Or maybe Flanagan just wanted them to look that way.
God help him for a cynical bastard. He just didn’t trust anybody, especially not immediately after meeting them. Which, he supposed, made his instinctive reaction to Sheriff Stacey Rhodes that much more surprising.
“I want to help with the search.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Stacey, come on, you need my help.”
“You’re on medical leave and I want you home.” Her eyes narrowing, she added, “I mean it, Mitch. Stay out of this. If you were personally involved with Lisa in any way, the last place you can be is in the middle of this investigation.”
“Who wasn’t personally involved with her in this town?” the guy said, suddenly sounding angry. Angry enough to incite Dean to take a step forward, sending a hard look in the younger man’s direction.
“Fine.Whatever.” Swinging around, Flanagan grabbed the doorknob. But before he twisted it and stepped out, he muttered, “Just tell me when you find her.” Looking back over his shoulder, he offered one more pleading glance at his boss. “Please.”
She nodded, saying nothing as her deputy stormed out as quickly as he’d burst in.
“Well, that was exciting,” Mulrooney said with a lazy smile, sounding anything but excited. It took a lot to get the big man’s juices flowing, and Dean suspected he wasn’t even fully conscious until he’d had at least three cups of coffee. Nice to know some things were still normal in this very un-normal place and situation.
“You’ll need to find out just how close those two were,” he told Stacey.
She frowned, not liking it one bit. “I know.”
Her shock hadn’t been feigned; she apparently hadn’t had any idea her chief deputy had been involved with the missing woman. It had visibly shaken her. He understood why. Stacey was pretty damn confident in her own abilities, and not knowing something she must now see as obvious had to burn.
“Okay, enough for now. Can we get out of here?” Dean asked. But before he could take one step toward the door, his cell phone rang. “Damn it.” Then, recognizing the number on the caller ID, he put a hand up to tell the others to wait. “Taggert.”
“It’s Wyatt. I’m sending you a file and you need to look at it.”
“Good Lord, not another one,” he muttered. Glancing at Stacey, he pointed to her desktop computer, and she nodded her permission.
“It’s another kind of file; not a video.”
Thank heaven for small favors. But hearing the obvious tension in his boss’s voice, he knew whatever Wyatt was sending was bad. Dean sat in Stacey’s chair and faced the desktop, accessing his e-mail. “What is it?”
“ Brandon found the auction. It’s already over.”
Damn. They’d thought they had a few days, at least, before the next seventy-two-hour countdown started. His pulse throbbed in his temple and his fingers curled tightly on top of the keyboard as he kept refreshing the screen, wanting the thing to hurry up. Yet somehow, not ever wanting to have to see it at all. “When?”
“Looks like it went down yesterday around noon.”
The words stunned him, every muscle in his body clenching reflexively. “The unsub’s already got almost twenty-four hours on us? How could this have happened?”
He saw the others react to the news. With his few words and his visible frustration, they already knew as much as he did. Stokes and Mulrooney both sat back down across from him, leaning over Stacey’s desk, tense and completely at attention.
Wyatt continued. “ Brandon thinks the site owners are paranoid about being compromised, especially as more and ever more illegal activity is turning up there, child pornography and the like. So the security has gotten more intense. There was some Reaper chatter; then the site went black with a ‘Be Back Soon’ message scrolling across, followed by a line of gibberish.”
“Code for the members to find their way back in?”
“Perhaps. Or information on how to get into the invitation-only auction. It’s open only to the members who like that sort of thing and who can afford to pay for it.”
Dean would love to think that was a small group. But his gut told him it wasn’t. With a whole world full of deviants the possibilities boggled the mind.
“When Brandon got back in this morning and saw more chatter that it was over, he went deep and finally found a transcript. Have you got it yet?”
Refreshing the screen, he saw the e-mail. “I’ve got it. It’s opening.”
Wyatt waited, saying nothing.
When the screencap appeared, Dean resisted the urge to dive to the bottom of it to find out what they were up against and started at the beginning. He read quickly, feeling his stomach heave at the excited chatter between Satan’s Playgrounders with handles like Twistedsister, Thebutcher, and Marquisdesade. One persistent bidder whose name hinted at his true proclivities, Lovesprettyboys, tried to persuade the Reaper to let him choose the victim, but had been shot down. The others seemed content to merely toss out suggested means of death. Things so sick Dean wondered just how far the depths of the human mind could reach.
“I think I’m gonna puke,” Mulrooney said.
Dean didn’t turn around; he merely pointed to a trash can and kept reading. All the way to the bottom, to the winner’s final bid. And his choice.
“Good God,” he whispered.
“Taggert?” Wyatt’s voice asked from the phone. “Do you see?”
“I see.”
“We’ve got to stop him.”
“I know.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Stokes snapped, as she, too, read the final few lines.
Mulrooney was more blunt. “Fucking medieval.”
Good description. Barbaric, horrific. Though, considering the viral popularity of some online videos, like the ones of the overseas assassinations of Americans by terrorists, not necessarily something nobody had ever heard of.
Stacey, who was seated on the corner of her desk, out of eyesight of the screen, asked, “What is it?”
Dean didn’t answer. He merely turned the monitor so she could read the words for herself. She did so, then paled, closing her eyes and turning away.
“Lily’s trying to track the payment,” Wyatt said, meaning all three of them were in the office this early on a Saturday morning. Good to know the whole team was so anxious to catch this guy.
“You can see the winning bid was thirty-five thousand,” Wyatt added. “He can’t move that much money around the Internet without somebody noticing him. This is the closest to real time we’ve ever gotten, and she’s making the most of it, focusing first on trying to find accounts that lead to anywhere in Virginia.”
Another voice suddenly came through the phone. “There he is! I see the bastard.”
Recognizing Brandon ’s voice, Dean asked, “What’s he got?”
“Hold on,” Wyatt replied. A low rumble of conversation followed, until Blackstone came back on the line. “He’s in the Playground right now.”
“The Reaper?”
“Yes.”
“I see you,” came Brandon ’s voice from the background. “Why don’t you come out from under that cape, you little prick.”
Unreal. They were watching a cartoon version of the sadistic killer freely strolling through his cyber world and couldn’t lay a finger on him. “Can he trace him?”
Wyatt seemed distracted. “Why is it going in and out? Are you losing him?”
“Shit! Oh, no, you don’t!” Brandon shouted, frustration making his voice throb.
Wyatt snapped into the phone, “I’ve got to go. We’re doing what we can; I think we’re going to lose him again. One thing we know at this point: The Reaper is online, playing in the Playground, right this minute. If you’re going to conduct interviews this morning, you might keep that in mind.”