R. E. Bradshaw - Rainey Nights (16 page)

Rainey looked at Sheila, who was staring back, open-mouthed. “Do you want this to be an official request for BAU help?”

The words shot out of Sheila’s mouth so fast and loud, there was no question how she felt. “Hell yeah! Bring the cavalry if you have to. We’re in deep shit here, if I hear you right.”

Rainey returned to the phone. “Yes, make it official… and Danny, plan to come by the house when you’re done at the prison. I think we need to talk.”

Rainey stayed with Detective Robertson for an hour more, relaying what she knew about Dalton Chambers. Sheila was familiar with the news stories, but not the facts. There were differences in the murders, but only someone talking to Dalton would know so many details. Since there was no trial, the Messiah signature was never made public. The lesbian angle was a new twist, but Rainey hoped that had more to do with the new killer than Dalton’s fantasy. He preferred virgins. This UNSUB obviously had a thing for lesbians. The fact that Rainey was in a relationship with a woman did not escape her attention. If it wasn’t the UNSUB’s preference, then the question was how much did Dalton know about her life now?

Rainey was barely present during the discussion with Sheila. Her thoughts were on not going into a panic. She could feel it beneath the surface and it frightened her. The panicked feeling was a new experience for Rainey. The closest she had ever come to the sensation was the drive to find Katie, after she was kidnapped. Not even during her own attack and recovery did she ever feel so out of control. Katie was the common denominator. Rainey wasn’t with her, she wasn’t sure Katie was safe. She had to leave. She had to find Katie, now!

She excused herself. “Sheila, I’ve told you all I know at this point. You need to wait and see what Danny comes up with in Chambers’ cell. If he’s communicating with someone locally, you should find out fairly soon. Until then, if he’s really a copycat, you have a partial profile to work with. It should be enough to get your investigation rolling. I’m sure Danny will call you the minute he knows anything and the rest of his team should be here soon.”

Sheila wrinkled her brow, questioning Rainey, “You don’t want a piece of this? I can get you on as a consultant.”

Rainey took a deep breath, trying to quell the growing anxiety threatening to overwhelm her. She exhaled slowly, and then said, “Right now, I have a much bigger problem to deal with.”

Sheila tilted her head to one side, looking even more puzzled. When she spoke, the concern for Rainey showed in her voice. “You know this lesbian angle is not by chance. There are no coincidences. You taught me that. What could possibly be more important than finding the man that may have been sent by some maniac to kill you?”

Rainey started for the door, saying, “I have to go tell Katie that a piece of crap I put away is probably trying to have me killed. How do you say, hey babe, another serial killer is after me, how was your day?”

#

On the drive home, Rainey tried to think how she would tell Katie about this new development in their lives. Rainey resigned from the FBI last summer, telling Danny, “I know what I want to do with the rest of my life and chasing serial killers is not on the list. I’m going to spend my time being happy, with Katie.” Rainey spent the last nine months doing just that, being happy. So blissful, in fact, that she began to think that maybe the life she led before would fade away someday. She knew now it would never be possible to forget. The lids on her mental boxes, where Rainey compartmentalized her life, began to fly open. Her worlds were crashing into one another. There would always be serial killers and sexual sadists coming out of the woodwork, some who knew her personally. As Katie said earlier, Rainey was paranoid, but it was for a good reason.

Rainey brought Katie into this world of constant threat. Now, she had to protect her. Rainey did what she could, teaching Katie how to use the weapons in the house, always reminding her to be vigilant and cautious, but none of that would stop a determined killer. If Dalton’s minions were coming after Rainey, Katie was in real danger. Rainey really didn’t want to tell Katie that part. It was hard enough keeping Katie from freaking out over the bail bonds business. They agreed that Rainey would call before she went to apprehend a particularly dangerous skip, and then call Katie back when the capture had been completed. It was the least she could do to keep Katie from worrying every minute. It minimized the amount of time Katie thought Rainey’s life was in danger. With the turn of events today, that was a luxury Rainey could no longer grant. They were both possible targets of a serial killer, again.

Rainey thought about sending Katie away, somewhere safe. Maybe Katie and her mom should go to Europe for a while. At least, until Danny caught this latest UNSUB. The lid on the box where she kept the foreboding thoughts slid off. Those thoughts were the voices in her head that told her she should never have brought Katie into this sphere of twisted killers. She slammed her hands on the steering wheel in an uncharacteristic loss of control.

“Fuck!”

Out of the box flooded the feelings she ignored, the warnings she dismissed. In the beginning, Rainey’s instincts told her dragging Katie into this life was a mistake. Ernie knew what kind of business they were in and exactly what kind of people might be coming after Rainey. Mackie chose the life long ago. Katie had only discovered the enormous stresses of being in a relationship with someone like Rainey after she fell in love. It had been Rainey’s responsibility to tell Katie what she was really getting into. She had, up to a point, but she was also afraid to tell Katie too much. Rainey selfishly had not wanted to lose Katie, so she held a substantial amount of information back, stuffing those feelings in the little mental box, and putting it away. She told herself that she could keep Katie safe. Rainey didn’t know if that was really possible anymore.

Rainey was happy to find Katie’s car in the driveway. She said she was going to clean out the closet in the master bedroom today, but Katie went off on little sudden trips all the time. She always told Rainey or Ernie where she was going, but sometimes she just had to get out of the house. Rainey thought it was because they were so isolated out in the woods and a social butterfly like Katie needed to talk to people. Rainey encouraged Katie’s continued work with her literacy centers, but insisted that the centers hire security. The thought of Katie in that rundown strip mall in Durham made Rainey cringe. Katie only went two nights a week now, usually when Rainey had to work, and some Saturdays. Katie seemed content to live out on the lake, away from the hustle of the city, but a woman with that much energy had to focus it somewhere. Today, the closet was her planned project.

Rainey opened the front door of the cottage, happy to have found it locked. She punched in the alarm code to quell the incessant beeping. She was surprised to find the room empty. Katie was usually right there to greet her when she came home. She shut the door, locked it, and re-armed the alarm. She hung her jacket, took off her holster, and opened the gun safe. In the act of putting the gun away, her systems went on high alert. Rainey’s instincts were telling her something wasn’t right. Katie should have appeared by now. Maybe she was in the closet and didn’t hear Rainey come in. Maybe she was under a pile of boxes and couldn’t get up. Rainey told her not to move the heavy boxes from the top shelf, for two reasons. The boxes were too heavy for Katie to move, and she didn’t want Katie to see what was in them.

She stood there with the gun safe open, her hand on the Glock still inside the holster, observing her environment. She could not smell supper cooking, which was always the first thing Rainey noticed when she walked in the house. It was eerily quiet, the hum of the refrigerator motor the only sound she could make out. She carefully pulled the Velcro retaining strap open. In the quiet, the ripping sound was excruciatingly loud. She took the gun, leaving the holster in the safe and shut the door. Glock in hand she peeked into the kitchen. No Katie. She checked the back door. It was locked. She surveyed the rear deck through the glass in the door.

Rainey wasn’t in a panic, yet, but the beating of her heart was beginning to pick up the pace. She told herself Katie was fine, just distracted, anything but that something was wrong. Rainey knew she was overly cautious, and yes even a bit paranoid, but she had good reason to be before today. After what she found out in Durham a few hours ago, her paranoia triggered a survival instinct she listened to very attentively. Rainey chose to look at how she lived her life as not so much in a perpetual state of fear, but more a constant vigil of readiness. Her guard had been down once. That sure as hell wasn’t going to happen again.

She crossed the main room, hugging the wall to her back. At the corner, where the wall met the hallway to the master bedroom, Rainey could see into the home office. The computer monitor was dark, gone to sleep from at least an hour of inactivity. Peeking around the corner, she could see the bedroom door was half open. If she called out Katie’s name, she would give away her position. She saw no movement and heard only the sound of her own heartbeat, picking up its pace. Slipping around the corner, Rainey kept her eyes on the crack between the doorframe and the hinged edge of the door. She was about to enter the bedroom when she heard something inside the walk-in closet, the entrance of which was obscured behind the half open door. The next sound turned her blood to ice.

“Hello, Agent Bell, so nice of you to join us.” The Virginia accent was unmistakable.

Chill bumps erupted over Rainey’s entire body. She took a step closer to the opening, then froze again as the voice continued. “I told this pretty blond lady here that it was you that I really wanted to talk to. She’s really nice to spend time with, but then she’s not you, is she? I’ve waited so long for this. Come on in and sit a spell. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

Rainey took a deep breath, let it out slowly, clasped her pistol in front of her, and crashed into the door. The bedroom door and the closet door smashed together. In the briefest of seconds, Rainey saw Katie sitting in the closet floor, pictures and notebooks scattered around her, and then the door slammed shut. The next voice she heard stopped her in her tracks.

“Hello Dalton. You asked to see me and now I’m here. What is it you want to talk about?”

It was Rainey’s own voice. Katie was listening to the tape of her first interview with Dalton. Rainey stored the tape in one of the boxes she had asked Katie to leave on the top shelf. Apparently, Katie did not listen.

“Rainey, what the hell?” Katie’s voice cried out from inside the closet.

The rush of adrenaline crashed into Rainey’s heart with the full force of the fear she had held at bay. The fear turned to anger instantly. She snatched the closet door open so forcefully it banged into the other door and slammed shut again. She snatched it back open, this time holding on to it, and shouted, “What the fuck, Katie! I thought that asshole was in here. What the hell are you doing?”

The tape continued to play in the background. Dalton’s sickly sweet drawl echoed on the walls of the closet. “Well, Rainey, may I call you Rainey, what an unusual name. Your parents were hippie freaks, I guess. Bet your momma was pretty. Bet you look like your momma, all tall and dark with those green eyes…”

Rainey took two long steps into the closet and hit the stop button on the old cassette recorder. Katie must have also found it in the boxes. Rainey still had the Glock in her right hand.

“Oh my God, you scared the shit out of me,” Katie said.

“I could say the same about you. I repeat; what in the hell are you doing?” Rainey’s anger boiled just below the surface. She pointed at the crime scene photos and notebooks opened on the floor around Katie.

Rainey kept a Murder Book for each of the cases she investigated or researched. When she left the BAU she brought some of them home with her, the rest she gave to Danny. They contained the detailed elements of each crime, copies of reports and photographs, among Rainey’s personal notes. Dalton Chambers had been one of the cases she felt the need to hang onto. Along with Dalton’s Murder Book, Rainey had placed accounts of other unimaginable deeds in the boxes and stored them in the top of the closet. People turn away from the screen when they show crime scenes on TV shows. They would never come out of their houses again, if they saw some of what was in the boxes Katie had emptied onto the closet floor.

Katie began closing notebooks and putting them back in the boxes. “I’m sorry, Rainey. I tried to get one of the boxes down and I dropped it. Once I saw what was in them, I couldn’t stop myself.” She paused and looked up at Rainey. “Oh God, what time is it? I can’t believe I’ve been in here this long. You must be starving.” She started throwing things back in the boxes faster.

“Leave it,” Rainey said, sternly.

Katie stood up. “Are you mad because I didn’t listen to you or because I scared you?”

Rainey tried, but did not succeed, to control her anger. She glared at Katie. “You need to listen to me when I tell you that you don’t need to know everything I’ve seen and done.”

“Rainey, I… I had no idea…”

“That’s kind of the point. You don’t have any idea. You and most of the world have no clue what’s out there. I believe that’s a good thing, don’t you? There are all kinds of reasons you shouldn’t be looking at these files, but the most important one is, because I asked you not to.”

Katie’s hands shot to her hips. “Oh, come on. You told me the boxes were too heavy for me, not to leave them alone because they had your life secrets in them. I had no choice but to try, just to prove I’m not some shrinking violet. All this stuff poured out when I lost my balance on the stepladder. At least, the first one happened that way.”

“So, if I specifically said leave the boxes alone, because I don’t want you to know what’s in them, would you have done as I asked?”

“Of course I would,” Katie said defensively. “I respect your privacy. You said nothing about privacy and don’t use that tone with me.”