Hunters Read online

  “I ran a verification check on her and I’m not sure what to think. The Bureau never came back to me.”

  “That is odd.”

  “Yeah, and she said eight in the morning. It’s four in the morning.”

  “I noticed.”

  “So don’t send anybody, but watch my back for me.”

  “You’re gonna carry, I assume.”

  “Oh, yes.” He headed upstairs, pulled on some jeans and a sweatshirt, then strapped on his gun and threw a jacket over it. He splashed his face, but didn’t take the time to shave. Then he took an equipment pack off its shelf in the closet and took it with him. It was all stuff he’d put together himself, a manhunter’s kit.

  It was still deep night, and colder than he’d thought it would be, with wind coming steadily down from the north. As he opened the garage, the rattling of the door echoed through the silent neighborhood. No lights came on, though. Everybody knew that he kept irregular hours.

  The predawn air was icy silver, and the tires crunched on frost as he backed down his driveway. The Malibu’s heater screamed.

  Cold, hot, his body could absorb whatever came its way.

  He had worked himself into a new man, as hard as stone, as quick as the air, a man too silent inside to feel fear. He’d practiced with his pistol until it seemed an extension of his body. He did not push, he did not heel, and hours of exercise ensured that his wrist would never break in anticipation of recoil. He was comfortable with the standard issue Glock, but also with the .357 Magnum, and, of course, with the old Colt Positive, known as the Police Special.

  He did not go straight to the warehouse—never that—but rather made his way through the streets of Menard, the pretty, average city that had been his born home and would always be his home.

  He passed Abby’s girlhood house, now owned by the Dickson family. Along with Eddie and half the other guys in town, he’d courted her on that porch. He’d come to it at midnight, his adolescent body filled with desire, and swung alone on the old porch swing until her dad had come out and swung with him. Bill Baumgartner had understood a lot of things. When he gave Abby away, tears had touched his eyes as a smile had wreathed his face.

  Good people, Abigail and her folks.

  Bill and Amy were in Menard Memorial now, and when he went to see them on Sundays, he always told them the same thing, “I am searching.”

  For the kidnapper and killer.

  For Abby’s soul.

  For the unlived life of the child she might have been carrying.

  For the truth, cold and clean.

  The warehouse was one of the tin-siding jobs that looked like a gigantic barn. On its side was a faded sign, unreadable.

  He pulled his car up and got out. There were no other vehicles around.

  This was looking more and more wrong. Very wrong. But if she wasn’t law enforcement, who could she be? Surely the kidnapper wasn’t a woman—this woman.

  He been a detective long enough to know that the unexpected is usually the thing most to be expected.

  He walked up to the door, which was unchained, the locks thrown back.

  There was danger here, no question.

  He went in.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The air was cold and thick, smelling of mold and wet cardboard. His eyes were good in darkness, but not this good, so he put on the infrared glasses he had designed himself, cutting the lenses from a couple of Hoya RM9s. Then he pulled out his infrared illuminator and methodically swept his surroundings. A sodden mass of cardboard boxes appeared like a distant mountain range. Closer, he saw a jumble of ruined bicycles. Behind them were rows of dead Christmas poinsettias in plastic pots, also dry aquariums.

  There used to be light manufacturing here in Menard, little factories that used wetback labor to make cheap goods that would be sent out to California on the railroad. No more.

  Debris was what he had expected. It was what he did not see that was troubling him. The sense of abandonment had changed. Now, he felt the presence of watchers. So far, he hadn’t spotted them, but he knew that this was only because he hadn’t looked in the right place.

  With a movement as smooth and natural as taking a breath, he slipped his gun into his hand. Out of habit, he’d brought his Glock. Should have taken the Magnum instead. He was off duty and officially on leave, so it had been his choice.

  “Hello,” he said. “My name is Flynn Carroll. You asked me to come here.”

  Then he knew that somebody was behind him. It wasn’t a hunch this time, or an instinct. He’d heard the whisper that jeans make when they rub against each other.

  Sucking in breath, then slowly releasing it, he went deep into himself, blanking his chattering mind by concentrating his attention on the sound. In another moment, he was going to need to move very, very fast. He would have one chance only.

  Another sound came, this time off to his right. So there were at least two of them, and they were maneuvering to place him in crossfire.

  “Let’s stop this right now,” he said aloud. His words were followed by a silence. Were they surprised? He thought not. He thought they were very far from surprised, because he could see a third one off to his left, a figure that was more slight than the other two. Could be Diana. “Look, I’m gonna end up using this thing if somebody doesn’t show themselves real soon.”

  Outside, the wind shook the thousand windowpanes and made the tin roof jump and rattle. The massive late season blizzard that was bringing the arctic to Montana was now also plunging southward into Texas.

  “Flynn, listen carefully.”

  Diana’s voice filled the room, a whisper from everywhere.

  “Everything is good, Flynn. We’re all friends here. We just need to be very, very careful. This is all routine safe practice in this unit.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” a male voice drawled.

  A hand came down on his shoulder—and he took the guy down with a standing grapple, a simple jujitsu maneuver for which his assailant was, to Flynn’s surprise, entirely unprepared.

  “Keep back,” Diana snapped. “Don’t challenge him.”

  The guy he’d taken down got up. His face was hard to see in the darkness, but Flynn sensed a scowl of rage.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  All he could see of the eyes were shadowy sockets, but he could feel the anger.

  “Flynn,” Diana said, “please give Captain Larsen your pistol.”

  “No.”

  “Flynn, you’ve come in here heavily geared and with a drawn weapon. Of course we’re being careful. Now, calm down. Give him the gun.”

  Flynn thought about it. He didn’t move.

  “We need to fly before dawn. We have a long way to go and time is of the essence. If you want to help prevent another disappearance and maybe stop this perp, now’s your chance.”

  “I don’t like total strangers coming up on me in dark rooms.”

  “This is a special unit, Flynn. We’re operating under our own set of protocols. We’ve set up an orientation for you downstairs.” She turned on the lights.

  He lost his night vision equipment. Nobody else was showing a pistol, so he put his away. But he did not give it up.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  At the far end of the space there was an old iron spiral staircase that had probably been ordered from the Sears Catalog a hundred years ago. He followed the rest of them down, and found himself in a basement that was just as dark as the floor above had been, but felt smaller. Not for long, though. A match flickered as Diana Glass lit a gasoline lantern—and hung it on the barrel of some kind of old tank. The thing wasn’t in US livery and it was dusty, but it looked like it had never been driven.

  “The Korean War,” she said, waving a dismissive hand toward it. “They were on their way to San Diego when the conflict ended. Great shielding if you worry about listening devices.”

  “Which you do?”

  “That would be correct. Flynn, first off, I want you to unde
rstand that there are many things that make this unit special. The first of these is that we’re all just the same as you. We all have a missing loved one.”

  “None of ’em walked out,” a male voice said. “My Cindy did not walk out.”

  “Louie Lander, LAPD,” Diana said. “Just like you, just like the rest of us, he’s done a hell of a job on a lot of missing persons cases.”

  Louie Lander had a tight-to-the-skull faces and a hard, sad smile. “Just like me,” Flynn thought, “I smile like that.”

  “Can you explain this security, because this is the most unusual damn unit I’ve ever come across.”

  “Flynn,” Diana replied, “we’re dealing with the most unusual damn thing that’s ever happened. Mike, why don’t you tell him your story?”

  The second of the three guys standing in the light said, “Sure, Diana.” He regarded Flynn with eyes full of pain. “We were having a cookout. It was just after dark. My wife and my little boy were out in the backyard playing hide-and-seek. I was cooking on the grill. I noticed it was kinda quiet.” He paused. “That was in 2008. I never saw them again.”

  Flynn thought about this. “You were there? Right there?”

  “I was standing twenty-three feet from my wife when it happened. My boy was playing near the back fence. Forty feet. I heard nothing, saw nothing. Finally I ran out into the alley. Up and down. Went to the neighbors.” He stopped. “Called the precinct.” He looked toward Diana Glass. His voice dropped. “A missing roller bag did the investigation in. Plus, the way they disappeared. No sign of an intruder. The local Bureau decided it was a walkout.”

  “Your son—his case wouldn’t have been abandoned.”

  “He’s on goddamn milk cartons,” Mike muttered. “Nothing.”

  The same thought came into Flynn’s mind that must have come into the mind of every investigator on the case: she left and took the boy with her, open and shut. No way could they have been abducted right out from under the nose of the father.

  Mike’s grin was eloquently bitter. “I can see what you’re thinking,” he said. “We were very much in love.” He sighed heavily. “We still are. At least, inside me. Inside me, my family goes on.”

  “I hear that loud and clear,” Flynn said. He looked to the third guy. “What about you?”

  “First, my wife’s sister, six years ago. She was a talented woman, a violinist with the St. Louis Symphony. We all thought she walked out on her life, all except her boyfriend. The locals did a good workup. Went nowhere. Then, two years ago last month, I got hit. My Lynn. She comes out of the Costco near our place at ten at night—she worked there nights—gets in her car. And it just sits there. Eleven, I can’t get her on her cell so I drive over. There’s the damn Altima, empty. I call in the troops but nobody can find her. We get the security video. Two cameras. She crosses the parking lot, gets in the car, and it just sits there. Except.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There was a power failure at the store. One minute after she got in. Lasted twelve minutes.” The locals—my buddies—figured that’s when the kidnap took place. But when the Bureau found that a couple of changes of clothes and six hundred dollars in cash were gone with her, they got a different idea.”

  “So we’re all in the same situation. Cases abandoned as walkouts. The operative word here is ‘abandoned.’ These are dead cases. So why are we here?”

  “Last year, the Bureau finally upgraded its relational databases,” Diana said. “The first thing I did was to look for cases similar to my husband’s.” In the hard light of the gasoline lantern, her face had taken on a startling brightness, as if her skin was on fire inside. “What I discovered is that he wasn’t alone. Real walkouts are common, but almost always associated with domestic disturbance. Some of them are genuine, some of them are murders. There are a number of them like our cases, with no domestic trouble, and the spouse insisting that he or she would never, ever do this.”

  “How many?”

  “Flynn, over the past ten years, I’ve found eight thousand unsolved disappearances, two hundred thirty-six of which involve people who continue to claim that their loved one was kidnapped, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

  “Anything linking them?”

  “Nobody was a criminal, nobody was sick, nobody was disabled. Everybody had some sort of notable talent—musician, artist, electronics expert, you name it. It’s a highly functional group of people.”

  “Abby was a musician.” He sighed. “So the FBI finally realized that something was up. A serial kidnapper. But why organize the unit now? Just because they got a new database?”

  She glanced at her watch. “We need to move. The reason we pulled you in now is we’ve got the best case we’ve ever had, and we want the best team that can be deployed.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s always an element of risk in this work, Flynn. We don’t want to talk about it until we’re off the ground.”

  “You’re saying we’re not secure?” He looked around. “You’re not sure of these guys?”

  “There could be extremely sophisticated surveillance,” Mike said.

  “We’ve set a trap for the perp,” Diana added. “He’s taken two sisters. The third sister has moved in to live with her father. It’s an easy stakeout, and we intend to be waiting, starting tonight.”

  “How long? Do you know when he’s gonna show up?”

  “We think he’ll use the blizzard to cover his tracks.”

  “So it’s in Montana. And we’re sure he’ll show?”

  “Nothing is certain, obviously. But this is the most talented of the three sisters. She plays the piano and the violin, she’s a novelist, she’s a dancer. We have a target profile, and she’s way up at the top. Her sisters were good, but she’s outstanding.” She strode to the rickety spiral stair and went pounding up, oblivious to its creaking and swaying.

  What the hell was going on here? What kind of a perp were they dealing with, who could steal this many people and do it so well?

  They had an ancient minivan, white and caked with dirt, its side panels scratched deep from a lot of overland work. The interior had once been luxurious, but the leather was now full of scuffs and tears, and the windshield was intricately cracked.

  He sat behind Mike, who drove, consulting a handheld GPS as he maneuvered through the empty predawn streets. If they didn’t want to ask the local guy for directions, that was their business.

  It was six, shift change, and he saw a cruiser heading toward headquarters, the uniforms inside sipping coffee. Quiet time, six o’clock. The druggies have crashed, the citizens are just waking up, the whores are in the diners or in their motels. Quiet, good time, the eastern sky glowing with promise, dew gleaming in the summer, frost in the winter, here and there a jogger. Your city’s most intimate moment.

  “You aren’t gonna get a flight at this hour,” he finally said. “You’re gonna need to take the Southwest at eight to Denver, then there’s probably a United up to Billings. Assuming anything’s flying.” The late news had mentioned that the blizzard was setting records for snowfall and wind speeds. They’d called it a snow hurricane.

  She drove toward the low buildings of the Menard Airport, now called Menard International since the Mexico City flight had been added. As a teenager, he’d come here to watch the planes taking off. In those days, there’d been a United 737 that headed for San Francisco at seven in the evening, and he and Abby had watched it and dreamed of what it would be to live there in a house in the Marina District or Nob Hill, and listen to the mourning of the buoys and watch the rolling fog. One night she’d said, her voice soft and shy, “What do you want first, a girl or a boy,” and he had slipped his hand into hers and replied with silence, and known that she was to be his wife, and it would be good.

  They passed the main terminal, which was unchanged from the way it had been all of his life, two low wings and a central tower. Inside were the six gates, now crushed behind a wall of security
, but the Airflight Restaurant was exactly the same, and still served the chicken fried steak dinner on Thursdays, and you could watch the planes while you ate.

  Down at the end of this road was the hangar where Donald Douglas had once repaired an early Cloudster, and which now sheltered the ten or twenty private aircraft that called this place home.

  “You have your own plane?”

  “Yes.”

  “So somebody’s a pilot?”

  “I’m a pilot,” Charlie said. His tone reminded Flynn more of a funeral director.

  They pulled around to the small parking area beside the hangar and got out. They moved as a team, he had to give them that. There was a practiced smoothness that he liked to see in a team.

  As Diana entered the hangar through the weathered side door, she turned on the interior lights. Mike trotted over to the main door and rolled it open, revealing the empty concrete apron and equally empty runway.

  There were two planes in the hangar, one a gleaming turboprop, the other a twin engine thing that was just that—a thing. Old. Grease on its landing gear. Bald tires.

  Charlie hopped up onto the wing and opened a door.

  “We can’t fly into a blizzard in that,” Flynn said.

  “Charlie can,” Diana said.

  Flynn was normally an unconcerned flyer, but this situation was not reassuring. “You’re looking at seventy-mile-an-hour winds in that storm,” he said.

  Charlie, who was standing on the wing, said, “It’s got new engines compliments of the US Air Force, plus a classified antifriction coating and the most advanced avionics in the world.”

  “It’s too light. No way. I thought you guys had Gulfstreams and things like that. Real planes.”

  “This is the real world, not TV. I had to fight like hell for this. We’re travel-rated for commercial only.”

  Flynn was the last to climb in.

  He saw cracked insulation along the doorframe. He smelled gasoline. Mike and Louie had pulled the hangar door back and the morning sky was red with menace, the north wind already brisk. Billings was a thousand miles away, deep in the vastness of the storm.