Laurie glanced at the screen in frustration. Her phone had stopped being a means of communication. Now it was just a clock, and it was exactly two minutes since she’d last checked it. Cameron had been gone for much longer than she’d anticipated, and rather than risk going completely stir-crazy, she had come outside and wandered a little way from the cabin into the forest. Her gun was tucked firmly into the waistband of her jeans, but she didn’t feel afraid out here. She felt more comfortable than in the cabin, where every creak of the wooden frame had her eyes skittering left and right, making her fearful Grant Becker had found her hideaway and was on his way inside to get her.
She was in danger of allowing him to dominate her through fear even if he couldn’t get to her in person, and she decided she’d rather risk a face-to-face confrontation in the open than cower in a corner. Sitting on a rock, looking down the majestic valley, Laurie wanted this thinking time to review what she knew of the murders and Grant’s part in them. Instead, her mind stubbornly refused to shift away from Cameron and the events of the previous night.
How did this happen? How, in the space of a few days, had she gone from being the ultimate professional, married to her job, to being so utterly, hopelessly attracted to the man she had been sent here to investigate? She tried to analyze it. Was it their unique situation? She’d never been in this sort of danger before, and he had come to her rescue. Was she seeing him as a modern-day knight in shining armor? Was it because they’d been unexpectedly thrown together? Was she—heaven forbid—subconsciously trying to step in and replace Carla because she sensed that might be what he needed?
This isn’t reality. She had to keep reminding herself of that. We’ve never been granted the opportunity to get to know each other. The person I think I’ve fallen for doesn’t exist. If we met under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t look at him twice. Okay, that wasn’t strictly true. Any sane woman with a pulse would look at Cameron twice. But I wouldn’t be feeling like this. I wouldn’t be driven to distraction by this restless, burning longing for a man I met a few days ago.
“Laurie.” Cameron’s voice jolted her back down to earth. Whom was she kidding? As she rose from her rocky seat, she knew she was in deep trouble. It didn’t matter how long she’d known him, what the circumstances were or what was coming in the future. This man held her in the palm of his hand, and there was no chance she was getting away anytime soon. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
Although she smiled up at him, he didn’t return the expression, and she saw the depth of his concern in his eyes. For a second, she put herself in his place. He’d lost Carla to Grant, and now Grant was coming after Laurie. I don’t mean as much to him as she did—no one could—but it must hurt like hell to be reminded.
“I’m sorry.” She tried to keep her voice upbeat but failed miserably. “It felt claustrophobic in there on my own.”
His face softened. “Let’s go back and get a drink while I tell you about my strange morning.”
Once they were back inside the cabin, Laurie listened with a growing sense of disbelief as Cameron recounted the story of what he’d seen at the Paradise Creek vacation village and his subsequent conversation with Chief Wilkinson.
She felt the color draining from her face. “I don’t understand. I spoke to Captain Harper myself. Even though he wasn’t happy with me when I told him I wanted to stay in Stillwater for a few days, he told me he was going to inform the FBI about Moreton as soon as he got off the phone.”
“Talk me through that conversation. Start to finish.” Cameron carried the coffee cups out onto the porch. Laurie sat on the bench, tucking her legs under her in a defensive position. “How did he sound when you spoke to him?”
“It’s hard to say. The reception was so bad.” She frowned. “In fact, I couldn’t hear anything at all that first time.”
“First time?” Cameron’s gaze became intent.
“Yes, I didn’t really think much of it with everything else that was going on. I called Captain Harper’s number, but the line was so bad all I could hear was a buzzing noise. I ended the call and a few minutes later he called me back.” Lifting a hand to her mouth as a thought struck her, she turned wide eyes to Cameron’s face. “Oh, dear Lord. It wasn’t him, was it?”
“Check the call log on your phone.”
With fingers that weren’t quite steady, Laurie checked the last number to make an incoming call to her phone. She held it up to show Cameron. “No caller ID.”
Cameron took a sip of his coffee. “Interesting, but it’s not conclusive. When the signal was bad, your captain could have called you back from another phone rather than using his own cell. How did he sound?”
“It was hard to say. His voice was faint. There was still interference, like there was static on the line.” She looked up, her brow furrowing as she concentrated on the memory of that call. “I told you about the cursing, right? That was unusual. The captain has a temper, but I’ve never heard that sort of language from him before. He’s usually always professional. Is it possible Grant intercepted my call to Captain Harper somehow?”
“From what you’ve told me, I’d say it’s not only possible, it’s highly likely. If he was hacking your phone, he’d have been alerted as soon as you tried to make your call to Harper. All he needed to do was use some sort of jamming equipment so you couldn’t hear anything and were forced to hang up. Then he called you back, pretending to be Harper.”
“I’ve been having problems with my phone signal.” Laurie did her best to remember when it started. It came back to her now. “Ever since the night we went to Dino’s. The night I first met Grant. He could have been hacking my phone since then, but to do that he’d have needed my number.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Did you give your number to the vacation rental company?”
“Yes, they needed it for housekeeping and to give me directions when I first arrived. But surely they wouldn’t give it out, not even to a police officer.”
“No, but Grant must have found a way of getting into their office on the vacation village site. He had to have a key to your cabin. He got in there to leave the first arrangement of flowers and then he got in the second time to kill Moreton,” Cameron reminded her. “He could have found your number at the same time.”
Laurie took a moment to think about that. About her sleeping in that cabin while Grant Becker had the key to the door in his pocket. About him turning the key over between his fingers as he planned how he was going to kill her. Then another thought took over. She turned wide eyes to Cameron. “So we are still the only people who know Moreton is dead?”
“It looks that way.” His face was grim as he sipped his coffee.
Laurie assimilated the impact of those words. The bottom line wasn’t good. Two days ago, when she had believed she was calling Captain Harper, not only had she told him Moreton had been murdered, she had also told him where the agent’s body was. Now the body had vanished and she was back to having nothing except allegations and hunches. Her captain had no idea what she was doing here in Wyoming. The exact nature of her undercover work for the FBI was a closely guarded secret.
The only people she knew for sure she could trust were Moreton and Mike Samuels. One of those was dead, and with her laptop gone, she had no way of contacting the other. If she called Captain Harper now and outlined her suspicions against Grant Becker, she knew he would listen to her, no matter how wild her story sounded. He had known her since she joined the force, had nurtured and supported her as one of his most promising junior officers. But there was no way he would respond with a knee-jerk reaction to what sounded—even to Laurie’s own ears—like a crazy accusation against a well-respected sheriff from another state. No, the captain would do what he always did and play by the rules. Which would involve Laurie coming out of hiding and exposing herself to danger. The situation would be exactly the same if she tried to call the FBI. And, anyway, how the hell was she supposed to start that conversation with a telephone operator in the nearest field office?
She was aware of Cameron watching her as though he was attempting to follow the thoughts flitting across her face. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed.
“Grant has had his own way for too long over all of this. It’s time to take the fight to him.”
* * *
“The common denominator is how these women look, right?” They had eaten dinner and were sitting across from each other at the table. Cameron was making notes on a pad. Laurie nodded. “So it seems likely he sees them, they have the right look, he sends them flowers and then he snatches them and kills them?”
“That seems the most obvious scenario.” Laurie took another surreptitious glance at the darkening window.
“Stop worrying. He isn’t out there,” Cameron assured her. “Back to our scenario. What if there is more to it? What if he needs to have some interaction with them, as well?”
Her smile peeped out, making his heart give that extra beat it reserved just for her. “I thought I was meant to be the cop around here?”
He threw out his chest, striking a macho pose. “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know how these things work.”
She laughed, and he was pleased to see her starting to relax. The realization she had no credible way of contacting the authorities about Moreton’s death and the missing girls had hit her hard. “Okay, continue with your theory, Detective Delaney.”
“If he did have some interaction with them before he killed them, we might be able to link him to at least one—hopefully more—of them.”
“There’s just one problem with that. None of these women are officially dead.”
“I’ve thought of that.” Cameron held up his pad, pointing to the words he’d just underlined. Find the bodies.
Laurie slumped in her seat. “Just like that? In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a very big state. Searching it would take longer than forever. Particularly as we have no way of knowing where to start.”
“Nobody has been looking until now. At least not officially. And nobody has been looking for bodies,” he reminded her. “Grant has been safe because no one has made any link between him and these girls. Now he has a double problem.” She raised a questioning brow. “You’re a cop and I know him just about as well as anybody does.”
“Okay.” She took a sip of the wine he’d poured for them both. It was a bottle he’d snatched up from the lake house before he left, one of his favorite vintages, and the mellow flavor was helping Cameron relax. He hoped it would have the same effect on Laurie. “Tell me about our suspect.”
Cameron thought about Grant Becker. Big, dependable Grant. That was the way he’d always viewed him. Yet, even as a child, he’d known there were things in his friend’s life that were troubling. He tried to find the words to paint Laurie a picture of the man he’d more or less grown up with. “We met in the sandbox on the first day of school and have been friends ever since. My mom would bring him home from school with us and he’d stay for dinner two, maybe three, times a week. I never went back to his house.”
“Why was that?” Laurie’s eyes were fixed on his face.
“At first I never questioned it. You don’t as a kid, do you? You just accept things. As we grew older, I realized his home life wasn’t good. His dad was a drunk. Grant would have bruises. Oh, he always had an explanation for them. He walked into a door...fell down a stair.”
“You think his dad beat him?”
“That was what I figured at the time, when I was old enough to think about it at all.” Cameron took a slug of wine. “I was wrong. His dad left home when we were ten and the bruises continued. That was when I knew it must have been his mom who was beating him.”
“Didn’t anyone do anything?”
“I know my own mother went to see the school principal a few times.” Cameron’s lips quirked into a smile at the memory of the fiercely protective woman who had reared him. With enough maternal love to spare for every child in Stillwater, Sandy Delaney hadn’t been able to bear the thought of her son’s friend being subjected to cruelty. “But while Grant stuck to the story his injuries were caused by accidents, there was nothing anyone could do. Short of sending him on summer camps for underprivileged children and hoping he might open up to someone, of course. And I know what you’re going to say. If Grant was abused by his mother as a child, that placed him at risk of becoming an offender—potentially a killer—as an adult.”
Laurie lifted her wineglass to her lips, sipping the light-colored liquid slowly. “It’s not my area of expertise. While I know most serial killers have experienced childhood trauma of some sort, not all victims of child abuse go on to kill. Many grow up to lead fulfilling lives. But abuse can impair self-esteem, interfere with the ability to function adequately in society, succeed academically and form healthy relationships. Take that to the extreme and serial killers will often fail to keep a job for any period of time and rarely have a successful intimate relationship.”
“Academically, and in the workplace, Grant has always been an overachiever. In school, his grades were consistently well above average, in spite of anything he might have been dealing with at home. When he left school he joined the police force and was fast-tracked onto a criminal justice degree program. Once he’d completed his degree, he pretty much straight away ran for office. That about sums up his determination. And you’ve seen how he looks. Muscles like those don’t come easy. He’s a big guy anyway, but he works hard to maintain all that physical strength and endurance.”
“What you’re describing isn’t necessarily someone who is functioning adequately in society,” Laurie said. “It sounds to me like Grant has always had a hell of a lot to prove.”
Cameron considered that statement. “I never really thought of it like that. I guess you could be right, except...well, couldn’t you say the same thing about me? I worked hard at school, got a degree, built up my own business and got elected to public office at a young age. How is Grant so different from me?”
“That brings me to my next question. Does he have the ability to form healthy relationships?”
“Growing up, I think I was his only friend. In recent years, he and Vincente have become friendly. They are both single guys with a few interests, like hunting, in common.” He considered the matter. “Although when we saw them together at Dino’s, I was surprised. I thought the friendship had fizzled out recently.”
Laurie shook her head. “The question was not so much about friendships, although they are important. I meant intimate relationships.”
Cameron gave it some careful thought. He couldn’t remember Grant ever forming an attachment to a woman. Even during their teenage years, his friend had never seemed to experience the highs and lows of the agonizing crushes that gripped his peers. He shook his head. How had he missed this?
“As far as I know, he never had a relationship. Never even dated. The first time I saw him pay any attention to a woman was when he asked Carla out that first time he met her. If I hadn’t been so mad at him for hitting on my date, I might almost have been pleased he was finally relaxing and taking time off from his job long enough to pay attention to his personal life.”
“Except we now know his interest in Carla wasn’t normal.” Cameron’s fingers tightened around the stem of his wineglass at the words, and Laurie placed her hand on his arm, her face sympathetic.
He relaxed slightly under the pressure of her fingers. “So we can look at the missing girls and see if we can make a link to Grant that way, or we can look at possible places he may have disposed of their bodies.”
Laurie jumped up. “The lack of internet is a hindrance, but I made some notes about these girls. You may recognize some of their names.” She headed into the bedroom and emerged with a notepad. Flipping over the pages, she bent her head over what appeared to be a series of hieroglyphics.
“Did a spider crawl over the page?” Cameron teased.
Laurie frowned in mock annoyance. “If you can’t read it, neither can anyone snooping. Let’s start with the first girl to go missing. Lisa Lambert vanished two and a half years before Carla died. Age twenty-two, she was a clerk working at Palmerston Insurance in Stillwater, although she was barely clinging on to her job. She shared an apartment, had some problems with drugs and alcohol. She didn’t come home after a night out, which wasn’t unusual. When she’d been gone a week, her roommate reported her missing.”
Cameron shook his head. “I didn’t know her. Don’t even remember anything about her disappearance, but—” he looked stunned “—my God, Laurie, that was only six months after Grant met Carla.”
“If Carla had the sort of effect on him you described, who knows what that did to an unbalanced mind? He could have seized on anything about Lisa that reminded him of Carla. We know their coloring was the same. Eight months after Lisa disappeared, Kathy Sachs, a waitress working at the Stillwater Heights Hotel, didn’t turn up for her shift. She’d only been there a month or two, wasn’t local, had said she wasn’t happy in her job. She was quite open about the fact that she only came to this area to escape an abusive marriage, but she missed her family back home. No one took much notice when she didn’t show, except she left all her stuff behind, even her cell phone. The hotel manager decided to report her missing.”
“Don’t tell me—she never got in touch to claim her stuff?” Cameron grimaced. Somehow, hearing there were five missing girls wasn’t as bad as hearing their individual stories.
“If she did, there’s no record of it.” Laurie went back to her notes. “The next girl who definitely fits the physical type I was looking for is nineteen-year-old Tanya Horton. She was due to meet friends at the cinema in Stillwater. When she didn’t turn up, they went in without her. After the movie, Tanya’s best friend rang her mom to check if she was okay. Tanya was known to be something of a wild child, and it wouldn’t have been out of character for her to have gone off somewhere without telling anyone where. On this occasion, her mom confirmed she had left on time to meet them. She didn’t live in town. Her folks had a place out near Elmville. Her car was found on the road between Elmville and Stillwater. The keys were still in the ignition. Like Lisa, Tanya has never been seen since.”
“I vaguely remember that in the news. When did it happen?”
Laurie squinted at her scribbled notes. “A year before Carla was killed.”
“And no one was linking these cases?” Cameron couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “These young women all went missing months apart in a specific geographical location and nobody was asking questions?”
“Cameron, there are seven hundred and fifty thousand people reported missing every year in the United States. At any one time, there will be about ninety thousand people still unaccounted for. Some of those people will be dead, some don’t want to be found. The police do all they can, but the sad fact is, unless bodies start turning up, no one is going to make these sort of links.”
“Moreton did,” he argued.
“Moreton was a geek, a one-off. He found patterns where no one else did, and he used sophisticated technology to help him. Your local police don’t have that sort of equipment, and, don’t forget, they were actually hampered by the fact one of their own was doing all he could to throw them off the scent.”
He was reluctant to let it go, but they could spend all night arguing over past mistakes. They needed to move this forward. “Who was next? Carla?”
“No. The next one is intriguing and possibly doesn’t quite fit the pattern of a missing person. I added her to the list because of how she looks, but she was never reported missing. Not in this country, anyway.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Marie O’Donnell was a young Irish woman who had been visiting her boyfriend on a tourist visa. When Marie’s visa expired, she had to go home to Ireland. The plan was she would return when she could get another visa. She never came back, and he never heard from her again. The reason her case made the headlines is the boyfriend was quite vocal about a system that could break up relationships. He became quite the campaigner.”
Cameron had been doodling on his own notepad as he listened, but he looked up sharply at that. “What was the boyfriend’s name?”
Laurie shook her head regretfully. “I didn’t make a note of his name. Is it important?”
“If I’m right, I know it anyway. He chained himself to the railings outside the council offices, even though we explained to him the laws governing visas are national, not local. Ever since then he’s dropped into my office once in a while to tell me where I’m going wrong. Alberta, my secretary, even knows how he takes his coffee.” He grinned reminiscently. “His name is Toby Murray.”
“Can we go and see him?” Laurie’s eyes sparkled.
“I’m not sure it’s safe for you to leave the cabin.”
Her eyes shifted again to the window. It was completely dark now. “Cameron, I’m a police officer. I’ve worked undercover many times. I’ve felt afraid before, but never like I did when I was here alone.” Her eyes seemed huge as they met his.
Cameron rose and went to the window, closing the drapes and shutting out the night. “Then we’ll just have to take care we don’t bump into Grant.” He held out his hand. “Let’s get some sleep.”
She rose, coming to him and placing her hand in his. “Sleep?” There was a trace of disappointment in her voice.
“Among other things.”
She rose on the tips of her toes, fitting the contours of her body intimately to his. “It’s the other things that have me interested.”