to agitate Sarah Baker. The journalist was lucky to have been granted access to this last victim of the Watt Lake Killer—the lone survivor who was going to help put Sebastian George away for several lifetimes. The journalist was one of the few people Sarah would talk to at this time. Sarah was having trouble communicating with her husband, Ethan, and with her mother and father. The journalist liked to think that their interview sessions were therapeutic for Sarah. She liked the woman. Admired and respected her. And Sarah’s pain had slowly become her own over the days she’d visited, listened, and written down her story, reliving the trauma piece by terrible piece with her.

  The journalist had once been a newspaper reporter, but she now made her living from true-crime features, and she was trying to write a novel. Her plan was to use these interviews for a book.

  But there came a moment during her sessions with Sarah when the journalist didn’t think she’d be able to write this book in the end. Or at least publish it for financial gain. It had begun to feel too personal.

  “In the early days of that winter,” Sarah said, staring blankly out of the window, “I sometimes heard choppers, thudding behind cloud . . . then came silence. Darkness. I’d thought hearing them searching for me was the worst. It wasn’t. It was when the silence came, and I knew they’d stopped looking.” She paused. “In the end it was the baby that kept me alive. I’d have done anything for Ethan’s baby, and to get back to him.”

  Sarah fell silent, her gaze going more distant.

  The journalist grew uncomfortable, warring with something personal inside. “Would you like me to bring her in?” she said. “Would you like to see her?”

  “No.”

  “She’s just an innocent, beautiful little baby girl, Sarah, just a day old.”

  Sarah’s mouth tightened, and her hands tensed on the bed covers. She focused intently on a tiny hummingbird hovering outside the hospital window. The trees were in full leaf. It was a hot July day out.

  The journalist leaned forward in her chair. “Please. Just look at her. She needs you. She might have been conceived out of violence, but there’s not a drop of bad blood in that tiny little body. She’s innocence embodied.”

  Tears pooled in Sarah’s eyes. Her fists bunched the sheets. She was fighting herself.

  The journalist got up and called the nurse. Possibly she was making a vital mistake—involving herself like this. Yet she was unable to stop, already too emotionally vested.

  The nurse wheeled in the crib. Sarah had given birth barely a day ago. Her breasts were hard lumps, swollen against her stitches and leaking patches of wet into her hospital gown. But mentally she was dead to her child. She’d been like that since DNA from amniocentesis had shown the baby was not Ethan’s. The tests had been done after the logger brought her in at about five months pregnant, and an infection of the amniotic fluid had been suspected. Doctors also wanted to determine how developed the baby’s lungs were, in case she went into early labor. The prosecutors and cops wanted the test, too. Results had revealed Sebastian George was the father. She’d been doomed from that moment to knowingly carry to term the baby of a monster. The fertility treatments prior to her abduction had made her ripe for it.

  The cops and lawyers were pleased with the test results. The baby DNA would convict Sebastian George on the sexual assault counts, no question.

  But Ethan had been devastated by the news.

  The day Sarah went into labor, Ethan hadn’t come to the hospital. The journalist had seen him outside, through the window. Under the oak tree. As if trying to come in. But he never made it. Sarah’s mother and her God-fearing pastor of a father hadn’t come either. This enraged the journalist.

  What true man of God would turn his back on his own daughter at a time like that? How could he minister to the souls of this town and instruct them about good when he couldn’t support a young woman—his own flesh and blood—in dire need?

  The journalist nodded to the nurse, who quietly left the room. The journalist then wheeled the crib to the side of the hospital bed. She seated herself next to the cot and silently watched the baby, an ache growing in her own chest, in her own breasts. She knew what Sarah and Ethan had been going through in trying to have a child. She knew it with every fiber of her own body, that need for a baby.

  Slowly, Sarah turned her head. She swallowed, stared at the little creature in the crib. Then very slowly she reached out her hand. Trembling, she touched the infant. It had dark, soft hair. Rosebud lips. Dark lashes. Like his.

  The baby’s miniature fingers curled tightly around Sarah’s forefinger. Her breath hiccupped in her throat. Silent tears leaked down her face.

  The journalist didn’t say a word. She tried not to cry, too. Her arms, her chest burned to hold them both. Meld them together forever. Make this right.

  “She’s beautiful.” Sarah whispered.

  “Your daughter.”

  Her lip wobbled.

  “Do you want to hold her?”

&n
bsp; She nodded.

  The journalist placed the swaddled baby in Sarah’s arms. After a few moments just gazing into the infant’s eyes, Sarah said, “Will you help me? Will you help me feed her?”

  The journalist helped slide the gown off Sarah’s shoulder, and she assisted her in latching that little rosebud mouth to the mother’s nipple. Sarah still had bandages over the wounds on her breasts. She was clearly in pain as the baby started to suckle. She leaned her head back against the pillow and closed her eyes. Tears leaked from beneath her lashes.

  “Dear God,” she whispered. “Dear God, please help me. Please help my child . . .”

  But God had long ago deserted Sarah Baker.

  Hope had deserted Sarah. The journalist believed hope died in Sarah the day Ethan was no longer able to hold her, love her. The day her own husband showed his revulsion and confusion. She had survived thus far, in part for him, but when he rejected her, that was the day she stopped trying.

  The journalist still believes to this day that Sarah would have kept that baby had the world left her alone. Had Ethan opened his heart to the child. Had her father led the way and shown others how to forgive, accept . . . how to welcome this innocent baby. Instead Sarah made the decision to surrender the infant, nameless, to the system.

  “I only want the best for her. I can never be free of him, but I want her to be free. The only way I can do that is to let her have a fresh start. To never know.”

  “During captivity, did you not once, ever, consider the baby might be Sebastian’s?”

  “Never,” Sarah whispered. “I don’t think it was possible for me to entertain the idea.” She paused. “I don’t think I—we—would have survived.”

  Tori set her e-reader down, got out of bed, and edged open the living room door. Her father was still snoring soundly. She crept over to where he’d tucked the crumpled newspaper onto a shelf. Carefully she smoothed it open on the table and read the teaser for the opinion piece inside. “Birkenhead murder—echoes of the Watt Lake Killer? See page 6.”

  She opened the paper to page six. Her father grunted. Her gaze shot to his slightly ajar bedroom door. But he spluttered and turned over, resuming his deep breathing. There was just enough light coming in from the window for her to read. She scanned down the piece with her finger, checking the names of the victims who had been abducted and killed by the man they’d dubbed the Watt Lake Killer. Her throat closed in on itself as she saw the final name.

  Sarah Baker.

  The name in her mother’s work of fiction.

  The scent of freshly brewed coffee and the sound of logs being tossed into the stove roused Olivia from deep slumber, the kind of heavy sleep where it takes a minute or two to orient oneself. She lay there a moment, reliving the comfort of having been wrapped in Cole’s embrace. He’d stayed the whole night. His side of the bed was still warm. Yet as she came fully awake, a subterranean unease grew in her.

  She got out of bed, grabbed her robe and tugged it over the pajamas she’d put on before climbing under the covers with Cole last night. She hesitated as it dawned fully on her again, in the light of day, that he knew who she was.

  He was privy to everything that had happened to her.

  The sense of nakedness, vulnerability, was suddenly stark. Olivia went into her bathroom, rinsed her face, dried it, and looked into the mirror. She felt a clutch in her chest.

  She didn’t know if she could do this—go out into the world as Sarah Baker now, the last victim of the infamous Watt Lake Killer—after coming so far to hide from it. She cursed suddenly, violently, as she caught sight of the defiled sheet bundled up on her laundry hamper.

  He wasn’t the only one who knew. Whoever crept in here and left her that scrawled message knew, too.

  She had to face him. She had to go out into the living room and look into his eyes.

  One step at a time . . .

  Cole dwarfed her tiny kitchenette. He stood with his back to her. Ace lay near his feet, waiting, no doubt, for crumbs to drop. Cole had stoked up the stove, and her home was toasty and filled with the scent of freshly brewing coffee. Dawn was flat and gray outside. Tiny snowflakes drifted past the window.

  Olivia stalled a moment, absorbing the scene. She’d never imagined a man in her tiny cabin. In her bed. A memory chased through her—the sensation of him under her, inside her, his muscular body, the roughness of his hair against her bare skin. Her cheeks flushed. That subterranean unease grew louder, tension seeping into her chest.

  He turned.

  “Hey, sleepyhead.” A grin creased lines around his eyes and deepened the brackets around his mouth. Dark hair fell in a lock on his brow. He wore a white T-shirt that was well-fitted and defined his abs, his pecs. His biceps rolled smoothly under toned, sun-browned skin as he reached for two mugs and set them on the counter in front of her. He looked more delicious than before, and rested, too, his gray eyes intense, lambent. Alive. Yet he also appeared more imposing. Bigger somehow, in her tiny home. Crowding her space.

  “I was going to leave you to sleep. It’s started snowing, barely, but I would like to make it into town and back before it really comes down,” he said. Her radio was on, playing music softly in the background as they faced each other across the small expanse of her kitchen.

  Conflict twisted through Olivia, and she almost allowed her gaze to flicker toward the sofa where she’d embarrassed herself. She knew he was thinking about it too. Her heart began to pound, and her skin felt hot. What next? What to say?

  She felt as if she were balanced precariously upon a fulcrum where one word or action could sway her life in one direction, and another could have exactly the opposite effect. The urge to scuttle back into her safety zone was suddenly overwhelming.

  He seemed to read her indecision. “You doing okay?”

  She drew her robe closer over her chest and cleared her throat. “Yes. Thank you for . . . everything.”

  He held her eyes a moment. Her pulse beat even faster.

  “I’m going up to the lodge first to check on my dad, and to see if the phones are back up. If they’re working, I might not need to drive into Clinton. If they’re still down, I’d like to get going right away before there’s too much snow and the roads shut down.”

  Just like that. Easy. She’d undergone a groundswell that was rocking the very foundations of her identify and life. And he seemed so relaxed.

  Olivia walked over to the door, called Ace, and let him out. She went to the living room window, folding her arms over her stomach as she watched him sniffing his way down to the lake.

  “Liv?” Cole came up behind her and put his arms around her, resting his chin in the curve of her shoulder. His breath was warm against her cheek. Her muscles constricted. Her heart began to gallop in her chest.

  She wanted to push him away. She suddenly couldn’t cope with the intimate reminder of the night before, standing here, right beside the sofa where it had happened. Having him in her bed, his compassion, suddenly felt even more intimate than sex. She struggled against her rising claustrophobia. But it was too much, too fast, and panic swamped her, black and smothering. Her heart started to palpitate, a dark inky tide suffocating her brain with the kind of blackness and anxiety that had always preceded a serious flashback.

  She pulled away sharply, spun round to face him.

  “You’re not really okay, are you?”

  She dragged a shaking hand over her sleep-tangled hair, glanced away, then met his eyes again. “I wish I were. I wish I was normal. God knows I try. But the truth? I don’t really know how I am right now.” She paused, then said, “Or who I am. Or who I can ever be.”

  He reached for her hands, but she backed sharply up against the windowsill, another shard of panic slicing through her.

  She clenched the windowsill behind her. “I . . . I’m sorry, Cole. I can’t do this with you. Not right no
w.”

  “This?” he said, crooking his head.

  Her face went hot. She didn’t even know what “this” was. “Us,” she said, tentatively.

  He held her gaze, his stormy eyes unfathomable for a moment. Then a smile slowly curved his mouth, crumpling that gorgeous, rugged face and fanning lines out from his eyes. “How about some coffee?”

  Relieved, she nodded.

  He went to the counter, poured a steaming mug. “How do you take it?”

  “Just a dash of cream.”

  He found the coffee cream in her fridge and splashed some in. He brought the mug over to her by the window. She felt naked in the harsh dawn light, without her bandana or polo neck. But he managed to avert his eyes from her choker of scars.

  As she took the mug from him, he said, “A friend of mine, Gavin Black, who quit war photography because of PTSD, once told me after our near-death incident with Ty that you’ve just got to keep living one day at a time, until you’re living again.” He paused. “I didn’t give those words any credence until your phone call pulled me out of the bar that night. Because I wasn’t living one day at a time—not even close. I was blotting it out. But I think I get it now. And it’s not easy. It involves exposing oneself to feelings that hurt. I don’t want to rush anything, either, Liv. Just one day at a time. And right now, the only pressing thing, my one step for the day, is to confront Forbes and make it clear where I—we—stand. I’m going to make it clear that his development proposal is no go.” He paused. “You’re okay with that?”

  She nodded.

  “Then that’s our job for the day—our one step.” He smiled, reached for his jacket hanging by her door. “You should take the Sunday off, just hunker down in the cabin, stay warm. Relax.”

  “Why? You think I should be worried th—”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think there is any danger out there. I believe Forbes and his cronies are being jerks about this development, but I can’t see that they’d physically harm anyone. Still, there’s nothing wrong with a day off.”