Should Be Dead (The Valkyrie Smith Mystery Series Book 1) (21 page)

Chapter 29

Valkyrie and the reporter were already half a mile down the road by the time Diekmann’s lights appeared in the rear view mirror.

“He’s chasing us,” she said.

“I told you Diekmann would figure it out.”

“It was the fed who tipped him off,” Val said. “I don’t understand what he was doing there. And why was Jackie there? Did you bring her?”

“Jackie?” Riley. “Oh, no. I think this is my fault.”

Valkyrie glanced at him. “What?”

“Jackie knew everything. She’s the one that found your background story. I told her to keep quiet about it, or I’d fire her. I didn’t think she’d do something like this.”

Val raised an eyebrow. “You threatened her?”

“I know, it surprised me, too.”

“I’m not going to prison, Riley. We’ve got to lose them.”

“Take a right up here. Cut through this vineyard.”

Val turned onto a pothole-ridden single-lane road. It led between two vineyards and past an old white farmhouse before dead-ending at another road. “Left,” Riley said. “Then swing to the right up ahead.”

Val followed his directions. This new street was in slightly better condition, and Val punched it. The tires screamed as they tore down the road, drifting around the corners, bouncing over the potholes and flying over the hills. The road dropped away into a steep ravine, and the car nearly took flight. Riley moaned as the pit of his stomach dropped. At the bottom, the road leveled out and then a hundred yards later, made a steep climb. At the top of the hill, the Packard took flight.

Riley braced himself against the dash and Val winced, anticipating a painful landing. When the car came down, the springs squealed and the front end shook so hard that Val could hardly keep it on the road. Surprisingly, the vehicle absorbed the impact and recovered instantly. The rear tires caught traction again, and like a rocket, they were off.

The flashing lights of the patrol car had grown increasingly distant as they carved a path through the rugged terrain. As the fog closed in, they disappeared altogether. A mile down the road, they took a sharp curve to the right and then circled down a hillside into a broad valley. The spotty fog drifted across their path, and an orchard rose up alongside the road. The trees looked gnarled and frightening by the light of the moon.

“Take a right,” Riley said. “Follow the road over the hill, then pull off and turn off your lights.”

Valkyrie did as instructed. They were over the hill and parked in just a few seconds. She twisted in her seat, trying to catch a glimpse of their pursuer’s headlights in the darkness. Thirty seconds later, she saw a flash of light over the hill, and heard the roar of the engine moving in the other direction.

“I think that did it,” she said. She opened the console and activated the scanner. For the moment, they caught only static. Val turned her attention to Riley. “What was that all about?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been chasing this killer for a year and I’ve yet to see a special agent show up out of nowhere. Are you saying Jackie had something to do with it?”

Riley winced. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Jackie threatened to tell Diekmann about you… that you weren’t who you said you were, but I told her to wait. I told her I’d take care of it. She must not have listened.”

Val leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. “My cover is blown, and now Odin is in the wind.”

“At least we caught Loki.”

“A lot of good that did. He was no help at all. He swears that he left Odin at the farm. Then he started making up stories about some mysterious shadowy figure who told him how to connect with Odin in the first place.”

“It is a bizarre story,” Riley agreed. “Why would someone help two serial killers get together?.”

“It does make me wonder, though…”

Riley looked at Val. “Wonder what?”

“What he said about Odin… If he really did leave Odin at the farm, where could he have gone? And why take Maddie with him? That’s not like Odin. He would have just killed her.”

“Did the victims own a second car? Maybe they split up.”

Val hit the speakerphone button. “Call Matt.”

Matt answered after a few rings. He sounded exhausted. “Val, it’s three a.m.”

“Sorry. I keep forgetting the time difference.”

“It’s only an hour, Val. It’s late everywhere.”

“I need a quick favor.”

“I have a test tomorrow…”

“Don’t worry, it should only take a minute. I need you to check something for me. I need you to search vehicles registered to the address of that farm you located.”

They heard clicking sounds coming from his keyboard. A minute later, Matt said, “There was just one vehicle, an old Mercedes. The color is
Impala Brown.”

“You’re sure?”

“If there was another car, it must have been registered to a different address.”

Val looked at Riley. “Odin’s still there,” she said. “He has to be.”

“Can you pull up a map of the property?” said Riley.

“You mean like Google Earth?” Matt said in a snarky tone. “Something like that?”

“Sure, that should work.”

“Val, you have a PC built into your car. You can do this without me.”

“Oh… sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sending the coordinates to your display now. Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“Odin must have seen us coming and left the house. Are there any old buildings on the property, or maybe a cave? Someplace Odin could be hiding out?”

The screens on her console flashed, and the satellite image of the area appeared. Matt moved it around a little. “The main house is a quarter mile from the beach,” he said. “But the cliffs are rugged, and there wouldn’t be anywhere to go down there. Besides, it’s public property.”

Riley pointed to the top of the screen. “Odin may have climbed the hills behind the house, hoping to hide out in the woods.” He touched the screen, and the map slid down to center on that point.

“What is that green triangle on the other side of the mountain?” Val said.

“That’s a campground.”

Val exchanged a glance with Riley. “That might be what we’re looking for.”

“If he runs into any campers up there, he’ll kill them,” Riley said.

Valkyrie touched the screen, sliding the image around to give her a better view of the area. “These marks… are they trails?”

Riley nodded. “If we come around from the north, we might be able to sneak up on him.”

“We can look out for campers at the same time,” Val said. “Matt, can you send these coordinates to my GPS?”

“Already done.”

Val thanked him and hung up. She turned to Riley. “How do we get there? Without getting caught, I mean.”

“Bodega Highway is the most direct route, but Diekmann knows your hotel is on that road. He’ll have cops posted there, and Highway One as well.”

“Is there another way?”

“Yes, but it’s twice as far.”

Val glanced at the clock on the dash and sighed. “We don’t have much choice. Better to get there slow than not at all.”

“Here,” Riley said, adjusting the GPS to a new point. “We’ll take the old highway north from Sebastopol. Nobody will even think to look for us there.”

“Perfect.”

Valkyrie started the Packard. She pulled out of the hiding spot under the trees and drove back to the main road. The GPS system automatically updated their position. She waited until the road was clear before pulling out.

“This would be easier if you had a more inconspicuous car,” Riley said.

“Nice try. I’m not selling the car.”

“A guy can always dream,” Riley said. He settled back into the seat. “There’s still one thing I don’t understand about all of this.”

Valkyrie glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

“I know what Odin did to you, how that affected you. I get that. But what I don’t understand is how you managed to find him. How do you track a serial killer like that?”

“I started looking for him two years ago,” Valkyrie said. “I had help from Matt. He wrote a program that could scan all the news stories on the internet, looking for certain clues. Odin didn’t have a name then, and he didn’t have the M.O. he uses now, so it took a lot of digging. We used to call him the Collector, because of how I first met him. Eventually, we found the story of the couple in Phoenix with their throats cut.”

“That was a message to you,” Riley said.

“Maybe. All I know is that after I investigated that murder, I got an anonymous tip pointing me to the next one. That was in Reno.”

“What happened there?”

“It’s a long story,” Valkyrie said with a sigh. “I got caught impersonating a federal agent in a small town north of Reno. They locked me up, and I spent three days in jail. After I escaped, I got another call directing me here, to Sequoia County.”

“Wait a minute!” Riley said. “You’re telling me you
escaped
from jail? You’re an escaped convict?”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” she said.

Riley shook his head. “I had no idea. I mean, I knew what you were doing, but…” A strange look came over his face. “Valkyrie, has it occurred to you that these anonymous phone calls might be the killer? That he’s leading you around, trying to lure you into a trap?”

“I’ve been through all that with Matt. It’s not Odin.”

“How can you be sure?”

“First off, he wouldn’t lure me here and then do nothing. If it was Odin, he would have killed me already. This person seems to know things about me, too. Things Odin wouldn’t know.”

“Like what?”

“He’s made references to things about my past, like when I was a cheerleader for the Tigers, or the year Tom and I bought the farm.”

“He said those things?”

“He hinted. He dropped clues. The first time I talked to him on the phone he said,
Good luck, Tiger.”

“That’s a little vague, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a coincidence. He knows things about me no stranger would know.”

“Creepy.”

“Yes, but the point is that anyone with that kind of information could have killed me years ago. He’s been able to track me down, even after I changed cell phones. That’s not something Odin could do. If he could, I’d be dead already.”

“And you have no idea who it is?”

Val pursed her lips and gave Riley a hesitant look.

“What is it?” he said. “Is there something else you’re not telling me?”

Valkyrie fixed her gaze on the road ahead. “There was something strange that happened at the funeral. I was in a wheelchair, right out of the hospital. I could barely even breathe on my own, much less dress myself or put on makeup. The doctors said I shouldn’t go, but I insisted. I had family in town, and they helped me get ready.

“During the burial, I noticed someone hanging back from the rest of the crowd. It was a man I didn’t recognize, but I didn’t think much about it at first. I just assumed it was someone Tom had worked with. But he never came close. He stood back at the edge of the street, watching us, waiting for the coffin to go into the ground. The second it did, he vanished.”

“And that’s who you think has been calling you?”

“I don’t know,” Valkyrie said. The fog had closed in, and she reached for the wiper switch to clear the mist from the windshield. “I don’t know why, but for some reason, I’ve made a subconscious connection between the two. The first time he called -the first time I heard that voice- I immediately thought of the man at the funeral. It may just be my imagination.”

“I doubt that,” Riley said, staring into the swirling fog. “It seems to me your hunches are usually spot-on.”

“Yeah? I have another one: I have a hunch Odin’s not going down without a fight.”

Riley glanced at her. “Are you going to kill him?”

Valkyrie didn’t answer. She fixed her eyes on the road and kept driving.

Chapter 30

Maddie snapped awake. The breeze had died down and the sequoias stood perfectly still. The forest around her was deathly silent. A layer of fog slid over the treetops, and a second layer crawled along the ground, weaving in and out of the trunks so that the trees looked like they had grown out of the clouds. Scattered pools of moonlight sliced through the branches like spotlights shining down from heaven. Down the slope, she heard the sound of a branch snapping. A minute later, an owl hooted somewhere in the distance.

Maddie waited for a few more minutes before trying to move. When she did, the pain in her gut was still there, but it wasn’t as sharp now. It was more of a constant throbbing ache, a pain that pulsed not only to every movement she made, but also to the beat of her heart. Maddie rolled onto her left side, trying to avoid further irritating the injury. A moan escaped her lips. She stretched her right leg out in a natural, somewhat relaxed position and waited for the pain to subside.

Ten minutes later, Maddie found the motivation to try again. This time, she managed to crawl to one knee before vertigo threatened to take over. She hovered there, trying to balance with her right leg still extended out behind her, waves of nausea washing over her. Maddie fought to control her breathing, to visualize the pain leaving her body. She somehow found the strength to maintain her position.

Maddie knew she would never get to her feet without putting pressure on that wound. She made up her mind to do what she had to, and to do it as quickly as possible. She clenched her teeth and pushed herself upright, forcing her right leg to support as much of her weight as possible. The move was quick, but caused enough torsion on her midsection that a muted cry escaped her lips before she even realized it had happened. Just as quick, Maddie was on her feet. She limped to a nearby tree and leaned with her back against it, fighting to stay upright. The cold, humid air rushed in and out of her lungs. Her limbs trembled. She could feel the warmth of fresh blood trickling down her midsection, the biting pain of all her other wounds: the scrapes and cuts on her body, the blisters and shredded flesh on the soles of her feet. Deeper still, she felt defiled, her soul weighed down by the burden of hopelessness and the despair of a heart that seemed numb and cold; a heart that might never feel anything again.