Chapter Ten

"There's not a damned thing we can do right now," Michael said, "and you're getting grumpy, so…"

"Screw you."

"So, let's get some rest. It's late, anyway. There's not anything we're going to be able to do until tomorrow morning but research."

They were at their hotel. After interviewing Tate, they had gotten some dinner and returned to the hotel to brainstorm. Dinner was grilled salmon from the hotel's restaurant and was worth every second. Brainstorming was an hour of swearing and griping and was worth not a single second spent so far.

But Faith wasn't ready for sleep. "So let's research," she said.

"We will. But we'll do it in shifts. You're the cranky one this time, so you sleep first. I'll keep wrestling with this while you sleep." He nodded at Turk. "The big guy should get some shuteye too. I'll wake you in a while, and you can wrestle with the case while I nap."

"Define a while," Faith said.

"Exactly five minutes longer than you want me to."

"Screw you."

"Get some sleep. You're not useful when you're irritable like this. Don't look at me like that; you know it's true. I'll keep brainstorming, and when I feel myself slipping, I'll wake you up."

Faith glared at Michael, who returned her stare impassively. Finally, she sighed. "You were a lot easier to deal with when you were afraid of me."

"The Boss used to say that too. Now go to sleep. Seriously, I feel like your mom."

"You mean my dad?"

"No, I mean your mom. That's how messed up this is. Go. To. Sleep."

"All right," she said, lifting her hands in surrender. "You taking a nap, too, boy?"

Turk responded by circling a spot in between the two beds three times, then lowering himself to the ground. He turned his head lazily toward her and yawned luxuriously. She found it fascinating sometimes, just watching him. "Everything's just so easy for you, isn't it?"

Turk met her eyes just long enough to make it clear that yes, everything was easy for him, and he loved it. Then he closed his eyes and promptly fell asleep.

She chuckled and set her bag on the other side of the bed. "I'm not changing out of my work clothes," she said to Michael.

She wasn't sure what she hoped to accomplish with that little micro-rebellion, but whatever it was, it didn't work. Michael lifted a thumbs up her way without even looking.

She lay down with her hands behind her head. She had no confidence she'd actually manage to sleep at all, but she didn't want to hear from Michael about not resting.

Against her will, however, her eyelids grew heavy, and soon she was fast asleep.

***

Faith opened her eyes and gasped. She tried to stand but found herself unable to move.

Her heart raced, and she took deep breaths to slow its pounding. She looked around as much as her bonds would allow her and took stock of her surroundings.

She was in a wooden chair bolted to the floor of what she guessed to be an old barn. The only light came through a small crack in the wall behind and to the left of her near the ceiling of the tall structure. Its beam fell on a metal cart—a surgical tray. On top of the tray was a selection of cutting implements: a scalpel, a knife, a couple of different handsaws and what looked like a cutting wheel for a table saw. All of them were rusty and pitted, and most had red-brown stains covering their blades.

She'd had this nightmare many times before, but knowing what was going to happen next rarely allowed her any relief, and it allowed her none this time. She struggled against her bonds, grunting with effort and pulling until she nearly felt her joints dislocate. She failed to loosen them at all, as she knew she would.

Panic seized her and knowing that she would survive this dream as she had the real-life event that inspired it did nothing to calm that panic.

The door opened, and behind her wide-eyed, hyperventilating exterior, she wondered if it would be Trammell or West this time. Or both.

It was West. He approached her, humming a tune under his breath. One Way or Another by Blondie. Faith didn't know exactly why that choice seemed odd to her.

"Well, hello there, Miss Bold," West said, smiling benignly at her as he approached the surgical table. "How are we doing today?"

"You're in jail," she replied. "You can't hurt me. This is only a dream."

West lifted an eyebrow. "Are you saying dreams can't hurt you? Now Faith, surely you're not that na?ve."

"You're just a phantom," she said, ignoring the trembling in her voice and the shaking in her limbs. "The real you is locked in a cell, weeks away from spending the rest of your life in a hole with a four inch by ten inch view of the sun."

"Oh, I wouldn't say weeks," he said, selecting a scalpel from the tray and turning it over in his hands. "This is a sensational case. They'll drag it out for at least a year. Ratings, you know." He started walking toward her. "And while it's true I'll spend a considerable amount of time at ADX Florence, the reality is that I have maybe ten to fifteen years of interviews, book deals and news specials before interest in me wanes and they finally decide they can't profit off of my exploits anymore. Then it's an early return to Hell for me."

He grinned at his joke. In the soft light of the cracked barn wall, his teeth looked unnaturally white.

"Go ahead and do what you're going to do," Faith said. "This means nothing."

West grinned and leaned down until his lips were right next to Faith's ear. "Don't be mad at me, Faith."

Faith's brow furrowed. "What? Don't be mad at you?"

"Don't be mad, but I need you to wake up now. Turk? Help me wake her up."

***

A rough, wet tongue dragged across her face, and she stirred.

"Don't be mad at me," Michael said. She opened her eyes and looked at him groggily. "I gave you fifty-seven minutes, but it was because I was organizing some things, not because I was trying to be nice to you."

"Fifty-seven minutes…" She repeated. She sat up and frowned at him. "Is that a joke?"

"Yes," he said. "It's actually been four and a half hours."

"Four and a…" she looked at her phone. It was nearly three in the morning. She sighed and rubbed her temples. "Okay. I guess I really was tired. Go ahead and sleep. Maybe fresh eyes on what you did will be a help."

"Fingers crossed," Michael said. "All I did so far was make a list of potential victims by looking up similar studies to the one Maria and Rebecca attended. It's surprisingly hard to convince people to breach privacy contracts. Maybe you'll have an easier time than I did."

"Hope springs eternal."

Michael lay down to rest, and Faith got to work. She didn't feel like she had very fresh eyes. How had she believed she wouldn't sleep? She felt sluggish now, in need of far more sleep than she got. When Michael's notes continued to swim in her vision after twenty minutes, she gave up and started coffee.

Turk fell into step beside her. Faith smiled at him and scratched behind his ear briefly before starting the coffee The hotel had one of those third-sized pots and coffee that came in a sealed filter-pouch that reminded her of a tea bag. She used one of the complimentary bottles of water to fill the reservoir and pressed the button. The pot hissed and sputtered angrily almost immediately before settling down. Air in the tubes, she thought.

Turk tensed at the sound and growled a low, quiet growl. Faith frowned at him curiously. There was no real threat, though, so why would Turk react like that?

After a moment, the flow equalized, and the hissing stopped. Turk calmed and released a sigh of relief. Ah. It was the sound that was irritating. How would those have sounded to Faith, though, if she had hearing like their victims? Would the sounds have disgusted her? Would they have made her sick to her stomach? Angry? Sad? Frightened? What about Turk's growls? She thought of the looks on the faces of the students at Gregory Tate's lab. There wasn't much in the way of emotion. Only pain.

"Damn it all," she whispered.

There was a conclusion struggling to get from somewhere deep in the back of her mind to the front. She focused on what she knew, trying to tease the idea into the light. There was no coaxing it closer at the moment, though. Not while she was this tired. She had to let it sit.

But what if she didn't have time to let it sit? Remember. I will break you.

Damn it, West had nothing to do with this situation. They were chasing a different criminal, not the fucking Copycat Killer. And he was in jail. He couldn't break anything except his own wrist, trying to pull out of his shackles.

The coffee finished with another series of hisses and pops. Turk bared his teeth at the pot but didn't growl this time.

Faith poured her coffee, then walked over to examine Michael's notes.

As he'd warned her, he hadn't made much headway. She sighed in irritation, but she couldn't blame Michael. Lack of progress shouldn't have surprised her. Actually, it didn't surprise her. It irritated her. There should have been some kind of pattern, something to allow them to come up with an actual investigative path. Right now, they were just directionless, and that wasn't doing anyone any good.

Except there was a pattern. The victims had excellent hearing and were probably lured by a high-frequency sound such as that produced by a dog whistle. They were both members of the same study, and while she wasn't sure if it mattered yet, they were both part of the music industry. She remembered reading a quote from a police detective once that said that in fiction, detectives dealt with a paucity of clues, but in real life, detectives dealt with a glut of clues and the difficulty was determining which clues meant something and which clues were pointless.

Faith had dealt with cases that provided a glut of clues and cases that provided a paucity. The truth, then, was somewhere in the middle.

Right now, the truth was somewhere in the ether, and she hated that.

Turk sensed her irritation and rested his head over her thigh. She reached down and scratched softly behind his ear. "This case sucks," she said softly, "and the problem is there's a lot we know, but one crucial something we don't know."

Turk whined contentedly, and Faith continued to think out loud. "Or maybe we know what we need to know and just don't recognize it. We need a next step. We're going to start spinning our wheels, and in a case like this, we can't afford to do that."

She'd promised Hector that she would stop this asshole before he hurt anyone else. She knew it was a foolish promise to make when she made it, but she still made it. She still wanted to believe it was true, even though she had never in her life solved a case without seeing more victims suffer first.

But God, it would be nice for that to happen just one time.

Her phone rang, and when she saw the number, her heart sank. She answered and prayed this wasn't what she thought it was.

It was.

"We need you guys at 6675 Peachtree Lane," Detective Wanda Simonich said. "There's been another murder."