Once Chosen (A Riley Paige Mystery—Book 17) Read online

  For a moment, he stopped the feet from dancing and admired his handiwork. He’d carved these two actual-sized wooden goat’s feet out of hickory himself. He’d done the job according to Pan’s instructions and design without knowing what they were for. The wooden feet had been ready when Pan had told him to sacrifice that young boy some eight years ago.

  After he’d strangled the boy, Pan told him exactly what to do. He held the carved feet against the boy’s dead flesh, then struck them repeatedly with a hammer until they left hoof-shaped indentations. The pounding took a good deal of effort and strength, especially around the victim’s chest, where ribs had to be broken. But when he finished, he could see the effect was remarkable.

  The body looked as if a goat—or rather the two-legged “Goatman” of Maryland legend—had danced all over it.

  Absolutely brilliant, the man thought.

  He only hoped that the public would start reacting to the Goatman connection at long last. The police had shrewdly kept the contents of his messages secret. So far, only the cops had known that he was attributing the killings to the Goatman.

  But lately he’d started telling everyone he met about a “rumor” that the Goatman was at large and killing people—and he came into contact with a lot of people daily. With some luck, the idea would catch on and add to the public hysteria.

  Meanwhile, it seemed rather sad that the boy’s body still lay buried, and that the exquisite touch remained unappreciated. The man wondered—if the body were found someday soon, as he had reason to hope it would be, would the hoof prints still be visible? Or would they be erased by physical decay?

  He also wondered about the woman he had killed four years ago, and whose body had never been found. It would be a shame if impressions were no longer visible.

  But Pan truly had an extraordinary imagination. He had also instructed the man to compose clever messages, at first teasing the dull-witted police with an empty grave, and now a year later revealing the locations of the most recent victims.

  The man smiled at the thought of the girl he’d killed last Halloween.

  The footprints must definitely have been visible on her.

  The body wouldn’t have been as decomposed as the others, and the prints had made an especially sharp impression in the skeleton costume she’d been wearing.

  As for the woman from the high school, Pan had been especially inspired on that occasion. What a stroke of sheer brilliance it had been to “plant” the corpse underneath a maple sapling! The roots of that tree must have been charmingly intertwined with the woman’s bones. He only wished he could have seen how the body had looked when it had been disinterred this morning.

  In his dictated message, Pan had described the spectacle in words of sheer poetry.

  BLOOD RED FROM THE ROOTS

  THE SAPLING GROWS NICELY NOW.

  The glory would go to Pan someday—perhaps very, very soon. Perhaps the time was near when Pan would finally release his stampede of universal panic upon the whole human race.

  Pan’s shrill melody was already growing louder now. Giggling, he set the feet in motion again, tapping them against the top of his coffee table, making them dance ecstatically. A familiar exhilaration was rising inside of him. Pan was filling him with a wild, jubilant power created by thousands of years of legend.

  And tomorrow night, on the Hallowed Eve, he would do Pan’s will again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  The next morning, the silence at breakfast was making Riley feel tense and uncomfortable. She and Ann Marie were sitting at a table at one side of the motel breakfast area, having an actual sit-down meal and coffee in real mugs for a change. All around them families and other groups of people were chatting away, but at their own table there was only the occasional faint clink of a fork against a plate.

  Riley was sure that her young partner was waiting for her to say something—to come up with some brilliant plan. After all, it had been Riley’s idea yesterday to stay here in Winneway and not drive back to Quantico. Riley had hoped that she’d have some idea what to do today after a good night’s sleep.

  But morning was here, and she still had no ideas. In fact, her sleep hadn’t even been all that great. She had awakened from hazy dreams she couldn’t quite remember … something about ghosts and goblins, she thought. They hadn’t been friendly kids in cute costumes, but something definitely more dangerous.

  And now it was Halloween. The kids in cute costumes would be out tonight, at least until the curfew. She was sure that at least one real monster would be out there too. She was sure that the killer who called himself the Goatman would strike again tonight. She didn’t yet know how to stop him.

  She remembered how indignant the sheriff had been yesterday when Riley had told him she thought Brad Cribbins was not their murderer.

  “We’ve got our man, and we can prove it,” he’d snapped.

  Riley hated to imagine how he’d react if they showed up again at the police station this morning, having blatantly ignored his order to leave. But she felt much too certain about this not being over to pull out of town and leave the residents to face whatever happened. She wondered if there was there anything she and Ann Marie could do quietly on their own, so Wightman might not even know they were still in Winneway—at least not until they’d made a break in the case.

  Probably, she thought. There are always possibilities.

  But right now, she just couldn’t think of what those things might be.

  She felt completely stymied.

  Every time she looked up from her coffee and her egg biscuit, she found herself wishing she’d see Bill looking across the table at her instead of Ann Marie. She and Bill always clicked especially well in moments like these, when tough decisions had to be made. If he were here right now, they’d be brainstorming away about tactics and strategy without worrying about whether or not every idea made much sense.

  We’d probably have figured out what to do by now.

  Instead, she had no familiar mind to bounce ideas off of. She knew that this silence really wasn’t Ann Marie’s fault. It took years to cultivate the easy, productive rapport she shared with Bill.

  But now …

  Are Bill and I ever going to work together again? Riley wondered.

  She fought down a surge of melancholy. Now was no time to give in to sadness. She had to think of something. And she had to get her young partner involved in whatever plan she came up with.

  Riley was still trying to think of something to say to Ann Marie when her phone buzzed.

  For a moment, she hoped the call was from Bill. Then her heart sank when she saw who was actually calling.

  It was Sheriff Wightman. Had he somehow found out she and Ann Marie had stayed in town in spite of his dismissing them? Was he calling to give them hell about it? Worse, was he going to report their disobedience to her superiors?

  The last thing she needed right now was for Walder to find out about some kind of confrontation on this job.

  She was surprised at Wightman’s subdued tone when she took the call.

  “Agent Paige … I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.”

  “Not at all,” Riley said, switching the call to speakerphone so Ann Marie could hear. At the moment there weren’t any other people close enough to overhear whatever might be said.

  Wightman spoke haltingly, “I’m afraid … I was a bit short with you yesterday.”

  Riley felt an urge to say, “Yes, you were.”

  Instead she kept her mouth shut.

  The sheriff said, “Look, I kept questioning Brad Cribbins long after you left the station, way on into the night. I went after him in every single way I could possibly think of. I’m pretty good at questioning reluctant suspects and …”

  Wightman paused for a moment.

  “And you were right,” he said. “He’s not our guy. I know it now. He would have cracked by now if he were. We can still hold him on the resisting arrest charges, but there’s no way
he’s a viable suspect in the murders. His connection with Allison Hillis really was coincidental, just like you said.”

  Riley suddenly breathed much easier. She saw that Ann Marie reacted the same way.

  Wightman added, “Look, I was just flat wrong, and I’m sorry. And to make matters worse, I’ve got Senator Danson calling every few hours to check on our progress with the case. I made the mistake yesterday of telling him I thought we had our man, and when he called this morning, I had to tell him otherwise. He’s not happy. I understand it’s personal for him, now that his niece’s body has been found, but that kind of nagging doesn’t help.”

  Riley’s teeth clenched at the mention of Danson’s name. She remembered how he’d glowered at her and Ann Marie the day before yesterday.

  “How soon do you expect to catch this killer?” he asked, and he’d apparently expected a better answer than Riley could give him.

  The fact that Danson personally knew Carl Walder also worried Riley. How long would it be before Danson contacted Walder to express his dissatisfaction with how the case was going?

  Has he maybe talked to Walder already? she wondered.

  If so, she could expect to hear from her surly superior at any moment.

  And that was the very last thing she needed right now.

  Wightman continued, “Anyway, I feel completely out of my depth, especially now that it’s Halloween. We’ve got to expect the killer to strike again tonight. I hate to ask you and your partner to drive back here from Quantico but—”

  Riley interrupted, “That’s not a problem. Agent Esmer and I never left Winneway. We stayed here overnight. We’re in the motel right now having breakfast.”

  Riley heard Wightman let out a sigh of relief.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I’m hoping you’ve got some ideas about what to do next. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  Riley gulped. So far this morning, ideas had been hard to come by.

  Now would be a good time to have one, she thought.

  She told Wightman, “I’m open to your thoughts.”

  “Well, I don’t have thoughts so much as questions. You’ve worked on these kinds of cases more times than you can probably count. What are the biggest dangers we’re facing right now?”

  Riley felt a familiar tingle. This was exactly the sort of question she or Bill might ask if they were brainstorming together right now. And she had a pretty good idea of the answer.

  “We might have one of two problems,” she said. “One is, our killer has been successful at getting by with murder. We don’t even know for how long. He might well be feeling confident, and with good reason. He’s damned smart and he knows it. He might keep right on outwitting us for a long time. A lot more people might die.”

  “That sounds bad,” Wightman said. “What’s the other problem?”

  Riley scratched her chin and said, “The other is, he’ll get cold feet. He knows that the game is getting riskier. I’m pretty sure he’ll kill again sooner or later. But there’s also a strong chance that he might go dormant for a while. For years maybe. And that could make it a lot harder for us to catch him.”

  “That also sounds bad,” Wightman said.

  “It is,” she replied. “We just don’t know enough about this man to guess which way he might go. Even basic profiling measures don’t narrow it down enough for us to close in on anybody without other indicators.”

  “So what can we do?”

  That tingle of Riley’s got sharper as an idea started to form in her mind.

  She knew they had to accomplish two things.

  One was to make sure the killer stuck with his schedule and tried to strike tonight.

  The other was to goad him into too much self-confidence so that he got careless.

  She said to Wightman, “The first thing I need is for you to call a news conference at the police station. Call it for this morning, as soon as possible. My partner and I will drive right over there, and we can talk everything through.”

  Wightman thanked her and ended the call.

  Ann Marie’s eyes had widened.

  “So what are we going to do?” she asked.

  Riley wasn’t ready to say just yet. The idea was still gelling in her mind.

  “Come on, let’s head out to the car,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  The man paced the floor with agitation.

  Where is Pan? he wondered.

  The god had gone silent yesterday evening, right around the time when the man had gotten word that a curfew would be in effect tonight. The man hadn’t heard Pan’s songs or words throughout the whole sleepless night. And now it was the morning of the Hallowed Eve.

  Has Pan abandoned me?

  Has he found a more able servant?

  Or had Pan decided not to carry out his will, at least not tonight? Perhaps Pan had taken the curfew as a sign that the task would be too difficult. For one thing, a lack of trick-or-treaters would offer scarcer prey.

  For another thing, things had changed a lot during the last couple of days. The police had found two bodies, just as Pan had intended. This surely meant that the police were more keenly alert now, and that they fully expected Pan to strike.

  They might even be prepared for it.

  Pan might have sensed too much danger in the air.

  All the man knew was that he felt isolated and empty and perplexed.

  What was he to do if Pan remained silent?

  He had no idea, except that he couldn’t act, couldn’t abduct and kill, because he’d never done so by his own will, only by Pan’s.

  How could he even go on living without the purpose and meaning Pan brought to his empty life?

  He cried out aloud, “Pan, you know I am your loyal and adoring servant! Please, please tell me what to do! I beg you!”

  The silence that followed was deafening.

  He didn’t think he could take it for another minute.

  He turned on the TV, just to have some noise in the room.

  He was surprised to see Sheriff Wightman standing on the police station steps talking to a group of reporters. Standing beside him were two women, one around forty years old, the other a good bit younger. Wightman was introducing them to the reporters.

  “I want to thank the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit for all their help,” he said. “Specifically, I want to thank Agents Riley Paige and Ann Marie Esmer. We couldn’t have solved this case so quickly without them.”

  The FBI was here!

  The man felt a flash of satisfaction. The police were obviously beginning to grasp the seriousness of what he and Pan were doing. He was sure that Pan was going to be pleased.

  But his satisfaction gave way to alarm.

  “Solved this case”?

  What on earth could the sheriff possibly mean by that?

  Surely the foolish sheriff was just trying to put everyone at ease. Maybe Pan would actually like that. He loved catching mortals by surprise. He enjoyed feeling their shock when they realized what was happening to them.

  Another reporter shouted a question, “How many murders have there been in all?”

  “We know of two,” the sheriff replied.

  “But do you believe there were others?” the reporter persisted.

  The sheriff quickly turned his attention to another questioner.

  The man felt a sudden thrill.

  He knows! he thought.

  He knows there were earlier victims!

  It was gratifying to know those killings had been noticed after all. But of course, Pan had planned it this way all along. Doubtless the god would soon dictate further messages leading the police to those bodies.

  The reporter he’d called on asked, “So you’re confident that you have the killer in custody?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the sheriff said.

  “But you’re not denying that you have a viable suspect,” the reporter said.

  “We do have a suspect in custody,” the
sheriff said.

  “But you won’t release his name?” another reporter said.

  The older BAU woman spoke up.

  “Not yet. Just be patient, please. We’ll make his identity known to the public soon, perhaps tomorrow.”

  The man noticed that the younger agent was looking at the older one with dismay. For some reason, she didn’t seem to like what she was hearing.

  The man certainly didn’t like it either.

  How can they be saying such a thing? he wondered.

  The sheriff and the agents all ignored the clamor of reporters asking them why there had to be a delay in learning the suspect’s name.

  Shouting above the others, one reporter asked, “So does this mean that tonight’s curfew has been canceled?”

  “No, the curfew is still on,” Wightman said. “The town’s nerves are still on edge, and understandably so. Halloween tends to be chaotic in the best of times. We don’t want any unnecessary confusion tonight.”

  Now the reporters were expressing public dissatisfaction with this decision.

  Wightman smiled and said, “Now let’s not make too much of such a small matter. Youngsters can still do their usual trick-or-treating. But I want everybody inside before dark. I’ll have police on patrol to make sure of that.”

  With a slight chuckle Wightman added, “If I had my way, we’d have a curfew every Halloween. Believe me, it would save a lot of trouble in the way of vandalism and rowdy behavior. But I’m sure we’ll be back to a normal schedule next year.”

  Wightman waved his hand as the cacophony of questions resumed.

  “That will be all for now,” he said. “Thank you for your time.”

  Wightman and the two BAU agents headed back into the station. A local TV anchor came onto the screen to restate for viewers what had just happened.

  But what did just happen? the man wondered, aghast.

  He turned off the TV and stood staring at the blank screen.