Hunted, page 17
“Take it slow, take it easy, and the rest will come. If it’s meant, you’ll end up in his bed as a permanent arrangement, Elizabeth Grace.” She hugged the pillow closer. “And God, please, let it be meant. Don’t let either of us break the other one’s heart.”
Chapter 30
Ethan parked behind the newspaper building at ten till three the next day. Wyatt’s department-issued SUV was there, and oddly enough, so was Chase’s car.
“Wonder what he’s doing here?” he mused as he got out and went around to the front. “Hey, sweet lady, how are you?”
Vanessa, who was his mother’s contemporary, looked up from her desk with a smile. “I’m doing fine as feathers, young man. Are you here for the meeting?”
“I am.”
She motioned over her shoulder toward the newsroom door. “Go right on up. You know the way?”
He winked at her. “I think I can find it.”
The newsroom was deserted, so he didn’t have to stop and talk to anyone, which suited him well enough. He was anxious about the meeting, which he knew was ridiculous, but the emotion was there and he had to own up to it. While he wasn’t about to go into the powwow in full-on suitor mode, he wasn’t planning to try to conceal his and Beth’s relationship either. It’d be the first time they’d gone public, and the thought had him uneasy considering who all would be there.
When she’d mentioned wanting to slow down last night, his heart sank. But the rest of their conversation hadn’t sounded like she wanted to end things—and he had to admit she made some good points. They really had jumped straight into the fire.
With that in mind, he’d stopped by Annie’s Arbor on his lunch break and picked up a small something to give Beth today. He patted his jacket pocket, making sure it was still there, and hoped it was the kind of gesture she’d appreciate.
The murmur of voices, punctuated with small bursts of laughter, met his ears as he climbed the stairs to the conference room.
“Sounds like someone’s having a good time,” he muttered. Portfolio in hand, he stopped just outside the open double doors, peering inside.
Beth was standing beside Chase, distractedly sorting through papers as she spoke to him and a black-haired man in a dress shirt and pants. She smiled at something one of them said and shook her head. When Ethan moved a step closer, she lifted her eyes to his, her smile softening and warming.
He crooked his finger and gestured with his head, then stepped back out of sight, trying to hold back a curse. He knew without asking who the black-haired stranger was—the mysterious Gordon.
That’s all the day needs, Bruce, he thought, reminding himself of his promise to try not to be jealous. Get a grip.
“Hi,” she said as she came out into the hall. She clasped her hands together with a shy laugh as they moved to stand next to the wall a few feet from the open door. “Nice tie.”
Ethan ducked his head as she smoothed a hand over the red-patterned silk. “Thanks. It begged me to wear it today for some reason. Nice dress.”
She spread her hands and did a tiny curtsy. “I hoped you’d like it.”
“I do, very much. I like what’s inside it more, but the dress is pretty.” It was a soft sky-blue at the top, deepening to indigo at the hem. “You look nervous.”
“I am. I want to get this right.”
He took a chance and touched her cheek, some of his unease settling when she pressed her hand to his and closed her eyes. “You’ll do fine. I got you something.” He pulled out the tiny card and handed it to her. “Go ahead and open it if you think we have time.”
“We do. Stacy’s running a few minutes behind, and Marshall, Wyatt, and Poppy are gossiping while Chase and Gordon catch up. They went to law school together, and they’ve not seen each other in years.” She ran her fingers along the edges of the envelope, which was no bigger than her palm. “What’s in here?”
He moved closer to her. “Open it and see.”
She bit her lip and held the envelope to her nose, sniffing. “It smells like you.”
Sliding her fingernail under the corner of the flap, she opened it and pulled out the small card. With red metallic hearts on a white background, it was a cute card meant to accompany floral arrangements. The interior had been blank, which was what Ethan had wanted. Something small, something with a hopefully significant message he handwrote himself.
I’m happy to take things slow with you, Beth Hudson. You’re worth waiting for. How about a courtship? E.
Pressing her lips together, she slid the card back into the envelope. She held it to her chest and nodded. “I don’t think I stand a chance against you.” She caught his hand, and when she glanced at him, a sweet laugh escaped. “Courtship sounds lovely.”
He smiled. “It does. You know, I feel a bit like I’m back in high school, passing notes to the girl I like, hoping to spend two minutes with her between classes. Next thing you know, I’ll be asking you to go to The Shack for burgers and fries after class.”
She touched his chest. “I happen to love burgers and fries.”
“You do?”
“Mm-hmmm. And I don’t have a curfew, as it turns out. Nor is my father liable to be waiting on me when I get home late, shotgun in hand.”
“No? What about your mother? Jackie’s always scared me more than Richard, you know.”
They both laughed, leaning into each other a bit.
“Mom adores you, and you know that,” she said. “So is that a serious offer, the meal?”
“It can be. What time?”
“Let’s play it by ear. I think what you’ll learn in this meeting is going to mess up your schedule, unfortunately. Anyhow… our first date.”
He smiled and touched her cheek again. “Yeah, how about that?”
“What in the world’s going on out here? I know I didn’t hear you two laughing,” Chase said jokingly as he stepped outside, Gordon on his heels. He stopped, taking in their postures and proximity to each other. To Ethan’s surprise, he narrowed his eyes.
Before he could say anything else, Beth straightened and cleared her throat. “We’re passing notes and making dates. You can wipe that grumpy look off your face, big brother. No one is drawing blood. Detective Ethan Moore, this is Galen Gordon, FBI. Don’t call him Galen, though. Apparently, he’s not fond of the moniker.”
“Only two people on this earth are allowed to call me that.” Gordon held his hand out to shake. “It’s good to meet you.”
Ethan took his hand with a firm grip, impressed to get the same in return. “You and Chase went to law school together, Beth mentioned. I think I remember hearing your name from back then.”
“We did, and I vaguely remember yours as well. We’ve lost touch over the last few years, but I hope to change that,” Gordon said.
Chase put his hands on his hips, ignoring the conversation. His eyes hadn’t left Ethan, and his frown had turned into a scowl. “What’s going on between the two of you? When the hell did this start?”
His reaction certainly wasn’t the teasing acceptance Ethan had hoped for and somewhat expected.
“Oh, for… it’s called dating, Chase, and it’s what happens when a girl and a boy like each other.” Beth matched his pose as Wyatt, Marshall, and Sampson stepped out of the offices at the opposite end of the hall. “Is that a problem?”
Chase turned to scowl at her. “Maybe, yeah. Whose idea was this?”
Her jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”
Ethan cursed under his breath.
“It was mine,” he said, his words mingling with her identical declaration. He tried again. “No, it wasn’t.”
Unfortunately, Beth said the exact same thing at the same time.
She threw her hands in the air. “Why does it matter?” she asked, turning her attention back to Chase as Gordon tried to cover up a laugh. “I thought you wanted us to draw a ceasefire.”
Gordon laid a hand on Chase’s shoulder. “You do realize there’s no good answer here, right? You might consider not saying whatever it is you’re thinking about saying.”
Chase glowered at him, then looked back at Beth and Ethan. “We will finish this discussion later.”
“The hell we will,” Beth said under her breath as Stacy came around the corner, carrying a large bag. “Hey, there you are and just in time too.”
She made the introductions.
When Stacy and Gordon shook hands, a visible spark jumped between them, snapping loudly in the corridor.
“Ouch!” Stacy yanked her hand back, shaking it as she winced. “Wow, Sparky.”
Gordon was doing the same dance with his hand. He gave a short laugh. “Me? No, I think that was all you. I just shook his hand”—he inclined his head toward Ethan—“and no static.”
“We do have to hide electronics from you,” Ethan gently teased. “I think he has a point.”
Stacy made a face at him as everyone laughed.
“Are we ready, kids?” Sampson asked as the men joined them.
“Yes, sir,” Beth answered. “Please come in, everyone. We have a lot to cover.”
As she led the way, Ethan hung back, as did Chase.
“This isn’t over,” he warned Ethan in a low voice as they closed the doors. “You and I need to have a talk, buddy.”
Ethan sighed as he took his seat next to Stacy and tried to ignore the disgruntled looks Chase was sending him. He should have known something would come up and put a stain on things. He’d just never expected that the resistance would come from Chase, of all people, and he wasn’t sure what to think about that.
Chapter 31
As she walked around the table, Beth wanted to stop by Chase’s chair and yank his hair. She didn’t know what his problem was, but she was going to find out as soon as she had two minutes alone with him. Whatever chip was on his shoulder, she’d be happy to knock it off. She barely managed to resist smacking him as she went to the head of the table.
That was neither here nor there at the moment, however. She had a meeting to conduct, a serious meeting, and she shoved her concerns over her brother’s reaction to the side for now.
“Thank you all for coming,” she said once everyone was seated. “There’s cake, cookies, and some other goodies from The Brown Bag over here on the table. Coffee and water too. Please feel free to help yourselves. So… as you all know, over the last few months, we’ve had numerous reports about trespassers, devil-worshipping cults, animal mutilations, and the like. There’ve been a few altars found but no real evidence of anything illegal.
“There’s also Cullen Jarvis and his ‘visitors.’ From the beginning, that aspect in particular has bothered me, given my family’s personal connection to Cullen, so I’ve been trying to figure out how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.”
“And you’ve done that?” Ethan asked.
“At least partially, yes. What I’ve discovered is that there have been several disappearances over the same period of time, and they correlate with the dates of all the other incidents.”
Ethan’s face was grim as the implications sank in. “When did you put this together?”
She sent him an apologetic look. “Just a couple of days ago. I went to Marshall as soon as I had something concrete. Gordon knew as well, as he had a key piece of the puzzle that helped make it make sense. I’ve printed out a summary sheet outlining the disappearances and the timeline. That’s what’s in the folders in front of you all.”
There were muttered curses all around as everyone opened their folders and read. Beth kept her eyes on Ethan, who was shaking his head. After a minute, he looked up.
She spread her hands. “Hopefully you see why it was important for me to wait until I had all the information. I didn’t want to go into this half-cocked and then have it turn out that the people had been located. I spoke with all their families late last week just to confirm—they’re still missing.”
Wyatt spoke up. “I asked Chase to sit in with us today after he called this morning to give me some information that’s pertinent. Why don’t you tell us what you know about this mess?”
Chase sat forward. “One of my clients came to me late yesterday. They work at an addiction outreach program here in Leroy, and apparently, over the past few months, several regulars stopped showing up. It’s above and beyond the normal drop-out rate, and the people who disappeared? They were lower risk.”
“So this person came to you instead of us? Why?” Stacy asked.
“Because of attorney-client privilege and healthcare privacy laws and all that. There are some legalities they didn’t want to get tripped up on. They authorized me to speak on their behalf insofar as giving the proper authorities the names. I met with Wyatt this morning to do just that.”
“And I asked him to sit in today with us since I’d been briefed by Agent Gordon on what we would be discussing. I had Beth make copies of Chase’s list and put them in your folders as well.”
Ethan cursed. “There are nine people on these two lists. You’re telling us that all these people are unaccounted for?”
Beth nodded. “Yes.”
“How is it that our department isn’t already aware of this?” Stacy asked. “Nine people missing from this small of a community? Surely that should have gotten someone’s attention.”
“Not necessarily,” Chase said quickly. “Three of the people on my list are from other counties—they only come here for treatment. When they disappeared, the reports were filed in their home counties. The two who were from Olman County disappeared about four weeks apart, and two different deputies took the reports.”
“Plus, a few of the missing people on my list are probably here illegally. You know how that complicates things.” Beth moved to the dry-erase boards at the end of the room behind Sampson and rolled the front board to the side to reveal the timeline she’d created.
There was stunned silence for a minute as everyone took in the visual, then Wyatt swore softly.
She sent him a sympathetic glance, then pointed at the list of names she’d assembled on the board. “As you can see, I’d already discovered two of the names in that folder—Amy Hamilton and Darius Kilgore. I didn’t know about the other three. What were their names and dates of disappearance?”
Gordon rattled them off, and she added them to the list. The three had disappeared a few weeks before Cullen Jarvis’s first report, and she drew an additional month on the timeline in order to enter their information.
“I consulted one of the sources I used when I wrote the Satanist series and asked him about the dates,” she continued. “There wasn’t a definitive pattern that I could see as far as it related to a particular number of days, but I knew there was something there. I thought it might have a relationship to the occult or the like, and sure enough, it turns out that all the disappearances occur on the darkest nights of the month, by the dark of the moon. Unless I’m wrong on my calculations, these others also fit that pattern.”
“That source, by the way, is me,” Gordon said.
Stacy spoke up. “So where does this leave us? I still have a hard time understanding how nine people go missing and no one notices.”
“I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much if I were you,” Sampson told her. “It looks like whoever is behind this was very careful to select their victims with the express purpose of causing this kind of confusion. Beth, have you managed to find out anything more about these folks? Has anyone at all heard from them?”
She shook her head. “No, sir, it’s like they’ve dropped off the face of the earth. No one has heard anything. Tracking the missing immigrants is a little trickier, but when I spoke with the local community advocate, he confirmed that no one in the usual networks had seen or heard from them.” With a tired sigh, she sat down next to Ethan. When he squeezed her arm, she took his hand and squeezed back.
Wyatt tapped the paper in front of him. “I’ll be speaking with the three deputies who’ve taken the reports—Wes Mason is on duty now. I have Robbie Bailey and Jason coming in at five. I figure getting the three of them together might trigger some memory or let us pick up a commonality that could help. I’d like to have both of you there, as well,” he told Stacy and Ethan.
They nodded even as Sampson was shaking his head. “One of the biggest questions I have is what’s happening to the bodies if these folks are being killed? Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t that easy to dispose of a human corpse.”
Beth and Chase turned to stare at him, and despite the somberness in the room, Chase’s lips turned up. “How would you know how easy it is or isn’t to dispose of a body, Pop?”
“Why, I buried a few in the backyard, young man. How else do you think?” The graveyard humor broke the tension in the room, and there were chuckles all around. “Seriously though, I wonder what the person or persons who are doing this are doing with the bodies, assuming they’re killing these poor souls.”
Gordon grimaced. “It can’t be anything pretty. They could be burying them on some out of the way tract of land, but that’s a big risk for someone who’s taken such care to keep this thing under wraps. If they were putting them in the Ohio, they’d have washed up along the river near Louisville by now.”
“There are a lot of spots hereabouts that are isolated,” Wyatt mused. “I wonder… hmmm. Beth, how’d you put the two things together?”
She sat forward and leaned her elbows on the table. “It occurred to me that if the altars were created by whomever was doing the ‘gaslighting’ on Cullen, for lack of a better term, they might have something they were trying to draw attention away from. So I went through the police blotters and the newspaper reports, the local gossip forums and what have you, looking for anything else that was odd that had happened on or near the same dates. Establishing a pattern wasn’t too hard, but I had to dig to make sure I had my facts straight. Plus, there wasn’t a lot of information until recently—not enough people had disappeared to make it a true pattern, if you will.”
