Special Forces: Operation Alpha: Redemption for Avery (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Ryker Townsend FBI Profiler Book 2) (2 page)

“Yeah, sure. I’m on it.”

As Hutch and Cam continued taking measurements, drawing diagrams, and bagging and tagging evidence, Crowley took photos of the crime scene. I walked the perimeter of the body dump site, trying to determine how the UNSUB could’ve pulled it off.

Why did you pick this spot?

I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds around me, clearing my thoughts to let the mind of a killer in. When I opened them again, I caught movement to my left.

A small little girl with tangled brown hair stood among the tall grasses. With all the activity at the crime scene, I would’ve expected her attention to be drawn to the others—but she held her gaze on me. That’s when I noticed the gaunt, haunted look in her eyes. She looked disheveled and bruised, with the skin of her face pressed tight to the bone. Even from a distance I saw something terribly wrong about her.

She looked dead.

The instant my thoughts turned toward death, it was as if she read my mind. She vanished in the blink of my eye. I searched for her, yet saw nothing until a frail shadow burst into view—closer this time.

I dared to look for Crowley, to determine if the little girl had been only my imagination, but after she disappeared again, a blistering cold blew through me from a world beyond my own. I knew instinctively what would happen next and braced for it. The dead girl reappeared in a blinding flash and stood inches from me, staring into my eyes—willing me to understand.

Her sudden manifestation jolted me. I almost gasped in shock, but I choked it down, doing anything to preserve what little remained of my manhood. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

What is it?
I wanted to ask, but my lips wouldn’t move. She inched closer until I smelled her decay—the familiar tang of old death. I fought hard not to wince. When something moved in the trees beyond where the girl stood, I looked up. Withered faces with sallow skin and sunken eyes gathered, emerging from the ground like spirals of smoke to take shape and cower in the shadows.

The girl had brought them. I didn’t know why, at first, until an abrupt spark of intuition crept into my mind like an insidious beast and clarity struck a chord between us. When I grasped the dead child’s intent, my gut twisted with the realization. I stood in the middle of a mass murderer’s dumping ground. Stunned, I peered over the land that surrounded me—certain that I would find other bodies under my feet.

Is this what you came to tell me?
I didn’t speak those words aloud. I didn’t have to. Once again I gazed down upon the little girl. With a broken smile, she slowly nodded and chills slithered down my spine.

San Bernardino National Forest, California

Ryker Townsend

I didn’t always see God in the master plan. Evil dominated my world, but how could darkness exist without the light to define it? When I saw the small girl standing in front of me, trying desperately to reach out to me from the grave, I wanted to believe in God. How could I not? She made me want to believe.

She smelled of the earth and pine needles—a feral child, dead long ago. I don’t know how I knew this, but I did. Something kept her earthbound. I did not sense hatred in this child. In her presence, I warmed with something far more sustaining than hate.

I sensed love kept her here.

“Who are you?” I tried speaking to her.

Her eyes watered and her small hand touched an embroidered red heart sewn onto her small tank top. The heart had rounded ears stitched onto it, attached with large and uneven loops of thread, something gloriously imperfect yet a priceless keepsake made by an inventive child.

A fragile tear spilled down her pale cheek. It trickled and vanished before it dropped to the ground. With trembling fingers, she touched the red heart again and pulled at the ears, making sure I saw it.

The heart meant something to her.

“Someone special gave that to you, didn’t they?”

This time the child ventured a brittle smile before she vanished in front of my eyes. I waited, but she didn’t come back. I knew with certainty that it wouldn’t be the last time I’d see her. She’d come to me for another reason I had yet to discover.

I had a strong feeling she would help me—she’d be the one to lead me to the UNSUB who’d killed Lily and others.

“Thank you,” I said to no one.

***

Minutes later

“What do you mean there are more bodies? How do you know—?” Crowley sighed. “Never mind. You got an inside tip from Casper. I get it. What do you need from me?”

“Have Sinead do the searches, but what I’m about to ask
you
will stray from the case we’ve been sent to investigate. You’re the only one who’ll understand why I need to work this way. You may need to cover for me.”

Crowley stiffened.

“I can’t lie to Reynolds. That woman doesn’t blink.”

“I’m not asking you to lie.” I shrugged. “Just…get creative.”

Anne Reynolds, my unit chief, had recruited me fresh out of college from the University of Maryland. She’d taken a special interest in my career and had begun to question my methods when it came to my gut instincts. In the end, I would always find direct evidence to support my assertions. My cases had to hold up in court with substantiated proof, but my odd behavior was never simple to explain.

Lucinda Crowley understood my process, after I’d shared my secret. I needed her to back me with my unit chief and other members of my team, or local law enforcement, whoever might question my certifiably odd conduct.

“What’s going on?” Crowley asked. “Talk to me.”

“I had one of my dreams two nights ago. I saw Lily right after she’d been dumped here. Her eyes hadn’t clouded over completely. Since it takes about two hours for that to happen, I believe the UNSUB killed her not far from here.”

“Okay, that’s something we can work with. What else?”

“While I walked the crime scene perimeter, another vision appeared to me.”

“What a minute. You had a vision while you were awake? Has this happened before?”

“It doesn’t happen often. If I haven’t had enough sleep, sometimes—” I didn’t finish. We were getting off track. “The point is, I sensed another presence, someone who had a connection to the UNSUB. I have to trust my gut.”

Crowley nodded.

“Okay, what can I do?”

“Contact Sinead. Have her focus on missing person reports for young girls. I need to see faces. Also have her search for any murders where the body had been found in this general location. I’m looking for something specific.”

“Like what?”

“A child who is missing or was murdered, she looked ten to twelve-years old, and it appeared as if she’d sewn a red heart on her tank top with—” I didn’t know how to explain how a heart could have ears.

“With what?” Crowley crossed her arms. “Don’t clam up now. You’re getting live tweets from the other side, for cryin’ out loud, and the dead are popping up in broad daylight like Whack-A-Mole.”

Crowley could always provoke me into rolling my eyes, even when I didn’t want to.

“Look for a police report that mentions a stitched red heart with…round ears.”

“Ears on a heart? What kind of ears?”

“Fuzzy brown ones.” I said it as if it made perfect sense.

Crowley narrowed her eyes and pondered my unusual description.

“Okay, fuzzy ears on a heart. That sounds like a Care Bear.”

Lucinda never failed to surprise me.

“Are you an authority on children’s toys?” I asked.

“No, but unlike you, I was a kid once.”

I furrowed my brow.

“Pfft.” She shrugged. “I didn’t pop out of my mother’s womb spouting Voltaire, playing chess, and eating big people food like roasted Brussels sprouts.”

“My affinity for vegetables still doesn’t explain how you know about—”

She didn’t let me finish.

“I had a Care Bear when I was little. After the bear wore out and lost its stuffing, kids would take the emblem off the belly—which was called a belly badge, by the way—and attach the plushy ears to it. It became a thing.”

Lucinda thumbed through her smart phone until she found what she wanted and handed her cell to me.

“Here’s Tenderheart. Could that be what you’re looking for? All the bears had names. Bedtime Bear, Cheer Bear, Birthday Bear.”

She had me at ‘belly badge.’ I stopped listening to the stuffed bear names and stared at the picture on her cell phone—at the spitting image of the crimson heart—and I imagined it with fuzzy ears to see it had been a perfect match.

“This is it.” I grinned. “You’re brilliant.”

“Well, I know my Care Bears. Never doubt it.”

“Good to know.” I handed back her phone.

“How are we going to justify the expense of unearthing a mass gravesite when we have no real proof it exists? We’re talking cadaver dogs, ground penetrating radar, and maybe even those probes that collect air samples to detect for buried body gases.”

“Ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen.”

“Yeah, whatever. They all cost money. We were called to investigate one case, Lily’s case, because the brutality suggested a serial killer might be in play. Sinead is searching for any similar kill patterns. Nothing so far, but if we find more bodies, that could bust this case wide open.”

Crowley had been right. At this point in the investigation, I needed justification for escalating our case scope and for keeping my team in Big Bear Lake longer than we expected. I’d have to reason with Anne Reynolds and give my unit chief something she could support, but I also needed something from Crowley and I had a suspicion she wouldn’t like it.

“You and Sinead get me all you can on any related cases in the area. Before I call Reynolds, I need a strategy, but there’s something else that I need from you tonight, after the rest of our team are tucked into bed.”

After she shot me a wicked smile, I had to clarify.

“That’s not exactly what I meant.” Although I had been thinking the same thing, I had the case on my mind.

Crowley scrunched her face and gave me the stink eye. I’d seen it before.

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“That depends.” I shrugged. “You know what they say about one man’s trash.”

I fought to keep my mouth shut when an unrelenting idiom popped into my head—‘There’s a seat for every ass
.
’ If I wanted her cooperation, resisting the urge to share the saying seemed prudent.

“Now I know I’m going to hate it,” she said.

Outside Big Bear Lake

Late Afternoon

Ryker Townsend

After we worked the crime scene, Hutch drove our team into the small town of Big Bear Lake, to get a bite to eat. From what I saw of Lily, I knew I would swear off meat for days, but Devin Hutchison and Camilla Devore were always hungry. They sat in the front, with Cam using her smart phone to hunt for a good local café, while my medical examiner, Dr. Julian Martinez, stretched out in the back, sleeping.

Lucinda sat next to me in the middle row, placing a video conferencing call to DC. She’d communicated what we would need to the team’s resource diva, Sinead Royce, and had followed up. When she made the online connection, Lucinda flipped the laptop toward me and I braced for the unexpected. Sinead did not disappoint.

Her face came on the screen and she grinned, wearing colorful eye glasses in wide green, white, and red vertical stripes that were perched on the tip of her nose.

“Hola, Ryker,” she said and waved. “
¿Cómo estás, jefe?”

“That depends. ¿Cuándo sale el próximo autobús para Tijuana?”

Sinead’s simple ‘how are you, boss’ greeting backfired on her when I answered in Spanish, ‘That depends. When is the next bus for Tijuana?’

“Wait, what?” She shoved her face close to the camera until her eyeball filled the screen. “No fair. You speak Spanish.”

“You’ve got a Mexican flag on your face.” I raised an eyebrow. “It’s quite fetching, but are we missing out on a holiday?”

Sinead Royce had a thing for eyewear of all kinds, from snappy frames that entered the room long before she did, to contact lenses that served to horrify normal people. Most days she reminded me of Ellen Page in black glasses that dwarfed her delicate face and small stature. If filmmakers came looking to cast the next Hobbit movie, Sinead would have the inside track.

“I’m celebrating the life of the first worm that ever made the ultimate sacrifice, to take a nose dive into a bottle of Mezcal and become legend,” Sinead said. “As you know, Mezcal is tequila’s wormy big brother.”

“Is that a thing?” Hutch asked. “Why didn’t I know about this worm holiday?”

Cam punched him in the ribs.

Sinead sounded like a party girl, but she didn’t have the face to make a real go of it. If she ever joined our team to a local watering hole, she usually got carded. She hadn’t changed much from her high school graduation photo.

But while most kids had been thinking about prom, Sinead had graduated high school at sixteen, completed her undergrad studies two years later, and received her Master’s in Computer Science with a specialty in cyber security, all before she turned twenty-one.

“I booked all of you into the Travelodge.” Sinead gave us the address and Cam plugged it into the navigation system of our rental SUV, a Chevy Tahoe.

“For the research you requested, I’m sending you the files for any case meeting your criteria, whether the file is still open or closed.” Sinead took off her Mexican flag glasses and replaced them with her own black-framed ones. Her expression turned somber. “For a sleepy vacation town, there are quite a number of missing girls in the area, Ryker. Some cases are as old as twenty-five years and still open.”

I scrolled through the files and noticed a disparity in ages.

“I had asked for murdered or missing younger girls,” I said. “The ages of these victims, some appear to be older, into their thirties.”

“I wanted you to have everything I found, but yes, I noticed that, too.”

When my eyes found the face I’d been looking for—the young, dead girl who had come to me at Lily’s crime scene—I stopped and stared at the image of the pretty child when she’d been alive. Bright eyes, an endearing and impish grin, and a face dappled in playful freckles.

“Avery Reed.”

I must’ve said the name aloud. Lucinda poked me and whispered.

“Is that her?” she asked. “The one you—?” She didn’t finish.

I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the girl.

“A couple hiking at Big Bear Lake found her body after she’d been missing three weeks.”

I read the details of her abduction and scrolled through the crime scene photos where the Sheriff’s office recovered her body. It broke my heart to see what had happened to Avery.

“Any arrests?” Lucinda asked.

I furrowed my brow as I read an update to the girl’s case record.

“Nineteen years after they discovered her remains, authorities found the body of the alleged perpetrator, dead. A Navy SEAL team killed him, a guy by the name of Ben Hurst. The girl’s brother, Sam Reed, had been part of that SEAL team.”

Reed had only been fifteen at the time his sister went missing. I couldn’t imagine the kind of obsession it took to hunt his sister’s killer all those years. If Reed were still alive, I wanted to meet him and I hoped Sinead could find him.

After I read more of Avery’s case file, I shook my head. “This can’t be right. It doesn’t add up.”

“What isn’t right?”

“If Hurst took the girl and killed her, how is it that years later, he abducted someone much older? Predators into preteen girls, they aren’t going to switch hit and hunt women in their thirties. That goes against type.”

“Then there’s Lily,” Lucinda said. “She’s seventeen, somewhere between in age, and she’s out in the open and displayed. You’re right. The MO isn’t consistent. The profile would be all over the board.”

“We could have more than one serial offender. This case just got complicated,” I said. “Good work, Royce. I have enough to call Reynolds and ask for more resources. When I get the green light, I’ll be in touch to arrange for cadaver dogs, ground penetrating radar, whatever it takes to search the marshlands where we found the body of Lily Rae Hubbard. We could have more than one killer using that site as a dumping ground.”

“With all the remote areas in the San Bernardino National Forest, how is it even possible that more than one UNSUB is using the same location to dump the bodies and not know about any others?” Cam asked. “The odds must be astronomical.”

“If we have more than one UNSUB using the same real estate, it implies a certain level of cooperation between them,” I said. “They might know each other, but I don’t want to speculate, until we have evidence.”

Cam had been right. If there were more than one UNSUB, the idea of a greater conspiracy had my mind reeling. Serial killers rarely worked together, although there were notable exceptions. Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono became known as the Hillside Strangler when it was believed there’d been only one rapist serial killer. At his trial, Bianchi went for the insanity plea, claiming multiple personalities were using his body to kill.

“I’ll need you to go through these files with me,” I said to Lucinda. “After we eat, we’ll work on the profile at the motel.”

“Or profiles, plural.”

I nodded in agreement.

Sinead had given me plenty of ammunition to justify the search for more bodies. But as I stared down at the faces in the case files, I committed each one to memory. I wanted to know them—whether they came to me in my sleep or had the courage to face me tonight—and share what happened to them.

Earlier I’d asked Lucinda for a favor, something she’d be uniquely qualified for. She knew about my gift and because she had FBI credentials, she could back me up. I didn’t want to chance that the souls I’d seen in the pines would remain silent in death. They were my best shot at stopping the UNSUB. Perhaps the brave child, earthbound because of love, would show them the way to me.

After the witching hour of midnight, I would return to the spot where Lily’s body had been found and search for the haunted souls of the other ones—and Lucinda would come with me.

***

San Bernardino National Forest

After midnight

Ryker Townsend

“I don’t know how you talked me into this.” Lucinda groused as she walked the dark trail behind me, guided only by the narrow beams of our flashlights.

“Dan Aykroyd was booked.”

“Not funny, Ryker.”

Moonlight dappled the ground and its blue haze cast deeply carved shadows into thick, scaly bark to make sinister shapes on the ponderosa pines. The chilly night air was thick with the pungent aroma of tree resin. Every sensation, from the cold mountain air to the ghostly images of moonlit shadows, put me back into my worst nightmare.

A year ago, I nearly died at the hands of the most frightening UNSUB I had ever faced in the remote mountains on the Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. Because I’d kept my gift a secret and hadn’t trusted anyone within the FBI, I became a victim. I still struggled with the trauma some nights and heard the whispers of my ordeal when I slept—the voice of my tormentor.

‘Death is powerful. Once someone is marked, no one can stop it, not even you.’

As much as I hated the taunt of those words, I embraced them. Those whispers reminded me how close I had come to dying.

‘You’re the voice of the dead. You watch over them, but who watches over you?’

I’d survived and my body had healed, but I would never be the same. I knew what being a victim meant and I’d even imagined my body on my ME’s autopsy table—cut up like store-bought chicken. My gift put me in harm’s way, but it also had thrown me the only lifeline I would get before Lucinda saved my sorry ass.

“You’re quiet. Are you okay?” she asked.

Her voice drowned out my mélange of demons and I loved her for it. Whenever I felt adrift on a vast sea, she’d become my island. Her voice grounded me in this reality and made me feel safe—and loved.

“Yeah, I’m good. We’re almost there. I can see the clearing.” I stopped at the edge of the marsh, turned off my flashlight, and shut my eyes tight to get my night vision. “No lights. If we’re not alone, it’s best we’re not a target.”

“Roger that.” Lucinda lowered her voice, as I had, and doused her Kel-Lite. “What’s the game plan, ghost whisperer?”

“I have no idea.”

I reached for my Glock and rested my hand on the grip as I searched the dark for anything that moved—alive or dead. When I heard Lucinda’s weapon clear her leather holster, she followed me into the clearing. I wanted to start where we’d found Lily’s body.

“You will tell me if we’re not alone, right?” she asked. “I left my 3-D glasses back in the nineties.”

I waved a hand and said, “Dead ahead.”

“Still not funny, Ryker.”