CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Thursday, June 22
11:15 p.m.
Maggie’s plan to check out of the hospital hit a snag the second she declared her intentions to the nurses on staff. The older of the two—Jamie—gave her a look like she was crazy. “No, honey, you’re not.” The nurse pointed a finger at Vic and Tucker. “You two are nothing but trouble. You upset those girls, and now you’re inciting my other patient to rebellion.”
“Ma’am, we had nothing to do with this.”
She wasn’t interested in listening. “It’s nearly midnight. Whatever you have going can wait until morning. And you.” Her finger moved to point at Maggie. “You can’t check out until a doctor signs off on it, and he won’t be in again until seven. Before you start talking about waking up the poor on-call doctor, think about what you’re saying. It’s going to take you nearly an hour to make your way home, and then you’re going to toss and turn and not sleep. Go back to your room, do your best to rest, and leave in the morning.”
Maggie didn’t want to leave in the morning. She wanted to leave right that moment. Rationally, she knew she was letting her emotions get the best of her, but the lure of home was nearly overwhelming. “But—”
“Maggie.” Vic didn’t say anything else, but it was enough.
She sagged, though she couldn’t say for sure herself if it was in disappointment or relief. She lifted her chin out of sheer stubbornness. “The second the doctor gets in, he signs me out.”
“I wouldn’t dream of stopping him.” Jamie eyed her clothing. “I won’t make you change, but you might consider removing the boots so you can be more comfortable.” It was as much of a concession as she was going to get, and everyone in the room knew it.
“Thank you.”
Jamie sighed and left the room. After that, there wasn’t much else to say. Tucker bolted like he had places to be—probably his hotel room—which left her and Vic alone. With only him to witness it, she allowed disappointment to take hold, just for a moment. “I just want my bed.”
“I know.” He sat next to her and carefully wrapped his arm around her. “It’s almost over.”
Maggie leaned her head on his shoulder, too tired to ask the questions that had been pestering her all day. She wasn’t the type of person who did well with inactivity, but she had better get used to it, because her injury was going to hold her back, at least for a little bit. Pushing herself too hard, too fast, would make everything worse.
No matter how restless she felt.
She let herself enjoy the feel of Vic next to her for far too long before she finally straightened. “You need sleep as much as I do, and I can attest that this hospital bed is uncomfortable in the extreme.” She squeezed his hand and let it go. “Get some rest, Vic. The case will be here in a few hours. I will be here in a few hours. We’re reaching the critical point, and a misstep because you’re too tired to think straight is going to provoke Britton to give you one of those looks.”
He chuckled. “If that’s not motivation, I’m not sure what is.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Okay.” There was nothing else to say, and she had no right to the disappointment she felt once she was alone in her room once more. Maggie looked at her boots—the effort required to bend over and unlace them too much for her to even contemplate. She could call in one of the nurses, but she’d be sentencing herself to yet another lecture. Compared to that, the slight discomfort of keeping her boots on was a small price to pay.
She scooted fully onto the bed and leaned back. I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes . . .
Maggie shot upright so fast her back spasmed. She froze, blinking into the darkness, her disorientation only made worse by the red numbers glaring from the clock. Three? She must have fallen asleep. She blinked and rubbed the back of her hand across her face, trying to figure out what had woken her.
It took several long seconds for realization to set in. Silence. Complete and utter silence.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she went on high alert. Hospitals were often hushed, especially at this hour, but silence was unnatural, even for a small place like this. She slipped out of bed, feeling ungainly and loud, but the reality was that the only sound was the soft scrape of her jeans across the sheets. It shouldn’t have felt like she’d just blared a bullhorn, but it did. She pocketed her phone out of instinct and sent a silent thank-you into the universe that she’d been too tired to mess with her boots when she’d lain down. Having to wrestle them on now would have been a nightmare.
She padded to her door and eased it open, feeling foolish for sneaking around. She was going to peek out into the hall, see the nurses at their station, and realize it was all in her head.
But when she peered down the hall, the nurses’ station was empty.
Maggie froze. Okay, that was weird. She started to try to convince herself that there was a reasonable explanation, but stopped. There was a serial killer on the loose—maybe in a room just down the hallway from her. At this point, assuming innocence was the wrong choice.
She slipped her phone out of her pocket, made sure it was on silent, and sent a quick text to Vic. If it was a false alarm, she’d send a follow-up. If he was sleeping, he probably wouldn’t even get the texts until morning. If it wasn’t a false alarm, she’d call.
Simple. Easy. Nothing to be concerned about.
Not feeling the least bit reassured, she slipped out of her room and started down the hallway, sticking close to the wall. Maggie had never missed her service weapon—she didn’t hate guns and could take them or leave them—until this point.
She reached the nurses’ station. There, a half-drunk cup of coffee sitting next to the computer. Maggie touched it. Cold. She couldn’t see the girls’ doors from here, and she had the insane urge to go back into her room and close the door and pretend that none of this was happening. She wasn’t an FBI agent anymore. It wasn’t her job to investigate.
Coward.
She couldn’t walk away.
She looked around for a potential weapon, finally settling on a metal fountain pen that had probably been a gift for one of the nurses, because it was too fancy to have been provided by the hospital. As weapons went, it was pathetic, but it was still better than nothing. She took a fortifying breath and headed around the corner.
An empty chair sat outside a room, innocuous as such things went, but she knew for a fact Vic had called in a local deputy to stand watch until morning. He or she should have been sitting in that chair. Crap. Ashleigh’s door was closed, and she didn’t wait for a chance to talk herself out of it. Maggie opened the door, squinting into the darkness.
It shouldn’t have been that dark.
She reached blindly for the light switch and had to bite back a cry of surprise when she found it. The bright clinical light made the room look like a child had finger-painted the entire room in red. No child was responsible for this, though, and that wasn’t paint. She took in the arterial spray across the walls and finally the source—the blonde girl lying in the middle of the floor, her throat cut in a vicious slash. There was no coming back from that. She was dead. Maggie didn’t need to measure the wound to know that it had most likely been made with the same knife that had stabbed Joshua Conlon to death after he’d been shot.
She desperately didn’t want to walk into that room, but the bathroom door was shut, and she needed to know if there were more bodies to report before she texted Vic again.
Sidestepping the blood as best she could, she made her way to the bathroom, a hysterical voice deep inside her chanting the old children’s rhyme.
Step on a crack and break your mother’s back.
Step on a line, and break your mother’s spine.
Step on a . . .
She stopped in front of the door. The handle was coated in blood, so the unsub had closed it after killing Ashleigh. Either she was going to find Madison in this room, also dead, or Madison was the unsub. Should have cuffed them to the beds. Don’t know what we were thinking. It didn’t matter that no one had asked her recommendation or that she wouldn’t have considered it before now—she still felt responsible.
Maggie took a careful breath, all too aware of how close she was to hysteria. She hadn’t dealt with murder in so long, and to have so many bodies piling up in such a short time was too much. She hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t shored up her walls and taken the necessary step back, both emotionally and mentally. There were training tricks to ensure that her reactions didn’t get the best of her, but they weren’t second nature now like they used to be.
But too much or not, she couldn’t hide from this.
She opened the door, her mind clicking into a cold and clinical place she’d thought was long gone. Three bodies. Two nurses—one stripped of her scrubs—and one cop, their hands and feet zip-tied.
She rushed to the nearest one—Jamie, though she was barely recognizable with her face already swelling from some kind of blunt trauma. Maggie touched her shoulder and startled when she opened her eyes and tried to lurch up. “Help them!”
“Jamie, Jamie, calm down. I need you to tell me what happened.” She looked around for something to cut the zip ties with, but the bathroom was void of anything even remotely resembling a weapon. “Take a deep breath.”
Jamie struggled onto her back, her brown eyes clearing of some of their panic. Some. “There’s a pair of scissors at the nurses’ station. Cut me free and I’ll take care of the others. Hurry.”
She couldn’t leave them like this. Maggie nodded and hurried back to the nurses’ station, doing her best not to look too closely at the body in the middle of the room. She found the scissors quickly and returned to cut Jamie free. “Now tell me what happened.”
“It was that girl.” She rubbed her wrists and then her ankles. “Didn’t see much. I heard a scuffle and rushed in there, thinking . . . well, I don’t know what I was thinking. The policeman they sent to watch the girls wasn’t at the door, and I was worried. I walked into the room, saw the blood, and someone hit me from behind. She must have hit me a few more times, with how much my face hurts.” She gingerly touched her head right behind her left ear. “I don’t think I have a concussion, but she knocked me out cold, so who knows.”
“She. You keep saying she. Was it Madison?” She needed to get moving, because either it was Madison or the unsub had Madison. Too much evidence for the former. Unless Ethan slipped his leash and came to the hospital, it has to be Madison.
Jamie took the scissors from her and cut through the cop’s zip ties. “Who else could it be?”
Maggie nodded, because there was nothing else to do. She motioned to the two unconscious people. “Can you take care of them? I’m going to call in reinforcements.”
“Yes.”
She didn’t ask again. She strode back into the room, grabbed a pair of gloves from the container on the wall, and moved straight to the body. For all the blood on the walls, the unsub must have dropped Ashleigh almost immediately, because a pool had collected beneath her. Maggie pulled on a glove and pressed two fingers to the pool of blood. It wasn’t warm, but it hadn’t started to dry, either.
Not much time had passed since Ashleigh’s death.
She sent a silent apology to the dead girl and rose. The unsub would need transportation, so she’d have to steal a car. That took time, even for experienced car thieves.
Maggie ran.
It hurt. A lot. But she didn’t slow down, and she didn’t stop. If it was already too late, then it was already too late, but she wouldn’t miss her chance because she babied her back. She took the stairs, already slipping into Madison’s point of view. She wouldn’t take the elevator—too public, even dressed as a nurse—and she wouldn’t walk out the front door for fear of getting stopped. It was possible she’d go out the back and try one of the other buildings on the medical campus, but most of those parking lots would be empty at this time of night.
Staff parking. That was definitely where she was headed.
Maggie picked up her pace, making it down to the main floor in record time and then heading for the back of the building. She grabbed the first nurse she saw on the main floor, a guy who looked about twelve. “Upstairs. Someone’s been killed. Call the cops.” To his credit, he rushed to obey, barking out orders with a command that belied his youthful appearance. She didn’t wait to see them obeyed.
He called after her as she rushed down the hallway, but she ignored him. Time was ticking, and if she missed her in the parking lot, Madison would be gone for good.
The staff parking lot was sparsely filled, which she’d expected, but her gaze landed on a nondescript black van idling just out of the circle of lamplight.
Don’t be stupid. Do not rush out there to the suspicious-looking van.
She moved into the shadows next to the hospital door and pulled out her phone to text Vic a quick update. Now really was the time to call in backup personally with the information she had that the nurse didn’t, but that van was idling, and she couldn’t risk it getting away from her. She had no vehicle, and even if she did, the chance of keeping up with someone who knew the roads around here was slim to none. Maggie knew them, of course. But there were logging roads that could take a person all the way to Canada if they knew the way, and she didn’t.
She checked her phone one last time and then started for the van. There was no way to approach unseen, but she still kept to where she figured the driver’s blind spot would be. It wasn’t until she was nearly on top of the damn thing that she realized the back door was cracked open. Trap. Definitely a trap. She might as well have rolled out the welcome mat.
Maggie readjusted her grip on the pen she’d slipped into her pocket and pulled open the door. It took her eyes several seconds to adjust to the darkness within the van. It looked like something someone had been living out of—there were two sleeping bags, a pile of what she thought were clothes, and a box of . . . canned food.
Her hand brushed something hard inside the sleeping back on the left, and she froze, feeling around blindly. That was definitely a foot. After looking behind her to make sure the parking lot was still empty of people, she climbed into the back of the van, the rational voice in her head screaming at her to get the hell out of there.
I have to know.
She crawled to the top of the sleeping bag and unzipped it a little. That was definitely hair. She felt down farther, still calling herself seven different kinds of a fool, until she touched a face.
Breath ghosted against her palm—alive—but whoever it was didn’t move. Judging from the hair and slight build, she’d guess woman, but there was only one way to tell for sure. Maggie slipped her phone out of her pocket, cast another quick look around, and lifted it up enough so that the light of the screen shined on the person in the sleeping bag.
She froze. She knew that face, though her being here and unconscious sent all Maggie’s previous assumptions into a tailspin.
Madison.
The van door clicked shut behind her, and she moved out of instinct, slithering down and back to the pile of clothes, burrowing under it as best she could. She went still as the driver’s door opened and the van shifted with the weight of a new addition. She couldn’t see anything more than the silhouette of a head, though the black hood covered any kind of distinguishing features that she could use to figure out who it was.
Not that it mattered. She knew who it was, even she didn’t know who it was.
The unsub.
And she’d just broken safety rule number one—never let yourself be taken to a secondary location.
Crap.
Friday, June 23
3:29 a.m.
Vic woke to the sound of a text message. He blinked into the darkness, already reaching for his phone before he was fully coherent. He thumbed it on and frowned. He’d missed five messages from Maggie.
Heard something weird. Going to investigate. Think it’s the girls.
Ashleigh is dead. Madison is missing. Found nurses and cop unconscious but okay.
Heading to parking lot. Unsub is either Madison or has taken Madison.
Dodge cargo van. Don’t know the year. Black. License plate 3P 8768P.
SOS. Im backlog of van. Unsub friring. Madison there.
It took him three tries to decipher the last, and once he did, he shot up in bed. She was in the back of the goddamn unsub’s van, and if she was able to text, the unsub might not know she was there. “Fuck.” Vic threw on his pants and dressed faster than he ever had in his life. He called Tucker, but his partner didn’t answer, so he called Britton.
“Yes.” From the calm answer, one wouldn’t know that it was three thirty in the morning.
“The unsub got to the girls at the hospital. I think Ashleigh’s dead, and Maggie and Madison are in the back of the unsub’s van. I don’t know if he knows Maggie is there, because she was able to get a text out. I have the make, model, and the plates.” They could send a BOLO on it, but that wouldn’t help them if the unsub was going where he suspected. “He’s taking them to the park.”
“That would be my guess as well.” There was movement on the other end of the line and the jingle of keys. “Tucker will take the hospital. I’ll be at your hotel in five minutes, and we’ll head for the park.”
The sheer helplessness of the situation made him sick to his stomach. “We don’t even know where he’s taking them.”
“When was the last text sent?”
“Minutes ago.”
“Then we have time.”
He forced himself to slow down enough to acknowledge that truth. It took time to get to the park, especially if the unsub was attempting to get them deep enough where he could play his game without fear that they’d make it back to civilization. “We still need to call in a BOLO.”
“I’ll do that. If Tucker isn’t answering his phone, go to his door.”
“Yes, sir.” Vic hung up. He looked at his phone for a long moment, the temptation to call Maggie nearly overwhelming. Doing so would put her in danger, even if her phone was silenced. He wouldn’t do that, not even to reassure himself. He had to trust that she could take care of herself long enough for him to reach her . . . wherever she was.
They’d find her.
They had to.
He called the ranger station as he left his room and headed for Tucker’s. There was only so much the rangers could do, but he still had to call it in. They might not know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the unsub was taking Maggie and Madison to Glacier, but they had his past actions to use as foundation to anticipate his future actions. Every one of his kills had been in a national park.
No, that wasn’t true anymore. He’d killed Ashleigh in the hospital.
Killed Ashleigh but apparently left the nurses and cop alive.
Vic would think about that later. Right now he had more important things on his mind.
An unfamiliar woman answered. “Glacier National Park.”
“Who is this?”
“What the hell? Who is this? You’re the one calling at three thirty in the damn morning.”
Just like that, he knew. “Ava. It’s Agent Sutherland. I need your help.” He detailed what little they knew.
“Shit.” She sounded shaken for the first time since he’d met her. “Okay, give me a second. I need to think.” She didn’t make him wait long. “If he’s driving in, there are only so many pull-off spots. It’s the middle of the night, so Going-to-the-Sun Road will be all but empty. He’ll take them there. Or that would be my guess. There are a ton of turnoff points where he could park and haul them farther into the park. People leave their cars at trailheads all the time, so it wouldn’t be out of the norm unless you were looking for it.”
“That makes sense.” It was as good a theory as any. And if he was taking the women into Glacier like they suspected, it would narrow the places to look for the turnoff point. But it would still take time. “Can we get the park rangers on this?”
“We don’t have many on shift at the moment, but I’ll send the ones out that I do have.”
“We’re coming in from Kalispell, so we’ll start on that side.”
“That helps.”
By this point, he’d reached Tucker’s door and lifted a fist to pound on it. “I’ll have my phone on me. Keep me updated.”
“We’ll find her.”
“Yes, we will.” Neither one of them mentioned what was at stake if they didn’t get there in time. Maggie was resourceful, and she knew that park as well as the unsub did.
But she was injured and trapped in the back of the unsub’s van, whether he knew she was there or not. She wouldn’t be able to keep hiding once he went to pull Madison out, and if she tried to fight him . . .
Who the hell is the unsub? All the suspects are either dead or in custody.
Vic swallowed hard and pounded harder on Tucker’s door. A good thirty seconds later, his partner opened the door, shirtless and looking like he’d been sleeping hard. “What’s going on?” He took in Vic’s clothing, and his gaze sharpened. “What happened?”
“You need to get to the hospital. The unsub was there.”
“Fuck.”
A nondescript SUV in generic gray pulled into the parking lot. Britton. “There’s at least one person dead there, and we need every bit of information the survivors have,” Vic said.
“I’m on it.” Tucker frowned. “Where are you headed?”
“The unsub has Maggie.” Saying the words aloud made the terror that Vic was barely holding at bay all the stronger. He’d just found her again. Even if he hadn’t, she still had a life here—passions, hopes, dreams. The thought of such a vibrant life cut off too soon made him sick to his stomach.
Vic had never been more afraid than he was in that moment.
Tucker stilled. “You’ll find her.” He burst back into motion, heading for his suitcase. “Go. I’ll take care of things on this end.”
He went.