“If they’re alive,” Robbie felt duty bound to remind her.
“Yeah. But given that, Dante is right. The satellite shots didn’t show any unusual groupings, our searches haven’t turned up anything, and I can’t think of a place downtown where six people could be held prisoner. Especially if their captor couldn’t be standing guard all the time. And he hasn’t been. Unless he has a partner, his captives have been left unguarded multiple times.”
“Luke seemed pretty certain when he checked in last night from the hotel,” Dante noted. “One unsub.”
“So nobody to guard them when he’s gone,” Sarah said. “Whatever safeguards he has in place, locks, soundproofing, anything else you can think of, the one thing he definitely needs to hold captives with the best chance of no one finding him out has to be isolation. And any isolated building is going to be in the outlying areas.”
“Where there’s been nothing but a cursory search,” Robbie noted. “Because all the missings disappeared in or near the downtown area. Shit. We may not be even an inch closer to identifying this unsub. And that means we’re no closer to finding the missing people than we were when we got here.”
“There is another possibility,” Dante said.
Robbie looked at him, brows raised.
“Well, Luke hasn’t picked up anything from any of them, and you can be sure that at least the teenagers and Nessa would have to be terrified to find themselves captives. All of them, really. So why hasn’t Luke felt that?”
“He said he needed time,” Robbie said.
“Yeah. But what if it isn’t time? What if Luke hasn’t been able to pick up anything because the unsub is keeping them drugged? Out cold so they don’t need a guard—and too far under to be aware enough to be afraid?”
—
JONAH SLEPT FITFULLY, which didn’t really surprise him. He was almost literally too tired to rest, which always sounded so absurd when other people said it but was so real when it was you. The thing was, Jonah usually had no trouble falling asleep, so he’d never developed any little tricks or method of winding down.
Sarah claimed black-and-white documentaries on any war of the past put her out like a light within five minutes. But that never worked for Jonah, not because he found war fascinating but because he liked documentaries in general and tended to get interested.
Not that interest in anything was his problem. He needed to sleep and wanted to, so he wasn’t about to turn on the TV or pick up a book or magazine. He’d drawn his bedroom drapes; since he and Sarah rotated shifts and he occasionally worked a third shift just because, his drapes were blackout and turned his bedroom into a dark cave that mimicked night no matter what time it was.
That wasn’t the issue either.
Jonah had never lost anyone under his command before, not even to an accident. The fact that Annie Duncan had been careless in being out, alone and unarmed, on foot in the night when everyone knows that was dangerous didn’t make him feel any better.
She’d been one of his officers, his responsibility. Telling her devastated parents and younger brother about her murder had been the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do. And dealing with his other officers hadn’t been much easier. They were in shock, they were grieving, they were angry, and they wanted someone to blame.
He’d really had to come down hard on them to make damned sure none of them targeted their federal friends. Of course, none of them knew just why these particular FBI agents were so important, so necessary to the location and capture of the monster who had taken six people and killed one more.
The monster who might have killed them all.
They didn’t know, and he didn’t tell them. That was just the sort of thing a blindly angry cop might, oh, text to a news organization. Not out of malice, but . . .
Jonah thought that if they were lucky, they had maybe another twenty-four hours before national media descended. National media that had been very preoccupied during the last couple of weeks by, among other things, the hunt for a serial killer in the nation’s capital, several sensational trials, at least three political scandals, and another senseless mass shooting, this one at a mall on the West Coast.
Even with the Amber Alert on Nessa, the goings-on in little Serenity, Tennessee, hadn’t quite surfaced to the attention of the national media.
But they would.
Right now, he had a handle on the strangers in his town, a good sense of them. Once national media arrived, that one area of control would go out the window. And probably make it all that much harder to find this monster, this unsub, and capture or kill him.
He was leaning heavily toward the latter.
Jonah tossed and turned for probably a good two hours before exhaustion finally claimed him. He slept hard, which wasn’t all that restful, but then he hadn’t expected anything else.
He wouldn’t have a peaceful night’s sleep until this monster was no longer a threat to his town. And depending on the outcome, he might not have a peaceful night’s sleep for a long time afterward.
He had set his alarm, but woke with a start before it could go off at ten A.M. as he’d intended. He turned off the alarm and turned on the lamp on his nightstand, squinting in the abrupt light.
He felt as though he’d slept for years. Or about six minutes.
As usual, it took him some time to extricate himself from the tangled covers, and that hint of normality was strangely reassuring. A hot shower helped; shaving the stubble off his face helped more even if the face in the mirror seemed more gaunt than he’d ever noticed before, and by the time he was dressed and headed for the Diner for breakfast, he felt almost human.
The waitresses were bustling about, but Clyde served him hot coffee without comment, and only a couple of minutes later slid a plate with his usual breakfast order across the counter.
Jonah was about to ask him if something was wrong, then reminded himself that everything was wrong. And when he glanced around the Diner, it was to find it unusually packed for a Thursday morning just before lunchtime.
No wonder the waitresses were bustling.
Packed with citizens of Serenity who were mostly just looking at their chief of police, some trying to be casual about it and some unabashedly staring.
Before Clyde could retreat to the back and turn Willie back up, Jonah summoned him with a slight movement of his head, and Clyde rested an elbow near Jonah’s plate and leaned nearer, lifting an eyebrow.
“Clyde, please tell me nothing’s changed in some even more horrible way in the last eight or ten hours.” He kept his voice low.
“Far as I know, nothing’s changed.” Clyde’s voice was low as well. “Except maybe that those who didn’t know about Annie Duncan last night know about her now.”
“That’s why the stares.”
“I imagine so. Somebody goes missing, there’s room for hope. Dead is dead. And even with that tent hiding Annie’s body, the details have gotten out.”
“Goddammit,” Jonah muttered.
“Bound to happen, you know that better than anybody. And new details make the old look and feel worse. We had six missing. Now we’ve got six missing—and one murdered. So maybe some of them have been murdered too. Maybe all of them. Nobody’s really talking about it. But it’s like the whole town’s holding its breath.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“They know he’s a killer now. So it’s natural to wonder . . .”
“If he’s killed the people he abducted. Yeah, I don’t blame them for wondering. I am too.”
“They don’t feel safe anymore. It’s shaken them.”
“I know the feeling.”
Clyde half nodded, then said, “I took breakfast to Sarah and the two agents around eight thirty. They all looked tired, and not all that cheerful, even though the gorgeous blonde was curious about my name.”