chapter Eleven
At lunchtime, Amberly grabbed a sandwich and soda from the vending machine in the break room and then returned to the conference room and the list that wasn’t happening.
The only name she could come up with was John, and her heart continued to rebel at the very idea that he could be behind all this with the notion of somehow forcing her back into his arms, back into his life.
By four, she’d managed to add three more names to her list, one of the men who worked at the Native American Center, who had expressed dissatisfaction over the fact that she wasn’t involved in any way with the facility. A second name was a female coworker who had never hidden the fact that she thought Amberly had progressed in her career solely on the fact that she was a minority. Finally, she’d written down John’s brother’s name. Although he lived in a suburb of Kansas City and had rarely visited them, he’d made it clear that he wasn’t a fan of Amberly’s.
She didn’t believe any of the people on her list were responsible for the crimes. She didn’t know why those women had been killed or what the dream catchers really meant.
She felt so out of her element with this particular case. No matter how she twisted the pieces, she couldn’t make them fit into a comprehensive picture. She absolutely couldn’t get into the head of the killer, and that’s what she was supposed to do well.
With a sigh of frustration, she dropped her head onto the cradle of her arms on the table, and instantly her thoughts turned to Cole and the night before.
She’d known it would be a mistake to get into his bed. She’d known they would make love again and they had, and it had been just as magical as the first time.
Apparently he had been her dream catcher, for she’d slept without dreams, snuggled against his warmth and listening to the strong, steady beat of his heart.
He could almost make her believe in love that lasted forever, in passion that never waned. What he couldn’t do was take her back in time and meet her before she met John, before she had Max, before it all got so complicated.
Besides, she wouldn’t want to go back in time because then she wouldn’t have had Max, and that little guy awed her with his heart, with his head and with his very existence in her world.
Tears burned at her eyes as she thought of her son. Her need to hold him, to smell him, was nearly overwhelming. Her very womb ached as if he’d been violently ripped away from her.
She needed to be home with Max. That was her world, that was her life, but she couldn’t. She was too afraid of bringing danger with her.
And this thing with Cole, this magic she felt when she was with him, she had to forget it. She’d sworn that Max’s life would come before hers, that she’d wait until he was older before even thinking about bringing a new man around him. The last thing she wanted to do was confuse him.
She raised her head as Roger came into the room. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He sat across from her and gestured toward her legal pad. “Doesn’t look like much is happening there, either.”
She smiled at the young deputy. “What can I tell you? I try not to make enemies.”
He returned her smile. “I could write down the names of at least four people I’ve pissed off just today.”
His smile faded as he stared at the photos on the bulletin board. “Maybe it’s somebody who is angry at your husband, maybe somebody who bought a painting of a dream catcher from him. I looked up some of his work online, and in his early years, he painted a whole series of dream catchers.”
Amberly frowned and reached for a piece of licorice and then offered the bag to Roger, who shook his head negatively. “So this might all be about somebody who thinks they paid too much for a John Merriweather painting, and instead of asking for their money back, they decide to kill innocent women and lure me to this little town so they can kill me, too?”
She shook her head and bit into the licorice, hoping the candy would help ease the headache she’d been fighting off all day.
“No matter how I twist and turn things, I can’t make anything fit,” she finally said.
“We all feel the same way,” Roger replied. “We’ve never had crimes like this in Mystic Lake, but we’re all doing the best we can to solve them.” There was a touch of defensiveness in his voice.
“You all are a great team, and Cole is a terrific, smart sheriff. I’m certainly not dogging the team. I just can’t believe that none of us can get a break that might lead us toward solving these murders.”
“It’s not from lack of trying. I’ve never worked the kind of hours I have in the last month.”
She nodded. “I’ve only been here a short time, and I already feel about half burnt out.”
“Sheriff thinks something is going to happen any day now. He thinks the killer won’t be able to control himself much longer. He’s deputized a couple of extra men to do night patrols around town.”
Cole hadn’t told her about it, but it didn’t surprise her. She knew his biggest worry at the moment was that somehow the killer would get to her, or take another of the young women in the town he considered his own.
It was almost five when Cole came into the room, and instantly Amberly’s heart lifted at the sight of him. When had it happened? When had the mere sight of him caused butterflies in her stomach to dance happily? When had the sound of his voice made her feel so safe despite any danger that might lurk nearby?
“Hi,” he said to both her and Roger, although the warmth of his eyes lingered on her. “How are we doing?”
“My list is pathetic,” Amberly confessed as she shoved the legal pad toward Cole.
He picked it up and looked at it. “You really don’t make many enemies, do you?”
“Granny Nightsong always told me that my moccasins should never leave footprints of anger behind me,” she replied. “And I’ve tried to live my life with that in mind.”
“It would be a hell of a lot easier on all of us if you had some real enemies,” Roger replied with a rueful grin.
At that moment, Amberly’s cell phone rang. With a frown, she dug it out of her purse. She’d had few calls in the past week, and when she saw John’s number on the caller identification, her heart gave a little lurch of anxiety.
“John?” she said.
A low, deep moan filled the line and panic stabbed through her. “John, is that you?” She jumped up from the table, her heart pounding so fast she felt like she might throw up.
There was another moan and then silence.
“John! John!” she yelled, but there was no response, just the ongoing silence, which chilled her to the bone. “Something’s happened at John’s house,” she said to Cole as she hung up her phone. “We’ve got to get there right away. It sounded like he was hurt.”
“Call it in to the Kansas City police,” he instructed Roger and quickly gave him John’s address. Then within seconds, he and Amberly were out the door and on the highway with sirens blaring and lights swirling.
Amberly’s heart continued to rap a rhythm that was near heart-attack pace as she tried over and over again to call John back, but her calls kept going to his voice mail.
“Why doesn’t he answer? What could be wrong?” She heard the hysteria in her voice but had no control over it. She couldn’t even mention the question that pounded in her head. Where was Max? He should be there with John. So, why hadn’t Max picked up his father’s phone?
If something terrible had happened to John, then where in the name of God was Max? Everything faded away except the cell phone buttons she continued to punch and the fear that exploded in every molecule of her being.
She turned to Cole and saw his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him. She was trapped in a void of terror where no sound could get in, where nothing mattered except getting to John’s as quickly as possible.
The drive from Mystic Lake to Kansas City seemed to take forever. With each mile, every minute that passed, Amberly’s emotions rose to greater heights, threatening the loss of complete control.
As they pulled onto the street where John lived, her heart nearly stopped beating as she saw several police cars and an ambulance in the driveway.
She was out of the car before Cole’s vehicle had come to a full stop. The dying grass rasped beneath her shoes as she raced across it toward the front door of the house. “John? Max?”
A police officer stopped her at the door. Holding back a sob of apprehension, she fumbled to show him her credentials. “I’m his ex-wife. Where is my son?”
She looked past the officer and saw John seated on the sofa. A couple of paramedics were working on the back of his head, and he looked dazed and half-conscious.
She shoved past the officer and fell to her knees in front of her ex-husband. “John…what happened? Where’s Max?”
He stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. “I just answered the door. He hit me in the head with something.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. He had on a ski mask.” John wobbled, and his eyes drifted shut.
“John! Where’s Max?” she asked urgently.
“We’ve got to get this man to the hospital,” one of the paramedics said, and at the same time, an officer pulled Amberly to her feet and away from John.
She turned to him. “My son. Do you know where my son is?”
She was vaguely aware of Cole stepping up next to her and quickly introducing himself.
“Ma’am, there was no child here when we arrived. We found your ex-husband just inside the door on the floor unconscious.”
“I have a six-year-old son. He was here with John.” Once again Amberly felt a rising hysteria. She tore down the hallway, searching in every room of the house, but there was no sign of her son.
“We’ll put out an Amber Alert on the boy,” the officer was telling Cole as Amberly returned to where they stood. John was being loaded into the ambulance, and she felt that if she didn’t find Max in the next minute, she was going to die.
It was at that moment her gaze fell to the floor next to the front door, and there, shining in a shaft of sunlight, was Max’s necklace.
AS AMBERLY FELL TO HER knees in the doorway and plucked up a silver owl on a broken piece of rawhide, Cole saw her shatter apart.
It began in the tremble that started in her hand and worked its way through her entire body. Her eyes went black, and for a moment, he feared she was going to pass out. He reached down and pulled her to her feet and into his arms, where the shaking of her body was violent.
“He…he doesn’t have his necklace.” The words haltingly came from her, as if jerked out by a chain of agony. “It’s his protection…the owl around his neck.”
“We’ll find him,” Cole said as he tightened his arms around her, almost frightened by the powerful tremors that swept through her. “I swear, we’ll do whatever we can to find him and get him back safe and sound.”
Unfortunately, Cole was out of his jurisdiction and was left powerless as the Kansas City Police Department took over. Amberly took a picture from her wallet of Max and gave it to Sergeant Mick Davis, who had taken over the scene.
Cole knew that, within minutes, the picture of the boy would be flashed on all the local television channels. But that didn’t mean an instant success at locating him.
Sergeant Davis led them both into the kitchen, and they all sat at the table so they could be interrogated. Amberly told him what time Max normally got home from school; the problem was nobody could be certain when the attack had taken place. And nobody knew how long John had been unconscious after the attack.
During the interview with the sergeant, Cole held Amberly’s hand tightly, hoping he was somehow helping keep the horror at bay.
It didn’t take a stretch of the imagination to realize that somebody had hit John over the head and taken Max from the house. The broken necklace indicated that Max had not gone willingly. There was also no question in Cole’s mind that whatever had happened in this house was related to the crimes he’d been dealing with in Mystic Lake.
Cole could tell that Amberly had gone to a very dark place inside her head as he explained to Sergeant Davis what was going on in Mystic Creek. She sat perfectly still, but he knew it was the eerie stillness that came before the damaging storm.
And then the storm exploded. She jumped out of her chair, wild-eyed and obviously half-crazed with fear. “We have to do something. We can’t just sit around and do nothing. We have to go and find him. He’s out there all alone…in the dark, and he’s scared. He needs me.”
Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks as she gazed first at Sergeant Davis and then at Cole. “Please,” she whispered. “Please do something.”
Cole realized this was her nightmare come true, and as her gaze held his with such pleading, such intense pain, he wanted to move the world to find Max.
“The best thing we can do right now is sit tight and let the local police work the case,” Cole said with a helplessness that gnawed in his gut. “Maybe whoever took him will call.”
“Why is this happening? Why would anyone want to hurt Max? Hurt John?”
These were questions that Amberly continued to ask over the next couple of hours, but nobody had any answers for her. John was conscious at the hospital but had been unable to give anyone any more information than he already had, other than the fact that Max had been standing just behind him and had been home from school for only about fifteen minutes when the attack had occurred.
As the evening turned into the darkness of night, Cole could feel Amberly’s desperation. “Why don’t you go lie down for a little while,” he suggested when the ten o’clock hour arrived, and her face was so pale, her eyes so red from weeping that she looked as if she were terminally ill. “I’ll let you know if anything happens.”
She hesitated. “You promise?”
“I swear. Come on.” He held out his hand and pulled her from the kitchen chair where she’d been sitting, staring at John’s telephone as if willing it to ring, for the past hour.
She got up with the weariness of a broken old woman. “I should be strong,” she said, her eyes once again tearing up. “I’m an FBI agent.”
He pulled her against him and held her tight. “And you’re a mother, and it’s okay to be a little weak right now.” She stood in his embrace for several frantic heartbeats and then stepped back and nodded.
He led her down the hallway toward John’s bedroom, but she stopped at the door of the first bedroom they came to. “I’ll just rest in here for a few minutes,” she said.
The room was obviously the place where Max slept when he was at his father’s house. There was a twin bed covered in a navy spread and a desk with an intricate puzzle halfway put together on it.
Cole watched as she curled up on the bed and pulled the pillow close to her chest. As she drew a deep breath, he knew she was inhaling the very essence of her son, and as she began to cry once again, he gently closed the door and left her there, knowing at the moment he was absolutely helpless to do anything to comfort her.
Another hour passed with Cole talking to the officers on scene, listening for any reports coming in and praying that somebody someplace would find Max alive and well.
He knew the woman he loved would be broken completely if she lost Max. He understood the kind of grief she would experience, and his heart ached with his need to shield her from it.
A crime-scene unit pulled prints off the front door, but John had told them the perpetrator hadn’t even stepped into the house before smashing him over the head.
One thing was certain. John Merriweather had officially dropped off the suspect list for the murders in Mystic Lake as far as Cole was concerned. The man certainly hadn’t hit himself over the head.
Through the next hour, Cole watched the Kansas City police at work and realized how much he had missed working for a bigger force. Until the murders in Mystic Lake, he’d felt stale, as if he were slowing wasting away in the small town. He’d been ready to consider making a move before the first murdered woman had been found.
But he wouldn’t leave his position as sheriff of Mystic Lake until the town was safe again, until the murders had been solved and the killer was behind bars. Only then would he think about his options for his future.
At the moment his greatest concern was for the woman in the bedroom. He knew the agony that stabbed through Amberly’s heart as she waited to hear about the welfare of her son. He knew that agony intimately, had experienced it when Emily had initially gone missing.
With Amberly in his mind, and nothing to do to move the investigation forward in John’s attack and Max’s vanishing, he quietly walked down the hallway to the room where Amberly had lain down.
He knocked softly on the door, and when there was no reply, he cracked it open, assuming the stress of the situation must have caused her to fall asleep.
Gone.
She wasn’t in the bed, and the window was open, the screen displaced. Cole’s heart crashed against his ribs as he raced to the window and peered out into the darkness of the night.
Had she been taken from this room as all the cops had gathered in the living room and kitchen? He looked closer at the screen. It appeared as if the screen had been removed from the inside.
If that was the case, then Amberly hadn’t been taken by anyone, but rather had run away. But to where? To hunt for Max? There was no clue where to look, no trail to follow. His gut clenched as he realized the only thing she’d had with her when she’d come in here was her cell phone.
Had she received a call from the kidnapper? Didn’t she realize that in all probability, the man who had taken Max was also the same man who had hung the items on her mailbox? The same man who had killed the three women in Mystic Lake?
He had to find her, but he had no idea where to begin to look. And he knew he couldn’t look alone. He raced from the bedroom in search of Sergeant Davis to tell him that they didn’t have just a missing boy anymore, they also had a missing woman who had been marked for murder.