do I, honey, but we won’t quit until we get him.” He hugged her close, then leaned down and gave her a quick kiss. “I need to call the Director.”
“And I need to make sure you have enough clean clothes,” she said, and began cleaning her brushes and covering up the painting.
He frowned. “I didn’t mean to mess up your work.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t work now if I had to. I’m going to do laundry. I have this overwhelming need to do something for you to make it all better, and that’s all I’ve got.”
He watched her leave the room with her head up and that familiar take-charge stride, and knew she would be okay. It was the Stormchaser’s latest victims he was worried about.
After a quick phone call to the Director to let him know what had happened, he was given the go-ahead to proceed as the team saw fit and told to stay in touch daily.
He went back into the den and changed channels until he found one giving early reports of the storm front that had just gone through Wichita Falls. It had produced three funnels, one of which had cut through part of the city. Victims were being taken to the local hospitals, and so far two bodies had been taken to the morgue. Tate knew all they could do now was wait and see if the Stormchaser was truly back.
* * *
It took exactly sixteen hours for the news to break that storm victims had been murdered, and by that time five bodies had been pulled from the rubble, three of which had been identified as having survived the storm and killed afterward. And they were all nude, which was a new twist to his M.O.
Tate called his partners, then made a call to the local police in Wichita Falls to tell them what they were dealing with, and that the team was on the way.
Keystone Lake, Oklahoma
Hershel was no longer in the state of Texas. He drove all of the next day, following the storm front as it moved into Oklahoma. According to the National Weather Service, the chances of storms firing up in the northeastern part of the state were high, so he’d set up his campsite at Keystone Lake, near Tulsa. The camping area appeared to be a popular one. He’d chosen a site on the far side of the campgrounds in the hopes that the sound of his portable generator would not disturb nearby campers. He had a waterproof, two-room tent with zip-up windows and a heavy-duty floor, a fan for hot, muggy nights, and a laptop computer with a satellite connection for streaming live TV and keeping an eye on weather systems, as well as the FBI’s investigation of the Stormchaser murders. He liked knowing the media had given him a special name, and he liked hearing that the agents were catching fire for not stopping him last year in Louisiana.
The sun began to set as he was cooking his supper. He ate a solitary meal in the growing dusk, listening to a pack of coyotes announcing their arrival for an evening hunt, yipping in a high-pitched tone that morphed into brief howls.
The mournful sound made Hershel shiver. He wasn’t by nature a man who enjoyed sleeping out under the stars, and the thin walls of his tent weren’t much more reassuring. As it grew darker, he put out his fire, started up his generator and went into the tent to settle in for the night.
He kicked off his shoes at the front and padded across the floor to the sleeping bag beside his laptop. His choices were limited, but he finally found reception from a local station. When he saw footage of the agents in Wichita Falls standing at his first kill site, he upped the volume. He knew them well enough by now to read the frustration on their faces and actually laughed out loud.
Shame on you, Hershel Inman, laughing about people dying. You’re sick and mean, and I’m ashamed I was ever married to you.
Hershel frowned. Everything had been going just fine and now Louise had to put her two cents into his business again.
“Well, you can just be pissed all you want, Louise, because you went off and left me. I didn’t leave you.”
I didn’t leave you on purpose, and you know it. I died. I didn’t want to die, but I died anyway.
Guilt hit Hershel like a kick in the belly.
“You blame me for not getting your insulin. It’s my fault you died. My fault. Why don’t you go ahead and say it!”
I never said it was your fault. But I died, and that’s not my fault, so don’t you dare say it was.
Hershel shut down the laptop, but the night air was still. Without any breeze coming through the screen windows, he knew sleeping would be uncomfortable. He set up his fan so that it would blow on him during the night, trying to ignore the constant sound of Louise’s rants.
“I’m going to bed now, so you need to go away. How do you expect me to sleep when you’re talking in my head all the time?”
I don’t talk to you, Hershel. I’m dead, remember?
“Then who am I hearing if it’s not you?” he yelled.
Don’t ask me. You’re the one who’s crazy. Remember? You’re the one who turned into a killer. I just died. Now you go away and let me rest. I’m tired, too. I’m tired of watching you break my heart all over again.
Hershel zipped and locked up the flap to his tent, and then threw himself onto his sleeping bag. He wanted the knot in his gut to go away. His euphoria from his kills was gone. He needed the storms to come back. Rain washed him clean, and killing made the pain go away. He fell asleep to the rattle of the generator, and when it ran out of gas toward early morning, he never knew it.
Two
Washington, D.C.
Jo Luckett was at her desk, tying up the loose ends of her last case when her phone rang. She answered absently, still locked into what she was doing.
“This is Jo Luckett.”
“Agent Luckett, this is Julie. Hold for Director Thomas.”
Jo’s focus immediately shifted as her boss came on line.
“Good afternoon, Agent Luckett. Good job on closing that case.”
“Thank you, sir. Good teamwork, as usual.”
“Speaking of teamwork, what do you know about the Stormchaser murders?”
She tensed. Her ex-husband was on the team, but she was certain that wasn’t what he meant.
“Probably not much more than what anyone would hear on the news, why?”
“He’s killing again. We’ve activated the original team, but I’m adding you to it. Julie emailed you the file. Familiarize yourself with all the details and await further orders. At the moment the team is on the move. Once they get settled, I want you to join them.”
Even though her stomach was in knots, she answered firmly. “Yes, sir.”
There was a pause, and she thought he would hang up, but he didn’t.
“Will you have a problem working with your ex-husband on this?”
“No, sir, of course not,” she said shortly.
“Good.
