Sight Unseen (17 page)

“I’m going,” Griffin said testily. “I don’t need you to tell me what to do.” He motioned for Metcalf and Reade to join him and he glanced at Kendra as he turned toward the door. “I hope to see you tomorrow.”

Kendra watched Lynch open the door as they exited and exchanged words with the guard outside.

Lynch turned back toward her. “Me, too?”

She nodded. “Thank you,” she silently mouthed.

He shrugged and stared at her for a long moment. “If you need me, call.” He turned and followed the other agents out of the condo.

She
did
need him. She didn’t want to be alone with the memories that were bombarding her. But if he stayed, she would reveal weakness, and she didn’t want Lynch to see her like that. She had to be strong. That was another time, another place. She wouldn’t let Colby beat her now.

But oh, dear God, those memories …

Four Years Earlier

Carlsbad, California

10:40
P.M.

“HOW MUCH FARTHER?”
Kendra asked.

FBI Special Agent Jeff Stedler eased off the accelerator as their car hit a dense patch of fog. “Almost there, Kendra.”

A thick, soupy marine layer had descended on the coastal town of Carlsbad, thirty-five miles north of San Diego. The town’s tourist brochures touted the family-friendly resorts and expansive state park, but there was nothing inviting about this dark, lonely stretch of road in a long-abandoned industrial corridor. Large signs proudly trumpeted the cookie-cutter housing developments that would soon wipe the area clean.

“I don’t know why you think I can do this,” Kendra said tensely. “You should take me home.”

“Please. Just give it a shot.”

“I’ll be wasting your time.”

“I don’t think so.”

Kendra studied him. Of course he didn’t think so. His belief in her and everyone else in his life was unwavering, if a bit naïve. But she couldn’t dispute the fact that his confidence in people did seem to bring out their best. And that included her. In the seven months she’d been living with Jeff, he’d helped her finally find her truest, best self that had eluded her in those chaotic years after gaining her sight.

But tonight was still a mistake.

He glanced over at her. “Did you read the file I gave you?”

“Yes.”

“And…”

“It made me ill.”

“I’d be worried if it didn’t.”

He’d given her excerpts from the case file of a current FBI serial-killer investigation. It consisted mainly of descriptions and photos of nine grisly crime scenes that had one thing in common: each of the victims was decapitated, with no trace of the head left behind.

She shuddered. “Those photos were horrible. All those people … Even children.”

Jeff nodded. “Two little kids. I talked to the mother of one of them just yesterday. She kept telling me how much she wishes it was her.”

“I’m sure she does. I can’t imagine how someone goes on from that.”

“I can’t, either.”

She was silent. “Looking at those pictures, at first I just felt sick. Then I was depressed. Then I just got angry. I’m pretty much stuck at angry.”

“Good. Hold on to that.” Jeff turned on the wipers to clear away the condensation. The fog thinned, then billowed, with each turn of the road.

“Do you really think I can help?” Kendra asked. “I’m not like you, Jeff. This investigating stuff isn’t my thing. I don’t even like doing it.”

“You like helping people. You’ll get used to the rest. And I do think there’s a good chance that you might be the turning point. Nothing else is working for us. It might help to have a fresh set of eyes. Especially if those eyes are yours.”

“Ever since I was a little girl, even when I was blind, people were telling me I should be a detective.” She made a face. “I never thought the FBI would one day say it to me.”

He glanced at her with a smile. “I don’t know that I represent the entire FBI. I’m just one agent you happen to be sleeping with. If my colleagues seem a little skeptical, just ignore them. They don’t know you the way I do.”

“Meaning they’re not sleeping with me.”

“Meaning they haven’t seen you do the things you do. They’ve never watched you walk into a room, pick up on a thousand different details, and immediately give an entire rundown of the place. Or meet someone and hand them their entire personal history.”

“Parlor tricks.”

“They can be more than that.” His expression was intense. “And we can be more than that together. Do you realize how much good we can do? Why do you think I’ve been pushing you? You have a gift, Kendra.”

Jeff was an idealist, and he wanted to pull her along on his quest to save the world. Well, maybe she should go along even if that quest wasn’t her own. She had cared enough to want to live with him and begin to share his dreams. This was just another step. “I don’t know if you’re right or wrong, but I’ll see if—” She straightened on the seat. “There’s something going on ahead.”

The fog was pulsing with white, blue, and red strobes of light. Jeff slowed as they saw that the lights were actually flashers from half a dozen police cruisers parked in front of an old shoe factory.

They stopped and climbed out of the car. The factory’s small front courtyard was overgrown with brush and tall grass. Weeds sprouted from every crack in the sidewalk and parking lot. The brick archway of the worker entrance was lit only by the headlights and flashers of the squad cars. Beyond the entrance was a vestibule that had obviously once held the time clocks. After that was the factory’s main floor, topped by a multipaned skylight ceiling. Kendra could see the beams of high-wattage police flashlights darting against the ceiling and spearing into the foggy night sky.

Jeff handed her a dark blue FBI windbreaker that matched his own. “Here. Put this on.”

“I’m not cold.”

“I didn’t think you were. It’s so the local cops know you’re working with us. Go ahead.”

She slipped on the windbreaker, which was clearly meant for a man Jeff’s size. She rolled up the sleeves and followed him through the archway.

“Are you ready for this?” he whispered.

She wanted to tell him no, that she wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready for what lay ahead. She nodded jerkily, then was silent as they walked past a pair of cops securing the entrance. “I … think so. I’ve been preparing myself.”

“It may not matter. Sometimes no amount of preparing helps. If it gets to be too much, just leave the same way you came in. It’ll be okay.”

“Got it. And if I—”

That smell.

A sharp, acrid odor flooded her nasal cavities and burned her eyes.

The stench of death.

She hadn’t prepared herself for that.

They entered the cavernous factory floor, which was illuminated only by the investigators’ flashlights and a stray light from squad-car headlamps against the dusty upper windows. Kendra counted almost two dozen uniformed officers, detectives, and FBI agents pacing around the scene. Some looked busy, but most just looked freaked-out.

Then she saw why.

The remnants of several belted assembly lines could still be seen on the factory’s concrete floor, some more complete than others. Every fifteen feet or so, tall metal poles towered overhead, anchoring the conveyor-belt chassis to the slab.

Each pole had a human head impaled upon it.

Every single one of the victims on Jeff’s list, Kendra realized. The men, the women, the two children …

And their eyes were glued open.

Shock. Horror. Nausea.

“Are you okay, Kendra?” Jeff asked.

“No.” How could she be okay in a world that could produce a human being who could do this? She started to shake. “Terrible. It’s terrible.”

“Take deep breaths.”

If she took deep breaths, she’d smell the stench even more clearly. Didn’t he realize that?

“You can leave,” Jeff said quietly.

“No, I can’t.” Her gaze was held by those faces, by those staring eyes … “They’re looking at me. Can’t you see? They’re all
looking
at me.”

“Kendra, it’s not that they’re—” Jeff stopped. “This is too rough. You should go back to the car.”

“Too late.” She closed her eyes. But she could still see those faces. Particularly the faces of the two little children. She opened her eyes. “Too late for them. Too late for me.” She fought back the nausea and took a step forward. “And they know it. They know someone has to make him pay.
I
have to make him pay.”

“Kendra, I didn’t think that you would—”

“Get me closer to those heads. Maybe he left something, did something, that will let me find a way to help them.”

“Forensics will do that. It’s not your—”

“Don’t tell me that.” Her eyes were blazing as she whirled on him. “You brought me here. You almost made me come. Now you get me the help I need to make sure the monster responsible will never do this again.”

Jeff hesitated. “Stay here. I’ll talk to Griffin and the local police and get permission. I’ll be right back.”

She watched him start across the room, then forced herself to turn and look back at those heads.

She was becoming accustomed to the horror now that she had made her decision to not let herself be helpless before it. Sadness, anger, shock were still present, but there was also a burning desire for justice … and revenge.

Staring eyes. Broken hearts. Broken lives.

“I’ll find him,” she whispered to them. “Give me a little time. I’ll find him for you.”

Staring eyes …

San Diego International Airport

Present Day

6:40
A.M.

STARING EYES.

Block it out, Kendra told herself, as she looked up from her coffee. She had spent the night before being attacked by memories of that fever dream of a night at that factory and had gotten very little sleep. Now that the decision was made, she must not dwell on it any longer.

Easy to say. She had been able to suppress but never forget the eyes of those two little boys, seemingly following her around the factory floor.

Their faces were frozen, forever seven and eight years old, but their eyes were pleading, begging.

Dammit.

She parked herself at the Stone Brewing Co., well away from the Terminal 2 gate of the San Francisco flight. She didn’t want to run into any of the FBI agents yet.

In case she changed her mind.

She checked her watch. The plane was already boarding. She imagined Griffin standing on the jetway, neck craned, looking around the gate for her.

“Everyone knows you’re here, Kendra.”

She whirled around. It was Lynch. He was already at the restaurant, sitting with his back to the concourse.

He swiveled to face her. “Your bodyguard phoned Griffin the second he dropped you off at the curb outside.”

“Of course he did.” She shrugged. “Which would make it even more awesome if I decided not to go.”

“True.” He smiled faintly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

She nodded. “I didn’t get much sleep. I was just thinking about my first night on the Eric Colby case. It was hideous, and I wanted to strike out at everyone and everything. I don’t know if I could have held it together without Jeff there. He believed in me so much … I didn’t want to disappoint him.”

“You didn’t. You made him proud.”

“I hope so.”

Lynch closed the newspaper app he’d been reading on his tablet computer. “Do you think about him a lot?”

She nodded. Of course she did. She had watched him die only a year before, in the case that had first brought her and Lynch together. Jeff had been abducted during the course of a murder investigation, and Lynch had made her believe she could save him. He was wrong.

“I miss him.” She hesitated. “But not in the way you might think. We’d broken up almost a year and a half before he died. We didn’t have a future together. But even though I never saw him anymore, I liked living in a world with Jeff Stedler in it. Does that make any sense?”

“It does.”

“And the world is somehow sadder without him in it. He was a good person.”

“So are you.” Lynch motioned toward the concourse. “Are we gonna do this?”

She braced herself and nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

San Quentin State Penitentiary

Marin County, California

“THERE’S A CROWD UP AHEAD.”
Kendra was gazing out the window of the rental van she was sharing with Lynch, Griffin, Metcalf, and Reade. Metcalf was driving, and they had just completed the forty-five-minute drive from the airport. As they approached the penitentiary’s East Gate, they were greeted by the sight of twenty protestors. “They all have anti-death-penalty signs. Are they here for Colby?”

“They’re here for everybody on death row,” Lynch said. “But yes, Colby’s upcoming execution is what brings them here now. There will be hundreds more this weekend. By Monday night, there will be thousands. On both sides of the issue.”

For an instant, those staring eyes were once more with Kendra, haunting her. “Thousands…”

“It’s their right,” Griffin said.

“I know that.” She looked straight ahead and away from the protestors. “Just as it was our right to put that bastard here in the first place.”

After checking in at the gate, they were escorted to a two-story administration building where they soon found themselves in the office of Warden Howard Salazar, a sixtyish Latino man with wire-rimmed spectacles and close-cropped gray beard.

“When people ask what I do for a living, I say I just take meetings about Eric Colby,” Salazar said sourly as he hung up his phone and rose to his feet. “Or answer the phone from journalists about what happened at the last meeting. It’s pretty much all I do these days.”