With a shrug, Sam said, “Just something I’m mulling in my mind. It may turn out to be worse than useless, so I’d rather make sense of it myself before offering it even as a theory.”
“Sam, you know profiling, investigating, is a collaborative effort,” her husband said matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, I know. I just . . . want to sit with this awhile longer myself. At this point, it’s just a cockeyed theory with absolutely no evidence to back it up.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Luke advised her.
“No, I won’t.”
Robbie said, “In any case, it’s pretty clear a stranger would stand out in Serenity, in the day or the night, especially given the likelihood that he watched the victims for quite some time before he put his plan into action.”
Lucas nodded. “Jonah, you and your people have talked to just about everyone in town, and you said it yourself: Aside from us and Tyler family members with alibis, there just aren’t any strangers here.”
Making a last-ditch protest, Jonah said, “You’re telling me someone I know is doing this?”
“Know in the broadest sense, probably,” Luke said. “Even in a town this small, there are bound to be people on the periphery of your life. Not friends or neighbors or coworkers. Maybe you’d recognize a face, or even know a name, but not really give them much thought because your life and theirs haven’t really intersected. There’s been nothing to make them memorable. Maybe they live a bit farther out, don’t come into town too often. Don’t get into trouble or otherwise draw your attention.
“We all have people like that in our lives. Vague recognition, but no interest. No real knowledge. What may be vitally important to them, an experience, an event, could easily be something that barely scratched the surface of your life. And whoever this is, he probably learned early how to go unnoticed. Maybe he grew up in an abusive home, and drawing attention meant a beating. He learned to be quiet, still. To blend in. At a guess, he’s in his thirties or forties; he’s too patient and too careful to be younger.”
Samantha took up the not-quite-musing, her voice as thoughtful as Luke’s had been. “The judge wasn’t a small man, and both Sean Messing and Simon Church were in good shape, athletic. So this guy has to be able to handle size and muscle, either with his own muscles or by some other means.”
“A gun?” Jonah suggested.
It was Robbie who said, “Six people . . . a child, a teenager, a young wife and mother; I’m betting at least one of them would have cried out, made some kind of commotion, if they’d seen a gun. The men probably would have struggled, one of them at least. Hunting is common in this area, right?”
Jonah nodded.
“Then so are guns. Especially these days. We don’t fear what’s familiar, as a rule, at least not quickly enough to react. Besides . . . the judge was out in the open. The two teenagers in a stopped car with no sign of damage to indicate someone forced them to stop. Luna Lang crossed through about fifteen feet of a security blind spot and vanished. Sean Messing in a theater. I just . . . I just can’t believe that every single one of them could have been taken by force, without any kind of a fuss and without leaving some kind of evidence of that behind.”
“It doesn’t seem likely,” Luke agreed.
“So,” Samantha said, “we’re back to trying to figure out what all these missing people had in common.”
With a sigh, Jonah said, “I thought we were doing that.”
“We were. But I’m reasonably sure all of us kept in our heads the notion that these people were taken by a stranger, because even though stranger unsubs are more difficult to find, let alone capture, it’s the monsters hiding in plain sight that frighten us the most, because we don’t know who to trust—even when the faces are familiar.
“Now we have to consider what a member of your community might have in common with these missing people when viewed by one of their own neighbors. Somebody they all know. Somebody who may have been watching them for years.”
Jonah was startled. “Years?”
“Without knowing what he’s doing to these people, it’s almost impossible to theorize. But given that we believe he’s a local, and somehow connected to these missing people, the chances are good that whatever’s driving him has been in him for a long time. Could be a mental disorder, but I would have expected that to manifest before now, and obviously; you or someone else would have noticed. So it could be simple resentment or hate.”
“Those kids didn’t do anything to make somebody hate them,” Jonah objected. “Not the teenagers, and certainly not Nessa Tyler.”
“It only has to make sense to him,” Dante spoke up to say. “A madman has his own mad logic.”
Slowly, Luke said, “The one answer we need as soon as possible is, for now, at least, the hardest one to figure out. We don’t know why he wanted these people. I’ve never heard of a serial abductor except for the few who abduct kids or teenage girls and keep them literally in bondage, for years.”
“Saw the most recent one like that on the news,” Jonah said, looking a bit queasy.
“There have been worse cases. When abduction or even slavery isn’t the goal, but murder is. Torture is. What really doesn’t fit here is the range of victims. We’ve got three men if we count Simon Church, two women if we count Amy Grimes, and a ten-year-old girl. I’ve never heard of any serial killer with tastes that broad in his victims.”
“Which,” Dante said, “is yet another argument that this is personal. These people were targeted.”
“Yeah,” Samantha said, “but for what? What did they do to get on this guy’s radar?”
Lucas said, “We don’t know if they’re dead or alive. If they’re dead, where are the bodies? If they’re alive, where is he keeping them? How is he controlling them? It’s been weeks for the teenagers; is he feeding them? Torturing them? In a town so tense the slightest sound draws instant attention, why has no one heard anything, or seen anything the least bit suspicious?”
Samantha said, “He has to have a fair amount of room, and it has to be a remote location . . .”
—
IT WAS THE strangest thing, Robbie decided. The room around her, brightly lit, just faded out, darkening around the edges. The darkness slowly crept toward her, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t ask the others if they couldn’t see what was happening.
Couldn’t help her stop it.
The darkness was going to swallow her up, she knew that, felt it, and watched helplessly as it swallowed up the others one by one, creeping up to them, over them, like some hideous black sludge, moving in terrifying slow motion, until they vanished and only the black was left. Only the darkness. She could hear her heart beating, but nothing else.
Nothing except the eerie sounds of that thick, smothering darkness flowing toward her, rustling softly as though it were whispering to her.
It was . . . almost seductive.
Wait for me.
Can you hear me? I know you can. You aren’t like the others.
We can . . . together . . . and we . . .
. . . belong together . . . you know . . .
. . . we do . . .
Listen to me . . .
She didn’t know where it came from, but Robbie was aware of the certain knowledge that if she listened to the whispers, if she let them in, she would die.
The blackness was creeping toward her, rustling, whispering, and all Robbie could think to do was slam her shields up as hard as she could, making them as strong as she could make them, because she couldn’t let it in . . .
—
“DANTE IS A medium,” Luke was saying. “Able to communicate with the dead. When they want to communicate, that is. And even then, they often have nothing helpful to say. Something else we’ve learned.”