Текст книги "Fear the Dark"

BOTH SAMANTHA AND Lucas turned to stare at Robbie after her rather violent entrance, perhaps a bit startled but no more than that. Taking unusual things calmly was one of the requirements to be an SCU agent.

“What’s happened, Robbie?” Sam asked.

“I just came out of a waking nightmare.” Robbie couldn’t be still, so she paced. “It seemed as real as this is. Only in that waking nightmare, I was standing by the window in our sitting room, and when Dante came in, I turned around and shot him. Killed him. You want to take my gun? I wish you’d take my gun.”

Sam was frowning slightly. “He already knew he could mess with your mind, change your memories. Why would he give you the memory of killing Dante?”

“Just for jollies?” Robbie was in no mood for speculation but gave it a shot. “I think he tried to make me actually do it. When I came out of it, I was standing outside Dante’s bedroom door, in a robe, holding my gun. So he’d gotten me that far. I really think he believed he could make me kill my partner.”

“But you didn’t,” Sam reminded her quietly.

“No, I didn’t. Not this time. But when he couldn’t make me actually do it, he made me believe I had. He really made me believe I had.” Robbie wasn’t the crying sort of woman, but her eyes glistened with tears she wouldn’t shed. “And how can I trust myself now? Around any of you? As long as this son of a bitch is alive, how can I trust myself?”

“Were you asleep or already up?” Luke asked.

Robbie didn’t even have to think about that. “I’d been asleep. Sleeping hard, because I was tired. When I came back to myself, I was standing at his door. I had my gun, but I was still dressed for bed in a sleepshirt, with a hotel robe over it.”

“So maybe it was an experiment,” Sam said. “To find out if it was easier for him to get into her head, influence her, if she was asleep when he tried. If he’s been watching us, he must know we’ve split shifts. It doesn’t seem to be working out very well, since you barely slept and Dante should be here any minute, but the unsub could have seen you two go into the hotel hours ago.”

Robbie blinked. “Dante’s coming?”

“Yeah. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s nearly as shaken as you are.”

“Why? He was asleep.”

Sam opened her mouth to reply, but Dante came in just then, not slamming the door as Robbie had, but not exactly calmly. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his hair still damp from the shower, and he was rubbing the center of his chest with one hand.

He looked immediately at Robbie. “I had the most vivid fucking nightmare. You shot me. Only it wasn’t really you.”

Before Robbie could speak, Lucas held up a hand. “What do you mean it wasn’t really her?”

“It was . . . her face was like the missing people we watched on the videos. Like the face of a doll. No expression. No life. Creepy as hell, though not as creepy as seeing—and feeling—her shoot me. I mean, I got shot once; it was just a graze, but I remember how it felt. This was like that, only much, much more painful.”

“More than a dream,” Robbie muttered. “That bastard got into our heads again.”

Dante frowned. “First time for me.”

“You were asleep,” Sam told him. “More vulnerable even with that strong shield. Especially since he can’t seem to aim his energy very well.”

“Really?” Robbie said. “He aimed it at me pretty well.”

It was Lucas who said, “I doubt he meant Dante to know anything at all. It was you he was after, Robbie, you he’d already left . . . bread crumbs to follow. You he wanted to be able to control. What Dante got was . . . spillover.”

“Vivid spillover,” Dante muttered. “I swear my chest hurts like hell.”

Dryly, Sam said to him, “Power of suggestion. Robbie was convinced she’d shot and killed you, and she’s a telepath. She doesn’t usually broadcast, but in moments of extreme stress . . .”

“I have been known to,” Robbie admitted, with an apologetic grimace to her partner. “Sorry.” Then she frowned. “I don’t like the way this bastard is playing with our minds. My mind. And why’s he fixated on me?”

Musing, Luke said, “It could be yours is the only ability he really understands, or believes he does. Close to what he has himself; any kind of true mind control or mind influence has to begin with telepathy. Or it could be he wants to control you for some reason we don’t yet know.”

“We need to figure that out,” Robbie told him. “And I mean soon. I catch him in my head again, I’ll give him more than a headache or nosebleed.”

Dante said, “You can do that?”

“She’s not supposed to,” Lucas said.

“Oh, tell me Bishop wouldn’t approve, destroying a monster like this one. Besides, it’d be self-defense.”

“That’s a report I’d like to read,” Sam murmured.

“I’m still in the dark,” Dante complained. “You could destroy him? As in—kill him? With your mind?”

Earnestly, Robbie said, “I’d have to be touching him physically. And I’d have to be really pissed off.”

“And if you were?”

“Well . . . ever get hold of your daddy’s shotgun and shoot a pumpkin or watermelon when you were a kid just to see what would happen?”

“Yeah.”

“Something like that.” Robbie seemed very calm.

Dante was rather glad she was calm. He looked at Lucas. “When I joined the unit, I was told that psychic abilities couldn’t be used as weapons except defensively.”

Sam murmured, “Read the fine print. That’s shouldn’t be used as weapons except defensively.”

“Sam.”

“Well, it’s true. Look, we don’t have many psychics in the unit either powerful enough or with enough control to actually be able to hurt somebody else. And, like Robbie said, she has to be enraged, completely out of control. That’s not only not her normal state, it’s almost unheard of.”

Reassuringly to her partner, Robbie said, “And Bishop taught me a lot about control. So did Miranda. I’ve never killed anybody with my mind.” She paused, then added, “Blew the hell out of some pumpkins and watermelons, though.”

Dante sat down at the conference table. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”

Robbie sort of waved the hand not holding her coffee at him, and said to Luke and Sam, “With all due deference to Dante’s uneasiness, I’m way more concerned with our unsub and his apparent ability to waltz in and out of my mind whenever he wants.”

“It might not be so easy for him,” Lucas pointed out.

“I don’t know if it was easy for him or hard, but I don’t want him in my head again, ever,” Robbie snapped—if quietly.

“Calm down,” Sam said quietly. “There’s no way in hell you’d ever deliberately shoot your partner. If this unsub made a try for that, I’m guessing he ended up just as you expected, with a pounding headache and probably a nosebleed. At least. If he’s relatively new to his abilities, he could have ended up with a lot worse. But whatever he was trying, all he could really do was what he did before. Plant a few memories in your head. Probably quick and brief ones.”

–

HE COULDN’T GET the bleeding stopped for the longest time, and that frightened him, even though he didn’t want to admit it.

Only cowards were afraid, and he was no coward.

He finally tore strips from his shirt and stuffed them up inside his nose. The plugs kept the blood from streaming down over his now-torn shirt, but he had to breathe through his mouth, and every time he swallowed he tasted blood.

That was . . . unpleasant.

And he suspected there was something badly wrong with his head. It hurt, of course, maybe worse than it had ever hurt before, but . . . the lumps. They had been there before, of course, but when he put his hands up to feel, he realized there were new bulges. He wondered if that was what happened when a brain grew beyond the capacity of a skull to hold it.

Would the skull crack, eventually? Or would it continue to bulge, as his bulged?

That could be a problem.

Still, he was utterly committed to his plan, and just as utterly convinced it would work. First he would finish punishing Jonah, that was paramount. Because it was all Jonah’s fault, and he had to pay.

Choices. It was all about choices.

Every choice had a price.

And Jonah would pay. Because when the girl had escaped, all according to plan, she had unknowingly stepped on a pressure plate, and that would set it all in motion.

Jonah would be first through the doorway, if he knew Jonah. And he did. He’d be first through, and he’d see what was waiting for him. The punishment that was worse than being shot or killed; those were too quick.

This . . . this would haunt Jonah Riggs forever.

–

ROBBIE THOUGHT ABOUT it, then sat down heavily in one of the chairs at the conference table across from Dante, obviously still more shaken than she wanted to admit. “It seemed so real. So unbelievably fucking real.” Then she looked around, suddenly realizing. “Where’s Jonah? Wasn’t he supposed to be working with you guys?”

Sam filled her in on what had been happening, finishing, “He left about an hour ago, so—”

Before she could finish, Jonah came into the command center. He looked windblown, but the relief on his face told them all they really needed to know.

“How is Nessa?” Sam asked anyway.

“In pretty good shape. Cuts and scrapes on her bare feet, and I doubt she’ll ever sleep in a dark room again, but Doc says she’ll be fine with enough rest and good food.”

“He didn’t hurt her?”

“No. She doesn’t remember him even touching her. Though she was out at first, so . . . still possible, I guess. She wanted a shower, and Doc had a quiet word with her; he doesn’t believe she was molested or suffered any kind of sexual attack.”

“She didn’t see him,” Lucas said, and it wasn’t a question.

Jonah shook his head. “If I understood her, he was seldom there, and when he was, because she was trying to hide her awareness from him, she visualized a black snake. Although even if she’d opened her eyes, she wouldn’t have been able to see him; from what she said, it was darker than dark in that place.”

“Was he starving her—the rest of them?”

Jonah shook his head. “Nutrients through an IV as far as Doc could tell from Nessa, and what she could tell him about where and how they were held.”

“So the others are alive?”

“They were when Nessa got away. At least, she thinks they were. She could hear them breathing, and in feeling her way out, touched at least a couple of them.” He paused, shook his head. “Freaked her out, but she didn’t scream. She’s a strong little girl. She was certain they were breathing.”

“Kept where?”

“I left two of my men with orders not to budge from where we found Nessa, and I didn’t backtrack because I wanted to get Nessa to the doc ASAP. But from what she said and where we found her, he’s been keeping them in what used to be an old clay mine. Deep underground.”

“I didn’t know clay was mined,” Luke said.

“All kinds of things have been mined in Tennessee,” Jonah said. “A couple hundred years back, this state was considered one of the richest in the South for minerals. Anyway, clay was mined for reasons you’d expect: pottery, additives for masonry, that sort of thing. Usually in big open pits, which ended up as lakes once they played out, most of them. But there were a few test shafts bored into the ground here and there; some were successful, and some just . . . ended. It sounds like that’s where Nessa and the others have been held. There’s a forest there now, but when the shaft was originally dug more than a hundred years ago, the trees were a lot more sparse.

“The shaft, large enough for a man of medium height to stand up straight, was bored down at a slight angle, and at the bottom they found a big cavern. Interesting, but it was unsuitable for removing clay. And there was nothing else interesting there, no other minerals or gems. It was marked on the old map—I have one of my people digging that up now—and notes made that if anyone ever decided to build there, the cavern would have to be blasted first, and fill brought in.”

“It’s that close to the surface?” Lucas asked intently.

“Safe to walk across, even ride a horse or drive across probably, but not safe to sink any kind of building foundations there. That area was even farther from town than it is now, so they just took simple precautions. The entrance boarded up with timbers, DANGER, DO NOT ENTER painted across them. And people forgot. The paint faded, the timbers rotted, and the forest grew all around it.”

“Until the unsub came along.”

Jonah nodded. “If he grew up around here, he could have heard about it. There are a few mine shafts scattered closer to the mountains, but the ranger service makes sure the barriers at the mouth of those shafts cannot be opened. Dangerous.

“I don’t remember any of my friends as kids wanting to explore any caves or shafts, and I haven’t had to chase any away in the years I’ve been chief, but everybody knew it was somewhere in the woods. If he’d been hiking in the woods, he could have found it. Vines had grown up all around there, but they wouldn’t have been too difficult to pull away. And it’s far enough out that he probably didn’t worry much about keeping it hidden while he came and went.”

Sam frowned. “Did Nessa say anything about pulling vines away when she was getting out?”

“No. But she was so intent on getting out, I doubt she would have even noticed them.”

“We’ll need to talk to her,” Sam said.

“I know. But right now, the doctors and her family are around her. And we know where to find the others without having to talk to her first. That’s our priority, finding the others.”

“Agreed,” Luke and Sam said in one voice.

Jonah frowned at Robbie. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”

“We had a little disturbance.”

“Little?” Dante murmured.

Robbie shook her head. “Never mind that for now. I think it’s safe to say that both Dante and I are wide awake, believe me.”

“Okay.” Jonah straightened. “I’ve put Doc on alert at the clinic, and I have my people standing by. Sarah will meet us at the station.” When Lucas raised his brows, Jonah added, “My first priority is getting those people out of there. I mean to go in there in force, armed, and wearing vests.”

“Do you expect him to be there?” Sam asked neutrally.

“Honestly? No. I expect that by now he knows Nessa’s escaped—whether he deliberately let her go or not—and that he’ll be watching from a safe distance. My only real concern is whether he has the place booby-trapped. We’ve never needed a bomb squad.”

“I can help you there,” Sam said.

Jonah eyed her. “You’re sort of handy to have around.”

“I have my moments. Our vests are in the SUV. Let’s go.”

EIGHTEEN

Jonah hadn’t known what to expect at the bottom of that long, long shaft into the earth. Nessa had tried to tell him, haltingly, but it was clear there was just something she couldn’t manage to tell him, something that horrified her exhausted little soul.

It might have been only the terrors of a little girl lost, but whatever it was, just her expression had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. So he’d exchanged his service weapon, a Glock .22, for the .44 Magnum he kept more as a showpiece—but also kept clean and oiled. And used at the shooting range whenever he used his service weapon.

The only one of the others to comment had been Samantha, who had said merely, “Looks like that cannon DeMarco carries.”

“It kicks like a mule,” was all Lucas said.

“I’ll say,” Sarah agreed, checking the load on her own Glock. “I fired the damned thing once at the range, and it knocked me on my ass. I don’t need anything that powerful.”

“Probably depends on what you’re aiming at,” Robbie murmured, envying the other woman her almost preternatural calm.

Sarah looked fairly rested, having logged, probably, a couple hours more sleep than Dante and Robbie, and she was most definitely ready to move, now that Nessa was safe and it seemed at least even odds they were going to find the others as well.

Safe and unharmed, they hoped.

They were all suited up in their body armor and armed, but they didn’t ride horses to meet the other two officers. Instead, Jonah’s Jeep was joined by four others from the police motor pool, and they loaded up and headed out in those.

Thunder rumbled about the time they turned off a paved road and onto a rutted track, and it was Samantha who asked, “Did anybody check the weather?”

Jonah, who was driving their Jeep in the lead, replied, “The worst of it’s supposed to hold off, except for the wind. But sometime after midnight, we’re gonna get slammed.”

There were still enough dead leaves from the winter past to be blowing across in front of them, and Jonah had the Jeep’s running lights on. Which helped more and more as the rutted road disappeared and he appeared to be following no more than a wide space between trees.

“I can see how you wouldn’t have to worry about kids coming out here,” Samantha said. “Spooky as hell. I know there’s a storm rumbling around, but . . . still.”

“This used to be fairly good riding on horseback,” he told her. “But the undergrowth got out of control and nobody wanted to keep up the trails. Land’s owned by a billionaire who also owns four or five mountains in the general area, and to his credit he wants to keep them wild. Hiking or riding is fine, but no lumber and no development.”

“Good for him,” Sam said.

“Yeah, I more or less agree with him. But a few hundred acres of this wilderness fall within my area of responsibility, so I’m really not keen on hikers or riders out this way.”

“Unless you send them,” Sam murmured as the headlights illuminated two clearly relieved uniformed police officers, who had their horses tied to trees just off the track. They were holding flashlights, and it was easy to see they’d been waving them around nervously until they saw the lights of vehicles approaching.

Jonah had gone over the plan with everyone, and everyone knew their part. There was no exit from this hole in the ground except the one they were going into.

They waited at the opening for just a couple of minutes, with Jonah and the other feds watching Sam. She swore under her breath, but said to Jonah, “No booby traps. No bombs.”

“Sam?”

She looked at her husband and partner briefly, then said to Jonah bleakly, “Go ahead and get EMS out here as quickly as you can. We’ll need five stretchers.”

“And five coffins?” Jonah asked steadily.

“No. No, they’re alive. Let’s go.”

He gave the order quickly, sending two officers back with one of the Jeeps to guide the EMS truck into the woods.

The first half-dozen people going in, which were Jonah, Sarah, and the agents, all had the big police spotlights that could be carried and gave off an amazing amount of light. They turned them on as soon as they started into the downward-slanting tunnel.

But within a very few steps, one by one they turned the lights off. Because there was light at the bottom of the tunnel.

Bright, bright light.

“It’s not a fire,” Lucas breathed. “Which means he wants us—you—to see his work.”

“Oh, Christ,” Jonah murmured.

“It isn’t what you think,” Sam said. “He didn’t physically torture them any more than he physically tortured Nessa.”

“Then—”

Jonah broke off as soon as he cleared the tunnel and stepped into the cavern. It wasn’t huge, maybe thirty feet from end to end, and about twenty feet across.

The lights had been placed with exquisite care, so that each of the missing people, watering eyes shut tight against the first light any of them had seen since they’d been brought here, weeks for some of them, were the inescapable focus.

Each of them sitting, unrestrained but unmoving, on upright wooden chairs. An IV pole beside each chair, the tubing from the bag snaking down and attached to the needles expertly placed in each victim’s arm. Unmoving. Unable to move.

Their pants and shorts, or panties, down around their ankles. And beneath them, fastened to the chairs they could not escape, were pots or bowls or buckets to catch their urine and feces.

“Oh, my God,” Jonah said, his voice hardly a whisper.

Lucas leaned over to say something to Sarah, and she immediately turned and began to herd the officers back up the tunnel. “We’ll need you later to help carry them,” she said, her voice breaking a little. “But not yet. Not just yet.”

“People always find new ways to torture each other,” Sam said. “Physically is the easy part. But mentally? Emotionally? How do you get over being abandoned in the darkness? Unable to move or speak even to call for help? How do you get over being so helpless that someone else has to empty– How do you get over that humiliation, that loss of dignity. How do you get over being so alone, and so untouched. For so long. Alone. In the dark.”

There was a moment of utter silence, and then they could all hear Amy Grimes mumbling to herself nothing that made sense. Nothing that would ever make sense.

“Let’s get some of these lights out,” Lucas suggested quietly. “Leave just enough for the medics to work by. And don’t break them. All these—all these people have bare feet.”

Jonah did his best not to look at them directly, as the level of light gradually diminished, but he eventually realized that none of them were going to open their eyes willingly. Not even Sean Messina, who had been taken barely a week before Nessa had.

None of them wanted to open their eyes even if they could. None of them wanted to believe in the voices they probably thought were imagined. None of them had it in them any longer to believe there could be anything else for them, ever, but the darkness.

–

WITH BOTH HANDS holding the hot coffee cup on the conference table in front of him, Dante said, “Nessa’s the only real survivor.” His voice was dull. “She wasn’t down there long enough. And she found her way out of the dark, on her own. That will count. That will mean something to her, some day in the future if not now.”

Jonah looked across the table at the two most experienced profilers here. They were all here, the feds and Sarah, all with coffee they’d barely touched and eyes that didn’t want to meet anyone else’s. Every one of them had helped carry the stretchers up that long, dark tunnel, only then accepting the silent, respectful help of the officers waiting outside.

Jonah said, “I know enough about profiling to know it’s about damaged people and the reasons people have inside them that give them the ability to damage others. So tell me. How many of the five . . . survivors . . . we brought out of that place are going to have lives worth living?”

Sam was the first to meet his eyes, her own so dark, as dark as they’d been when he’d first met her, dark and unspeakably old in her urchin’s pale face.

She drew a breath and said, “Mrs. Lang’s baby may help her. The maternal instinct is strong enough to overcome almost anything. Amy Grimes is young, and the young are resilient. It depends on how strong her sense of self is. That’s true of all of them. But . . .”

“But?”

“The judge is never going to be the man you once knew, Jonah. He was a man of dignity, and he can never see himself that way again. If he even leaves the clinic, it’ll likely be to go to some kind of mental care facility or at least a residential medical care facility. Maybe Sean Messina too. His sense of self seemed to be very wrapped up in being strong, independent, able to handle himself and whatever else came along. But he couldn’t handle what happened to him. Even the ones that somehow manage to move on, even Nessa, will be marked forever by what they experienced down in that hole in the ground.”

“Because of me.”

She shook her head immediately. “No, because of someone with a sick and twisted mind who wanted to make you suffer. And not just by a blow dealt and then over with.”

“What do you mean?”

“He knows you, Jonah. He knows how you feel about this town, these people. Especially these people. You saved them. Every one of them owed their life to you.”

Jonah started to speak, but didn’t when she held up a hand.

“This is important. This is why everything has happened the way it has. He wants you to suffer. He wants you to spend the rest of your life suffering because of what happened to these people. And even wondering if they would have been better off if you hadn’t saved them in the first place. Blaming yourself for what happened to them. For the rest of your life. That’s what he wants, Jonah. That’s what he needs.”

Lucas nodded. “She’s right.”

Jonah finally took a drink of his coffee, vaguely aware that he had the wrong order, it was too sweet. Not that he cared. “I just . . . I honestly can’t think of anyone who could hate me that much.”

“That’s because he doesn’t hate you,” Luke said.

“What? All that—and he doesn’t hate me?”

“If he hated you,” Robbie said slowly, “it would have been you down there.” She glanced at Luke, who nodded.

“Exactly. He doesn’t want to torture you, he wants to watch you torture yourself.”

“I still don’t—”

“Think,” Samantha urged. “He isn’t someone on the periphery of your life the way we originally thought. At least he wasn’t always. He looked up to you somehow, admired you. But then something happened. Something happened to him, just like it happened to those six other people. Only for whatever reason, you didn’t save him. Maybe you couldn’t. Or maybe you made a choice, and saved somebody else.

“Think, Jonah. You know who this is. Whatever happened to him was so traumatic it turned a normal man into a monster. And he blames you.”

Sarah caught her breath audibly. “Jonah.”

“You know who it is?”

She looked at him, white-faced. “You said it yourself. That maybe you shouldn’t have gotten him out of there. Because of all the pain. Months and months in the burn ward out in Nashville. Horrible, disfiguring scars. And then . . .”

It was Sam who asked. “What happened then? He survived the burns?”

Sarah was looking at Jonah as if she couldn’t look away. “One of the few really bad car crashes we’ve had here. Five years ago. Bast—Sebastian Gettys. He was driving too fast and missed a curve. Swerved, hit a culvert, and the car flipped. He’d been on his way home to cut the grass, and he had a can of gasoline in the back, a can with a loose lid. And the car had a faulty wire, one they’d recall the model for just the next year. The fire was . . . God, the fire. It was an inferno.

“We could hear the fire truck coming, but he was screaming.” Sarah closed her eyes briefly. “I can still hear that screaming sometimes in my mind. You couldn’t stand it. You grabbed a big wrench from your Jeep and somehow pulled the door open. He must have managed to get the seat belt undone, but he was still screaming, beating at the flames.”