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The discreet knocking came again. Baldwin didn’t stir. She slid her arm out from under his neck and stepped into the marble-tiled bathroom, pulling a thick terry-cloth robe off the hook behind the door and shrugging it on. She glanced at the clock—3:48 a.m. Who the hell was knocking on their door at this ungodly hour?
Picking up Baldwin’s .40, she went to the door, gun pointed down the length of her naked thigh.
“Yes?”
“Ma’am, I have a package for you.”
“It’s nearly four in the morning. Can’t it wait?”
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“No, ma’am. The concierge told me to deliver it person
ally. I’m looking for Lieutenant Taylor Jackson. That you?”
She didn’t answer. A communiqué in the middle of the night. She had a brief thought of her mother’s middle-of
the-night phone call, two months ago.
“Leave the package by the door.”
“I can’t do that, ma’am. I promised—”
“Leave it,” she barked. She heard a whispered thump, then footsteps retreating down the hall.
Opening the door, weapon up, she glanced right, then left. The hallway was appropriately deserted. She reached her left hand out, taking the package by the corner. It was an envelope, padded, one you’d find in any office supply store in the country. Only about the size of a CD. There was a bulky lump in the middle.
Against her better judgment, she pulled the package inside. With a last look into the hallway, she secured the door, flipping the bolt and slamming the safety lock home.
“What’s that?”
She jumped, the deep rumbling of Baldwin’s sleepstrewn voice startling her. It was the first words he’d spoken to her since they’d entered the hotel room several hours earlier. She remembered how it was between them and felt herself blush, then pushed it all away.
“A package, hand-delivered. Get the concierge on the phone.”
She looked at the manila envelope. It had her name and the name of the hotel. Obviously, someone knew they were here.
Baldwin came back to the hallway. “Concierge said it was delivered by a man about half an hour ago. They ran it through their security checks and an X-ray, said it looked 14
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like a cell phone. He didn’t seem concerned, said he felt the source was of pure motive, whatever the hell that means. I’d feel more comfortable if we got the local bureau involved, let them send it through the bomb sniffer.”
But Taylor had already slit the top of the package, looking inside. There was a cell phone.
“No way, no how, Taylor. This is definitely going to the lab. You don’t have any idea what they can do with a phone these days….”
Briiii
The phone buzzed in Taylor’s hand. She looked at Baldwin, then back at the phone. Four rings, five, six, seven. Eight. She took a deep breath.
“If they wanted me dead, they would have done it back at the warehouse.”
She flipped the phone open and held it to her ear. There was a bit of static, then she heard a voice. “Taylor?”
“Oh my God. Daddy?”
The voice rocked Taylor to the core. It had been a long time—three years, since she’d seen him in person. He was dead. Missing. Gone. This tortured, broken man couldn’t possibly be her father. But there was no mistak
ing the voice. It was his.
And he was scared.
“Taylor? Are you there?”
“Daddy, where are you?”
“Taylor, I want you to listen to me. You need to do what he says. Just go along with him, sweetheart, and you’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
“But, Daddy—”
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“Taylor? Are you there?”
“I’m here, Daddy.”
“Taylor, I want you to listen to me. You need to do what he says. Just go along with him, sweetheart, and you’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
She looked sharply at Baldwin. Exact words. She stopped speaking. The voice came again.
“Taylor? Are you there?”
She didn’t respond.
“Taylor, I want you to listen to me. You need to do what he says. Just go along with him, sweetheart, and you’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
A recording. Her heart sank. Jesus, still being manipu
lated by this freak. She handed the phone to Baldwin, let him listen to the loop.
With a shake of his head, he handed it back to her. Not her father. Just a voice recording. It could have been made anytime. There was nothing about it that said he was actually alive.
The fury bubbled up in her chest and she turned the cell phone so it faced her, then screamed, long and loud, into the mouthpiece. She went to hit the end button, but heard a laugh coming from the speaker. She held it to her ear. That voice she did recognize. The same jeering tones that had spoken to her in the warehouse. He was laughing at her.
Thirty-Nine
Nashville, Te
Monday, December 22
11:58 p.m.
“Father?”
Snow White was asleep in the chair in his expansive library. Charlotte looked at him, his body bent, the mis
shapen hands, and felt nothing. No pity, no sorrow for the pain he obviously suffered. It was fitting, actually, that a man who had been the source of such agony and misery, who had tortured the life out of ten young women, should be afflicted with a disease that crippled his tools of de
struction.
She had that feeling again, fleeting as it may be. She’d always wondered what it would feel like to empty the soul from a body. When it came down to it, she didn’t have the power, wasn’t able to consummate the burning desire she felt. So she fed on others who could. Which was the course that led her to her father’s ap
prentice. Where better to satisfy her lust than in the be
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havioral unit of the FBI? She was fed a steady diet of murder, of psychologically misfortunate beings who felt that same pull. She could study them, get to know them, and in some special cases, work with them on a more literal level.
She’d never done that with her dad. After her mother died giving birth to Joshua, she’d been in charge of the house. When she’d walked in on him murdering Ava D’Angelo, the second of his victims, she’d calmly shut the door and gone to the kitchen to oversee the di
arations.
He sought her out, later. He talked to her, discussed the murder with her. It was an experiment, he said. “Like the experiment I did on Joshua’s guinea pig?” she had asked. He’d seen it then, that he’d passed along the emptiness of soul that accompanies the desire to take life. Fu
That was the last they discussed his extracurricular ac
tivities. She’d gone away to school, then went on to college, got her Ph.D., and joined the FBI. He was forced to stop killing by the advancement of the arthritis. They were both complete, yet empty.
Then Troy had come into their lives.
It had taken her weeks to write the special program, to upload it into the CODIS database. It was a brilliant de
ception, a Trojan horse that took the information inputted by the various law enforcement officials across the country and filtered the results. She’d built the program to warn her of possible anomalies in DNA matches before they made it into the official system. This gave her the freedom 14
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to examine the kills, then pass them along unscathed to the official database, keeping back the murders she was most interested in. To be honest, she was astonished the program had failed. The IT support at Quantico must have rolled out an update that kicked her Trojan out of the system. That’s why the DNA matches suddenly poured in. Her system wasn’t flawless, after all. That could, would be fixed.