Chapter 15
Fifteen
When ERT finished their preliminary collection, Carter followed Lincoln inside, through the kitchen to the dining area where O’Shea stood next to the cleared-off table. Jo crossed to her husband’s side and rose on her toes, kissing his cheek. “I’m going to head back to town. Keep an eye on Larry.”
“Do we know where he is?” Carter asked. If Larry was in fact Dr. Fear, he would have to put on a hell of a show the next few days, pretending to carry out his law enforcement duties while torturing Barry and Trudy.
He wouldn’t have had to do that before, always attacking outside of Apex.
That said, after twenty-five years avoiding detection, Carter didn’t put it past Dr. Fear.
“Larry called this in,” O’Shea replied. “Once I got here, I told him to leave. He can’t be the lead investigator on his brother’s disappearance, even if he is the chief.”
“Especially if he’s the prime suspect,” Jo said. O’Shea’s brows furrowed into a deep V, and Jo tilted her head toward the table, to where Carter and Lincoln were taking their seats. “They’ll fill you in.”
O’Shea waited for Jo to leave, for Agent Drake to join them, then demanded an update. By the time Carter and Lincoln were done, O’Shea’s brows had raced the opposite direction, flirting with his hairline. For his part, Drake had propped his elbows on the table and hung his head in his hands.
“Is Larry our only suspect?” O’Shea asked.
“No,” Lincoln said. “Number two on our list is Barry.”
Lincoln laid out his alternative theory, same as he’d done for Carter, and O’Shea’s agitation escalated. He pushed out of his chair and paced the area in front of the patio doors. “Anyone else?” he asked.
“Jeremiah Kline,” Carter said.
Lincoln gasped. “He’s not old enough. And just no!”
“Why not? He’s from a founding family, has gray hair, and is always under our feet. He’s too young for the older kills but maybe he’s connected somehow.”
“Fine.” Lincoln leaned back in his chair, arms folded, crossing one leg over the other. “If that’s your outside-the-box pick, then mine’s Lydia.”
Now O’Shea gasped, while Drake just looked confused. “Who’s Lydia?” the younger agent asked.
“Lydia Osler,” Lincoln said. “Psychologist at the hospital and adjunct psychology professor at Apex U. She’d have access to the victims at the hospital, she’s also prematurely gray, and she’s tight with the town gossips.”
“That all makes sense, given the diagnoses.”
“Yes,” Carter said, “except, according to Clyde Weathers, the copycat said he was operating on his clock. And it would put her in her teens when she started killing.”
“That didn’t stop you from accusing Jeremiah,” Lincoln sniped. Apparently, he’d developed a fondness for the grad student. A tiny part of Carter turned green, but the bigger part of him hoped Lincoln was right. He liked Jeremiah too.
O’Shea braced his forearms on a chair back. “Suspects aside, next steps?”
“If Dr. Fear sticks to their pattern,” Lincoln said, reverting back to their, accounting for his Lydia theory, “which we can’t be sure of after the Weathers murder, and if Barry and Trudy are currently held by them, we’ve got seventy-two hours from when they were taken.”
Carter checked the time on his phone. “I say we estimate twelve hours have elapsed. They didn’t show at FP this morning.”
Lincoln nodded. “Agreed.”
“Do we bring Larry in?” Drake asked. “Or any of the other suspects?”
“Not yet,” Carter replied. “Jo has an eye on Larry, and the others won’t go far. We’ve seen each of them this morning already. If one of them is Dr. Fear, they must be keeping Barry and Trudy close.”
“We’re also working against the clock on Clyde Weathers,” O’Shea informed them. “His arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday. If he pleads duress, it’ll officially connect Stacy’s murder to the police station fire and to the Dr. Fear case.”
“At which point the press descend like locusts,” Lincoln said, fingers plowing through his gold-and-silver strands.
“They haven’t picked up on it yet,” O’Shea said. “I convinced Larry to list Stacy’s cause of death as an OD”—he pushed off the chair back, forcefully—“which if he’s Dr. Fear makes sense that he agreed. Fuck.”
Another point in the Larry column. “I don’t want to risk another escalation,” Carter said. “Especially with Barry’s and Trudy’s lives at stake. That’s a hit this community shouldn’t have to take. We need to move fast.”
“I want to go back to the library,” Lincoln said. “Talk to Molly. Get back into the archives.” He rose from his chair and shrugged into his jacket. “Now that I know who I’m looking for, I can make faster work of the photos. Get us the evidence we need to connect him to each of Dr. Fear’s cycle.”
“We’ll coordinate with Jo,” O’Shea said. “Keep working the meth angle.”
“There’s something there,” Carter said as he rushed to catch up with Lincoln, who was already halfway to the door, in his own world.
“Babe, wait!” Lincoln teetered to a stop over the threshold, Carter catching him by the back of the coat.
“I need to go to the hospital with O’Shea and Drake.
I want to talk to Weathers and see if he can connect any of our suspects to Stacy.
I also need to check in with Beverley and tell him about Barry and Trudy and see how they’re coming along with Baxter.
It’s all there. We just have to make the pieces fit. ”
Lincoln nodded absently, making mental to-do lists in his head, judging by the fountain of questions that followed.
“And can you or someone on the team there check our suspects against hospital logs? Or get the logs to me, and I’ll check them?
Again, now that we know who we’re looking for, it should be faster work. ”
“I can do that,” Drake said.
“And we’ll give you a lift to the hospital,” O’Shea told Carter.
“Thanks,” Carter said. Without thinking, he leaned forward to kiss Lincoln goodbye, like Jo had O’Shea.
Lincoln turned his cheek up to meet it, just like a married couple, or so Carter thought, only to suffer the crushing hammer of disappointment as Lincoln moved his cheek out of kissing range, his attention directed over Carter’s shoulder. “Give us a minute?” he said to the agents behind them.
“Sure.” O’Shea grinned as he and Drake stepped around them. “We’ll be outside.”
Carter bit back his own grin, hoping Lincoln’s request for privacy was cause for a rewind. “What’s going on?” Carter asked, once the door swung shut.
“Why did Dr. Fear escalate?”
Or not. The disappointment hammer struck again, but Lincoln’s question was a valid one, the primary thing Carter should have been thinking about.
Not how he’d warm up Lincoln’s lips with his.
He gave his head a single, hard shake, forcing it and himself back into the case. “Because their cycle was hijacked.”
Lincoln tilted his head. “Why the notes to us? Why stay in Apex? Why not resume in DC?”
“You don’t think this is Dr. Fear? You think it’s another copycat?”
“Oh, no, I think this is Dr. Fear. I’m just trying to understand why they’re changing things up.”
“The copycat was a new trigger,” Carter speculated.
“Yes and no. There was a trigger before Baxter; Baxter just caused the escalation. Whatever set off this latest cycle, something about it feels different.” Lincoln’s eyes strayed over Carter’s shoulder again.
Carter rotated, following Lincoln’s line of sight to the patio door and the fingerprint dust outline there of the note.
“I think maybe they mean for this to be their last.”
Lincoln’s words, the outline of the note, the significance of its location, their involvement all crystallized for Carter. He understood what Lincoln was driving at. “They mean to escape this time. For good.”
Interrogating Weathers was largely a bust. Other than recognizing his distorted voice, Clyde didn’t recognize anything else about Baxter—and he had no idea whether Stacy knew Baxter either.
Aside from Stacy being an addict, Weathers had given them nothing more to solidify their theory that Baxter had used the drugs to lure Stacy to the motel.
Speculation, and from there, nothing but question marks.
Stacy sure as fuck wasn’t talking, and Baxter still wasn’t talking either.
Carter was two seconds from tearing apart the office adjacent to the makeshift command center, frustration at the boiling point, when the door swung open.
“We may have something,” Drake announced as he stepped into the room. Then immediately stepped back.
Carter must have looked like he was on edge. Taking a deep breath, he walked behind the desk and waved Drake inside.
Drake hesitated a moment longer, then finally entered.
He laid three sheets of paper on the desk and pushed the first one toward Carter.
“Property record for several acres Baxter owns just outside of Apex.” He nudged the middle sheet—an aerial photo with dotted lot lines, a large red circle, and a pin-drop inside the circle.
Drake tapped the pin-drop. “Baxter’s place.
” Then he tapped the circle’s edge. “The DEA’s designated hot zone for meth production in the area. ”
Baxter was smack dab inside it. “Easy pickings for someone who needed to practice disappearing and murdering people.”
“I think he did.” Drake pushed the last sheet of paper toward Carter.
“This graph extrapolates the data from the missing persons reports. This blue line is the rate at which we should be seeing missing persons reports, based on the DEA’s estimates of the growing meth epidemic.
This red line shows a similarly steady increase in APD’s missing persons reports until this shelf spike here. It’s been above average since.”
Carter checked the date at the bottom of the graph that corresponded to the spike.
“2009.” Jeff Baxter’s last year at Apex U.
A year after Dr. Fear’s last cycle, after he’d found out who Dr. Fear was and began transforming himself into a killer too.
Fucking hell. “Get out there,” he told Drake.
“Get out there and see if he buried any bodies on or near the property.”
The younger agent rushed out, rallying the team.
“Good work, Agent Drake!” Carter shouted after him.
He shot off a text to Beverley and Kirk, requesting a video chat.
As Carter waited for the response bubbles to materialize into words, O’Shea poked his head in the room.
“You need me?” he asked. “If not, I’m going to go with Drake. ”
“Go.” Carter stacked the sheets and situated himself behind the laptop. “I’m going to see if this is enough to make Baxter talk.”
“Good luck.”
O’Shea shut the door, just as the call from Beverley dinged. Carter accepted, and the director appeared on-screen, in a different suit from this morning and with even deeper bags under his eyes. Little sleep on their end either. “What’ve you got, Agent Warren?”
“Another missing couple.”
“Dr. Fear?” Kirk said somewhere off camera, as Beverley replied, “Your text said this was about Baxter.”
“It’s about both,” Carter replied.
“Explain,” Kirk said, appearing beside Beverley.
“The missing couple is Barry and Trudy Cousins, the former police chief and his wife. No one thought their absence unusual at first. They have a tendency to travel spontaneously, but when Barry’s brother, the current chief, checked out their place, there were signs of a struggle. And a diagnosis from Dr. Fear.”
“Fuck,” Kirk cursed. “They’re back.”
“They never left,” Carter said. “They’re finishing their cycle. Which is why it’s more important than ever that we get Baxter to talk, and I think I have the evidence to do that.”
Carter walked them through Drake’s findings, each man looking paler and more tired with every piece of evidence Carter presented.
Kirk wiped a hand down his weary face. “Let us go back with this. Maybe it’s enough for a deal.”
“No.” Carter stood and braced his hands on the desk, looming over the laptop. “If O’Shea and Drake find bodies out there, this guy is probably going away for multiple life sentences. No deal is going to change that, and he’ll know that. But I can bait him.”
“Agent Warren,” Beverley said, a note of warning in his voice.
“I want to be the one, sir. I’m the one here in Apex. I’m the one on the clock now, trying to save a couple who’s important to the town here.” And to him. He liked Barry and Trudy and would do his damnedest to save them.
Kirk nodded. “He helped rescue my daughter, Bev. Give him what he wants. He and L have got the best shot at this now.”
Beverley seemed less convinced, but he conceded, telling Carter to hold while they retrieved Baxter.
Fifteen agonizing minutes later, the screen flickered to life again, now broadcasting an interrogation room.
Baxter was handcuffed to the table and a suited man—attorney, Carter assumed—sat beside him.
“What’s going on?” the suit asked, glancing between Carter on the screen and Beverley and Kirk across the table from them.
“This is Agent Carter Warren,” Beverley said. “He’s on the ground in Apex. Agent Warren, Attorney Ford and Jeff Baxter.”
“My client isn’t talking.”
“That’s fine,” Carter said. “I’ll talk. We found your property outside of Apex, Mr. Baxter.
Located right in the middle of a meth hot spot.
We have agents headed there now. I wonder what they’ll find there.
How much practice did it take to transform yourself into your favorite serial killer?
How many times did you try to impress your idol, and they still rejected you? ”
Baxter lunged at the bait. “He didn’t reject me,” he snarled. “He rejected himself.”
He. Confirmed by Baxter himself. Carter struck Lydia off the list for good. “Who is he?”
“Jeff,” the attorney chided.
Carter tossed out more bait, leading Baxter after the hook. “You’re one to talk, dyeing your hair gray to look like him, pretending to have the same MO as him.”
Baxter scoffed.
“How many times did you mimic Dr. Fear before you actively interfered? Before you stole from him? Before you aimed too high and went after Senator Kirk’s kid?”
And hooked. “You can’t steal something that someone is willing to give away.”
“And you can’t get away with mimicking a killer you don’t understand. It’s not about taking for Dr. Fear. It’s about getting the fuck out of this place.”
Baxter smiled, maniacal and unhinged, and chomped at the boat Carter was steering. “Exactly.”