Undercover Hunter

by Rachel Lee

  But she knew what she was really afraid of: that he might come on to her later. That he might think that was an invitation for more. That he might want to take this places she didn’t want to go.

  Didn’t men always do that?

  They decided to get takeout from the diner. The place was crowded. Either the search parties had quit for the day, or they weren’t going out.

  “Storm brewing,” Mavis told them. “Gonna be a nasty one.”

  “Great,” said DeeJay. Another hindrance, not that there was much they could do, storm or no storm. They didn’t need to review the photos and plans for the resort at all. That left getting in touch with Craig Stone, and who knew how long it might be before they could meet.

  She turned from the counter with her share of the takeout and realized a young man was staring at her. Dark haired, dark eyed, slender just shy of frail. He stared, appearing almost hypnotized, then looked quickly away. Well, it wasn’t the first time some would-be stud had stared at her. She was used to it.

  “Hey, Calvin,” one of the men called out.

  The slender man turned. “Yeah?”

  “You better not stay in town tonight to work the phones or you won’t be getting home.”

  “I heard,” Calvin answered. “A good night to be by the fire.”

  DeeJay swore she could feel his eyes on her as she and Cade walked out.

  And for some reason she remembered the sheriff’s remark that in some ways she resembled the victims.

  “Cade?” They were heading for the grocery now to get tonight’s salad makings and some other things in case they couldn’t get out tomorrow.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you agree with Dalton? Do I look like the vics?”

  “What brought that up?”

  She wasn’t about to tell him that a young man’s stare had made her uneasy. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

  Sheesh, it wasn’t even as if he had stared for long. “I don’t know. It just popped up.” She felt foolish already for her reaction to something so common, and to link it with a remark from the sheriff that had been clearly off-the cuff, the way some folks said others looked like movie stars? Or maybe the guy had known one of the victims and had, for an instant, seen the resemblance that Gage had noted. Still, she filed away his face and name in case he turned up again.

  “Apart from being a woman, nearly a foot too tall and at least twenty pounds heavier?”

  She thought he was going to laugh at her, but then he surprised her.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You do.”

  “Actually, thirty pounds,” she said, once her heart stopped skipping nervously. “Muscle.”

  A laugh burst from him. “Well, then, you’ve got nothing to worry about. And isn’t that a guy’s line? It’s all muscle?”

  Reluctantly, she laughed, too. “Yeah. But in this case it’s true.”

  “Then even more reason he won’t look your way.”

  Unless he decided to change his routine for some reason. The thought plagued her all the way home.

  A ticking time bomb. One who made his own rules. Time seemed terribly short.

  Chapter 6

  They had barely finished carrying the groceries in when their landlord, Hank Jackson, showed up. He was so bundled against the cold that it was impossible to tell how lanky he was. They invited him in for coffee, but he waved the offer away. “Figured you don’t have the TV hooked up, seeing as how you’re not gonna be here long, so I wanted to warn you. We’ve got a really bad storm moving in, maybe a foot or more of snow by morning. Best lay in supplies and plan to hunker down. If you need anything, I’ll be at home.”

  “Did they call off the search parties?” DeeJay asked.

  Hank nodded. “No point in getting somebody else lost. High winds are coming in, too, so visibility will be shot.”

  “That’s got to be hard on that boy’s family.”

  “No doubt,” Hank answered. “But sometimes you can’t fight what is.” He spoke with a kind of weariness that seemed to spring from experience. “Anyway, I don’t know exactly what you folks are used to, but trust me, the locals are staying at home. It won’t be long before the snow starts flying. Call me or trot over if you need anything.”

  DeeJay closed the door behind him and thought of Hank’s heavily pregnant wife, Kelly. “I hope Mrs. Hank doesn’t decide to go into labor tonight.”

  “You know, I bet Hank could handle it if it’s uncomplicated.”

  Together they put away the groceries, then sat to eat the meals they’d bought at the diner. The foam containers had managed to keep them somewhat warm, although the fries were ruined. DeeJay didn’t care. Soggy or not, she devoured them, fueling the engine that kept her warm, replacing the calories they’d spent on their cold hike. Cade seemed to feel pretty much the same way.

  “I like this town,” she announced when finally she could slow down her eating. “Sorry, I’ve been eating like a pig at a trough.”

  “And I haven’t? What do you like about Conard City?”

  “The people, mainly. Even Mavis with her attitude. Everyone’s been nice.”

  “Ah, but either they know we’re here to help or they think we’re writing a travel piece.”

  She made a face at him. “Don’t dash my illusions.”

  He flashed a grin and picked up the other half of his sandwich. “Unfortunately, I don’t know how much more we’ll be able to get done today. You call Stone, I’ll call the sheriff and see if they’ve learned anything new at all. Then we’re stuck in a storm.”

  Craig Stone turned out to be surprisingly easy to get a hold of. “I can come over after the storm and show you all the maps and trails you want,” the forest service ranger assured them. “Right now I’m tasked with pulling in a few winter hikers before it’s too late. At least we have a pretty good idea where they are. Tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow it was.

  “People choose to go hiking in this,” DeeJay said after she hung up. It wasn’t a question.

  “Winter camping is great for the hardy,” Cade responded. “Lots of solitude, pristine woods, a good excuse to sit around a big fire. I need to show you after this case is over. With cross-country skis or snowshoes, it can be refreshing and restorative. You just need the right gear.”

  For all her carping about the cold, DeeJay didn’t really hate it. But she felt it and wondered if they made the proper gear for someone like her. Then she realized that Cade was talking as if they would have some kind of relationship after this case. The kind that could involve going off into the woods camping together.

  She stole a sideways glance at him and decided it had just been an offhanded remark on his part, the kind of casual thing people often said. She needed to get off high alert with him, she thought. Other than that kiss on the mountain, for which she took a full share of responsibility, he’d been amazingly easy to work with—and that despite the fact that she had begun their partnership by making issues over every little thing.

  Whatever objection he’d had to working with her initially, it seemed to have vanished. While they weren’t exactly a smoothly oiled team yet, they were managing pretty well, and he treated her with a great deal of respect. That’s all she wanted from him—his respect. The rest of it, like the snares of attraction she kept feeling, had to remain off-limits. He was far from earning her trust as anything but a professional partner. Hell, at heart he was probably like most men. She just hadn’t seen it yet.

  He reached for the phone. “Now for Dalton. Then we’ll figure out how to spend some time. What did you do in the army when you got slowed down?”

  “Poker,” she answered. “And it’s not much fun with only two.”

  Another smile, then he dialed the phone. She could hear only his side of the conversati
on, but then he started talking about potential access to the crime scene on the mountain and how they were going to speak to Craig Stone tomorrow and look at maps. “Yeah, it’ll help us get a handle on the type of guy our unsub is. How determined, and so on. Every little bit helps.”

  A pause. “Really? Yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Gage.”

  He hung up and looked at DeeJay. “You’ll never guess. Craig Stone is law enforcement, too. Gage thinks he should be let in on who we are and why we want to know about access to the crime scene. He thinks Craig will be a whole lot more helpful if he knows what we’re after.”

  DeeJay didn’t need to think about it for long. “I agree. Why waste time talking about scenic hikes if we can come straight to the point?”

  Cade nodded. “I’m with you. Gage said we should tell him as much as we choose, and he’ll back us up. As for new information...none.”

  DeeJay leaned back in her chair, toying with a French fry, watching it flop soggily back and forth. “This guy’s impossible. He accelerated five years ago, toward the end, then quit. Skipped town, whatever. Maybe he just stopped, which means it could be anyone in this county.” She dropped the fry. “Then there’s what appears to be his timeline this time around. He’s taking victims closer together than five years ago. He accelerated, but is this acceleration controlled? Will he start moving faster again? We can’t count on his spacing at all.”

  “I know. I hate these cases with a ticking clock, especially when I can’t see the countdown timer.”

  She nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. The passing of each minute seemed like a minute lost, even though they were doing everything they could. “Then there’s his scene setting. He hung his first trophies in the middle of nowhere so they couldn’t lead back to him. I wonder if he’s doing that again.”

  “I don’t know. That depends, don’t you think?”

  “On what? Whether he’s furious that his first batch of trophies is gone? He might be.”

  “In which case he’d keep them closer to home.”

  She closed her eyes to think, and looking at Cade for some reason wasn’t helping her thought processes. She could have drowned in those eyes of his. “I keep getting hung up on that cargo netting. On the way he wrapped his victims. It’s familiar in some way, but not from a criminal case. It’s something else. Dang, I wish I could get at it.”

  “All I keep thinking of at the moment is that he’s in the driver’s seat, and even if he doesn’t accelerate we haven’t got a whole lot of time. And what if he does accelerate? He could move in a matter of days. God, I hate having my hands tied.”

  He sighed and went to get them more coffee. The first icy pellets rattled against the window, and the house creaked a bit as the wind hit it. “Here it comes. The only good thing I can say about this blizzard is that it will shut him down, too.”

  * * *

  Fifty miles away on his isolated ranch not far from the foot of the mountains, the storm had indeed shut Calvin down. He spent an hour or so with his web and his trophies, but eventually at some level his preoccupation was pierced by the blizzard. He had to get back to his house before he risked getting lost out there in a whiteout, or stay here and freeze with his chosen ones.

  Calvin had no desire to commit suicide, either accidentally or deliberately, so he trudged back to his house before the wind wiped out all visibility. It was going to be a bad one. Nobody had exaggerated that.

  When he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, the keening wind became muffled. For an instant it felt as if he’d lost his hearing. But then the endless ticktock of the grandfather clock reached him. He hated that sound, was goaded by it. It had marked the endless minutes of his suffering at his mother’s hands. Reminded him of when the universe had devolved into pain and her measured ranting as she had cleansed him.

  Sometimes he thought about throwing it outside until the elements killed it, except that the ticking sound sometimes helped carry him away to his new life of purifying others.

  He felt cold to the bone from sitting out in the barn for so long, and from the long walk in the wind to get back here. The fire in the woodstove was still cranking out heat, so he went to make himself a hot drink.

  It was as he was standing in the kitchen that he realized his thoughts had followed a new path while he’d been out there enjoying his boys. He’d been measuring a spot for his next one, and he realized he was looking for a larger place. To fit something bigger than his usual.

  Like that woman he’d seen in the diner. It hadn’t taken him long to find out who she was, some travel writer visiting the town to write about the ski resort. With her husband.

  But her look had attracted him: dark, dark hair, a little long like the boys he preferred. In fact, based on that alone, she fit his profile. But she was a woman, taller than he liked, and certainly older. That should have ruled her out.

  But somehow it hadn’t. She looked something like his mother. As he sat near his woodstove in a chair that needed new springs, he turned her around in his mind. The more he thought about her, the more she seemed to glow in his memory. Was he imagining it, or were the Fates trying to tell him something?

  Twice before he’d been guided to a woman. He hadn’t got the same satisfaction from them, but it had felt essential at the time. Maybe it was part of his mission, a part he didn’t fully understand yet.

  But she would be more difficult. Hard to get her away from her husband. Bigger, so therefore stronger. But still a woman, which meant weaker. And fear, as he had learned, could weaken people if it was handled properly.

  Once he had her, he could focus on her face and pretend she was one of his boys. He was good at that. Since she was bigger, and more of a challenge, the power that filled him as he took her life might be greater. Her resemblance to his mother at once repelled him and drew him.

  He thought about where on the net he would hang her, how she would fit in, and whether he’d feel as good about her as he did about the boys.

  The wind strengthened, rattling windows, as he sat thinking for a long, long time. The spider in his web with an especially large and juicy morsel.

  It could work. He just had to plan it carefully.

  Smiling, he rocked on and thought about that woman.

  * * *

  “I found a Scrabble game,” Cade announced, emerging from the bedroom.

  DeeJay, standing and looking out at the front window, turned. “You can’t even see across the street,” she said. “Heck, I can’t even see the street.”

  He came to stand beside her. “So we get a break. It’s kind of pretty, though.”

  She looked out again and nodded. “I guess so. As long as there’s no need to go out in it. Scrabble?”

  “Yup. It’s old, and I make no promises about whether it has all the tiles. Wanna give it a shot?”

  She nodded. “Maybe we can limit ourselves to making words associated with the case.”

  He arched a brow at her. “Do you ever stop working?”

  “Not when I’m on a case. Do you?” She watched his dubious look gradually melt into that engaging smile.

  “Not really,” he admitted. “But since we’re kind of mired at the moment, and I suspect I have the files memorized well enough that I could recite them off the top of my head, I’m thinking a change of perspective might be useful.”

  “Like clearing the decks and then seeing where everything falls afterward.” She smiled back at him. “I’m game. Maybe whatever it is at the back of my mind will get jogged loose.”

  “Still have that sense that there’s something in that mess you should recognize?”

  “I can’t escape it.”

  They brewed another pot of the inevitable coffee, then sat at the kitchen table with the game. They disagreed briefly about whether they should find out if there were m
issing tiles, but it was humorous and they knew it wouldn’t change anything in the end. If the tiles weren’t there, it wasn’t as if they could replace them somehow.

  The game was from a time when the board had no guides to keep tiles in place, when the tiles were still made of wood and contained in a cloth bag. It all looked worn and well used.

  DeeJay drew the highest-numbered tile and played the first word: cereal.

  Cade laughed. “I thought we weren’t sticking to the case.”

  An unexpected laugh escaped DeeJay. “Um...is that what you think we’re looking for? A cereal killer?”

  “You should see what he did to my oat bran.”

  “I hate to tell you that you’re slightly off track.”

  They continued in the same vein for a while, joking lightly back and forth, in no hurry and not even keeping score. Cade proved to have a wicked talent for managing to hit triple-word scores, but as the tiles began to run out, the words became shorter. So did the distraction the game provided.

  DeeJay looked toward the kitchen window and saw only swirling white. Even the neighboring Jackson house was invisible now.

  She leaned back, forgetting the game, and cupped her mug with both hands. “I hate being stymied,” she admitted. “I hate it when I can’t do anything, when I’m missing important information, when I’m just plain stuck.”

  “Me, too,” Cade said. Without asking, he began to gather up all the tiles and replace them in the bag. The break was over. “Unfortunately, nothing’s going to happen until tomorrow.”

  “So we’re left running over the same tired ground.”

  He didn’t answer, but what could he say? The storm held them prisoner, but she wasn’t sure it would have been any different if they’d been able to go out and about. Any information anyone had on this killer was already in their hands. Even reading it upside down wouldn’t change that.