“I don’t want you for sex, Delores.” Preacher chuckled low in his chest. His voice carried a confident swagger, and his next words made Ava’s skin crawl. “But if I did you couldn’t stop me, could you? Sooner or later, you’ll have to eat and drink something and then… well, I could come down there and do whatever I wanted to you, couldn’t I?”
Fourteen
Snakeskin Gully, Montana
Behavioral analyst and FBI Agent Jo Wells looked over Bobby Kalo’s shoulder to stare at her laptop screen. Kalo, a twenty-year-old Black Hat hacker known online as The Undertaker, had recently joined her team. The FBI had plucked Kalo off the streets at seventeen, after he’d come under investigation for hacking the Pentagon’s mainframe. Following a long period of training they’d assigned him to work with Jo in the wild west out at the Snakeskin Gully field office. “Any luck?”
“Sure, I’ve set up our laptops with a list of links for direct access to the databases, one click is all you need.” Kalo demonstrated. “You click on the link on the main screen and then use the icons.”
Jo stared at the screen. “What about the passwords? Some of the sites are restricted.”
“Ah, you don’t need a password.” Kalo gave her a smirk. “Once you’ve logged into your computer the databases are open to you.”
“That’s a mite dangerous.” Agent Ty Carter pushed up the rim of his Stetson and dropped his boots from the desk. “Anyone can hack into a laptop, it’s child’s play.”
“Not our laptops and phones.” Kalo leaned back in his chair and pulled his shoulder-length fuzzy hair into a band. “It’s kind of the same as I installed in the… ah… never mind.” He grinned. “In simple terms it’s kinda like a virus, if anyone hacks our systems, alarms go off everywhere, a little tracker seeks out the perpetrator, and we get their information but they get wiped out.”
Jo chewed on her bottom lip. “How so?”
“Think of it like the stick of dynamite on Road Runner. If they light the fuse by hacking our stuff then—” Kalo opened his hands wide “—boom!” He stood and sauntered to his desk, took a candy bar from a jar, and dropped into a chair.
“I see.” Jo had the mental image of a computer exploding then disintegrating into a pile of black dust. “Good job.”
She glanced at her flashing email icon and sat down. “Carter, it’s from Jenna. They have a killer freezing and dismembering bodies out of Black Rock Falls.”
“Let me see.” Carter moved a toothpick into the corner of his mouth and pulled his rolling office chair beside her. “Two bodies, both female.” He enlarged the images and stared at the screen. “This killer likes ink. Something about it draws him to these women.”
Jo flicked through Wolfe’s preliminary report and scanned the crime scene photographs. “Yeah, seems so.” She examined the images, trying to squash the shudder of revulsion. “How does he know they have ink? In this weather they’d be bundled up against the cold?”
“Beats me.” Carter enlarged the image of the frozen head and leaned toward the screen. “This one has a tiny bluebird on her forehead just above her eyebrow.” He shrugged. “They haven’t found the other head yet, so we’ll have to wait and see if the tattoos are visible.”
She turned to Kalo. “See what you can find.”
“I’m on it.” Kalo tapped away at his keyboard, eyes flicking from side to side as he scanned the files.
The images confronting Jo reminded her of a case—but which one? “I’ve seen this before, I’m sure of it.”
“I hope you’re not planning on paying them a visit?” Carter rolled his green eyes to the ceiling. “We can’t fly in this weather. I’ll need three hours at least of clear skies before I’m taking that bird anywhere.”
Jo lifted both arms in the air and dropped them to her sides. Bad weather had trapped them in town since the first falls. “I hadn’t realized as this town isn’t on any major routes to anywhere else, there would be no snowplow service past the local school.”
“Uh-huh.” Carter gave her a long considering stare. “That’s why I rented a place in town for the winter. The road to my cabin is impassable.” He scratched his cheek. “I’ve been trying to figure out why you agreed to set up a field office here? This town has a population of one hundred and most of them live off the grid.”
Jo remembered the confrontation with Alexis, her boss and husband’s lover. She’d had the choice: retire from the FBI or banishment to Snakeskin Gully. She stared at Carter. “It’s a long story.”
“Well, maybe you’ll tell me sometime.” He smiled around the toothpick between his teeth. “There’s not much to do around here in winter.”
“Oooweee, I have a match.” Kalo grinned at her from across the room. “You gotta see this. It seems the psychopath named by the media as The Sculptor has been a busy boy. Sending the case files to your laptop now.”
Jo looked over a few of the case files gathered from all over the country and shook her head. “If this guy is in Black Rock Falls, Jenna is going to need all the help she can get.”
“She sure will and I wish I could be there for her.” Carter stared at the screen. “I like Jenna.”
Amused, Jo smiled at him. “I wouldn’t mind having Kane here either.” She chuckled. “Maybe we could swap. You and Jenna would make a nice couple.”
“Call yourself a behavioral analyst and you can’t see she’s smitten by him?” Carter shrugged. “I don’t make moves on another man’s woman.”
Jo hadn’t seen this side of him before. “Smitten, huh? He’s been working with her for years and he’s still living in the cottage. I don’t think so.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Can we get back to the case? What do you see, are there any specific similarities?”
“Yeah, some have different MOs but most are the same. It’s too early in the investigation into the Black Rock Falls cases to say for certain if this is the same guy. We’ll need to wait for Wolfe’s autopsy report to be sure.” He flicked back from the case file photographs to the ones from Black Rock Falls. “It’s not a copycat, little information went out in the press releases.”
Worried a delay might put Jenna and her team at risk, she leaned forward in her chair. “I’ll forward these case files to Black Rock Falls and then I’ll call Jenna. I’d be interested to find out Kane’s slant on this killer as well.”
After sending the files, she made a video call. “Hi, Jenna, we have the files and I’ve sent you what we have on similar cases. The killer in Black Rock Falls has the same MO as one the press named The Sculptor. He’s been murdering women across the country for four or five years and from what I can see, we have likely only found the tip of the iceberg.”
“Yeah, we thought this wasn’t his first dance. He’s too slick and leaves no evidence behind.” Jenna shrugged. “He’s like most of the psychopaths we deal with lately. Does he do this in winter or all year round?”