Fear the Dark (8 page)

And then decide when and how to take her.

—

SAMANTHA CLOSED THE
take-out box that had held a rather good dinner and pushed it away, saying absently, “That Diner guy is a really good cook.”

Jonah, sitting on the other side of the round table from Sam, had closed his own box some time before and was staring at the evidence board with the timeline. In an equally absent tone, he said, “Yeah, he really is. Listen, does anybody else think there's something weird about having a timeline when something at most of the abduction sites messes with time?”

“We don't know that's what's happening,” Robbie objected, still working on her supper. “It's what
seems
to be happening.” She waved her fork for emphasis.

The chief turned his gaze to her. “Do you have another explanation?”

“I don't have an explanation at all. I've never seen anything like it.” She looked at Lucas. “You've been at this the longest, right? Can you explain it?”

“No, lost time is a new one on me, except for time lost during a blackout. None of us have blacked out, so that explanation won't fly. But most of us in the SCU have dealt with things we couldn't explain—at the time. If you can't explain a thing, leave it and look at the case another way. Very often, the pieces don't seem to fit together until you have them all. Then they fit. Then the puzzle makes sense.”

“Victimology?” Sam suggested. She had been talked out of touching any items belonging to the victims for the time being, as requested by her husband, who wanted to “use our brains before the extra senses.”

He hadn't fooled anyone, including his wife. He'd wanted to give her more time to recover from the strange collapse earlier in the day, to get some food into her system. And to give them all time to become more familiar with the facts—such as they were—of the disappearances.

Luke nodded an agreement with her suggestion. “We have an energy signature we can't explain, but not at all the abduction sites. We have missing people, but we don't know if they're still alive, or dead. We don't have a suspect or a motive. The victims are the only thing we have to profile. We have to look for something they all have in common.”

Recalling the FBI courses he'd attended, Jonah said, “Isn't most profiling done on the basis of crime sites?”

“No, it's a pretty individual thing. You work with what you've got. In most cases, the crime scene is apt to provide a lot of information. Other times, especially if you don't have a crime scene but a dump site, or someone just missing, then you have to concentrate on victims.”

Samantha said, “To study a hunter, you study his prey.”

Luke nodded again. “At first glance, the only things connecting
these victims is that they were all white, and they all lived in Serenity.” He frowned suddenly. “Two of them were
leaving
Serenity.”

Jonah wanted to correct the past tense usage but couldn't bring himself to interrupt.

Dante asked, “Think that could have been his trigger? Two teenagers leaving town?”

“It's worth considering. If he has abandonment issues, and especially if he was close to either of those teens, their leaving could have been the stressor. Something had to set him off. You don't just wake up one day and decide to start disappearing people, leaving no clues behind. This is something you work up to.”

Dante said, “Think he's had practice runs? If not here, then somewhere else?”

“Maybe.”

“Not here,” Jonah protested. “I would have known.”

Robbie said, “I imagine you would have. And assuming he lives here, he probably wouldn't have wanted to take anyone local until he was sure he could do it. So we should check missing persons for—what?—couple hundred miles all around?”

Sam was making notes on a legal pad. “At least.”

Jonah frowned, but before he could speak, Luke was continuing. “He's moved awfully fast, taking six people in less than a month. Not much of a cooling-off period. Except . . . He took Luna Lang just three days after he took the judge. The other abductions were more widely spaced. He also took her earlier than the others, before midnight.”

“Not sure about the judge,” Jonah pointed out. “He walked to his fishing spot just before dark, and he was there long enough to catch
a few. We don't know
for sure
that he wasn't taken before midnight, since he wasn't missed until morning.”

“True,” Luke conceded.

“And Sean Messina disappeared before midnight too. The movie started at nine.” He frowned. “Why on earth did I decide a midnight curfew was early enough?”

Sam said, “The downtown area is practically deserted
now
, and it's barely nine. You don't have to be psychic to feel the tension and fear; once it gets dark, most people are very obviously going to stay home.”

“Yeah, you're right. But all this time I've been thinking the dangerous hours were after midnight. Now, all we really know is that it's either likely or certain that these six people disappeared sometime after it got dark, and before dawn.”

Robbie said, “In the dark. The dark can be a friend, if you're bent on stealthy. Easier to hide. Easier to watch. And easier to make off, without attracting notice, with someone you've grabbed.”

“After first knocking them out?” Sam asked with obvious interest.

“Sure. I mean, lots of options. Just because we haven't found a weapon doesn't mean he didn't have one. The traditional blunt instrument, something heavy he could easily carry. A Taser. Some drug in a hypodermic he could inject before they realized what he was doing. Even a choke hold, assuming he's strong enough and quick enough and has the knowledge. We can't check any possibility off our list as far as I can see.”

Dante said rather plaintively, “Aren't we getting further and further away from finding things these people actually have in common?”

“We seem to be,” Sam agreed.

“What does that mean?” Robbie asked, adding, “I haven't taken any of the profiler courses yet, remember?”

“As profilers, we need to ask the basic questions first,” Luke said.

Samantha said, “Why these particular people in these particular places at these particular times. Even if we haven't figured it out yet, they
have
to share a common characteristic. Something that made each one of them a target.”

Brooding, Jonah said, “Two teenagers eloping, a judge doing some night fishing, a young wife and mother going to borrow baby food from a neighbor, a car salesman out on a movie date with his girlfriend, and a ten-year-old girl who got up sometime during the night to get herself a drink of water.”

“Are we sure about that?” Dante asked suddenly.

Jonah looked at him. “That she got up to get herself a drink?”

“Yeah.”

“Well . . . it was apparently a habit with her. The fridge in the kitchen dispenses cold water and ice, and that's what she likes. The stuffed bear she always slept with was on the kitchen island, beside a glass half full of water, with her fingerprints on them.”

“She's been printed?” Luke asked.

“No, the kids aren't usually printed until they hit high school. Process of elimination. We dusted her room, eliminated prints belonging to her parents, and concentrated on objects they said she handled a lot. Pulled a clear set of kid-sized prints from a lacquered music box she apparently loved. The prints on the glass in the kitchen were a match.”

“Sounds like you have a solid crime scene unit,” Dante ventured.

“It's a two-person team. And they are, unfortunately, getting better with practice.”

Nobody commented on Jonah's grim statement. There was a moment of silence, and then Lucas spoke again.

“You've already checked into missings for a couple hundred miles all around Serenity, haven't you?”

Jonah nodded. “Yeah. When Sean Messina was taken. I looked for missings that were in any way like those here. Came up dry. Within a
five
-hundred-mile radius, there were about a dozen reported missing. A few turned up as bodies, killed accidentally or otherwise; a few are still missing but didn't just vanish into thin air, and the rest turned up more pissed than grateful that someone had reported them missing and gone looking for them.”

With a sigh, Sam crossed through some of her notes.

“Sorry,” Jonah told her.

“Don't be. You've saved us needless work. And based on that, plus other indicators, we have to assume the guy is here in Serenity, probably
grew up here or at least has lived here quite a while, long enough to not stand out as being a newcomer, and that he has a personal reason for taking these people. If you're abducting people in or close to home, you aren't taking strangers. It's too high risk to take people who have or might have a connection to you, especially not just for the sake of taking someone.”

Dante said, “You also aren't an experienced predator, right? Experienced predators never hunt where they live.”

Sam was nodding. “Almost always the case, yeah. If they're stranger abductions, we're dealing with a whole different kind of bad guy.”

“I just . . . I just can't believe anyone local could be doing this,” Jonah said, still resisting. “How could somebody be
this
disturbed and go unnoticed? By family, friends, neighbors. By me. How could I not see it?”

“Evil hides,” Sam reminded him. “More often than not, behind something familiar, something nonthreatening. That's its ace, being able to hide. And . . . most people don't believe in monsters. So they aren't looking for one, especially close to home.”

There was a brief silence, with Jonah obviously pondering the existence of human monsters while the feds looked at him with varying degrees of sympathy.

It wasn't an easy thing to accept, that a monster could walk around in your town looking and acting just like everybody else.

Not an easy thing at all.

Finally, Lucas said, “Your people did very thorough interviews of anyone connected in any way with the missing people, right up to the latest abduction. I assume they've been working just as hard on Nessa Tyler's abduction?”

“Yeah. Everybody I could spare canvassed the neighborhood all day
and
talked to as many people as we could find who even knew the family. Her teachers and other students at school, every parent who ever had her in their home for a play date. We even checked alibis on the out-of-town relatives who joined the family for support. No flags, no suspicions. Once it got dark, I didn't want my people out knocking on doors, so they've been doing phone interviews all evening. So far, still no red flags. At all.”

Dante asked, “Besides those family members, are there any strangers in town?”

“The four of you. That's pretty much it.”

Luke asked, “What about Mrs. Lang's husband? Did family come to Serenity to support him?”

“His family lives in Serenity. His parents, brother, and sister-in-law have been trading off time so he's never alone and has help with the baby. Neighbors have helped out too. Dave and Luna have always been a very well-liked couple.”

Samantha leaned her chair back, laced her fingers together over her middle, and turned her head to gaze steadily at her husband and partner. “Strike three.”

“What?” Jonah asked, baffled.

Luke said, “Everything we're hearing, learning, just increases the probability that someone in this town is behind the abductions.”

“How is that possible?” Jonah asked after a moment, still struggling against a reality too painful to readily accept. “One of my neighbors just suddenly decides to abduct people? Someone smart enough or with some kind of weird ability to circumvent security systems, including cameras? And—the weird energy, the missing time, people vanishing
into thin air. Plus the strangeness of those photographs Sarah took at the scene where Amy and Simon disappeared.”

He had shared those very odd photographs, and their bafflement over the open car doors not showing, the footprints not showing: seen by their eyes, but not by the lens of a camera.

Samantha said, “No way to explain any of that yet.” But her tone was just a bit elusive.

Jonah looked at her. “All of you looked at those pictures, and all of you seemed as baffled as Sarah and me. Have you come up with a theory or something since?”

With a shrug, Sam said, “Just something I'm mulling in my mind. It may turn out to be worse than useless, so I'd rather make sense of it myself before offering it even as a theory.”

“Sam, you know profiling, investigating, is a collaborative effort,” her husband said matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, I know. I just . . . want to sit with this awhile longer myself. At this point, it's just a cockeyed theory with absolutely no evidence to back it up.”

“Don't wait too long,” Luke advised her.

“No, I won't.”

Robbie said, “In any case, it's pretty clear a stranger would stand out in Serenity, in the day
or
the night, especially given the likelihood that he watched the victims for quite some time before he put his plan into action.”

Lucas nodded. “Jonah, you and your people have talked to just about everyone in town, and you said it yourself: Aside from us and Tyler family members with alibis, there just aren't any strangers here.”

Making a last-ditch protest, Jonah said, “You're telling me someone I
know
is doing this?”

“
Know
in the broadest sense, probably,” Luke said. “Even in a town this small, there are bound to be people on the periphery of your life. Not friends or neighbors or coworkers. Maybe you'd recognize a face, or even know a name, but not really give them much thought because your life and theirs haven't really intersected. There's been nothing to make them memorable. Maybe they live a bit farther out, don't come into town too often. Don't get into trouble or otherwise draw your attention.

“We all have people like that in our lives. Vague recognition, but no interest. No real knowledge. What may be vitally important to them, an experience, an event, could easily be something that barely scratched the surface of your life. And whoever this is, he probably learned early how to go unnoticed. Maybe he grew up in an abusive home, and drawing attention meant a beating. He learned to be quiet, still. To blend in. At a guess, he's in his thirties or forties; he's too patient and too careful to be younger.”

Samantha took up the not-quite-musing, her voice as thoughtful as Luke's had been. “The judge wasn't a small man, and both Sean Messing and Simon Church were in good shape, athletic. So this guy has to be able to handle size and muscle, either with his own muscles or by some other means.”

“A gun?” Jonah suggested.

It was Robbie who said, “Six people . . . a child, a teenager, a young wife and mother; I'm betting at least one of them would have cried out, made some kind of commotion, if they'd seen a gun. The men
probably would have struggled, one of them at least. Hunting is common in this area, right?”

Jonah nodded.

“Then so are guns. Especially these days. We don't fear what's familiar, as a rule, at least not quickly enough to react. Besides . . . the judge was out in the open. The two teenagers in a stopped car with no sign of damage to indicate someone forced them to stop. Luna Lang crossed through about fifteen feet of a security blind spot and vanished. Sean Messing in a theater. I just . . . I just can't believe that every single one of them could have been taken by force, without any kind of a fuss and without leaving some kind of evidence of that behind.”

“It doesn't seem likely,” Luke agreed.

“So,” Samantha said, “we're back to trying to figure out what all these missing people had in common.”

With a sigh, Jonah said, “I thought we were doing that.”

“We were. But I'm reasonably sure all of us kept in our heads the notion that these people were taken by a stranger, because even though stranger unsubs are more difficult to find, let alone capture, it's the monsters hiding in plain sight that frighten us the most, because we don't know who to trust—even when the faces are familiar.

“Now we have to consider what a member of your community might have in common with these missing people when viewed by one of their own neighbors. Somebody they all know. Somebody who may have been watching them for years.”

Jonah was startled. “Years?”

“Without knowing what he's doing to these people, it's almost impossible to theorize. But given that we believe he's a local, and somehow connected to these missing people, the chances are good that
whatever's driving him has been in him for a long time. Could be a mental disorder, but I would have expected that to manifest before now, and obviously; you or someone else would have noticed. So it could be simple resentment or hate.”

“Those kids didn't do anything to make somebody hate them,” Jonah objected. “Not the teenagers, and certainly not Nessa Tyler.”

“It only has to make sense to him,” Dante spoke up to say. “A madman has his own mad logic.”

Slowly, Luke said, “The one answer we need as soon as possible is, for now, at least, the hardest one to figure out. We don't know
why
he wanted these people. I've never heard of a serial abductor except for the few who abduct kids or teenage girls and keep them literally in bondage, for years.”

“Saw the most recent one like that on the news,” Jonah said, looking a bit queasy.

“There have been worse cases. When abduction or even slavery isn't the goal, but murder is. Torture is. What really doesn't fit here is the range of victims. We've got three men if we count Simon Church, two women if we count Amy Grimes, and a ten-year-old girl. I've never heard of any serial killer with tastes that broad in his victims.”

“Which,” Dante said, “is yet another argument that this is personal. These people were targeted.”

“Yeah,” Samantha said, “but for what? What did they do to get on this guy's radar?”

Lucas said, “We don't know if they're dead or alive. If they're dead, where are the bodies? If they're alive, where is he keeping them? How is he controlling them? It's been weeks for the teenagers; is he feeding them? Torturing them? In a town so tense the slightest
sound draws instant attention, why has no one heard anything, or seen anything the least bit suspicious?”

Samantha said, “He has to have a fair amount of room, and it has to be a remote location . . .”

—

IT WAS THE
strangest thing, Robbie decided. The room around her, brightly lit, just faded out, darkening around the edges. The darkness slowly crept toward her, and she couldn't move, couldn't ask the others if they couldn't
see
what was happening.

Couldn't help her
stop
it.

The darkness was going to swallow her up, she knew that, felt it, and watched helplessly as it swallowed up the others one by one, creeping up to them, over them, like some hideous black sludge, moving in terrifying slow motion, until they vanished and only the black was left. Only the darkness. She could hear her heart beating, but nothing else.

Nothing except the eerie sounds of that thick, smothering darkness flowing toward her, rustling softly as though it were whispering to her.

It was . . . almost seductive.

Wait for me.

Can you hear me? I know you can. You aren't like the others.

We can . . . together . . . and we . . .

. . . belong together . . . you know . . .

. . . we do . . .

Listen to me . . .

She didn't know where it came from, but Robbie was aware of the certain knowledge that if she listened to the whispers, if she let them in, she would die.

The blackness was creeping toward her, rustling, whispering, and all Robbie could think to do was slam her shields up as hard as she could, making them as strong as she could make them, because she couldn't let it in . . .

—

“DANTE IS A
medium,” Luke was saying. “Able to communicate with the dead. When they want to communicate, that is. And even then, they often have nothing helpful to say. Something else we've learned.”

What? We've already talked about this. Haven't we?

Half nodding, Dante said, “The universe doesn't like to make things too easy for us, apparently. Even with these extra senses of ours, we still have to work to get what we want and need.”

Wait a minute. I know we've talked about this. Because Jonah was curious and didn't seem freaked out. Though right now . . .

Jonah nodded, more uncertain than anything else.

Maybe he's more freaked out than he shows. Maybe he always was.

“Robbie is a telepath, able to read minds,” Luke said. “Not all minds, of course; even our strongest telepaths can only read sixty to seventy percent of those around them. Sort of like trying to tune in on a particular radio frequency; not all people are on a frequency a particular telepath can receive.”

What the hell . . .

Without any ability at all to stop it, Robbie heard herself saying, “Like all of us here, and most agents in the SCU, I have mental shields, so I can generally block out thoughts even on my frequency when I want to. And I usually want to, in case you were wondering. I believe it's an invasion of privacy to read someone else's thoughts
without their knowledge or permission.” She sounded more than a little defiant.