Seventeen
They rounded a bend in the road to see the revolving blue-and- white glow of patrol car lights casting shadows on a lone double-wide mobile home. Jane spotted Tom’s champagne Crown Vic and knew they were in for another grilling on their whereabouts during the time the woman had been murdered.
She spotted something lying under a bright blue plastic tarp in the center of the gravel road; the victim, waiting for the last crime scene photos before the coroner took her away.
“Too late again,” Baran growled. Jane could almost feel his rage burning in the darkness like something molten.
After parking behind the farthest patrol car, she got out carrying her notebook, Baran and Freika moving around to join her. The Warlord had the camera looped around his neck, but his eyes flicked restlessly over the surrounding woods, and she knew he was scanning for Druas.
Then he stopped in midstep. “He’s here,” Baran murmured.
“Yeah, I see him,” Freika said, pitching his voice too low for the cops to hear. “He’s talking to Reynolds in that group of cops.”
Startled, Jane looked toward the group as her stomach laced into knots. A tall, skinny blond man she’d never seen before was standing with the detective, the lights of the surrounding cars throwing grotesque shadows as he gestured violently. His lifted voice carried clearly up the street. “I don’t know what the fuck happened. We’d just got out of the car when this guy walks up and grins at her, and then he fuckin’ cut her, and she…”
“The blond guy?” she asked softly.
“Yeah,” Baran said, his tone grim. “I don’t like this. Let’s get the hell—”
“That’s him!” the blond shouted suddenly. Jane jerked, feeling her stomach plunge. He was pointing right at them. “That’s the guy that did it! He had a tattoo on his face….”
As if in slow motion, Jane watched the group of cops turn toward them, Tom’s eyes narrowing. As their attention was diverted, something nasty and triumphant flashed across the blond’s narrow face.
A couple of feet away, two deputies standing beside a patrol car pivoted in their direction. Jane registered the wariness flashing over the face of the nearest man, a burly black officer. The eyes of his fellow cop widened under a shock of carrot red hair. “Sir,” the black deputy said to Baran, reaching for his sidearm as he stepped toward them, “we need to talk to—”
“Look out!” Druas shouted.
The Warlord grabbed the cop’s shoulder and jerked, pulling him off-balance. The man staggered past them. Baran slammed an elbow in the back of his head. As he fell, out cold, the Warlord pivoted and punched the redhead in the face. The deputy collapsed in a boneless heap on the gravel road.
It had all happened too quickly for anyone else to react.
Jane heard Tom roar, saw several of the cops reach for their guns as the whole herd started forward. Druas, grinning maliciously over their heads, winked and blew her a mocking kiss.
Then the world flew sideways and something hard slammed into her stomach. Jane screamed before she realized Baran had jerked her off her feet and tossed her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. One powerful arm clamped across the back of her thighs as he started running, bounding toward the woods.
“Stop!” somebody bellowed. “Stop or we’ll shoot!”
Baran didn’t even break step.
Something popped, sounding more like a child’s cap gun than the 9mm Smith & Wesson Jane knew the cops carried. She cringed and covered her head with both hands.
“Hold your fire!” Reynolds bellowed. “You’ll hit the woman!”
Thank you, Tom!
Her head almost slapped into Baran’s butt as he leaped over something. Yelping, Jane flailed around until she managed to hook her fingers in the fabric of his T-shirt. Between bruising impacts with his shoulder, she gasped, “I’ve…got…a car!”
“They could catch us in a car!” Freika yelled back, racing through the dark at Baran’s heels. “Nothing human can keep up with a Warlord on foot.”
She realized he was right as they plunged into the trees. Jane had no idea how fast they were going, but even Freika was running like hell to keep up. How was Baran doing it? She wouldn’t have thought it possible to carry a grown woman at a dead run through thick woods, yet Baran didn’t even seem to notice her weight. Must be in riatt, she decided woozily as her stomach protested jolting against his rock-hard shoulder.
Clutching his shirt, she looked up to spot the swing and jitter of flashlight beams. The deputies had charged into the woods after them. She clamped her eyes shut and prayed nobody popped off another shot. Given her position, any bullet would probably end up in her head.
The flight through the woods seemed endless. Jane could barely see the trees Baran dodged around or the brush he either bulled through or leaped over. Yet he ran without breaking stride. With his sensors, the woods must have looked as bright as day, or he’d never have been able to do it.
She, on the other hand, jounced along in the center of a black, half-seen world with his shoulder pounding into her belly. It was all she could do not to vomit down his back.
Somehow Jane managed to hold it together until the shouts of the deputies faded behind them. Finally, unable to take any more, she yelled, “Baran…stop! I’m going…to…be…sick!”
He kept going.
“I…mean…it!”
Something in her tone must have told him Jane was serious. He slid to a halt and lowered her to her feet. She promptly collapsed onto all fours, swallowing desperately as she fought to control her gastric rebellion.
Freika flopped onto his side, panting like a bellows. Even Baran was breathing hard. Managing a glance up at him, she saw his eyes glowing in the dark like a pair of coals. “What the…hell are…we doing?”
“Keeping you alive,” he gasped, and braced his hands on his knees.
“Yeah, well…” She rolled onto her back with a groan. “I can’t decide whether…we’re Butch and…Sundance or Thelma and Louise. Either way…it ain’t…good.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Movie references.” She took a deep breath, blew it out, and managed an uninterrupted sentence. “Both from flicks with heroes who ended up dead after a run in with the cops.”
He straightened to look down at her. She could see the burn of his eyes in his silhouette. “I can’t go to jail, Jane. You’d be dead before they closed the cell door.”
“Freika…” she began.
“Does not have opposable thumbs,” the wolf said from the darkness. “I’m good, but I’m not that good. I can hold Druas off for a while, but he’d gut me eventually. And then it’d be your turn.”
Jane sat up wearily and braced her palms behind her in the crackling leaves. “What the hell are we going to do, then? We can’t stay on the run. I’ve covered manhunts before, I know how it works. They’ll saturate the area with law enforcement. Cops’ll come in from three counties, they’ll have helicopters, dogs…”
“Huh. Any dog that comes after me is kibble,” Freika growled.
Jane ignored him to focus on Baran’s shimmering eyes. “As far as they’re concerned, you’ve butchered three women and taken a fourth hostage. They won’t stop until they get us.”
“I’ve infiltrated enemy armies, Jane. I can handle a few twenty-first-century policemen.”
“Of course you can.” She braced her elbows on her knees and sighed. “If you’re willing to let the situation blow completely out of control. You can’t kill these people, Baran. One, they’re just doing their jobs, and two, you could trigger a paradox.”
He looked off into the darkness. “Anything I do here I was supposed to do.” She felt him brush her shoulder as he extended a hand to help her up. “Come on. We need to get moving again. They’re getting closer.”
“Not that close. I don’t hear a damn thing.”
“That’s the idea. If we stay far enough ahead of them, they won’t hear us, either.”
“So, now what?” She put her hand in his and let him tug her onto her feet. “We run around in the woods indefinitely, dodging cops? That’s not going to work, Baran. Eventually, they’re going to corner us.”
“And I’ll take care of them,” he said, wrapping his fingers around hers and tugging her forward through the darkness. “Eventually Druas is going to get tired of playing games, and then we’ll finish it.”
“Baran, dammit, these men are my friends! I don’t want them hurt.”
“And I don’t want you dead!” He reached up and pushed a limb aside for her to pass under. She was lucky he was there; she hadn’t even seen it.
Frustrated, Jane stopped, pulling at his hand in an effort to get his attention. “Look, this is what he wants! Why are we following that bastard’s game plan? That’s not the way to win this.”
The full red glare of his eyes focused on her face. “And what do you suggest?”
She blurted the idea that had been teasing the edge of her consciousness for days. “Work with Tom to set a trap for him. He could pretend to arrest you. When Druas shows up to come after me—”
“Forget it.”
“It would work!”
“Jane, in case you haven’t noticed, Reynolds is leading that pack back there. If he arrests me, it’s not going to be ‘pretend.’”
“If we told him the truth…”
“That he’s after Jack the Ripper? Oh, that’ll go over well. He’s not going to believe us.”
“He will if you show him the Mary Kelly recording. It’s pretty damn evident that thing is not the product of contemporary technology. It sure as hell convinced me.”
“Out of the question,” he said coldly. “I’m not going to put your life in the hands of some human who could get us all killed. I’ve been that route before, remember?”
Jane winced, remembering the civilian scientist whose stupidity had resulted in the slaughter of Baran’s entire unit. Which sounded like her cue for a change in tactics. “Okay, let’s say it plays as you think it will. You lead the cops around by the nose until Druas gets tired of waltzing and comes out to play. You kill him. What happens then? Are you going to leave his body for the cops to find?”
“You know I can’t do that. They’d do an autopsy. Given his implants and reinforced bones, that would raise too many questions.”
“So as far as the cops are concerned, this case will be unsolved.”
Leaves crunched as he shifted his weight. “It’ll have to be. Otherwise Druas would have had no reason to come here—and that would cause a paradox.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. But what about me?”
“You go back to your life.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t. I’ll end up under a cloud of suspicion I’ll never escape.”
“What?” Jane could almost hear the frown in his voice.
“Baran, as far as they’re concerned, I brought you here. I vouched for you, I supplied you with an alibi while, they believe, you killed three women. I could be charged as an accessory.”
“That’s highly doubtful,” Freika said. “There’s no evidence.”
“Which doesn’t mean a damn thing. People will believe I’m guilty. Tayanita’s a small town; that kind of public doubt would ruin me. The paper my family ran for more than a century will go under. And if the story goes national—and it could, given the serial-killer angle—I won’t even be able to get work as a reporter anywhere. For the rest of my life, I’ll be the woman who covered up for the Tayanita Ripper.”
“Hell.”
Hearing the sick realization in his voice, she knew she finally had her opening. She had to take advantage of it. “My only chance is to talk to Tom and get his help. He can clear both of us when this is over.”
“He won’t cooperate.”
“Yes, he will,” she said, praying she was right. “I’ll convince him.”
“Before or after he slaps me in jail? In either case, you won’t have much time to convince him. Druas was back there, Jane. And I guarantee, the minute the cops take me into custody, he’s going to be all over you.”
“Not if I’m with Tom.”
“Even if you’re with Tom.” His tone was grim and certain. “You’d outlive your cop friend by about two minutes.”
She frowned. “But would Druas risk killing him? Wouldn’t that cause a paradox?”
Freika snorted. “If Druas gave a damn about paradoxes, he wouldn’t have started the whole Jack the Ripper scheme to begin with.”
“For that matter, he doesn’t even have to kill the cop,” Baran pointed out, “just incapacitate him long enough to get at you.”
They had a point, and yet…“Well, we’ve got to do something. This sure as hell isn’t working.”
There was a tense silence. In the distance Jane thought she could hear shouts.
Finally, reluctantly, Baran said, “I have an idea.”
Tom Reynolds emerged from the woods five hours after he went in, feeling as if someone had beaten him. He could hear the helicopter circling overhead, along with the bay of distant tracking dogs, but it wasn’t looking good.
At first he’d thought it would be easy. The two dogs had picked up a scent quickly enough, following the trail Arvid and Jane and that damn wolf-whatever had left as they’d run into the woods.
Then suddenly the animals had stopped dead and begun casting around as though the trail had vanished. He’d seen that behavior before, of course; it usually meant the perps had gotten into a car and driven off. But it was the middle of the fucking woods. There wasn’t room for a car. And there was no stream around the three could have used as a scent-free pathway. It was as if they’d somehow erased the trail.
Where the hell had they gone?
And how had Arvid run like a freaking gazelle carrying the weight of a full-grown woman—in the dark, in brush so thick even the cops had a hard time forcing their way through? What was the son of a bitch, Superman?
Tom sighed, rubbing his stomach as he trudged toward the victim’s house. They had no choice but to continue the search, though the sheriff had grumbled he’d rather wait until there was more light. Unfortunately, they couldn’t afford to do that, not with Arvid holding a hostage. Jane could be dead by morning.
Assuming he hadn’t butchered her already.
None of this shit made sense. She must have been covering for him, but why? Tom would have bet his badge Jane Colby was not the kind of woman who’d turn a blind eye to murder. He’d known women who rationalized their lovers’ crimes, up to and including the rape of their own children, but Jane just didn’t fit the profile.
Yet she’d looked Tom in the eye and sworn Arvid wasn’t the killer. He’d believed her, too, though he normally had a pretty damn good idea when he was being lied to.
So what the hell was going on?
Adding to the general fun and games, he now had to go talk to the victim’s roommate, who’d been cooling her heels ever since she’d arrived more than an hour ago. All the poor woman wanted was for someone to tell her what the hell happened, and since the coroner was off talking to the vic’s immediate family, the sheriff had sent him out to handle it.
The deputy had put the woman in a patrol car; they didn’t want her going into her house until they’d had time to finish processing the scene. Cynthia Myers had been killed outside, but they still needed to go over the house, if only to close any loopholes Arvid’s defense attorney might use later.
As he approached the car, the front passenger door opened and the woman got out. “Are you the detective?” she asked. “Can you tell me what happened? Nobody’s talking. Who did this? They said Cynthia’s dead. What…?”
He sighed and gestured toward the open passenger door. “Why don’t we sit in the car, Miss…”
“Terri Jenson.” She knotted her shaking hands together and obediently got back in.
With a sigh, Tom walked around to the driver’s side. He always hated dealing with survivors, but unfortunately, it was part of the job. And a good rapport with family and friends of the victims could be invaluable to solving a case. He got in the car, pushing aside the officer’s clipboard and ticket book so he could sit down.
“I was at work when one of the neighbors up the road called and said there were police at my house,” Jenson told him. “She said…she said Cynthia was dead.” Her eyes filled.
Tom studied the woman sympathetically. She was a short, slender brunette, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, both clean. Not quite thirty, he decided, scanning her haggard face. She was probably pretty, at least when not dealing with the murder of a close friend.
“I’m afraid your neighbor was right,” he said gently. “Cynthia was attacked outside your house earlier tonight by a man with a knife.”
She flinched. “Do you know…who did it?”
“Her boyfriend identified—”
Terri’s eyes widened. “Who?”
“Her boyfriend.” Tom reached into a pocket and pulled out his notebook, flipped it open. “Jason Anderson. He told us—”
“I don’t know who you talked to, but it wasn’t her boyfriend.”
Tom blinked at her. The woman stared back at him with an expression of indignant alarm. “You seem pretty sure about that,” he said cautiously.
“I should,” she told him, her voice sure and cold. “Cynthia and I have been lovers for the past five years.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He dragged a hand through his hair, fighting the cold, sick feeling that was trying to take root in his guts. “Are you sure she didn’t have a male friend you don’t know about?”
“Cynthia did not date men,” Terri gritted. “If a man told you he was her boyfriend, you were talking to her killer.”
By the time Tom pulled into his own driveway, it was pushing dawn. His eyelids were gritty, and a headache was throbbing a relentless bass beat behind his forehead. He’d spent the past three hours trying to find Jason Anderson, who had mysteriously vanished.
As far as he could determine, Terri Jenson was right. Virtually every word in Anderson’s statement had been a lie. The address he’d given them was a vacant lot, the phone number was a dummy, and they could find no mention of anybody named Jason Anderson in Tayanita County, either in the phone book or in criminal records, not even as an alias.
Tom had also done a computer search on the name with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Half a dozen Jason Andersons had popped up, all in other counties, but the ages and descriptions hadn’t matched.
It was beginning to look as if what Terri said was true. Anderson—or whatever his name was—had killed Cynthia Myers, and possibly the other women as well. He’d accused Baran Arvid to throw off the cops while he escaped. But why had Arvid run? Even if he hadn’t realized it made him look guilty as hell, Jane damn well should have known.
The sheriff had called off the search for the two—a manhunt was ungodly expensive—but he’d still issued a Be On the Lookout for them. He hoped the BOLO would eventually bear fruit or they’d emerge from hiding on their own. Either way, Tom was going to question them thoroughly.
And then chew Jane out for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty.
Yawning, he pulled into the two-car garage of the brick colonial he and Christine had shared for the past fifteen years. It was dark in the garage, and he reminded himself to buy that replacement light-bulb he’d been meaning to pick up.
Wearily, he got out of his Crown Vic and trudged toward the cement steps that led up into the house.
He sensed the motion barely an instant before the hand closed over his throat, jerking him back against a body that was a lot bigger than his own. Another hand reached into his shoulder holster and neatly removed his gun.
“We want to talk to you,” Baran Arvid said.
“What a coincidence,” Tom gasped around the fingers circling his throat. “I want to talk to you, too.”
Then he drove an elbow back into his captor’s ribs in a blow that should have made the man keel over and gag. Arvid didn’t even grunt.
“We had nothing to do with the murder, Tom,” Jane Colby said from the darkness.
“That statement would fill me with more confidence,” he wheezed, “if the Man of Steel here wasn’t choking the shit out of me.”
The hand around his throat disappeared, but he heard the warning click of his own gun being cocked. He rubbed his throat and glared in the direction of the sound. “Did it ever occur to you to just come to the sheriff’s department and fucking talk to me?”
“I couldn’t risk being arrested,” Arvid said. “The killer has targeted Jane. If I leave her alone, she’ll end up like the others.”
“All you had to do was ask for police protection…” Tom bit back the “dumbass” he wanted to add to the end of that sentence. “Under the circumstances, the sheriff would be happy to assign the manpower.”
Jane sighed. “Y’all can’t protect me from this guy, Tom.”
“And Bead Boy can?” His headache gave a particularly nasty throb. “Look, I would feel a lot more comfortable if I could see who the hell I’m talking to. Let’s go to the Sheriff’s Department.”
“No.” Arvid’s tone did not invite debate.
Shit. He didn’t want them in the house, not with his wife in there asleep. “Then let’s go out on the deck. Christine left the lights on out there.”
As he led the way out of the garage, he heard the distinctive ring of Jane’s boots on the cement drive. “Just for curiosity’s sake, does the phrase ‘assaulting a police officer’ mean anything to you?”
“Yeah, and I’m sorry about that, Tom. We just don’t have a lot of options right now.”
He grunted. This melodramatic shit was getting on his nerves.
Tom walked across the lawn and up the steps that led onto the deck. Leaning a hip against the railing, he watched as Jane followed, the big photographer on her heels. That damn wolf melted out of the darkness after them. He thought about protesting its presence, then decided that would probably be a waste of time.
Jane fell into the nearest lawn chair with a tired sigh as Arvid took up a post against the railing protectively close to her. The wolf sat on his haunches at her feet.
“So,” Tom said, “you want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”
“That,” the wolf said, “is a very long story.”
An hour later Jane rubbed the throbbing spot between her eye- brows and eyed the detective. Tom was staring at the frozen playback of the Ripper recording with his jaw hanging open.
“Shit,” he said at last, “I’ve died and gone to an X-Files rerun. Where are the fucking gray aliens?”
“About four hundred light-years that way,” Freika said, tilting his muzzle skyward.
Tom shot him a wild-eyed stare.
“He’s playing with you, Tom,” Jane said.
“No, I’m not.”
She ignored that. She really didn’t think she wanted to go there. “You can see why we couldn’t allow Baran to be arrested.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head and sat back in the lawn chair he’d dropped into about halfway through their explanation. “But what I don’t get is why you’re telling me all this.”
“Because we need your help falsifying paperwork,” Baran said.
Tom gaped at him. “What?”
“We need to make it look as though I’m under arrest for at least the next three hours.”
“Aside from costing me my badge, what would that do?”
“We’ve got to lure Druas in. He needs to believe he has an unrestricted path to Jane, but he’s not going to believe I’m going to just walk off and leave her.”
“Because he’s from the future, he’s probably got access to the paperwork surrounding this case,” Jane explained.
“Three hundred years from now?”
She shrugged. “Why not? Look at all the paperwork that survived from the Ripper murders. And record-keeping wasn’t nearly as good in Victorian England as it is now.”
Tom frowned, considering the idea. “So how would my falsifying a report help you?”
“If you leave a paper trail that shows Baran in custody during a particular period of time, Druas will think he’s got a clear field to me.”
Tom’s eyes widened. “But that means the fraud would have to be rock-solid. If it ever came out that I hadn’t had you in custody, the creep would know it was a trick.”
“Yeah.” Baran folded his arms, his expression grim. “You’d have to keep the secret until you died.”
“Shit. It’s not that easy, Arvid. Even at this hour, there are people at the department and people at the jail. They’d know you were never there. And I’d lose my badge.”
There was a desperate, thrumming silence while they tried to figure out a solution to that problem.
“What if you were questioning him somewhere else?” Jane asked suddenly. “It doesn’t have to be that you actually arrested him, just that you could attest that he was in a given location at a given time. Maybe you could say he attacked you here.”
“But that wouldn’t get you alone,” Baran pointed out. “I’d never have let you out of my sight.”
“Druas doesn’t know that. Look, Tom could say I was horrified that you’d actually attacked him, so I ran off. You held him for a while, but then he escaped and you ran. It would create a window of time when I’d be left unprotected.”
Baran shook his head. “Druas wouldn’t fall for that.”
“If it’s in the paperwork and Tom swears it happened that way, why wouldn’t he?”
“Neither of us would be that stupid.”
“People are uncharacteristically stupid all the time,” Jane said. “Besides, Druas believes he’s smarter than the rest of the universe. He wants to believe we’re that dumb.”
Tom sat forward and braced his hands on his knees. “You have no way of knowing whether this guy is going to take the bait. You’re asking me to put my career on the line on the off chance this is going to work. If it doesn’t, I’m fucked.”
“If it does, no other women will get killed,” Baran told him. “Including Jane.”
He sighed. “Shit, when you put it that way…But what if he does take the bait and you can’t beat him?”
Baran’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not going to be a problem. One way or another, Druas is dead.”
Tom sat back in his chair. “I’d object to that just on general principles, but practically speaking, I can’t offer an alternative. Even if I arrested the bastard, I doubt a prison would hold him, not given the abilities you describe.”
“And you’d lose a lot of cops during his escape.”
“You sure I can’t help take the fucker down?”
Baran shook his head. “Too risky. If he got his hands on you, you wouldn’t have a prayer. I’m going to have my hands full keeping Jane alive as it is. I don’t need to worry about triggering a temporal paradox by losing you.”
“So how do you know telling me all this won’t cause one of those paradoxes all by itself?”
“It won’t,” Baran said.
He lifted a brow. “You sound pretty damn certain.”
“He is,” Freika said from the floor of the deck. “We’re all still alive, aren’t we?”
Tom stared at the wolf. “You mean…Never mind.” He sighed and looked over at Baran again. “So, have you got a gun? I figure if I’m committing career suicide, I might as well do it right.”
“I’ve got one at home,” Jane told him.
Baran shook his head. “Wouldn’t do much good anyway.” He told Tom about Druas’s armor and reinforced bones.
“Huh.” The detective contemplated the problem. “How about a knife?”
“That’d work.” He shrugged. “I could always slit the bastard’s throat. Better than being unarmed.” He grimaced. “Actually, I should have picked one up earlier.”
“I’ve got a bowie knife with a sheathe I use for deer hunting, if you want to use it.”
“Are you sure, Tom?” Jane asked. “If Baran uses that knife to kill Druas…”
The detective waved a dismissive hand. “That asshole needs to go down. Whatever I can do to help, I’m going to do. Give me a minute.” He got up to open the glass door and slip inside.
Baran took a deep breath and looked at Jane. “Well, you were right.”
Jane shrugged. “Tom cares more about protecting people than career building.” She looked at him steadily. “He’ll keep the secret until he dies, Baran.”
“Yeah.” For a moment they fell silent. Baran stared off across the yard at the moon riding just over the trees. “This plan is risky as hell,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t like it.”
She shook her head. “You know I’m the only one who can pull it off.”
“Maybe, but it’s so damn risky….” He straightened from his pose leaning against the deck railing and walked over to her. His expression going even grimmer, he slipped the suit-nullifying ring off his finger. Then to her surprise, he knelt on the deck beside her and took her hand. Solemnly he slipped the ring on her finger. Its alien metal automatically shrank to fit. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Staring into the fierce vow in his eyes, Jane curled her fingers around his. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I know.”