Hollis said calmly, “So probably it wasn’t personal at all. Maybe the unsub wanted to find out if you could reach out telepathically. If anyone could hear you. Did you try right after you woke up in the box?”
Simon immediately shook his head. “Honestly, it didn’t occur to me for a long time. I don’t know how long.” His voice was very steady. “I was . . . panicked. Didn’t know for sure I was—was underground, but it’s what I thought. What was so terrifying. When the panic sort of died down, I started wondering if anyone would ever find me, ever even know where to look—and I suddenly realized I should have been trying to reach somebody, anybody.”
He looked at Nellie. “I didn’t try to reach you specifically, but within just a few minutes, I thought I had. I wasn’t sure, though. I don’t use my Talent a lot, but when I do there’s a pretty strong connection. This time the contact felt . . . tenuous. Almost muffled.”
She nodded. “To me as well. I was certain it was you, but not at all sure I could hang on to that thread long enough to find you.”
“Thank you.”
Nellie smiled at him, then looked at the others. “This . . . unsub . . . had to know Simon is a Cavendish, an elder, and so a telepath, probably a strong one. Wouldn’t he have expected him to reach out?”
It was Finn who said thoughtfully, “Maybe not. We’ve all been having trouble using our Talents in the last few weeks. Maybe he needed to know if Simon could reach anyone.”
Miranda said, “Maybe because the energy we’ve all been aware of is his doing and he’s not sure how effective it is.”
“Or,” Bishop said, “it’s affecting him, affecting his own abilities, and he wanted to know if any of us have the same problem.”
“So I was a lab rat.” Simon managed a smile. “A very lucky lab rat.”
Finn glanced at Bishop, then said, “We mean to make sure your luck holds. I’ll have a deputy outside the door here, and when you’re discharged, you’ll have an escort.”
Uneasy now, Simon said, “You mean he might not be finished with me?”
“I mean we’re not going to take any chances. We’re doing our best to keep a close eye on all the elders, especially when they’re in transit. Listen, the doc wants to keep you here at least until afternoon. Get some rest, okay?”
Simon didn’t bother to deny that being held for long hours in a nearly airless box that could very well have become his coffin had been exhausting. Instead, he merely smiled, thanked them all again, and settled back to rest.
They left his room and gathered in a waiting room just down the hall, the area nearly deserted at such an early hour. The sun had not yet come up.
Finn didn’t have to ask if the others, like himself, were up for the day. He merely said to Bishop, “Does this help us at all?”
“Maybe. That he was drugged is a new wrinkle—we believe—but the drug used, like so much these days, can be easily found and obtained on the Internet. Backtracking every citizen in Salem looking for that purchase would take far more time than we have.”
Nellie perched on the arm of a chair, absently petting Leo when he sat by her feet. Nobody had questioned her dog’s presence in the hospital, which vaguely surprised her. “Two people dead so far—that we know about. One of them this week. I’m sure I don’t have to tell anybody how glad I am that Simon is safe, but burying him alive for whatever reason doesn’t seem to fit with the rest. Am I the only one waiting for the other shoe to drop?”
“No,” Hollis said instantly. She was frowning. “I really don’t understand this . . . test, or game, or whatever it is. Keeping Simon alive, making sure he’d be alive all those hours. Except for the bump on his head and ligature marks from those zip ties, he doesn’t have a mark on him. From brutal torture and dismemberment to that? It doesn’t make sense. And another thing. We’re sure the first two victims weren’t psychic, and there are plenty of members of the five families who aren’t. Simon very definitely is. Why grab a strong telepath, mess around with some kind of injection and oxygen tanks, and then hang him out like bait on a hook?”
“To offer us a puzzle?” DeMarco suggested wryly.
“Or just to see if he could lead us around by the nose?” She sighed. “I know unsubs play games with law enforcement sometimes, and we’ve sure as hell known them to play games with us, specifically, but . . . that tends to be after we’ve been following them around for a while, right? Maybe even when we’re close to catching them, or believe we are. So they start playing games, to throw us a curve or two, make us rethink. Only that doesn’t apply here. At all. We’ve only just started building a profile. So, why now?”
Bishop said, “To slow us down, maybe, keep us from building that profile.”
“Every time he leaves us a victim or potential victim he gives us more information,” Hollis objected.
“True.”
“To muddy the water, maybe,” DeMarco said. “Two victims who were family members but not psychic; a third victim who is definitely psychic. Two men and a woman. Two who weren’t missed right away, one who was. Two brutally killed, one left alive for whatever reason—but who would certainly have died if Nellie hadn’t been able to read him and lead us to him. No real pattern we can grab onto.”
“Still family members,” Hollis said. “That’s all they have in common. Members of the Five. If anything, that’s even clearer now.”
“I don’t have enough deputies to watch every elder, much less watch them twenty-four hours a day,” Finn said unnecessarily. “Even just trying to protect those who have to be out alone is going to be difficult. Obviously, we’ll do what we can, but . . . I’ve spread the word that none of the Five should be alone, even at home if possible, for the duration, but I don’t know how much protection, if any, that’ll provide when we don’t have a name or a face to put to the threat. And every deputy I have on escort duty is one less I have to patrol and keep an eye out for trouble.”
Quentin said thoughtfully, “Which could also be something the unsub wants to make sure of. To tie up your resources and keep the rest of us spread thin, give himself more time and more room to . . . work.”
“And we still don’t know what his endgame is,” Diana added. “A grudge against the families is possible—we all know that—maybe because of the Talents or just their importance, their power, in Salem, but that would be more about what they are, not who they are. It doesn’t make sense that a motive like that would lead the unsub to just randomly take out members of the five families, whoever he can grab. Does it?”
“Unless we should be looking somewhere else entirely for a motive,” DeMarco said. “Maybe he’s been playing games all along. Maybe we’re looking exactly where he wants us to look.”
Hollis frowned at him. “At the Five.”
He nodded. “As you said, that’s even clearer now than it was when we got here. So that’s where we’re looking. At the Five. At them as potential victims. Around half the people in this valley are members of the five families. Three victims so far, all three members of the Five. Everything we know or believe puts the families at the center of our focus. And yet we’ve all agreed that doesn’t make sense. Wiping out the Five as an endgame would be crazy ambitious, never mind insane.”
Hollis said slowly, “We’re looking at the Five because of the victims chosen. Looking for a reason that ties in with their identity as members of the five families. Which is mostly why we’ve been spinning our wheels.”
“So maybe,” DeMarco suggested, “we should look at it another way. Maybe his motive, his endgame, is a lot more specific.”
“Specific to his victims?”
“Maybe . . . specific to only one victim.”
“One victim intentional, everything else he does window dressing?”
“We’ve seen it before.”
Hollis nodded. “Sleight of hand. I want to kill C, but I kill A and B first to divert suspicion.”
“Or the water is muddied because everything we know so far has led us to be focused on the Five. But all three victims could be connected by some reason other than their being members of the families. Three victims doesn’t give us enough to be certain of conclusions, not statistically. Especially in an area where there are so many overlaps in victimology. These people could be targeted, for all we can know, because they went to the same doctor or graduated from the same high school.”
“Great,” Hollis muttered.
“You know it’s as likely as anything else. Probably more likely.”
“I know. I don’t have to like it.”
Bishop said, “But we have to consider possibilities.”
“Yeah. But I still say the timing of this unsub is . . . off. Even if he wants to play games, or test us, or whatever,” Hollis said slowly. “Mostly serials are obsessed with satisfying their own twisted needs, killing one victim and then moving on to the next. They don’t have the desire or the time to lead us around by the nose.”
“So why is he bothering with games?” Quentin mused. “Why follow a brutal murder by burying Simon alive and allowing us the chance to save him? I think Reese is right. The only other answer I can think of is that he wants to distract us.”
“So what is it he doesn’t want us to see?” DeMarco finished.
“Megan,” Hollis said immediately, frowning. “His first victim. For months his only victim. But . . . if she was his real target, why would Cole Ainsworth’s murder have been so vicious? You don’t torture somebody just to kill them. You don’t torture somebody unless you’re sick enough to enjoy it.”
“True enough,” Bishop agreed.
Diana said, “Killing Megan could have triggered a lot of twisted urges. Couldn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Quentin said slowly. “Especially if he killed her in a rage and that rage wasn’t satisfied by killing her. Add that to the months after her death when he was lying low and couldn’t do anything about his feelings and urges and . . . Yeah. Her death could have triggered him in more ways than one.”
“So,” Hollis said, “we have to find out everything we can about Megan. About her life. And about her death.”
THEY RETURNED TO Hales B and B long enough for showers and breakfast, then split up. Finn and Nellie, after some argument, went to Nellie’s bank, where she had work waiting and where Finn could coordinate with his deputies and the team. And where neither would be alone.
Quentin and Diana headed back up to the site where Simon’s box prison waited so any evidence there could be tagged and collected, and Hollis and DeMarco went to check in with their acting medical examiner.
Bishop and Miranda went to talk to Megan Hales’s family. It was still early when they reached the Hales home out in the valley, but since Finn had called ahead they found her parents and teenage sister sitting around the breakfast table with coffee, all three still clearly in shock.
It was a comfortable, sprawling house, innumerable family photos the clearest indication of strong family ties. In virtually every grouping, Megan’s bright smile as a baby and child and young woman beamed out.
“I thought she was safe,” Megan’s mother, Sylvia, said to the agents, her voice curiously hollow. She stared down at the hands wrapped around her coffee cup, then lifted her anxious gaze to search their faces. “She’d talked about leaving ever since Paul . . . So I thought she had. She was—was embarrassed and self-conscious because everybody knew, and she just wanted to get away. To escape from the goldfish bowl, she said. I wished she’d write or call, of course I did, wished she’d let us know how she was doing, but I didn’t really expect . . . She was young, and a new life would be—would have been—exciting. There would have been so much to do. Starting a new life. She was—would have been—busy. We knew that. So when she didn’t call or write—”
Miranda, hearing the desperate need for reassurance, said quietly, “There was no way any of you could have known she didn’t leave the valley. Every indication was there that she did. You can’t blame yourselves.”
Frank Hales said, “Is that why she—why he picked her? Because she was going to leave? Because she was alone?” There was something in his voice that said it was a question that had tortured him.
“We aren’t sure,” Bishop told him. “Can you tell us about Megan? What she was like? Who her friends were?”
“You don’t think one of her friends—”
“No, probably not, but everything you tell us can help us to understand her. And understanding her could help us to find her killer.”
“She was a good girl,” her father said harshly. “No trouble at all as a child. Just like other little girls, she was horse crazy, rode all the time. She grew out of that by the time she was a teenager, when she—when she and Paul started to go steady.” He hurried on. “When she finished her schooling she went to work as an accountant, helping to keep the books for us at the office. She was busy. She didn’t have time to—to fool around. She was working for her future, for a good future. Planning it all out . . .”
“It wasn’t Paul. Was it?” Sylvia’s voice was thin.
Bishop shook his head. “He left Salem two months before and didn’t return until late last fall. His movements have been accounted for.”
“So he just jilted her.” Chloe Hales spoke up for the first time, her voice unnaturally steady.
Miranda looked at her. “Sisters talk,” she said quietly. “Did Megan say anything to you, Chloe? Was there anyone in her life she was . . . uneasy about?”
The teenager’s brows knit over bright blue eyes that remained fixed on her coffee mug. “What do you mean?”
“Just that. We have some reason to believe that Megan was killed by someone who knew her. Perhaps knew her well, or believed he did.”
“Believed he did?”
Miranda glanced at her husband, then said, “He may have been an . . . admirer. Watching her but not able to get up the courage to actually interact with her. Or he could have been a friend, one she may have confided in without any romantic interest.”
“Or?”
Miranda studied the girl for a moment. “Or . . . it might have been someone she turned to after Paul left. All those weeks of everyone around her knowing she’d been jilted, maybe feeling sorry for her. The day she’d planned for her wedding getting closer and closer. That had to be rough. Painful. It would have been natural to turn to someone else, another man, for comfort. Did she, Chloe?”
“She never would have cheated on Paul.”
“But after Paul ran off with someone else? That wouldn’t have been cheating.”
“She didn’t say anything to me about that,” Chloe muttered, still frowning and staring at her mug.
Frank Hales looked at his daughter, surprise and something else crossing his strong features. “Chloe? If you know something, you have to tell us.”
“She didn’t talk to me,” Chloe repeated.
Bishop said quietly. “But you noticed something, didn’t you, Chloe? Or maybe someone else noticed something, saw something, and told you about it?”
There was a long silence, and then Chloe half shook her head, but said, “Gabby Douglas was always jealous of Megan. Always. She couldn’t wait to say nasty things about Megan after Paul ran off with his cousin.”
“What did she tell you?”
Chloe hesitated again, then looked up, finally, and met Bishop’s steady gaze. “She said she’d seen Megan sneaking around. She said . . . that Megan must not have loved Paul after all, because she didn’t waste much time crawling into bed with someone else. And she said it was worse than being with a distant member of his own family like Paul had.”
“How was it worse?”
Chloe bit her lip.
Miranda said gently, “We need to know, Chloe. How was it worse than being with a distant member of his own family? Who was Megan seeing before she disappeared?”
“Danny Dryden,” Chloe whispered. “He’s . . . he’s one of our cousins. A first cousin.”
HOLLIS AND DEMARCO went to the hospital, where Dr. Jill Easton, her assistant, and her colleague Dr. Brady had pulled an all-nighter to tackle the two postmortems.
Though all three looked tired, nobody complained. The two men sat on either side of a metal desk in one corner of the large, sterile morgue, drinking coffee, while Jill joined Hollis and DeMarco next to the remains that lay underneath sheets on two stainless steel tables.
Hollis had never been fond of morgues, but she was accustomed enough that neither the harsh lighting nor the eye-stingingly harsh odors of chemicals and the faint, underlying smell of death distracted her from her job. Much.
“Please tell us something we didn’t know,” she asked Jill in a tone that really was almost pleading.
Jill smiled faintly, but there was a tiny frown between her delicate brows. “Well, with Cole Ainsworth—the ID is now official, thanks to a healed fracture from football and a small scar on the sole of his left foot—I can’t tell you anything any of you couldn’t see for yourselves. He was likely rendered unconscious by a severe blow to the head, and COD was massive blood loss and shock.
“Between those two events, he was tortured by somebody with enthusiasm and a very sharp knife, maybe a scalpel but likely something as common as a kitchen or pocket knife. Your unsub didn’t stop when his victim stopped breathing, which is why Ainsworth looks the way he does. The unsub had fun removing most of the skin in strips, some of which he seared apparently just because. He both cut and crushed muscles and some organs, the latter probably with some kind of common tool like a hammer or mallet. What organs he didn’t destroy by crushing he removed and left with the other remains. He didn’t exactly dismember Ainsworth so much as crush some of the long bones of the arms and legs—with pliers, I think—badly enough that nothing but a few tendons and shreds of muscle held them in place. It was afterward that he cut or broke most of the long bones to separate them from the other remains.”
She shrugged slightly. “I don’t know if time of death matters to you in this particular case, since I understand you believe he was held for quite a while before he was killed. And TOD isn’t easy to determine because of what was done to the body and the cold temperatures. But I estimate he’s been dead about forty-eight hours.”
DeMarco said, “Do you know if he was drugged?”
“Preliminary tox screen doesn’t show alcohol or drugs or other toxins, but I’ve sent samples to the lab. Results in a few days, probably.”
“If you had to guess?” Hollis asked.
“If I had to guess, I’d say he was awake and aware while all of it was going on.”
“Awake. Jesus. Any signs he was restrained in any way?”
“Yeah. Ligature marks on one otherwise unmarked wrist and ankle from a fairly thick rope. He was tied that way for quite a while. Hours at least. Longer. But traces of an adhesive were found on the arms, wrists, and ankles. There were also some wood slivers embedded in his back, arms, and legs. My guess, after he was tied up for a while, he was then duct-taped to some kind of wooden frame, something as simple as a cross, that held his body fairly stationary while the unsub worked on him.”
Hollis winced and exchanged glances with her partner. “A cross that might have been symbolic?”
“Maybe. Though I’d guess it was more likely the simplest, strongest frame he could construct and use without much effort and using tools ready to hand. No special knowledge or skills required, and judging by the splinters the wood was likely from some old woodpile or tumbledown building.”
“Okay. And Megan?”
“Died sometime last summer, approximate.”
Hollis nodded. “Fits our time frame.”
Jill looked at her thoughtfully. “You saw her, right? Her spirit?”
“Yeah, yesterday morning. Why?”
“She happen to tell you she was pregnant?”
With another glance at DeMarco, Hollis said, “No. How far along?”
“Six, eight weeks. She may not have known herself, but chances are she at least suspected.”
Hollis was thinking about Paul Ainsworth and that very sudden jilting of his fiancée, thinking about how an unexpected pregnancy would have compounded the misery of that hellish situation for Megan, but all she said was “Okay. Can you tell how she died?”
“Hyoid bone is fractured, pretty nearly crushed, so I’m thinking she was strangled by someone with very powerful hands. With so little flesh remaining it’s hard to be sure of bruising around the throat, but I am.” She didn’t have to explain to them how she was.
Hollis merely nodded.
“I don’t believe he tortured her,” Jill went on. “In fact, he appears to have buried her with care. And possibly caring. We found enough to be certain there were flowers placed in the grave. Not held in her hands, but spread all around her, under her, like a bed. And one more thing. I don’t believe that diamond ring went in the ground with her. Best guess, it was placed on her finger within the last couple of weeks.”
“But it was hers.”
“The report I got is that it was traced to the jewelry store where Paul Ainsworth purchased it just before they got engaged. Anything over a carat is traceable, and the setting was custom. It was her engagement ring.”
“That’s interesting,” Hollis said slowly.
“I thought you’d like that.”
“Any idea why he would have put the ring back on her finger sometime after she was originally buried?”
“Maybe as simple as he didn’t want to be caught with it in his possession.”
“Or as complicated as—?”
“Well, we can safely infer at least one thing. I can tell you she’d been uncovered and then reburied numerous times since she was originally buried.”
Hollis drew a breath and exchanged glances with her partner. “Did you find any foreign DNA?”
“Yes. Some pretty degraded, some not so much. A good defense attorney might make mincemeat of it, but I know what I know.”
“Semen?”
“Semen. He visited her. A lot.”