Undercover Hunter

by Rachel Lee

  “If he knew anything, he’d already have said so,” DeeJay argued. “But I’m not opposed to talking with him if Dalton okays it.”

  “Sometimes the right line of questioning can pull out stuff people don’t realize they know.”

  “True. When you figure out the right tack to take, let me know. I feel like I’m blindfolded here, and I don’t like it.”

  Neither did he. “With one hand tied behind my back,” he added.

  “Of course. Undercover. It may make the perp feel safer, but it’s not making me happy.”

  “He disappeared once before,” Cade reminded her.

  “I know. We don’t want that to happen again. God knows how many kids he may have killed the last five years. We’ve got to stop him. A clue would be nice beyond the similarity of his victims.”

  “And that damn cargo netting. I give him points for originality on that one. There’s all kinds of ways to keep trophies, but this one is unprecedented.”

  “As far as we know, but yeah.” She drummed her fingers, resting her chin in her hand. “Was there anything unusual about that netting? And if he’s into displaying his trophies that way, maybe we should find out if anyone around here recently purchased netting of some kind. And lots of plastic.”

  “I think they’re already looking into that, but let me check with Gage. I’ll ask him about the old sheriff, too. What’s his name?”

  “Tate.”

  Cade reached for the wall phone. Landlines were more secure. DeeJay listened to his half of the conversation and picked up most of what she needed to know. The cargo net had been sent for forensics and had revealed nothing. It had been out in the Wyoming weather for too long, plus it was a standard type of netting readily available for a lot of purposes. No sign that anyone in the area had recently purchased any kind of strong net, but that was being looked into. As for the plastic, standard paint drop cloths available at a million places around the country.

  “God,” she said when he hung up. “This guy read the books.”

  “So it seems. Gage agreed to bring Tate in on this. We’ll get a call from Tate, probably this evening.”

  Cade proved he was better than average at cooking. The steaks were perfectly broiled, medium rare. Potatoes done to perfection. Frozen broccoli seasoned with a hint of mustard powder, softening the sharp taste.

  DeeJay tried to go light on the butter, but finally gave up. She wanted to enjoy this potato, damn it, and this whole meal.

  They seemed to reach a silent agreement not to discuss the case while they ate. A good thing, too, because she had been beginning to wonder if the knot in her stomach would ever go away.

  The food also gave her an excuse not to look at Cade, which she realized she had begun to do more often than necessary. Not only did he have those amazing aquamarine eyes, but his face was perfectly proportioned with a strong jaw, and just enough weathering to make him appealing to her. He was an awfully attractive man, and her motor hummed a little when she looked at him and wasn’t thinking about the case. Hummed more than a little. It remained, though, that he was a man and therefore couldn’t fully be trusted. Sooner or later, most of them proved to be egotistical idiots. She needed to focus solely on the investigation. It would keep her safe, and, more importantly, kids’ lives were at risk.

  “So, generally speaking,” Cade said, “what’s it like being a military cop?”

  “Interesting,” she said, which even she realized was a conversation ender, possibly even rude. It said nothing at all. She hesitated, torn between the need to keep her distance and the need to keep this partnership working. “I started out low in the ranks pretty much like everyone else. Doing the standard stuff—guarding, traffic, that kind of thing. But then I took a test and they decided I’d make a great investigator.”

  “I thought you were an officer.”

  “It doesn’t happen often, but I finished my degree in criminology. There was another test I took, and my CO at the time recommended me for officer training.”

  “He must have thought highly of you.”

  “I was a pain in the butt to him. You could say I got promoted up instead of out.”

  A smile danced across his face, and she allowed herself a dangerous moment to notice how appealing he was. Wrong time, wrong place, but what the hell.

  “So were you routinely a pain in the patootie?”

  “Mostly. But I kept solving cases so, at least for a while, I was fairly untouchable. I couldn’t let things slide. I’m not the type. I’m cursed with a sense of justice.”

  “That’s not a bad thing.”

  “That depends.” She put her fork down and looked squarely at him. “You’ve been a cop for a while. You must have run up against cases that weren’t politically expedient to pursue.”

  “Not many. I take it you ran into that a lot.”

  “The military is an interesting organization. Everything is about hierarchy and promotions. Not so much in the enlisted ranks, but when you get to the officer corps you learn that some people are important. They’ve got connections, they’ve got rank, they’re being groomed for flag rank, whatever. Very political in a lot of ways. I stepped on those toes.”

  “How?”

  “I insisted on investigating and pushing for charges against rapists. A lot of ranking officers wanted to sweep it under the rug. It didn’t look good to admit that stuff like that was happening under their command. It looked even worse when they tried to scare the victims into not reporting the rape. When I got wind of it, I wouldn’t let it go. It’s kind of a good-old-boys network, and they weren’t happy with me.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. What could he say anyway? she wondered. She knew enough to realize that a lot of cops weren’t good about investigating rape even in civilian life.

  “And finally you stepped on the wrong toes?”

  “They were all wrong,” she admitted. “But when I brought in an indisputable case against a young officer who’d actually committed the rape against an enlisted woman, my days were numbered. I get that being at war for long stretches can turn people into animals, but...” She shrugged and finally said, “If you don’t insist on some rules, all you have is a mob. Justice.”

  “So why did this guy turn out to be so problematic?”

  “General’s son. You’d have thought I’d taken a dump on the family escutcheon. They wanted me to bury it and I wouldn’t. JAG brought him up on charges. And that’s when I got the killer performance report.”

  “One report was enough to ruin you?”

  She sliced off another piece of steak. “That’s all it takes. But there never would have been another good one after that. No more promotions, either. I had a reputation by then and that was it. I could either resign my commission and get out honorably or I could wait for them to find an excuse to ruin the rest of my life. And they’d have found it.”

  He was silent for a few seconds. “That stinks.”

  “Well, I’m here now, still doing the kind of work I want to do, and I’m more interested in catching this killer than worrying about my former career.”

  “But it left scars.”

  She could feel her eyes go hollow. This was an area she wasn’t comfortable discussing. Emotions. They were tenuous and dangerous. “I really don’t like men,” she said flatly.

  “I can see why.”

  She gave him points for not saying he was different. She’d heard that countless times, but saying it didn’t make it so. A guy needed to prove it to her, and few enough had.

  They were silent through the rest of the meal, leaving DeeJay entirely too much time to ponder the unhappy fact that there was one man she wanted to like and he was sitting right across from her.

  Despite having been raped during her first year in uniform, despite having watched her superiors s
weep it under the rug and even threaten her—and she’d been young enough then to be scared by those threats—she didn’t have a hang-up about sex. Sex and rape were very different things. No, she had a hang-up about men. She lived with wanting something from a man and being afraid to even try for it. Not that it mattered. They were on a job and had to remain strictly professional. Nothing else could be allowed to muddy the waters.

  * * *

  Cade had cooked, so DeeJay washed the dishes. Just as she was finishing up, the wall phone rang and Cade grabbed it. Holding a dish towel, she turned around and waited. Once again in the middle of the table was the thick envelope, and added to it was the file they had brought with them. She had a feeling they’d be poring over it again before the night was over. On a case like this, the only break you could afford was for sleep and a meal. Too much hung in the balance.

  “Okay, see you then,” he said, and hung up. “Well, that was the old sheriff. Nate Tate will be here in about thirty minutes.”

  “I hope we can learn something from him.”

  He nodded. “What’s killing me is that we can’t go out and ask the kind of questions we need to. On the other hand, maybe we need to pull together a list of them for Gage and his deputies. Tell him what we need.”

  “We should have thought of that right off the bat,” she agreed.

  “Well, what can you expect? We still didn’t know what if anything they already knew. Hard to make a list of questions under those circumstances. But now that we’ve seen everything they have...” He shrugged. “We probably should have turned this case down.”

  DeeJay surprised herself by laughing. “Yeah, right. You strike me as a man who could walk away from this and let someone else handle it.”

  His mouth framed a crooked smile. “Careful, DeeJay. I might get the idea that you like me.”

  She turned around to hang up the towel, ending that line of conversation. She was grateful that he didn’t pursue it.

  * * *

  Nate Tate proved to be a fit man in his late sixties, with dark hair going gray. He had a folksy, friendly manner, but something in his dark eyes suggested to DeeJay that he could turn to steel in an instant.

  “Sorry to take so long,” he said. “We’re babysitting grandchildren, and I had an infant falling asleep in my arms. That must not be disturbed.”

  “Of course not,” Cade said as they shook hands. He introduced DeeJay, who shook Tate’s hand, as well. “Coffee?”

  “Never say no to that.”

  “And it’s not Velma’s,” DeeJay tried to joke.

  “Ah, you’ve heard about Velma’s coffee. Woman doesn’t even guess she’s famous for that awful brew, but the department would be lost without her.”

  They gathered in the living room, away from the toxic files, and Tate took the easy chair, leaving the sofa for the two of them.

  “So you’re what the state sent us,” he remarked. “Think I met you once before, Cade.”

  “You did, at a conference. It’s good to see you again, Sheriff.”

  “Just Nate. There’s only one sheriff in this county. All these years and Gage is still the new sheriff. I tease him about it, but he seems resigned.”

  “How long were you sheriff here?” Cade asked.

  “Nigh on forty years.”

  “Hard for someone to step into your shoes.”

  “Only in some minds.”

  “More minds than usual right now,” DeeJay said.

  “I’ve been hearing a bit of that,” Nate agreed. “Don’t like it. It’s not fair to Gage or the department. What’s more, I’ve been saying for years this county is going to hell in a handbasket. Why wouldn’t we eventually get a serial killer? Had damn near everything else.”

  He sipped his coffee, then set his mug down on the side table. “I’m not sure what I got to offer, but you name it and if I can it’s yours. I’ve been mad enough to split a gut before, but this beats all.”

  DeeJay nodded. “I couldn’t agree more. We hear you’re tightly plugged into this county. You know everything.”

  “Most everything,” he corrected. “If someone really wants to keep a secret, I probably wouldn’t know. I’ve been working over things in my head. We all know the basic profile, but it’s so general. Young guy, probably white, probably abused as a kid, maybe some head injury...thing is, I could point to hundred guys around here. Child abuse happens here as much as anywhere. Kids get thrown from horses or bang their heads other ways.”

  “What about somebody who went away for around five years and came back?” Cade asked the question and it settled in the room like a pall.

  “Gage is working on that,” Nate replied. “Thing is, youngsters leave looking for a better life. Then when all those jobs opened up at the ski resort last year, a whole bunch of them came back. Maybe forty or fifty. I didn’t take a head count. Most of them the right age.”

  “So, many came back for a temporary job?” DeeJay asked. She seemed ready to leap on that.

  “Not temporary,” Nate said. “You need to talk to Luke Masters, the guy who’s heading up the whole thing. These folks were promised they’d get trained for other work once construction is finished. According to Luke, this company prefers to hire locally because employees stay.”

  “Hell,” said DeeJay. “That almost looked like a clue.”

  Nate nodded. “Crossed my mind, too. Then we got a number of others who finished sowing their wild oats and came home to work the family land. Kind of a dribble, but still there. Moving away and coming back isn’t exactly unheard-of around here. Hell, I did the same thing myself back when. Did my six years for Uncle Sam, then came to stay put. You’ll find a few of those around here, too. We’re getting our vets back from the wars. Now, you could look for head injuries there, I suppose.”

  DeeJay shook her head. “I’m not going to sift that way.”

  “She’s army,” Cade said.

  At that, Nate smiled faintly.

  “That’s not what I meant,” DeeJay said sharply. “Not because they’re vets, but because that’s a limiting sieve for this thing. We can’t afford to limit the search too much without better information. Besides, at his heart this creep is a coward. Picking on small boys. A real coward.”

  “Or a driven man,” Nate remarked. “Either way, it doesn’t strike me that he’d fit too well in a uniform. This sumbitch likes to write his own rules.”

  Nate reached for his mug, drinking some more coffee, clearly thinking. DeeJay let him, and Cade didn’t say a word.

  Then Nate asked, “You ever hear of a killer hanging his trophies like that before?”

  Both DeeJay and Cade shook their heads. “Doesn’t mean it never happened,” DeeJay remarked. “Just that we don’t know about it.”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that cargo netting. It was made of rope, which meant it was old. Now at one time or another we can have call for stuff like that around here. So it’s not a clue by itself. Anyone could have had some of that lying around in a barn or shed. It was big enough to be used to cover a flatbed for a truck, or to keep bales of hay in line for some reason. Probably a hundred other uses. But it’s still an interesting choice. Why hang them on the netting? Why not line them up somewhere he could look at them from time to time?”

  Cade spoke. “It’s interesting that he put them outside, too. Why not a basement or something like that?”

  “Because,” DeeJay said, “there was someone at home who might have discovered them. He put them as far as he could to keep them out of sight, and it worked for years. But he also had to be able to reach them to enjoy them.”

  Cade leaned forward. “Now I’m wondering if he might have come back a few times to take a look.”

  “I’m sure he did when he came back for good,” DeeJay answered.

 
Nate spoke. “Never would have found ’em except for the resort surveyor. Bet he didn’t plan on that. You think he’s still hanging them outdoors? In these temperatures they wouldn’t leave an infrared signature. Too cold.”

  “But he might,” said DeeJay. “If he’s hanging them in the woods again.” She sighed and reached for her own coffee. “I can’t imagine the expense of trying to keep infrared eyes on all that territory. Then you’d have to pick out the wildlife... Hopeless.”

  “But what I’ve been thinking,” Nate said, “was that using the cargo netting is so weird it must have some kind of meaning to him. Which ain’t no help at all if you’re not a mind reader. It might just have been the handiest way to hang the bodies in one place.”

  He rose, saying he had to get back to his grandchildren. “My wife loves ’em, but she’s getting to a point where they can drain her fast. Me, too, come to that. Wish I had the energy of a toddler.” Laughing, he zipped his jacket as he headed to the door. Then, just before he opened it, he paused.

  “I’ll keep thinking on it,” he said. “I reckon I don’t think about much else these days, except the grandkids.”

  Then he stepped out into the icy night. Even after the door closed, the frigid air hung in the small entry. DeeJay shivered again.

  “He’s right,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “That cargo netting. I’d almost bet it’s part of his ritual. Scene setting.”

  Their eyes met, and she could almost see the wheels spinning inside his head. “Damn, don’t I feel like a fool,” he said finally.

  “Why? It was Tate who mentioned the netting, and I think he’s right. We never saw the original scene—we never got to evaluate it forensically or psychologically. Everyone assumed it was just a handy way to display his trophies for his own pleasure. We’ve been working from files and some photos that are less than great.”

  She headed to get more coffee and take another look at the files. A new perspective. Cade was right behind her.

  “Scene setting,” he repeated. “Now if we can just figure it out.”