sir.”
“I want this man stopped. Find his money trail. Find the aliases he’s been using. Do what you do best and make that happen, understand?”
She got the message. Her skill at tracking perps via the latest technology was needed once again.
“Yes, sir, of course, sir.”
She hung up and immediately checked her computer, found the new message from his office and pulled up the attachment. The file was massive, far more than she had time to go through at her desk. She forwarded it to her laptop at home, then finished the report she’d been working on and filed it.
She wouldn’t let herself think of what the days to come would be like. She hadn’t had more than a half-dozen brief encounters with Wade in the past three years, and the thought of working with him made her sick to her stomach. She’d loved him so deeply—then, in one reckless afternoon, destroyed their world and their unborn child. She couldn’t imagine how this was going to turn out, but all she had left was her job, and she wasn’t going to fuck that up, too.
Tulsa, Oklahoma
On day three, Hershel pulled a hit-and-run during the storms that hit Tulsa, taking out three more people who had initially survived. He was back at the campgrounds at Keystone Lake long before daylight, sleeping peacefully while the city waited for sunrise, fearing the scope of the disaster.
The air at the scene of the debris field left from the tornado was hot and heavy, mingling with the scents of decaying food and diesel from the big machines the cleanup crews were using farther down the next block.
The yellow crime scene tape around the area where the two agents were walking marked the spot where the first body had been found. As soon as the body was identified as a murder victim, cleanup efforts in the immediate vicinity had been shut down, although the site had been so badly compromised, there was no way to tell what was storm-related and what might have been left by the killer.
Over the next sixteen hours the medical examiner had found two more murder victims among the bodies that had been recovered, and all three shared the same cause of death. They’d been rendered helpless with a Taser, and then they’d been strangled.
Once the media caught wind of the news, they quickly linked these victims to the earlier killings in Wichita Falls, Texas, and that was when the FBI had shown up, still following in the Stormchaser’s path of destruction.
* * *
Two hours later police cruisers from the Tulsa Police Department blocked off access to both ends of the street as the FBI agents moved through the third crime scene. A couple of news crews had stationed themselves at the far end of the next block with their cameras trained in the agents’ direction. They weren’t interfering with the investigation, but the long-range lenses could make it appear as if they were filming on-site.
Wade Luckett was standing less than a yard away from the bathtub where the third body had been found. He checked the picture on his iPad against the scene before him, then turned to look for Tate, who was standing a few yards away. “Hey, Tate, here it is,” he said.
Tate moved across the debris field for a closer look. “You’re right. And check that out. There’s a wall between that tub and the street, another impromptu barrier between the body and immediate discovery.”
“Just like in Wichita Falls,” Wade said, and then added, “Have you heard from Cameron today?”
“Yes,” Tate said. “They located the guy who thought he witnessed the killer leaving the James Atwood crime scene. He’s interviewing him sometime today. He also said that Laura Doyle showed up yesterday with the Red Cross.”
“He’s still sweet on her,” Wade said.
Tate grinned. “Sure looks like it. They stayed in touch after we came back from Louisiana last year. I know this because my lovely wife keeps me apprised of the important things in life.”
Wade heard the pride in Tate’s voice and remembered how close they’d come to losing Nola Landry to the Stormchaser last year.
“Okay, so she’s a great wife and phenomenal artist, but I’m all about her cooking.”
Tate laughed. Wade Luckett was never full.
Talking about cooking made Wade hungry, which prompted him to dig some gum out of his pocket and pop it in his mouth as he got back to business. He pulled up the pictures on his iPad, eyeing the similarities between the first scenes in Wichita Falls and the ones here in Tulsa.
“What I don’t get is how the hell he gets on site so fast. How does he manage to commit these murders while rescue crews are still at work?” Wade asked. “He hid among the Red Cross volunteers before, but there’s no sign of him with them now.”
“Obviously he can’t repeat that scenario because we know what he looks like. Although I would guess he has some burn scars now, after surviving that boat explosion,” Tate said. He was the profiler in the team and they depended on his instincts and knowledge.
“We’ve furnished both the Red Cross and local authorities with a photo of Hershel Inman, but it doesn’t mean much, not when we know how skilled he is at disguises.”
Wade stepped around the broken headboard of a bed, saw what was left of a child’s stuffed teddy bear and had a moment of déjà vu, remembering finding the giraffe at his son’s grave.
He was sad for the end of his marriage and the loss of his son, but he was still damn mad at Jolene for shutting him out. He’d been just as devastated as she was by the baby’s death, and yet she’d taken all the burden of grieving as her right only, and acted as if he’d lost nothing but the time he’d invested in the marriage.
He looked away from the toy and then glanced up as a police car sped past three blocks up, running hot with lights and sirens. He wanted this killer caught and put away so bad he could taste it. Then he shook off the anger and got back to the work at hand.
“So, taking it as a given that Hershel Inman’s appearance has changed, he’s apparently changed his method of killing to go with it.”
“If you think about the kill sites, it makes sense, though,” Tate said. “The first victims were stranded in rural areas by high water, so the sounds of gunshots would not be a concern. Now that he’s moved into a city, that kind of noise would be noticed. His method now needs to be swift and silent. The Taser would render the victims both mute and immobile. Strangling them afterward would be simple if they couldn’t fight back, and leaving the bodies naked further feeds his need for domination.”
“That’s damn cold,” Wade said.
Tate thought about how close Hershel had come to killing Nola. “Yes, and so is Hershel Inman’s heart.”
* * *
Hershel would have been pleased if he’d known they were talking about him. He hadn’t seen them in months. Now here they were going through the rubble while he was sitting less than two hundred yards away, watching. They weren’t so damn smart after all.
There were only two of them this time, which made him wonder where Winger was, but then he let it go. As long as he had their attention, he didn’t care how many people they sent to cover his handiwork.
He
