CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

As the FBI jet took off from the small Caruthers airport, Riley sat staring out the airplane’s window. Dawn was breaking, and she felt uneasy about what this new day was going to bring.

They finally might have a chance to stop this serial killer once and for all.

She hoped they could do that.

If not …

She didn’t want to think about what might happen otherwise.

She closed and opened her right hand a few times. She felt some twinges now, but no pain to speak of. The injury she’d gotten from punching the hobo named Dutch was healing up nicely.

That was a good thing. She might need to function at full physical capacity very soon.

The small plane’s cabin was more crowded than usual. Riley had taken a window seat, and Mason Eggers had sat down next to her. Bill and Jenn were both on board, of course, and so was Chicago FBI field chief Proctor Dillard.

Bull Cullen was on the plane as well. He’d managed to seat himself a safe distance away from Jenn. The leering interest he had shown toward her before was completely gone. Now he looked scared that Jenn might punch him in the nose again at any moment.

Riley wondered …

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, it was certainly good that Cullen wouldn’t be harassing Jenn anymore. And Riley was pretty sure that Jenn had gotten her hostility toward Cullen out of her system. Riley only hoped that Cullen wouldn’t get so jittery about Jenn that his mind wouldn’t be on the case. Right now, the team needed all the brainpower it could get, even his. She didn’t think he could have become this area’s Deputy Chief of Railroad Police if he was a total idiot.

But then Riley thought about Carl Walder back in Quantico. Somehow, that bureaucratic flunky had managed to become the Special Agent in Charge. And Walder was a constant drag on Riley’s work.

As soon as the plane reached cruising altitude, Riley managed to get Dermott’s Chief of Police, Royce Ulrich, on the phone. The poor guy sounded sleepy and confused, but he promised that someone would meet Riley and her team at the airport. And he assured her that she’d have the full support of his department.

Riley was about to tilt her seat back and try to sleep a little when she noticed Eggers’s face was pale and he was gripping the armrests of his chair.

She asked him, “Are you scared of flying?”

He nodded and said, “It’s bad enough in those big commercial airliners.”

Riley smiled sympathetically.

“I guess you’ve never been in a plane this small before,” she said.

“I flew once in a little Piper Cub many years ago. It was a lot smaller, but this is even worse somehow.”

Riley said, “Well, this plane is pretty much no frills as far as service is concerned. But I could go get you a drink of water if you think that would help.”

She almost added …

And I’m pretty sure we can find a paper bag somewhere.

But she realized that the mere suggestion of vomiting might be enough to induce it.

“I’ll be OK,” Eggers said.

Riley wondered if maybe she should try to strike up a conversation with him. That might distract him from his apparent fear of flying.

After all, she knew almost nothing about him.

She’d noticed earlier that he was wearing a wedding ring. This had struck her as odd, since he seemed so insistent on following railroad police cases all over the place. At his age, wouldn’t he prefer spending more time with his wife and family?

She said, “I see you’re married.”

As if by reflex, Eggers covered up the ring with his right hand, and a pained expression crossed his face.

Riley immediately understood her mistake.

A widower, she thought. The loss of his wife was surely the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Eggers simply nodded.

Riley quickly tried to think of some way to change the subject.

But then it dawned on her …

He doesn’t like to talk about himself.

He was a lonely old man who managed to stave off boredom and grief by staying involved with railroad cases. That was all Riley knew about him, except she was sure that he had a better mind than Cullen and the newer generation of railroad police gave him credit for. She respected his insights and his expertise, and she felt sure that he understood the nature of this case as well as anybody else—perhaps even better.

And the truth was, that probably was all Riley had any reason or right to know about him. He valued his privacy, and she needed to respect that.

She looked out the window and saw a landscape of forested hills dotted with lakes that shimmered in the early morning light.

Tourist country, Riley realized.

It certainly was a beautiful view, and it was unsettling to think about the implacable monster who was probably lurking down there somewhere at this very moment, scheming to corrupt all that beauty.

But Riley told herself …

We’ll be on time.

This time we’ll be able to stop it.

She tilted her chair back and closed her eyes, hoping to catch just a little sleep before the plane landed—which was going to be very soon.

*

When Riley and her colleagues got off the plane at the little Dermott airport, a police SUV awaited them on the tarmac. Riley was surprised to see who was standing beside the car. She could tell by his uniform that he was none other than Chief Royce Ulrich himself. He’d come in person instead of sending any of his local cops.

As Ulrich opened the SUV doors and escorted everyone inside, Riley noticed that the man didn’t have the face of a law enforcement official. He had a certain slick, plastic look that Riley quickly found a word for:

Commercial.

Ulrich looked like a male fashion model, or a salesman, or a tour guide. And Riley could understand why. In this beautiful part of Wisconsin, law enforcement typically had little to do except cater to tourists’ needs and troubles. A police chief here had to be as skilled in PR as in law enforcement—more so, probably.

As the chief drove the short distance into downtown Dermott, he said, “I thought you’d caught that serial killer already—over in Caruthers.”

Riley was briefly startled. But she realized she shouldn’t be surprised. The news about the arrest of a seeming hobo must be all over the news by now.

What should she say to Ulrich?

Riley glanced uneasily at Bull Cullen, who of course still believed that Timothy Pollitt was the real killer and that coming out here to Dermott was a waste of time and resources.

Cullen smirked at Riley but said nothing.

Riley said to Ulrich, “We’ve got a new lead. We need to follow up on it.”

It wasn’t a satisfactory answer and Riley knew it.

Chief Ulrich said, “How many people know about this? That you’re trying to catch a murderer here today, I mean?”

Riley thought for a moment and said, “Just the people in this car.”

Ulrich nodded and said, “I’d like to keep it down to the smallest number of people possible. I haven’t even mentioned it to any of my own cops just yet. Let’s keep things on a need-to-know basis. This town is right next to a state forest. Tourism is our whole local economy. If people get scared to come here, this town could be in serious trouble.”

Riley understood his concern, but she knew she couldn’t promise him anything.

She also wanted to keep the stakeout as secret as possible in order not to tip off their target. But afterward, especially if they caught their killer, they would all be all over the news.

*

In Ulrich’s office at the police station, Riley and her colleagues stood looking at a large computer screen, surveying a satellite image of the local train tracks. Eggers pointed to the curve in the railroad track and explained his theory—that the killer would try to stage his next murder there, because the engineer wouldn’t see the victim soon enough to stop the locomotive.

When Eggers finished, Riley said, “We need to monitor that stretch of tracks. But we need to do it without being noticed.”

Ulrich seemed thoroughly engaged now.

“I think I know how to do it,” he said.

He got up from his chair and pointed to a spot on the screen. It was a square-shaped object in the woods.

Ulrich said, “That’s an old wooden tower, built for looking out for forest fires. Its base is at an altitude of two hundred fifty feet, and it’s sixty feet tall. You can see twenty-five miles in all directions from it—including that entire length of railroad track.”

Riley was pleased.

She said, “We’ll post a couple of people up there, and we’ll also put several people on the ground, hiding in the woods near the tracks. The tower lookouts can alert the ground people by radio if they see anyone suspicious, and the ground people will move right in and apprehend the perpetrator. He can’t possibly get out of a trap like that.”

Riley noticed that Bill was squinting at the screen, looking slightly dissatisfied.

He said, “All this assumes that we catch our killer after he’s already abducted his victim. That’s OK as a last resort. But we should do everything we can to keep him from abducting anyone in the first place. We need to take a two-pronged approach.”

Riley agreed.

She said to Ulrich, “Have you got good surveillance cameras on the platform where the trains arrive?”

“We sure do,” Ulrich said.

“OK, then,” Riley said. “We’ll have somebody watching the surveillance feed when the twelve thirty train arrives from Chicago. We’ll also have three people in plainclothes on the platform itself. Everybody will be linked by phone, and they’ll watch all the passengers who get off the train, looking for a woman who resembles the other murder victims. We’re pretty sure the killer is obsessed with that particular appearance.”

Cullen looked skeptical.

He said, “And what do we do when we see a woman who looks like the others? Use her as bait and see if the killer comes after her?”

Jenn said, “What’s the alternative? Yank her aside and tell her a killer might be after her, when we can’t even be sure of that yet? She’ll be traumatized right there and then, and probably for a long time afterwards, and we’re liable to cause a panic among the people around her.”

“Jenn’s right,” Bill said. “We simply won’t let her get in any danger. The second a threatening man comes after her, we’ll swoop in and catch him. If we can do it deftly and quietly enough, bystanders might not even realize it has happened.”

Those words rang in Riley’s mind …

Deftly and quietly.

Those qualities were going to be especially necessary right there on the train platform.

She said, “I want Bill and me to be on the platform, coordinating with two plainclothes officers. Jenn, I want you to be nearby watching the surveillance feed, alerting us the second you see anybody. Dillard and Royce, I want the two of you to run things up in the tower, communicating with the men on the ground near the tracks.”

Then she noticed Mason Eggers.

Let’s not leave him out, she thought. She knew by now that he had a shrewd eye for detail.

She told him, “I want you on the lookout in that tower with Royce and Dillard.”

Bull Cullen spoke up in a petulant voice, “What about me?”

Riley glanced at Jenn and Bill. She knew they were all thinking the same thing …”

What about Cullen?

None of them trusted him much at this point—and with good reason.

He had a lot invested in the failure of this operation.

She certainly didn’t want him with her on the train platform. And she absolutely didn’t want him sitting in a booth with Jenn watching the surveillance feed. Nor would it be a good idea to stick him up in that tower with Mason Eggers, given his open contempt for the older man.

If Riley had her way, she’d bench him altogether.

But that really wasn’t an option.

She said, “Cullen, I want you with the team on the ground near the tracks.”

Then she said to Chief Royce pointedly, “I want four of your best people down there as well.”

She noticed that Cullen cringed at her words—and the implication that he wasn’t the “best” in her estimation, at least for the job at hand.

Royce brought a select few of his local cops into his office and gave them their assignments. Riley thought they also looked more like movie stars than cops, but they all seemed to understand what the chief was telling them very well.

They’ll do fine, she told herself.

Within an hour, everyone was at an appointed post. And just in the nick of time, too. It was almost 12:30 by the time Riley, Bill, and the two plainclothes cops stepped out onto the train station platform to mingle among unsuspecting people.

Riley spoke into her hidden microphone, “Can everybody hear each other?”

Bill and the two cops answered in the affirmative. So did Jenn, who was sitting in a nearby room watching the surveillance feed.

Now we wait, she thought.

The few remaining minutes seemed to take forever. But soon she heard a train whistle and the dull, monotonous roar of the locomotive.

Riley’s heart started to pound as the train approached the platform.