Fade to Black Read online

  “No prints?”

  “Not a damn thing. If they even dusted for them.”

  In a standard auto theft case, with a vehicle recovered within a few days, he’d bet they hadn’t bothered. He assumed the perp had cleaned off the back of the SUV, or even small-town, inexperienced guys would have recognized blood on the bumper and done at least something to investigate.

  “After it was recovered, the SUV was traded in. We tracked it down to its new owner in Ohio, and had it picked up. There could be blood on the undercarriage even after all these months.”

  She didn’t look particularly hopeful about that possibility. Considering Dean felt the same, he didn’t blame her.

  “Too bad about the semi,” she said. “That would have narrowed things down, since they’re not something just anybody can jump into and drive.”

  “Tell me about it. If the unsub was a licensed trucker, he’d be easier to track.”

  Mulrooney cleared his throat. The quick, curious glance he cast between Dean and Stacey made Dean stiffen in his chair. They’d been talking as though the other two agents weren’t in the room, and while it had been strictly business, something made him wonder if the personal connection he shared with the sheriff had been noticed by others.

  “So your guys are out stomping through the woods on their own today, right?” Mulrooney asked. “Better them than me. It’s going to be even hotter than yesterday.”

  Stacey nodded, busying her hands with some blank sheets of paper on her desk. As if she, too, had realized they’d been ignoring the other agents. “Yes, the same three deputies. They know that if they find anything, they are to call immediately and not touch a thing.”

  “Hope that crazy-as-a-jackrabbit guy on the ATV doesn’t show up,” Mulrooney said. “You sure we shouldn’t be searching on the inside of that fence?”

  Stacey frowned. “I’ll handle Warren. But my opinion hasn’t changed, based on a lot of things, including the way the man in the video moved and acted.”

  “I think there’s something there,” Dean said, flatly convinced of it. “I didn’t like that smile when he took off yesterday.”

  Nodding, Stacey admitted, “I noticed it, too. Maybe he is hiding something. But I have a hard time picturing him as deliberate and patient as the Reaper.” Swallowing, she added, “If you want me to watch the other video files to see if that changes things . . .”

  “Forget it,” Dean snapped, not even willing to consider letting her put herself through it. “Let’s do our interviews, see if Mr. Lee was anywhere near the tavern the night the victim disappeared. Look for any possible connection there. Then we’ll decide if we need to go have a talk with him.”

  Jackie, who’d been jotting some notes on a small pad, rose. “Okay, guess that’s our cue to get moving. Kyle and I are headed to talk to”—she consulted the pad—“Mrs. Baker, who runs the drugstore where Lisa was last employed.”

  Stacey grunted. “Good luck with that one. She fired Lisa for stealing from the register. I imagine she’ll have a lot to say about her, but none of it will be nice.”

  Mulrooney shook his head. “There’s that bad-girl angle again. All the others were described as—how’d you put it?” he asked Stokes.

  “Determined, headstrong,” she replied with a quirk of her mouth. “Which I took to mean they weren’t very well liked, but nobody wanted to speak ill of a murder victim.”

  “But all successful, workers or students,” Mulrooney said. “No other druggies, ex-cons. She stands out.”

  He’d noted the same thing the previous night, but obviously, judging by the thoughtful look on his face, Mulrooney considered the idea worth repeating. And Dean thought he was right. Every detail about Lisa’s case that made her unique from the others shored up their theories about her murder.

  “Somebody who wouldn’t be missed,” Dean muttered, “somebody he could experiment on without too much fear of causing a big search and rescue.”

  Stacey, who had just risen from her chair, stiffened and her jaw tensed. Dean saw a flash of emotion in her eyes, a hint of guilt in her tight mouth, and realized he’d just added to the weight of responsibility she’d already piled onto her own shoulders.

  Stupid. He glanced at the others, wanting to reassure her, but not wanting to embarrass her in front of their colleagues. Knowing he would be alone with her in a car in a few minutes, he figured he’d have time to talk to her then. He’d let her know she had done absolutely nothing wrong and had reacted as anybody in law enforcement would have.

  Before he could rise to leave, the door to Stacey’s office burst open. A wide-eyed young man, probably in his late twenties, erupted into the room, swinging an arm that was encased in a cast from the wrist to just above the elbow. “Is it true? Was Lisa murdered?” he bellowed, not even appearing to notice that three FBI agents and one annoyed-looking sheriff had all leaped to their feet and gone on alert at the unexpected interruption.

  Stacey put a hand on the younger man’s arm. “Mitch, calm down.”

  “I heard you were out in the woods looking for her body.” He thrust his good hand through his sandy blond hair, then noticed the others in the room. His face reddened, but he didn’t back out with an apology. Instead, his chin thrust forward, his expression going a shade grimmer. “It’s true. They’re FBI, aren’t they.”

  “Yes, they’re FBI.” She released the man’s arm, watching him closely.

  She probably wasn’t watching him as closely as Dean, Stokes, and Mulrooney were; however, it wouldn’t be the first time a perp had insinuated himself into a police investigation. Many serial killers had been well-known to the police before they’d been caught. And this guy had obviously known the victim very well, judging by his obvious dismay.

  “And yes,” Stacey added, “we’re looking for Lisa’s remains.”

  The truth of it seemed to deflate the young man, because he staggered back, his shoulders hitting the closed office door. He bent over at the waist, clutching his middle. “Oh, my God. She’s really dead.”

  “Who is this?” Dean finally asked.

  Stacey kept her eyes on the newcomer, giving him a frown of warning. “This is my chief deputy, Mitch Flanagan.”

  Now it was Dean’s turn to be surprised. Her chief deputy? A guy in a cast with no sense of professionalism, since he’d burst in on a closed meeting? A guy who, judging by his behavior, had been involved with their victim? He and Jackie exchanged a quick glance, and he knew he wasn’t the only one in the room who wanted to know more.

  Stacey returned her attention solely to Flanagan. “Were you friendly with Lisa?”

  His mouth opened, no sounds coming out. Then he nodded. “We were close.”

  Damn. Lovers. Stacey looked shocked. “How long had that been going on?”

  “Nothing was going on. Not in that way.”

  Doubtful. Or at least, not for lack of trying on this guy’s part.

  “But we were friends. She could talk to me, and I was trying to help her.” He rubbed a hand over what Dean suspected were tearstained eyes.

  Or maybe Flanagan just wanted them to look that way.

  God help him for a cynical bastard. He just didn’t trust anybody, especially not immediately after meeting them. Which, he supposed, made his instinctive reaction to Sheriff Stacey Rhodes that much more surprising.

  “I want to help with the search.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Stacey, come on, you need my help.”

  “You’re on medical leave and I want you home.” Her eyes narrowing, she added, “I mean it, Mitch. Stay out of this. If you were personally involved with Lisa in any way, the last place you can be is in the middle of this investigation.”

  “Who wasn’t personally involved with her in this town?” the guy said, suddenly sounding angry. Angry enough to incite Dean to take a step forward, sending a hard look in the younger man’s direction.

  “Fine.Whatever.” Swinging around, Flanagan grabbed the doorknob. Bu
t before he twisted it and stepped out, he muttered, “Just tell me when you find her.” Looking back over his shoulder, he offered one more pleading glance at his boss. “Please.”

  She nodded, saying nothing as her deputy stormed out as quickly as he’d burst in.

  “Well, that was exciting,” Mulrooney said with a lazy smile, sounding anything but excited. It took a lot to get the big man’s juices flowing, and Dean suspected he wasn’t even fully conscious until he’d had at least three cups of coffee. Nice to know some things were still normal in this very un-normal place and situation.

  “You’ll need to find out just how close those two were,” he told Stacey.

  She frowned, not liking it one bit. “I know.”

  Her shock hadn’t been feigned; she apparently hadn’t had any idea her chief deputy had been involved with the missing woman. It had visibly shaken her. He understood why. Stacey was pretty damn confident in her own abilities, and not knowing something she must now see as obvious had to burn.

  “Okay, enough for now. Can we get out of here?” Dean asked. But before he could take one step toward the door, his cell phone rang. “Damn it.” Then, recognizing the number on the caller ID, he put a hand up to tell the others to wait. “Taggert.”

  “It’s Wyatt. I’m sending you a file and you need to look at it.”

  “Good Lord, not another one,” he muttered. Glancing at Stacey, he pointed to her desktop computer, and she nodded her permission.

  “It’s another kind of file; not a video.”

  Thank heaven for small favors. But hearing the obvious tension in his boss’s voice, he knew whatever Wyatt was sending was bad. Dean sat in Stacey’s chair and faced the desktop, accessing his e-mail. “What is it?”

  “Brandon found the auction. It’s already over.”

  Damn. They’d thought they had a few days, at least, before the next seventy-two-hour countdown started. His pulse throbbed in his temple and his fingers curled tightly on top of the keyboard as he kept refreshing the screen, wanting the thing to hurry up. Yet somehow, not ever wanting to have to see it at all. “When?”

  “Looks like it went down yesterday around noon.”

  The words stunned him, every muscle in his body clenching reflexively. “The unsub’s already got almost twenty-four hours on us? How could this have happened?”

  He saw the others react to the news. With his few words and his visible frustration, they already knew as much as he did. Stokes and Mulrooney both sat back down across from him, leaning over Stacey’s desk, tense and completely at attention.

  Wyatt continued. “Brandon thinks the site owners are paranoid about being compromised, especially as more and ever more illegal activity is turning up there, child pornography and the like. So the security has gotten more intense. There was some Reaper chatter; then the site went black with a ‘Be Back Soon’ message scrolling across, followed by a line of gibberish.”

  “Code for the members to find their way back in?”

  “Perhaps. Or information on how to get into the invitation-only auction. It’s open only to the members who like that sort of thing and who can afford to pay for it.”

  Dean would love to think that was a small group. But his gut told him it wasn’t. With a whole world full of deviants the possibilities boggled the mind.

  “When Brandon got back in this morning and saw more chatter that it was over, he went deep and finally found a transcript. Have you got it yet?”

  Refreshing the screen, he saw the e-mail. “I’ve got it. It’s opening.”

  Wyatt waited, saying nothing.

  When the screencap appeared, Dean resisted the urge to dive to the bottom of it to find out what they were up against and started at the beginning. He read quickly, feeling his stomach heave at the excited chatter between Satan’s Playgrounders with handles like Twistedsister, Thebutcher, and Marquisdesade. One persistent bidder whose name hinted at his true proclivities, Lovesprettyboys, tried to persuade the Reaper to let him choose the victim, but had been shot down. The others seemed content to merely toss out suggested means of death. Things so sick Dean wondered just how far the depths of the human mind could reach.

  “I think I’m gonna puke,” Mulrooney said.

  Dean didn’t turn around; he merely pointed to a trash can and kept reading. All the way to the bottom, to the winner’s final bid. And his choice.

  “Good God,” he whispered.

  “Taggert?” Wyatt’s voice asked from the phone. “Do you see?”

  “I see.”

  “We’ve got to stop him.”

  “I know.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Stokes snapped, as she, too, read the final few lines.

  Mulrooney was more blunt. “Fucking medieval.”

  Good description. Barbaric, horrific. Though, considering the viral popularity of some online videos, like the ones of the overseas assassinations of Americans by terrorists, not necessarily something nobody had ever heard of.

  Stacey, who was seated on the corner of her desk, out of eyesight of the screen, asked, “What is it?”

  Dean didn’t answer. He merely turned the monitor so she could read the words for herself. She did so, then paled, closing her eyes and turning away.

  “Lily’s trying to track the payment,” Wyatt said, meaning all three of them were in the office this early on a Saturday morning. Good to know the whole team was so anxious to catch this guy.

  “You can see the winning bid was thirty-five thousand,” Wyatt added. “He can’t move that much money around the Internet without somebody noticing him. This is the closest to real time we’ve ever gotten, and she’s making the most of it, focusing first on trying to find accounts that lead to anywhere in Virginia.”

  Another voice suddenly came through the phone. “There he is! I see the bastard.”

  Recognizing Brandon’s voice, Dean asked, “What’s he got?”

  “Hold on,” Wyatt replied. A low rumble of conversation followed, until Blackstone came back on the line. “He’s in the Playground right now.”

  “The Reaper?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see you,” came Brandon’s voice from the background. “Why don’t you come out from under that cape, you little prick.”

  Unreal. They were watching a cartoon version of the sadistic killer freely strolling through his cyber world and couldn’t lay a finger on him. “Can he trace him?”

  Wyatt seemed distracted. “Why is it going in and out? Are you losing him?”

  “Shit! Oh, no, you don’t!” Brandon shouted, frustration making his voice throb.

  Wyatt snapped into the phone, “I’ve got to go. We’re doing what we can; I think we’re going to lose him again. One thing we know at this point: The Reaper is online, playing in the Playground, right this minute. If you’re going to conduct interviews this morning, you might keep that in mind.”

  “Got it,” Dean said, ending the call. He tucked the phone away and related the information to the others.

  “So let’s go knock on good old Mr. Lee’s door, tell him we’d just like to chat, and see if he’s online,” Mulrooney said. “I bet he’s got some high-powered security equipment out there, run by a state-of-the-art computer.”

  The idea had merit, but he saw by the look on Stacey’s face that she genuinely believed they’d be wasting their time. And frankly, they didn’t have time to waste.

  He trusted her. He hadn’t known her long, but he already had faith in her instincts, and if she thought they’d be barking up the wrong tree, he intended to take her at her word. “Let’s stick with the original plan,” Dean said.

  He glanced at the computer screen again, unable to keep his eyes off the final words, the sick desires of the winner. And the Reaper’s agreement.

  God, he hoped they found this guy before he grabbed his next victim.

  He enters the Playground through the south gate.

  The palette of odd colors is familiar, welcoming. The eerie, gray-streak
ed blue sky casts a perennial storm cloud over the preternaturally cheerful Playground. The grass is too green. The sun too yellow. The images too surreal, at odd angles, with unnatural curves and sharp edges.

  It’s Dalí’s version of Sesame Street.

  Only if you look closely can you see the writhing forms of anguished souls carved into the base of the tree holding the tire swing. At first glance, the yawning opening beneath the sliding board, which falls away into a pit of flame and torture, appears to be only a shadow. The metal rings hanging from a jungle gym seem simple gymnastic playthings—until you notice the screaming man hanging from them, begging for mercy as a fire is lit beneath his feet.

  As always when he comes to the Playground, peace washes over him. Happiness fills him from his core to the tips of his fingers and the very ends of each strand of hair on his body.

  Ahead of him, the morning crowd is thick and buoyant as the weekend begins and earthly workweek identities fall away. Possibilities abound; excitement ignites the air. Convention and morality and mundane laws simply do not exist in this world. Nothing is taboo, nothing sacred.

  No one ever says no. No desire is too dark to fulfill.

  Here is a woman being beaten by a long, spiked whip. There a man is led around on a leash like a dog. A crowd encircles a duo taking turns raping the brunette they have pinned to the ground.

  And a tall, skeletally thin man draped in expensive clothes takes yet another child by the hand and leads him through an elaborate gate marked PRIVATE.

  Then, at last, they notice his arrival. All fall silent. Watching him. Waiting for him. They part like the sea spreading for some biblical being.

  As they should. This is his kingdom and he stalks it like an all-powerful, all-seeing deity. Death ravaging the earth with every step he takes.