Credibility. Or the lack thereof.
Luke and the rest of the Special Crimes Unit had the respected might of the federal government behind them, and even if the long history of the FBI had at times been somewhat checkered, respect for the men and women who served had certainly survived.
Behind Samantha was the Carnival After Dark, loud and colorful and intended as pure fun. Games and rides and sideshows. Like hers.
Like her.
But what had been her choices in the beginning? Precious few. One, really. One choice. One decision. Invent Zarina, with all her seductive mysticism and drama-or starve.
She'd been fifteen the first time she put on the turban. She had begun hanging around the Carnival After Dark when it passed close to New Orleans, where her hitchhiking had taken her. Offering to tell people's fortunes on street corners had done little except get her arrested once or twice even in the Big Easy, and she'd thought a carnival might need or at least want a fortuneteller.
Leo had agreed-once she'd told him somewhat pugnaciously that his mother had been an opera singer, his father a doctor, and that the carnival's knife-thrower had a drinking problem, would nick his assistant's ear at that night's show, and was going to kill somebody if his knives weren't taken away from him.
All correct, at least up to her prediction of that evening's show; after that, he fired the knife-thrower.
And Samantha had joined the Carnival After Dark. She had, over the years, honed and refined her "act." Draping herself in swaths of colorful fabric, and clinking fake gold jewelry, applying heavy makeup to look older-and borrowing a turban Leo's mother had worn on some of the finest stages of Europe.
Samantha hadn't set out to become a carnival mystic. She wasn't at all sure why she hadn't, somewhere along the way, opted out and chosen to do something else with her life, especially once she'd gained confidence and had a little savings and the fear of starvation had left her. Because it had been easier, she supposed, to drift along day after day, year after year, being with people she liked and doing work that demanded little of her. Isolated and insulated in her own little traveling bit of the world.
At least until Luke had come along.
Looking down at her hands folded atop the satin-draped table, she heard the swish of sound as Ellis brought the next client in and then disappeared silently through the curtain behind Samantha.
Beginning her usual spiel, Samantha said, "Tell Madam Zarina what it is you wish to know about-" She had been about to add "tonight" but didn't bother when a ring dropped onto the table near her hands.
"I heard it helps if you touch things." The woman's voice was even, controlled. "So I brought that. Would you touch it, please?"
Samantha looked up slowly, knowing at once that this was one of the desperate ones. She had lost something, someone. She needed answers, and needed them badly.
A brown-eyed blonde of about thirty, she was pretty and casually dressed. And she was haunted. Her face was drawn, her hands writhed together in her lap, and her posture was so tense she practically trembled from the strain of holding herself still. She wanted to do something, was driven to take action, any action. This action.
Samantha looked at the ring. A birthstone, she thought. Opal. Plain band with the stone inset, small size. A child's?
She returned her gaze to the woman and said, "Some lost things can never be found."
The woman's mouth quivered, then steadied. "Will you try? Please?"
All Samantha's instincts told her to refuse, to make some excuse, refund this woman's money, and stop this now. But she found herself reaching out, picking up the ring.
The darkness swept over her immediately, and the cold, and she was choking, drowning.
Samantha was never sure afterward if it was the instinct for self-preservation or just the utter certainty of how the vision would end-and how she would end if she remained caught up in it-but whichever it was caused her to drop the ring. And just as suddenly as she'd been drawn into the vision, she was yanked out of it.
She stared at the ring lying on the table, then looked at her palm, where a circular white line now lay across the fading red line that was all that was left of the earlier frostnip.
"Shit." She lifted her gaze to the woman and found her pale, her eyes both shocked and eager.
"You saw something. What did you see?"
"Who are you?"
"Don't you know? Can't you-"
"Who are you?"
"I'm-Caitlin. Caitlin Graham. Lindsay's sister."
Despite the clear skies and bright moon, Lucas and Jaylene were having a frustratingly slow and difficult time of it. Not to mention exhausting. And judging by the intermittent radio and cell contact with the other two teams, they weren't the only ones; the terrain in these isolated spots was so rough it was as though they had been swallowed up by some more-primitive time, the strained roar of their vehicles' engines alien. When they could use vehicles, that was.
Sometimes, it was literally hacking their way through clinging, thorny underbrush.
Jaylene held the flashlight to illuminate the map spread out on the hood of their vehicle, and Lucas crossed off the second property on their list.
"At this rate," he said, "we don't have a hope in hell of covering all these places by tomorrow afternoon."
"Not much of a hope, no." Deputy Glen Champion, who Metcalf had assigned to go along with the federal agents because he was not only trustworthy but had grown up tramping all over these mountains, shook his head. "This is some of the roughest terrain in the state, and most of the places are like this one was- inaccessible by anything but a heavy-duty all-terrain vehicle, on horseback, or on foot."
They had borrowed a four-wheel-drive ATV from the sheriff's department motor pool, but even it had found the narrow, rutted dirt roads a challenge, especially after the late-afternoon storm and its torrential rain.
Jaylene said, "Just getting from one spot to the next takes time. Look at the next place-am I wrong, or is it at least five miles away?"
"Five miles of a winding dirt road," Champion confirmed.
"Shit," Lucas muttered.
Jaylene glanced at the deputy, then asked her partner, "Any hunches?"
"No." Lucas was still frowning, and even in the moonlight she could tell his face was beginning to take on that drawn, exhausted look it always acquired as they got deeper and deeper into a case.
She knew better than to comment on it. "Then we move on to the next place on our list."
Champion drove, again more experienced with this type of road than either of the agents. But even with his skill, it still required nearly an hour to travel the five miles.
He parked the ATV seemingly in the middle of the road and the middle of nowhere and cut off the engine. "It's about a hundred yards farther along, just past the top of that next rise."
The area was so heavily wooded that the trees literally pressed in on them from both sides of the road, and since the leaves hadn't yet begun to drop, even the bright moonlight did little to illuminate the road ahead.
It was also very quiet.
Jaylene checked her detail list with the aid of a pencil flashlight, and said, "Okay, this property hasn't had a house on it in about fifty years. Thirty acres of mostly mountainous pastureland and a big barn is all that's left. Says here the barn's still in good shape, and it was sold to an out-of-state developer about a month ago."
"Does the developer have a name?" Lucas asked.
"Not yet. It's a holding company. Quantico's checking all this, but it'll be tomorrow at the earliest before we know any more than we do now."
They got out of the ATV, moving quietly, and kept their voices low for the same reason that Champion had turned off the police radio a good ten minutes back: because sound carried oddly up here, smothered by underbrush or trees in one spot and bouncing around madly in another.