Fear No Evil

FIVE

NO ONE WAS in the room. It was just her, half-naked, and the damn blinking red eye of a camera. Filming her.

Lucy didn’t know exactly what was happening, but she feared her life was on the line. After all, she’d seen their faces. Isn’t that what she’d always heard? If you can identify them, they won’t let you go.

They’re going to kill me.

Her face burned remembering how Trevor had told someone that she was a virgin. He’d been standing in the corner, talking into a phone, as if he were a game-show announcer, talking about paying to watch her.

She might be a virgin, but she wasn’t so naive that she didn’t know exactly what he meant. He was going to rape her.

She swallowed, a sob escaping before she could stop the betraying sound of fear. She didn’t want to show him anything. No emotion. She’d lie there and let him do whatever he was going to do. She remembered Carina teaching her how to fight back, giving Lucy a top-notch self-defense class every couple of months. Kick, scratch, scream, run. Get away.

None of it helped when you were already tied up.

But she’d also learned that rapists got off on the fight, on subduing their victims. He’d called her “feisty,” as if that were a good thing, a fun thing. She wouldn’t do it. She’d bite her tongue before she screamed or begged for mercy.

The blinking eye bothered her, though. The camera. They were recording her. Why? To watch the rape over and over again? So he could show it to his sick friends?

Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed it uneasily, the vomit burning. She swallowed again.

Hold it together, Lucy. Think.

Someone would find her. They had to. By now her family knew she was missing. It was dark, late at night or early morning, she didn’t know.

They would be looking for her. Connor and Carina and Patrick and Dillon-and they had friends in high places. She had to hold on to that hope. And anything that might happen; well, put that aside. Put that away. Surviving was the most important thing. Everything else, she could deal with in time, right?

But her life-she had to survive, whatever brutality they had planned for her.

Where was she? The room was dimly lit, probably just bright enough for her body to be filmed. There was a single window, but the blinds were drawn. Two doors. She knew one led to a hall. The other? A bathroom? Closet? She didn’t know.

Trevor had brought her here on a boat. She’d heard something about an island. One of the guys said they were approaching an island.

What island? Catalina? Avalon? How could that be? Too many people and tourists. Maybe he’d taken her south, to an island off Mexico. Away from America, from safety.

The blinking eye of the camera mocked her. Lu-cy. Lu-cy.

“Enjoy the show for free” Trevor had said.

Was that camera live?

Her body involuntarily shook and she groaned out a cry of misery. How? What was he doing with it? Could people see her right now? Like this?

She pulled at her restraints, but they were tight.

“You fucking bastard!” she screamed. “Let me go!” Lucy strained and pulled.

On the other side of the door, someone laughed. It wasn’t Trevor.

It was a female voice. And it didn’t sound completely…right.

That scared Lucy even more.

Kate typed.

User not online.

Dillon Kincaid was persistent, she would give him that. Why was she even reading his pleas? She should have turned off the monitor when he first tried to draw her into conversation.

She was punishing herself. You want to know everything about the girl who’s going to die next.

Punishment? Where the hell had that thought come from? Kate was trying to prevent Lucy Kincaid’s murder. She still had a chance. Every one of Kate’s computers was working at full capacity. She had all the server space and computer resources she needed. The fastest drives, hundreds of gigabytes of memory. Nothing was slowing her down. Kate would find Lucy and she would save her.

Like she couldn’t save Paige and the others.

Dillon Kincaid was still writing.

My brother Patrick is a computer genius. He can help you. With your skills and his skills, together we can find Lucy before it’s too late. Talk to him, please.

There were good computer people, but no one was as good as Kate Donovan. All Patrick could do would be slow her down asking stupid questions about why she did this, why she did that. And he had a vested interest, his attention would be split. He wouldn’t be focused on the task, instead watching what was happening to his sister.

She typed.

User not online.

She glanced at Lucy Kincaid on the center screen. She was tugging at her restraints, yelling something. Fucking was one of the words. Kate smiled bitterly. Lucy was a fighter; Kate liked her.

Dammit, Lucy, I don’t want you to die.

Eighteen years old, her entire life ahead of her. Kate wanted to put a bullet in Trask’s head so badly she could almost feel her finger press the trigger, see the bullet enter his skull, picture his brains splatter on the wall. He deserved torture, but she’d be content with a quick death.

Dillon Kincaid sent another message.

Kate, I know you want to help. You’ve been helping for five years. You lost people you cared about. You’ve been running all this time, but still haven’t forgotten the victims. I have Quinn Peterson’s file here. His private file. I know what you’ve done, and I’m in awe of you. I also know what Trevor Conrad has done to these women-you know him as Trask.

Kate, together we can find him. As I read Peterson’s notes and your messages to him over the last five years, I see who this man is. Arrogant. Ruthless. Remorseless. He’s done this many times. Before Paige. Technology gave him the ability to broadcast his sick fantasies, but don’t think you pushed him into murder.

He’d been killing for years before you and Paige uncovered his crimes. You were going after him because of a missing girl. Well, guess what? If we dig further, we’ll find dozens of women he’s killed. You sent him underground. You’ve already saved lives.

Paige did not die in vain.

Please help me find Lucy. Don’t let her be his victim. Talk to me, Kate.

Her hands shook. She wanted to talk to Dillon Kincaid. He seemed to understand things even her friend Quinn Peterson didn’t.

But she couldn’t. Who was he, really? She couldn’t be stupid. Kate already had a plan, it was solid, she had to execute it.

She typed.

User not onlone.

She didn’t notice her typo until after she hit enter.

Hello, Kate.

She shut down the program, her heart pounding. He’d gotten to her, dammit.

Movement on the center screen caught her attention. Roger Morton walked into view.

The countdown read 44:05:00. Roger unchained Lucy, held her in front of him, his head close to hers. Kate reached over and turned on the volume.

“…pretty for the camera, Lucy.”

“Fuck you,” Lucy said.

“Oh, we’ll do that, sweetheart, I promise. But for now your fans just want a sneak peek.”

With a flick of his wrist, Roger extracted a butterfly knife and sliced open Lucy’s bra. Kate gasped, watched a thin trail of blood where the tip of the knife had nicked her breast.

Lucy stifled a scream and said, “Y-you bastard!”

She struggled. Roger laughed as he easily held her hands tightly behind her. Her struggles made her breasts bounce in the camera, perfect titillation for the sick perverts who watched Trask’s show.

Roger kissed Lucy’s neck and she used her head to wallop his. The hard crunch of bone hitting bone made Kate’s head ache.

“Bitch.” Roger was pissed. He liked feisty, but he didn’t like getting hurt.

Suddenly Roger cried out and Lucy ran out of the camera frame. The shot had been a close-up, but there was no mistaking that she’d kicked him in the balls. She was out of view for one, two, three seconds. Then she fell into view, pushed roughly onto the thin beige carpet.

Trask didn’t show his face, but Kate knew him from his broad build and the short-cropped blond hair. He bent over Lucy, slapped her once, then again, then kneeled as he tied her back down. She fought him, and Roger grabbed her legs. Lucy shouted obscenities, her hand working furiously. She bit Trask on the forearm and he slapped her so hard the side of her head hit the mat, her cheek instantly red with his handprint.

Her hand. Something about Lucy’s hand. She was repeating the same motions over and over. It looked like sign language.

Then the feed stopped, froze.

The countdown read 44:00:00.

“Dammit, I paid, you bastard!” Kate spun around to another computer, frantically typed until she brought up Trask’s secure server and paid him again to watch the feed. It took her nearly ten minutes to get through. His server was getting a lot of traffic today, she thought bitterly.

A message popped up on the screen.

Hello, Kate Donovan. Just wanted to make sure it was you, sweetheart. This one’s free. Enjoy.

“What happened?” Dillon asked. “Why did it freeze?”

Peterson sat at a vacant terminal and typed in a bunch of codes. “We have to pay to watch. I thought this was taken care of.”

A message came up on the screen several minutes later.

Hello, FBI. I see you’ve gotten much better at hiding your identity, but you’re not as good as I am. I don’t think I want you watching this one. You might get the wrong idea. Remember, this is consensual fantasy role-playing, but I’d rather not have to explain it to a jury.

Too bad you don’t know where Kate is. I gave her the feed for free. It’s ironic. All these years she’s been trying to find me, getting close, very close, but all she did was lead me right to her door.

“Shit! The bastard!” Quinn typed frantically, then the computer froze. Blue screen.

Quinn spoke quietly yet frantically on the phone. Dillon read Quinn’s file as he paced, feeling more helpless than at any other time in his life.

Thirty minutes later Patrick said quietly, “I have it.”

“How’d you do that?” Quinn and Dillon stood over Patrick’s shoulder.

43:31:45.

Again on screen, Lucy was restrained on the floor, tears running down her cheeks. She was looking straight up at the ceiling. Her breasts were bare, blood on her stomach, a bruise already forming on her cheek.

Dillon didn’t know if he was more relieved he had missed witnessing his sister’s humiliation or furious that it had happened in the first place.

“I hacked the feed, falsified the DNS so he doesn’t see it coming from a government server, and sent in Nick’s credit card information. I didn’t want him running names to numbers and seeing a ‘Kincaid’ on the list,” Patrick added.

Peterson was trying to text message Kate to warn her. “Dammit! Kate shut down her system. She’s in danger.”

“Lucy is in danger!” Connor exclaimed.

“Kate will contact us,” Dillon said.

“How can you be sure?” Connor threw his arms up in the air. “I can’t stand around and do nothing.”

“So don’t,” said Dillon.

“Stop playing shrink and tell me straight.”

Tensions were high, and Nick stepped between the two brothers. “I think what Dillon is suggesting is that we try to track him through other means.”

Connor sighed, rubbed a hand over his rough face. “The money.”

“Exactly,” Dillon said. “The payments need to be going somewhere. And, frankly, I don’t care about the law right now.” He glanced at Peterson. “Find the financial institution, get the DA, Andrew Stanton, to write any warrant we need, and see what trail we can find.”

Peterson went through the file he’d given Dillon and handed Connor a stack of paper. “These are the known bank accounts on this guy. Most have been shut down, many are inactive. We haven’t found a pattern to them, only that he opens them right before a live feed, and closes them immediately after, transferring the funds to another account. Last time we seized most of his money, and now we don’t know what he’ll do. Our profiler thinks he’ll withdraw the money every couple of hours to prevent losing it all.”

Patrick said, “Have Nick’s credit card company track the payment. Get every confirmation number you can, contact information. It’ll be a dummy company, but eventually it’ll lead somewhere. It has to.”

Connor wasn’t happy, but it gave him something to do. Nick clapped him on the back. “Where can we work?” he asked Peterson.

“I’ll get you set up.” They left with Carina.

Dillon and Patrick were alone. Dillon watched Lucy on the camera and admitted to his brother, “I’m scared for her.”

“So am I.” Patrick was reading code that seemed to fly by on the computer, his eyes darting back and forth. Focused, determined.

Dillon paced. What good was it to understand why someone kills when he couldn’t prevent him from doing it?

Kate was the key. She had confronted Trask, faced him. If Dillon could bounce theories off her, it would help him put together a better profile, one that could lead Dillon to Trask. And to Lucy.

If he could find his first kill, Dillon was certain that it would lead to his identity. A killer’s first victim almost always led to him. The FBI had to have run like crimes.

Dillon needed to put together a visual time line. He flipped open Peterson’s file and had just started creating a time line on the white board when Peterson’s computer beeped. Dillon looked at the screen.

“It’s her,” Patrick said.

Does Lucy know sign language?

Dillon typed.

Yes.

I’m sending you a feed of the last thirty seconds before it was cut off. Watch her hands. I think she’s signing in Spanish, but my Spanish is rusty.

Kate, you need to be careful. He knows where you are.

A long pause before a link came through and the words:

I know.

Dillon clicked on the link. He tried to focus on Lucy’s hands, but both he and Patrick tensed as they watched their sister brutalized as she was wrestled to the floor by two men. They replayed it, watching only her hands.

Kate was right. She was signing in Spanish.

Boat. Island. Before sunrise. Boat. Island. Before sunrise.

“She’s telling us the time. That the sun hasn’t come up yet.”

“It’s four thirty in the morning right now,” Patrick said. “She could be close by.”

“In the same time zone.” Which meant she could be thirty minutes away or hours.

“On an island. There are dozens of islands off the coast.”

“In this time zone, hundreds,” Dillon corrected. “I don’t think he’s close,” Dillon added.

“Why? You’re basing it on a hunch, not on fact.” Patrick was getting agitated. “She could be on Anacapa or San Miguel. An hour or less from where we are by helicopter! We need to check the Channel Islands right now.”

“We have less than two days to find her. We can’t possibly storm every island off the coast. And your hunch that it’s the Channel Islands? Filled with tourists this time of year.”

“There’s a lot of small islands in the chain. They could be on one of those.”

“But what if we’re wrong? We have no evidence, and it would take days to search every island even with the manpower of the FBI behind us.”

“Dammit, we have to try!”

Dillon tamped down his own temper, knowing his brother was teetering on the edge. First Connor, now Patrick. Well, so was Dillon. He was just better at holding back. Assessing. Being the reasonable, responsible, mature Kincaid. Sometimes he wished he could explode with the injustice he saw in humanity. But he couldn’t. People depended on his stability, particularly his family.

He tried to calmly explain his reasoning. “He had Lucy for more than twelve hours before putting the webcam on her. I think the bulk of that time was getting her to his destination. They went by boat, at least for part of the trip. Twelve hours on a ship could get them all the way to the Canadian border, or to the tip of Baja California.”

“Or he was waiting for midnight,” Patrick said. “Which is when the feed started. Are you willing to put Lucy’s life on the line for a theory?”

“Are you?” Dillon responded.

Peterson walked back in, immediately on alert when he felt the tension between the brothers. “What happened?”

Dillon told him about Lucy’s clues.

“I’ll get the Coast Guard on alert up the entire West Coast. I think he went to Mexico or Canada,” Peterson added.

“Why?”

“We’ve never found one of his sites in the United States. When we found Meghan, it was on a small island near Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada. But if that’s the case, the sun would already have risen. He used a private, secluded estate on a Caribbean island at one point, but we raided it and seized all his property.”

“So Lucy’s right? She’s on an island?”

Peterson nodded. “Very likely.”

“But we still know next to nothing,” Patrick mumbled, clicking frenetically on his keyboard.

“We know she’s on the West Coast, which is more than we knew five minutes ago,” Dillon said.

“I found her,” Patrick said.

“Lucy?” Dillon and Peterson said simultaneously.

“Kate Donovan. At least I’ve isolated her general area. Mexico, near the west Texas border. A couple hours out of Hidalgo, in the mountains, north of Monterrey. But she went off-line as soon as you downloaded the feed.”

Peterson looked at the map. “Dammit, that area is full of rebels, drug smugglers, gunrunners. We can get into Monterrey, but that means a couple hours’ detour. Direct? Virtually impossible.”

Dillon stared at Patrick. “I can find her.”

Patrick shook his head, mixed emotions crossing his boyish face. “Don’t.”

“I have to. For Lucy. Just get me a more accurate location by the time Jack calls back.”

“He might not even call,” said Patrick.

“He’ll call me,” Dillon insisted.

“Who’s Jack?” Peterson asked.

“Our brother,” Patrick said. “Jack is Dillon’s twin.”

“Another Kincaid?” Peterson mumbled.

Jack returned Dillon’s call thirty minutes later.

“Hello, Jack,” Dillon answered.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked without preamble. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in eleven years, but Jack got right to the point.

Dillon didn’t waste time. “Lucy has been kidnapped. I need your help finding an ex-FBI agent who’s hiding out in the eastern Mexican mountains.”

“Are you sure? Lucy’s an adult. Maybe she just walked.”

“If you have an Internet connection, I can send you the feed where she’s half naked and tied to the floor.” Dillon’s voice vibrated with anger. Jack had gone off to do his own thing twenty years ago and came home only for funerals. He didn’t know Lucy, and he wanted to believe she had just left the family without a word?

“Of course I’m sure she’s been kidnapped.” Dillon suppressed the complex emotions that talking with his brother Jack inevitably stirred. “The FBI has a task force in place. Her kidnapper has done this before. And if we don’t find her in forty-three hours, she’ll be dead. Murdered live on the Internet. Do you think I would call you if it weren’t a life-or-death emergency? If I didn’t think you might be in a position to help?”

“And you want me to track this FBI agent down why?”

“She has some sort of compound where she’s been tracking this killer for the last couple of years. She has her own issues with the FBI and won’t come back voluntarily.”

“So you want me to kidnap her and bring her to you?”

“No. I want you to bring me to her. She’s on a mountain, about an hour north of Monterrey, which according to the FBI is dangerous territory.”

“Dangerous is an understatement,” Jack said. “I’m not bringing you anywhere. I’ll find the agent myself and compel her to return.”

Dillon said, “No, Jack. You’ll bring both me and Patrick to her. She has computer files we need and the ability to find Lucy. She thinks she can do it on her own, but I think our killer might just want her to find him, that he might leak her information to trap her. And Lucy is his bait.”

“Why do you care about this renegade FBI agent? Who cares about the damn feds? Nothing but backstabbing bureaucrats with guns. I’ll help you find Lucy. I have friends all over the world.”

The quiet arrogant confidence in Jack’s voice was typical.

“No,” Dillon said. “Why is it always your way, Jack? You know very little about this situation. I’m certainly not putting Lucy’s life in your hands.”

“But you’re putting her life in your hands, Doctor? Since when were you in the military? Or the police academy? Do you even know how to shoot a gun?”

“Forget it, Jack. I’ll find Kate on my own. I’m sorry I called you. I guess you really are no longer family.”

Click.

Dillon stared at his cell phone. He didn’t like to gamble, but he also believed he understood his twin. He hoped he did.

For twenty years, Dillon had wondered what had happened to Jack that he would turn his back on his family and devote his life solely to the military-whatever the hell it was Jack did for them. Jack had only come home for Justin’s funeral, a sad testament to a man who as a boy had been Dillon’s best friend.

But Jack was fiercely loyal, had been from early childhood. They’d moved every six to twelve months while Colonel Kincaid was moved from military base to military base. They could only count on themselves and their family, because friendships were fleeting.

Jack joined the military when he turned eighteen and then something happened. Something that seemed to prevent him from keeping in touch with his family. Jack never spoke of it, never even acknowledged that anything had happened.

But Dillon knew his twin brother. Family used to be important to him.

The phone rang five minutes later.

“I’ll meet you in four hours at a bar called La Honda in Hidalgo, Texas,” Jack said. “Don’t bring anyone with you.”

Dillon wrote down the information Jack imparted and hung up. He was glad he was right about Jack, that he would come through after all.

Don’t bring anyone?

“Patrick, we’re going to Texas. I’m going to find Agent Peterson and see how fast he can get us out there.”