Pushing outside, Remi sucked down a lungful of fresh air and headed for her SUV.
Shadows surrounded the single parking lot light illuminating her vehicle. Unnatural light from the station’s doors reflected off shards of glass as she closed in, and a knot of warning twisted in her gut. She studied her SUV and slowed her pace. Something wasn’t right. She adjusted the weight of her weapon a split second before she turned back toward the doors leading into the station.
A fist slammed into her face.
Lightning shot across her vision, and the world slipped out from under her.
Remi shoved off the pavement with both feet to use his own weight against her attacker. They hit the asphalt together. Oxygen crushed from her lungs, but she couldn’t wait for him to make the next move. Catching her breath, Remi spun him toward her and launched her fist into the perpetrator’s face. She knocked him off balance as he tried to stand. Wrapping both hands around his wrists, she threw him into the light pole and drew her weapon. “On your knees, hands behind your head. Now!”
A low, even laugh penetrated through the sound of her pulse pounding in her ears. “Did you really think you could run from me, Sheriff Barton? That you wouldn’t have to pay for your failure like the rest of them?”
Her heart shot into her throat as she reached for the cuffs at her lower back.
“You killed them. Everyone connected to the New Castle Killer case. Why?” Nausea churned in her gut, hot and heavy at the same time. Forgetting the cuffs, she slipped her finger alongside the trigger of her weapon. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one who made sure Del Howe couldn’t take another innocent life.” The suspect straightened against her orders, standing at well over six feet. He rushed her, and Remi squeezed the trigger. The bullet grazed his neck but didn’t slow him down. He shoved his shoulder into her midsection, hauling her off her feet and slamming her into the side of her SUV. Her weapon fell from her hand and slid under the vehicle, out of sight. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, as he pressed his hand into her throat, pinning her against the warm metal. Dark eyes glared at her through the holes in his black ski mask. He lowered his voice, nearly pressing his mouth to her ear. She tried to push him back. “I’ve waited a long time for this, Sheriff. I killed the others, but none of their deaths had been personal. Just their punishment for following your orders. Your death—what I’m going to do to you... I’m going to enjoy the memories for the rest of my life.”
“Remi!” Dylan’s voice carried across the parking lot. Her gaze cut to him. The deputy withdrew his weapon, danger in his gray eyes, but didn’t fire. There was no guarantee he’d hit his target. “Let her go. Now.”
“Don’t worry, Cove. I haven’t forgotten about you.” Her attacker pulled his own weapon and fired.
“No!” Remi lunged for the gun, but it was too late.
Dylan clutched his side and collapsed to his knees.
Her scream cut off under the pressure of her assailant’s grip around her throat. The parking lot—Dylan—blurred in her vision as that same hand rocketed her head into the driver’s-side window and the world went black.
* * *
HE TOOK HER. The son of a bitch took her.
Dylan compressed a hand over the wound as a swarm of officers surrounded him on either side. Gravel bit into his palm as he forced himself to his feet. He stumbled forward as blood spread across his shirt. He closed his eyes and tried to catalog everything he’d seen. “Male, six-four or six-five, wearing a ski mask, black clothing. I didn’t see what type of gun he was carrying, but the slug in my gut will tell you that.” Pain vaulted through his system and threatened to bring him back to his knees, but this time a set of callused hands held him up.
Captain Elijah Paulson. “Somebody get this man an EMT, damn it, and pull the surveillance footage from that camera! What kind of vehicle, son? I’ll dispatch two patrols now.”
“He took her SUV.” Dylan rattled off the license plate from memory. He holstered his weapon and pulled his phone from his pocket with bloody, shaking fingers then pulled up the app Remi had required all her marshals to install in case of emergency. One step forward. Two. He caught sight of some kind of wiring where the chief’s vehicle had been parked. “Every marshal’s vehicle is equipped with GPS. He knew that.” Dylan nodded toward the collection of wires. “He was waiting for her.”
But the killer wouldn’t kill her outside a police station. He’d take her somewhere else. Somewhere no one would be able to find her. Dylan struggled across the parking lot, his steps growing heavier as he headed for his own SUV.
“Marshal Cove, where are you going? Wait for the EMT. All units, be on the lookout for a black SUV heading north on Eastern. Vehicle is registered to Chief Deputy Remington Barton.” Captain Paulson’s voice phased in and out between his ragged breaths. “Marshal Cove!”
He wasn’t going to wait for the EMT. He wasn’t going to sit here while Gresham PD figured out who to send after her or where to look. From what he’d been able to tell from the files Watson had collected on the twenty-five victims tied to the New Castle Killer case, Remi didn’t have that kind of time. The killer didn’t keep victims for extended periods of time. He killed them as soon as he saw the opportunity and moved on to the next. A growl vibrated up his throat and aggravated the bullet in his side. “No.”
He couldn’t lose her—not again—but he wasn’t going chase after a killer without knowing exactly what he was getting himself into either. He had to think. Dylan ripped open the driver’s-side door of his SUV and collapsed inside. A groan tore from his chest as the muscle shifted around the bullet. Phone in hand, he direct-dialed Finnick Reed. When the marshal’s witness had been taken by a serial killer, Reed had been able to narrow down her location by studying the habits of the man who’d taken her. If anyone knew how to get Dylan to Remi, it would be the former combat medic.
“Reed,” the marshal answered.
“The chief has been abducted by Del Howe’s killer.” Dylan twisted his keys in the ignition and spun out of the parking lot as Captain Paulson and his officers raced after him. He floored the accelerator and steered the vehicle with one hand while he tried to apply pressure to his wound with the other. “She’s injured. I’m not sure how bad, but I need you to tell me where the bastard might have taken her.”
“Wouldn’t hurt you to ask nicely for once.” The echo of keyboard taps filtered through the phone.
“Reed.” Another growl tore from Dylan’s chest as his anxiety over finding Remi in time increased. Frustration formed as he searched traffic patterns for an SUV going extremely faster than the speed limit. The killer had taken a high-ranking marshal. That meant he’d want to get the hell away from the scene as fast as he could, but Dylan couldn’t pick out any vehicle matching Remi’s description. The suspect had already veered off in another direction in an attempt to keep from being followed.
“Calm down. I’ve been studying your guy’s movements since our little meeting back at the office. He doesn’t stay in more than one city very long before moving on to his next victim. This doesn’t seem personal to him. It reads more like a job than anything, but according to Remi’s notes, there wasn’t only one victim here in Portland the killer was targeting. There were three,” Reed said. “Del Howe, Remi and you. I don’t think this guy is going anywhere until he’s finished what he started. He’ll have to be somewhere close to the city in order to get access to his victims, but not close enough he won’t be able to hightail it out if the police catch up to him. Somewhere where there’d be no neighbors to hear a scream.”
“You’re saying he’s not in the city. He’s just outside of it.” The on-ramp to the interstate that would take him west out of Gresham then north when it connected to the 205, out of the city—that would be the fastest way to escape. His instincts said Reed was right. The previous victims might’ve been a job as Reed had suggested, but w
hoever’d taken Remi had been building to this for years. Blamed her. He wouldn’t kill her quickly. He’d make her suffer. He was sure of it. That the killer needed privacy and time to exact his revenge on the investigators involved in the case, but that left a lot of options in the way of location.
Dylan maneuvered ahead of a group of vehicles and accelerated onto Interstate 84. He searched every lane ahead of him for the familiar SUV. The killer only had a few minutes of a head start, but Dylan knew from experience a few minutes was more than enough to seal Remi’s fate. “I need more, Reed.”
“According to CCS, Remi’s phone just pinged from a tower near Burton Ridge in Vancouver, north of the city,” Reed said. “But it hasn’t moved in a few minutes.”
Across the Columbia River. The killer had gotten farther than Dylan had originally thought. Determination burned through him. She wasn’t dead yet. He had to believe that. He had to believe the killer would take his time with her and give Dylan a chance to make it. “Send me the coordinates.”
“Camille and I will dive back into the files Watson recovered and narrow down a location where he might’ve taken her. Keep me updated.” Reed ended the call.
His phone pinged mere seconds after the line went dead. The small red dot on his screen assigned to Remi’s phone wasn’t moving, and he pushed the SUV harder. The dull sound of tires against cement droned in his ears as he sped across the bridge into Washington State. She wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t going to make another mistake.
Maneuvering between eighteen-wheelers and civilian vehicles, he spotted the exit leading to Burton Ridge and crossed three lanes of traffic to take it. His heart lodged high in his throat as miles of rolling black mountains and shadowed trees materialized through the windshield. If the killer had taken Remi into the wilderness, it’d take days for Gresham PD and USMS to search the woods.
He was catching up to her signal. Soon, he’d be directly on top of it. Dylan tightened his grip on the steering wheel as his eyes adjusted to the darkness along the off-ramp. His headlights illuminated the stop sign at the bottom of the decline. Bright lights from a convenience store right off the interstate honed his focus as the signal identifying his phone rolled over Remi’s.
Dylan slammed on the brakes. The bullet in his side jerked deeper into muscle with the added momentum and pried a muted scream from his chest. No sign of another vehicle. No sign of a body. Darkness closed in around the edges of his vision as he put the SUV into Park. He called in his position to the Gresham PD officers he’d lost in the chase. His weapon sat heavy in his holster. Shouldering out of the vehicle, he stepped out into nothing but fine dirt and shadows. Headlights illuminated a narrow path straight ahead of him but failed to alleviate the dread pooling at the base of his spine as he searched the tree line.
The killer had crossed state lines. He could’ve gone anywhere with Remi by now, but something inside—some part of him that’d been connected to her these past few years—said Dylan was on the right path. Dirt kicked up in front of his headlights as he rounded the front of the SUV. The GPS on her phone placed her right here, but suddenly, the red dot indicating her phone’s signal was moving. She was here. Hand resting on the butt of his weapon, Dylan approached the trees. He hadn’t come all this way to lose her. They hadn’t survived this game only to be separated again. That wasn’t how this would end.
Movement shifted in the trees to his left, and every sense he owned honed on the break in the leaves. “Deputy US Marshal Dylan Cove. I need you to come out, slowly, with your hands where I can see them. Now.”
A soft whimper reached his ears then another shift of the branches ahead. “I’m sorry!” a frightened voice said. A woman appeared from the surrounding shadows and stepped into the peripheral of his headlights. Dirty red hair dulled in the light, her clothing stained and torn in places. “I wasn’t trying to steal it. It was lying there on the road, and I didn’t think anyone would miss it. You can have it. I won’t tell anyone. I promise. Please.” Wide eyes lowered to Dylan’s weapon as the woman stretched her hand forward and offered him a phone. Remi’s phone. “Please, don’t hurt my son.”
Dylan loosened his grip on his firearm as a pair of small hands appeared from behind the woman’s leg. He holstered his sidearm and presented both of his palms straight out toward the woman and her kid. “It’s okay. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m a US marshal. I’m not here to hurt you. That phone you have? It belongs to another marshal who was abducted about thirty minutes ago. I tracked it here. Can you tell me where you found it?”
“Over there at the edge of the road.” The woman used her chin to indicate where she’d picked it up. She slid her hand down her son’s back to press him closer. One wrong move on his part and she and her son would disappear, and Dylan didn’t have the time to chase after her. The clock was already counting down for Remi. “He threw it out the window before he sped off.”
“Did you see if he was wearing gloves?” If he could pull a print from the phone, Reed would be able to narrow down the perp’s identity. Dylan took a step forward, keeping his hands raised as he approached the duo. “Did he say anything, or did you happen to see the marshal he’d kidnapped? Do you know where I can find her?”
Fear contorted her features and the woman hugged her kid tighter. Staring down at the ground, she seemed to disappear into a memory right in front of him before lifting that hesitant gaze to his. The woman shook her head. “You’re too late. She’s already dead.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Her head pounded in rhythm to the chaotic rush of blood behind her ears.
Dust caked the inside of her mouth as she struggled to open her eyes. Smooth rocks pressed against her abdomen and chest as she rolled her head to rest her opposite cheek against the hot ground. Sharp pain rocketed through her skull, a dried, crusted layer of something wet and sticky clinging to one side of her face. Blood. Pitch black surrounded her, the ground uneven and sloping. Thick humidity clung to the skin of her face and neck. She heard her own rapid heartbeat—fast and flighty—along with the whisper of her breath. Heard everything except what she wanted to hear the most: Dylan. He’d been shot trying to stop her abductor from taking her. Where was he now? Had he been found? Was he alive?
An agonizing ache set up residence in her shoulder sockets as she tried to bring her hands forward, but her kidnapper had bound her wrists behind her back and her ankles together. Coarse, fraying edges brushed against her fingers. Rope. Whoever’d hunted down and targeted her former officers and investigators had caught up with her, but she wouldn’t go down without a fight. Not with Dylan’s life in the balance.
“These lava tubes extend for miles underneath the earth, all throughout Oregon and Washington. You’d be amazed how easy it is to get lost if you don’t know what you’re doing.” The faint voice rolled along the corridor, bombarding her from every direction to the point Remi wasn’t sure where her abductor stood.
An onslaught of blinding light filled the chamber and forced her to look away from the figure standing directly over her. She hadn’t heard him approach. Hadn’t even heard him breathe. “I’ve spent months mapping as many of them as I could, but there doesn’t seem to be an end.” He paused. “Well, not for you, Sheriff.”
Caves. Lava tubes. He’d brought her underground. She tried to swallow past the dirt caked around the inside of her mouth as her vision adjusted to the new source of light. The headlamp blacked out his features, leaving only a silhouette of the man above her. She didn’t recognize his voice, his outline. Nothing at all that would give her an ID. But the fact he’d attacked her outside the Gresham police station while Nguyen was still in custody said the sergeant had been telling the truth all along.
Remi squinted up toward the light, her shadow casting a dark pool around her. Then the pain surfaced. The dirt had been stained with blood. He’d pulled off the freeway, taken the exit and maneuvered to the side of the road. It’d
been an opportunity to run, but when she’d climbed over the back seat into the cargo area, he’d been there. Waiting. The flash of metal was all she’d seen before the blade had embedded into her side. Now she was on the verge of going into shock, bleeding out, somewhere no one would be able to find her. Remi spit the dust from her mouth. “It’s chief deputy marshal now, but you already knew that, didn’t you? You’ve been looking for me, trying to find the perfect opportunity to get to me. A year, right? That’s how long it’s been since the last murder.”
“Would’ve been sooner if you weren’t so much of a workaholic. I couldn’t exactly kill you in your office with the rest of your team in the building, and when you weren’t falling asleep on your keyboard, you seemed to take added security precautions. Always armed, sleeping less and less these days, pushing yourself harder with each assignment, and then there was the added problem of Deputy Cove following you like a good little guard dog.” Her abductor’s knees popped as he crouched beside her, his voice even and unemotional. “It’s almost as though you knew this day would come, that you knew you couldn’t hide from your mistakes forever.”
A rock settled in her stomach as she realized how thorough the man balancing her life in his hands had been. Both he and Del Howe had been following her all this time? Remi settled her left temple against the ground. What were the chances? “The surveillance photos. You were using Del Howe to watch me. You knew who he was, what he’d done, and you used it for your own agenda. When he served his purpose, you killed him in the same manner he’d killed his victims.”
“What’s a little blackmail between killers?” A laugh penetrated the buzzing in her ears. “Besides, you know what they say about payback. But look on the bright side, at least now the families will know who killed their sons, brothers and nephews. Thanks to me, the victims of the New Castle Killer finally get the closure they deserve.”
Harlequin Intrigue April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 Page 26