Fielding leaned forward, his brows coming together in a scowl. “I sympathize with your situation, Hunter. But you cannot use your position, your authority as an FBI agent, to put pressure on or interfere with the local authorities.”
“No, sir!” Kathryn hoped she sounded sufficiently shocked at the very thought of such a thing. “My brother is an artist, and something of a free spirit. He’s done this before, dropping off the grid for weeks at a time.”
What she didn’t say was that while Dan might drop off the grid, he’d never dropped off her personal grid for this long. She’d dismissed Penny’s initial hysterics over Dan’s missed check-in. The woman was a frustrated actress and tended toward the dramatic in almost every situation. But when a week passed, and there was still no word, she’d begun to worry. She and her brother had a system, and even when he missed his calls to Penny, he’d never once failed to get a message out to Kathryn, somehow, some way. Until now.
“Good to hear.”
Kathryn nodded and hoped Fielding didn’t get chatty and start asking about her vacation plans. She’d hate to lie, but she would if he pushed her.
“Well, then,” Fielding said, sitting back abruptly, as if suddenly aware that in leaning across the desk that way, he’d gotten far too close to her for safety . . . his safety, that was, given his potent male charisma. “Enjoy your vacation, Hunter.”
Kathryn stood immediately, as anxious to get out of his office as he was to have her gone.
“Thank you, sir,” she said and managed to leave the office without once entertaining an improper sexual thought about SAC Fielding.
* * * *
Daniel Hunter struggled to sit up, his head pounding, eyes blurry, though it was hard to see anything in his prison. There was a ceiling light, but the switch was in the hallway just outside the locked door. His jailer turned it on when he brought food and water, or when he visited. The fucking freak.
Dan had no memory of how he’d gotten here, didn’t even know where here was. His last memory was of having a drink at the local bar. He’d tried to piece it together and figured the freak must have drugged his drink. But why?
He leaned against the rough wall and tipped his head back to stare at the lone window, high above his head. It was tightly covered. He only knew whether it was day or night by the small spot of sunlight that squeezed through a hole in the corner sometimes. He’d taken to ticking the days off by scratching a line on the plaster wall with a shard he’d salvaged from the ceramic cup he’d smashed on the first day. His jailer had picked up all the pieces, or so he’d thought. But once he was gone, Dan had scrambled around on the floor feeling for any sharp bits left behind. It had felt like a victory when he’d found the sharp wedge beneath the bed. And now, it was all he had, those lines on the wall, his small rebellion against captivity. That and the reminder that days were passing, that with every day that went by, his sister Kathryn was a little closer to finding him. And she’d never give up until she did.
He sighed and tried to make himself more comfortable on the thin mattress. If the bastard was going to trap him here, the least he could do was provide a decent bed. Not for the first time, he wondered why he’d been taken. Money was the obvious answer, but he was beginning to get a bad feeling about this setup. With every visit from his jailer, it felt a little more personal, a little more like an obsession. And that thought put him in mind of the great Stephen King book, Misery, and not in a good way. Although it brought back good memories, too. Dan and his sister had snuck away one Saturday to see the movie, and Kathy Bates had scared the shit out of them. He smiled, remembering, but the memory sobered him once again. Kathryn would be worried sick by now.
* * * *
South Dakota
Kathryn glanced at the GPS and made a right turn, quickly spotting the Sheriff’s Office down the block. She’d gone directly from Quantico to the airport, her bag all packed and waiting for her in the trunk of her car. A late night flight had gotten her as far as Minneapolis, where she’d spent the night in an airport hotel, catching a 6:00 a.m. puddle jumper into Spearfish, South Dakota, which was the nearest town of any size.
She had her brother’s itinerary. He always e-mailed it to her before he went on one of his trips, even though he insisted she didn’t need to worry about him. But whom else did she have to worry about? Easy for SAC Fielding to tell her to leave the search for her brother to someone else. Fielding had a wife and three kids, not to mention a whole plethora of relatives, including two brothers, a sister and a backyard full of nieces, nephews and cousins. He’d invited Kathryn to a barbeque one summer, along with a bunch of others from the office, and she’d been amazed at the sheer number of blood relations.
She and Daniel only had each other. Although that wasn’t completely accurate. Their father was still alive, but he had remarried and was engrossed in his new family. It wasn’t that he’d turned against Kathryn and her brother. She knew he still loved them, but she supposed he preferred to forget the tragedy of losing his first wife, their mother, to cancer when Dan was still a baby, and the hard work of raising the two of them mostly on his own. She couldn’t blame him, really. It had been rough on all three of them. Fortunately, she and Dan remained close. They had each other, and that was all they’d ever needed. Even as kids.
But because Dan was all she had, because she’d all but raised him, the idea of standing by and waiting while someone else made desultory efforts to locate him wasn’t even an option. She had to do this.
Kathryn parked in the small side parking lot of the Sheriff’s office, noticing the number of SUVs and trucks alongside. She was glad she’d upgraded to the midsize SUV instead of taking the standard 4-door sedan. It had been a dry winter in this part of the country, but dry was a relative term. They’d had snow, just not as much of it, and spring had come early. Still, she was glad for the 4-wheel drive on the SUV. She drove a Jeep back home in Virginia, but the best the car rental could do was a Toyota Forerunner. It did the job, and at first glance, let her blend into the local scenery. She wanted a chance to look around before everyone started pointing at her and saying FBI, or at least cop. She’d even made a point of wearing jeans and a black turtleneck for the flight into Spearfish this morning, trying to avoid standing out any more than necessary. But even so, she knew she had that FBI look about her—a little too stiff, a little too conservative. A little too conservative in other ways, too, as the few men she’d dated had been happy to point out. Too many of them had been excited by the idea of dating a gun-toting woman, and then been disappointed when she also turned out to have a brain and a will. She’d only dated one guy, a homicide detective, who’d actually accepted her for what she was, at least at first. But he’d eventually moved on to some air-headed bimbo. Okay, that wasn’t true. The bimbo was a pediatrician, and so probably wasn’t an airhead. But she wasn’t a cop either, and that had been the problem for her homicide detective. There’d been too much shop talk and not enough of anything else between them.
She’d pretty much given up on dating after that. Her vibrator had become her favorite companion, and Ben and Jerry her best friends. And she’d buried herself in work. Until Daniel went missing.
Despite the patches of snow on the ground, it was warmer than she’d expected when she climbed out the SUV. She left her heavy jacket in the truck and went with her standard FBI blue blazer over her sweater. She wore plain, black, flat-soled ankle boots for two reasons—one, they were comfortable enough to run in, if necessary. (Forget Agent Scully’s three-inch, blocky pumps. Never happened.) And the second reason was that at nearly six foot, Kathryn tended to be taller than a lot of men even without heels. The FBI was still largely a man’s world, and too many of those men copped an immediate attitude if they had to look up at her. So she wore flat soles on the job. Of course, technically, she wasn’t on the job today, but since she was about to defy SAC Fielding and use her FBI credentials to push the investigation, she figured she’d better make a pass at looking the part.
The station door opened as she climbed the stairs. Two men in jeans, long-sleeved shirts and well-worn cowboy boots emerged. Kathryn sized them up automatically, noting height, weight, coloring. They looked alike, probably a father and son from their ages, with the older one well into his sixties. The younger one tipped his hat and held the door for her.
Kathryn smiled and hurried up the last step. “Thanks,” she said and ducked past him and into the station.
There were three plastic waiting chairs against the wall and a battered wooden counter with a skinny deputy at a desk on the other side. With his neatly trimmed brown hair and guileless brown eyes, the deputy looked all of eighteen, but Kathryn figured he had to be older. Although not by much. He glanced up as she approached.
“My name’s Kathryn Hunter. I’m looking for Sheriff Sutcliffe,” Kathryn told him. “I think he’s expecting me.”
The deputy didn’t seem impressed. He eyed her carefully, then slowly picked up the desk phone and hit a number.
“FBI’s here to see you, Sheriff,” he said unhurriedly.
Well, so much for blending in, Kathryn thought.
The deputy eyed her unblinkingly while he waited. “Yes, sir. Will do, sir.”
He hung up the phone with deliberate movements, then, with all the speed of a sloth, stood, walked around the desk and over to the swinging door of the counter’s pass through. Reaching beneath the counter, he hit a release of some sort. A buzzer sounded, followed by the click of a latch as the door nudged open. He stood there holding the button, listening to it buzz for a good ten seconds before he finally said to Kathryn, “The sheriff will see you.”
Kathryn wanted to slap his hand away from the damn buzzer, but forced herself to bare her teeth in a semblance of a smile and push through the low, swinging gate. Sloth boy finally released the button and preceded her past several empty desks and down a short hallway where he stopped in front of a closed door. The top half of the door was frosted glass, and the name “Sheriff Max Sutcliffe” had been stenciled in gold lettering.