Chapter 18
To Do:
- Ask Sawyer why system is not break-in-proof
- Call Mom Charlie
Jack Hartley stoodin Claire’s kitchen, dressed in overshined dress shoes and a black suit and tie. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed perfectly into place, and a clear earpiece nestled in his right ear. His footsteps were completely silent as he stepped closer to her. He was tall, but not so tall that he would stand out in a crowd. A distorted, male version of herself stared back at her. The slope of her nose. Her earlobes.Her own brown eyes peered out from an unfamiliar face, and she didn’t know whether to scream or run or cry.
The bottom fell out of her stomach, and her head spun like she had climbed onto a Tilt-A-Whirl. What could he possibly want with her after two decades of silence? And how had he gotten past her security system?
Had she stumbled into some kind of alternate universe? One where she had a caring father who made sure she arrived home safely and who would offer to sit on the front porch cleaning a shotgun in case that good-for-nothing Luke ever came back?
But no. Jack Hartley wasn’t that kind of father. He wasn’t a father at all. At least not to her.
Mindy cleared her throat, still sitting in the kitchen chair. “So. What the hell are you doing here? Did Claire’s sudden media appearance remind you that you had a daughter you abandoned twenty years ago?”
Claire’s phone vibrated in her pocket, but she couldn’t catch her breath. Her eyes flicked between Jack and Mindy, and she was unable to find her voice.
“Claire,” Jack said, digging in his pocket. “Forgive the intrusion. When we heard you were out of the country, we had to catch you as soon as you came back. Local law enforcement really should have informed us of your whereabouts but?—”
“We?”
He withdrew a badge from his wallet and flashed it at her briefly. “FBI. We need your help.”
For fuck’s sake.
She stared at him, then threw her purse onto one of the barstools. She slapped the Taser on the counter then marched up to Jack. “Did I stumble onto the set of a bad movie? You come back into my life after two decades of absolute silence, claiming to be with the FBI, and you suddenly think I owe you something?”
He flushed, and his brows knit together.
“I understand you have some qualms with our shared history, but this is all trivial in the light of what we’re facing.”
Trivial?
Claire turned away from him and pressed her hands to her face. Her nostrils flared. Had she not suffered enough? Would this hellish nightmare of a summer ever end?
“Let me see your credentials,” she said flatly. No way she was going to take his words at face value.
“Fair enough.” He flipped open a small black wallet and handed it over.
“Jack Hartley, special agent. That’s just…great.” She folded it back up and fought the urge to fling it at his head. Her hands shook as she handed it back. “So, twenty missed birthdays and an unanswered invitation to my wedding is trivial?”
“I’d like to talk to you about all that sometime. I really would. But right now, I need your help. The country is facing an imminent threat.”
“Unless there’s an emergency overstock of tacos in a bunker in Waco that is about to expire, I’m not interested in helping you.”
“Claire. This is serious.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Clearly he wasn’t going to go away. “Do you mean Barney? He’s in prison.”
“Barney?” Jack scoffed. He paced up and down the hallway, checking the door frames and feeling underneath side tables. Was he trying to find her emergency pizza money? “You got a note before you left, yes?”
“That’s really none of your business. Detective Smith is handling it,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her.
“I’m afraid this is out of Detective Smith’s jurisdiction.” He opened then closed the blinds on her kitchen window. “We don’t believe that note came from someone looking to get a rise out of you. We believe Barney was a minor cog in a much bigger, much deadlier machine.”
Her blood ran cold. More Barneys? Could it even be possible? “I don’t understand.”
“Most of this is confidential,” he said as he ran his hand over the top of Claire’s windowsill and peered into the bottom of a vase. “But I’ll tell you what I can. We don’t think Barney was working alone.”
Claire’s breath caught in her chest. So, her note-leaver wasn’t just a punk kid playing a horrible joke? “But the Widowmaker victims—he knew them all. What motivation would someone else have?—”
“Yes, Mr. Windsor knew all his victims. But there are over forty thousand missing women in the United States at any given time. We’ve received some intelligence that suggests that some of these disappearances are connected in ways that we never dreamed.”
“What, like the A-A-S-K? The American Association of Serial Killers?” Claire shook her head.
“That may not be far off.”
Claire’s stomach fell into her butt.
The wooden chair creaked. Mindy gripped the arms with wide eyes.
Claire’s hands shook, and she curled them into fists. “What kind of intelligence?”
Jack resumed his pacing, over-polished shoes barely making a sound on the hardwood floor.
“Over the past several decades, numerous bodies of missing women have been recovered across the country. Over one hundred of these women had a symbol etched into their skin. And those were just the ones who hadn’t decayed beyond recognition. There’s no telling how many more there were.”
“How old were these women? Where did you find them? What’s the commonality?”
Jack turned to look at her. Did he look…impressed? No, that was definitely wishful thinking. “That’s the thing. The commonality isn’t clear. They were found as near as Philadelphia and as far as Anchorage. The only common thread that links the victims is that they’re all women. All different ages. Most were young and beautiful, but some were older. Many were career-driven, powerful women.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Would this nightmare never end? As if things weren’t bad enough when there was just one Barney. Now there was a legion of Barneys across the country? And they wanted revenge on Claire? Absolutely not. Time to move to Canada.
Something about his explanation didn’t sit right. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said slowly. “None of Barney’s victims were particularly powerful. Ariel was a waitress. Courtney was a perpetually intoxicated architect.”
“Regardless, we believe they’re connected. We never saw the symbol on a live person. Until we saw you on TV.”
“Symbol? What symbol?” She looked down at herself.
Jack reached for her, and Claire flinched. Something flashed in his eyes, but the shadow had passed before she could interpret it.
He brushed her hair aside, revealing her shoulders and collarbone.
“That’s not a symbol, it’s a stab wound.” Idiot.
“Not that one.” He gripped her shoulders and marched her over to the mirror next to the front door. “That one.”
She squinted in the half-light.A one-inch strip of skin that was normally covered up by a bra strap shone bare. Ah, of course. The shallow mystery scratch Barney had thoughtfully left her. It didn’t look like much at first. Claire had simply written it off as another ghastly physical reminder of the horror she had gone through. But, as she leaned into the mirror, she made out some minute details.
She gasped, immediately transported back to the dingy parking garage where the fluorescent lights hummed like a swarm of wasps. The air smelled like the basement of a new house, but the acoustics didn’t match. Her hands were bound behind her back, and Barney had taken his knife and carved something into her skin. At the time, she had thought it was his initials. But this didn’t look like initials. What the hell was it? A person?
She touched the mark on her neck. “Barney’s other victims. Did they—?” How did she finish this sentence? Did he brand them too? Were they also gifted with temporary tattoos?
“We don’t know, but we suspect they will if we can find them before they’re decomposed beyond recognition.”
Jack pulled a manila folder out of his nondescript black briefcase, which he had stashed on the bar. He laid a stack of pictures down. Claire approached hesitantly.
“These are some of the victims that have been recovered across the country,” he said, flashing through photo after photo. Claire’s stomach lurched. Even though the pictures were mostly close-ups of the symbol, the blood-spattered flesh and first-hand knowledge of the horror these women had faced in their last hours weighed on her like an anvil. The symbol was large in some, and barely decipherable in others. There were minor differences in each, but the general shape was undeniable. Vaguely humanoid with a strange protrusion. What was it?
Claire shuddered and covered the mark with her hair, willing it to disappear. If her sleepwalking was stress-induced, as she was beginning to suspect, she definitely needed to zip-tie herself to the bed frame tonight. It was that or end up pants-less on a roof with an emergency churro clenched between her butt cheeks.
Mindy had moved to the couch in the living room, staring warily at Claire’s father and yammering away on her cell phone. She had called Sawyer and cancelled the emergency call when Claire had calmed down.
“There are two reasons why I’m here, Claire.” Jack sat down on the very edge of one of the barstools, leaning forward and staring intently into her eyes.
Great. The guy left for twenty years and then only reappeared to ask her for something. Classic deadbeat dad. Was he going to ask for money next? “You said you needed my help. With what?”
He shuffled the pictures back into a neat stack and tucked the envelope in his briefcase.
“First, the locations of Barney’s missing victims. Their families deserve closure.”
Claire crossed her arms. A headache was forming. “I already told the police everything Barney said to me that night. He didn’t tell me where the bodies were.”
Jack nodded. “We also need information on this group, organization, cult, whatever it is they’re calling it.”
“How do you expect me to get all this information?” And why was this her responsibility? Surely an agent could torture the information out of him just as easily.
He pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Our agents have visited Barney in prison, tried to interrogate him. He refuses to speak to us. We even asked his ex-fiancée to go on local TV and make an appeal to him directly, but it didn’t work.”
Aha! So that was why Victoria looked so shifty during her interview with Marnie.
“He says he’ll only speak to you,” he said slowly. “We need you to go to the prison and talk to Barney. And while you’re there, we’re hoping you can get some information on this group.”
“No.”
The word had been on the tip of her tongue, but Claire wasn’t the one who said it. She turned. Mindy stood in the living room with her fists clenched at her sides, manicured nails biting into her palms.
“This is your daughter, Mr. Hartley. Your little girl. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything to you now because it certainly didn’t mean anything to you when you walked out on her and Alice and Charlie twenty years ago.”
Jack was pale again, except for his ears, which had started to burn red. “Claire, I would be happy to talk to you?—”
Mindy held up a single finger.
“But now we know, you left because you were scum. You ran out on your family when you accidentally started a new one with the cashier from the health food store. You have no idea what horrors Claire faced that night, and what’s even worse is the fact that you obviously don’t care. You’re only here because of what Claire could do for you. Like so many others, you want to use her.”
Mindy walked closer to him and jabbed him in the lapel.
“You don’t know anything about her. You don’t know that she still eats strawberry shortcake every year on her birthday because that was the last birthday cake you made her before you left. You don’t know that young Claire would run out and check the mail every day, hoping for a card or some sign that her dad was still alive. Claire is a survivor. She has survived something no one should ever have to witness, and she has flourished for two decades without you.”
“Mindy—” Claire found her voice. “Calm down. It’s okay. But you,” she said, swiveling to point at Jack. “Get out of my house. I don’t care who you work for. You don’t have the right to come into my home without permission.”
Jack frowned. “Claire, I?—”
“Mindy. Get my mother on the phone.” Alice was the only thing in her arsenal enough to scare an FBI agent out of her home.
“Okay, okay.” He backed toward the door. “Take my card.”
Claire stared him down. He might as well have been holding a live snake.
He put the business card on the bar and backed up another step. “I’ll give you some time to process, but I’m afraid we’re on a time limit. There’s no knowing when the next victim will be taken. I’ll be in touch.”