When Shadows Fall Read online

  “I don’t think so. I think his letter, the will, it’s all a confession. Because if he’s innocent, why the hell would he go to her instead of coming to us?”

  Thurber’s face was red, and Sam flinched at the tone of his voice. Bitterness, fury, hurt, all bled into the word her. She understood, she really did. When someone you trust, who you think is a friend, betrays that trust, it’s hard not to have negative feelings.

  She tried to calm him down. “Agent Thurber, I’m not sure why I’ve been brought into this, either. But Doug clearly had a reason for reaching out to me. Maybe he knew I’d take things to you, and you’d know he was trying to help you solve this case. Maybe he thought I’d look at it with a fresh eye.”

  Thurber crossed his arms on his chest. He looked like an angry kid whose best friend had just kicked a rock at him. “Or maybe he’s fucking with us, like he’s been doing for the past ten years. He went native in a whacked-out cult, for Christ’s sake. How can we take anything he has to say seriously, especially when we have no proof he’s the one saying it?”

  Thurber’s thin veneer had finally cracked, if they’d angered him into using the nonapproved term for Eden. Sam took note. Thurber was more than angry about this—he was bordering on thermonuclear.

  “He makes a good point, Sam,” Fletcher said. “This guy had a lot of chances to make things right with the FBI, and instead he stayed quiet for years, then out of the blue went to a country lawyer and made up a bizarre will and spent quite a bit of time following you around. None of this is adding up.”

  Sam took a breath. They were right. Of course they were right. This was all too weird for words. She looked at Thurber. “Do you have any idea where the cult might be now? Can we go interview them about Doug? And maybe we’ll get lucky, and they’ll know something about Rachel Stevens.”

  “NRM,” he snapped.

  Sam sighed heavily. “Forgive me, Special Agent, but I’m not in the mood to be politically correct right now. Where are they?”

  “I have no idea. They haven’t been on the radar for years.” He looked at his watch. “I need to get to another meeting. Please excuse me. Jordan? You have to prepare the 9:00 p.m. Stevens briefing.”

  The younger agent rose without saying a word.

  “Am I invited to this powwow?” Fletcher asked.

  Overtly polite, Thurber said, “Of course. You’re a part of the task force, Detective. By all means, join Special Agent Blake.”

  So Thurber’s rancor was directed at Sam, and by association, Xander, the civilians on his turf. They were usurping his role in what was becoming a very big, convoluted and soon-to-be media-driven case. Sam mentally set her jaw.

  Get used to it, buster. I’m here to see this through to the end.

  “Great, I’ll be there in a minute. Just need to ask Dr. Baldwin something.”

  “Fine.” Thurber shot Sam a perturbed look as he stalked out the door. Blake followed him. Fletcher gave Sam a smile, and wound his finger around his ear, indicating either Thurber or this case was completely loco. She couldn’t disagree.

  Fletcher waited until Thurber and Blake were out in the hall, then said to Baldwin, “Yesterday morning I caught a case, and then your people took it over. Oscar Rivera?”

  “From the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Yes. What do you want to know?”

  “Seems convenient you were here in town while all this shook out. No chance you were already here, working on that case, were you?”

  “What makes you think that?” Baldwin asked.

  “Awful lot of energy to murder a kid who might be involved in some drug running. It seems more sophisticated than that. Thought you might know more. My boss said your people mentioned it might be a serial.”

  Baldwin nodded. “Yes, and that’s as much as I can tell you right now.”

  “Ah. Gotcha.”

  Blake stuck her head in the door. “Hey, Detective, you coming? Chop-chop.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Fletcher said. He shook Baldwin’s hand, nodded at Sam and Xander and took off.

  Once it was just the three of them, Sam said, “Another serial?”

  Baldwin nodded. “Someone’s been drowning young men across the country. It’s not related to this case at all. So let’s talk about Matcliff.”

  “All right. There’s more going on than Thurber told us, isn’t there?”

  “There is. We need to figure out why a man you say is a stranger reached out to you instead of his own agency. Maybe he was worried about being prosecuted, maybe there’s something more nefarious at play. But my number-one question right now aligns with Rob’s. Why you? Why did Douglas Matcliff choose you to get the ball rolling on all of this? Why didn’t he just come to us?”

  She watched him for a moment. “So you didn’t have anything to do with pulling me into this?”

  He shook his head. “I swear I didn’t. It’s a complete coincidence of timing, that’s all. Though this is a good example of how you’d work with us, if you chose to come on board.”

  She shook her head, not trusting her voice. Xander was sitting to her right. He reached over with his left hand and gently touched her arm. She was grateful for it; she’d been feeling very alone for the past half hour.

  Baldwin nodded once. “All right. Let’s focus on the facts. You didn’t recognize the name Timothy Savage. Does Doug Matcliff ring a bell at all?”

  “If it did, I would have said something. I can’t imagine where I’d cross his path. A marine, an FBI agent? Baldwin, you and your people are the only ones I’ve worked with from the agency, and I don’t know any marines.”

  “We need to go through all of your files, all your old cases, everything and anything that might give us a clue as to how he knew about you.”

  She relaxed a bit, seeing he wasn’t trying to pull a fast one on her. “That’s a good plan. Maybe there’s something in Nashville that I just haven’t thought of. There’s another strange thing I’ve been wondering about. Everyone who knew Matcliff as Timothy Savage in Lynchburg said he had a son, Henry. Henry is the one listed as the primary heir in the will. We can’t find him, but there was a young man hanging around the edges while we were there. He came to the funeral home where I posted the body, and followed us to the cabin in the woods. We need to put our hands on him. He may have at least some of the answers we’re looking for.”

  “We’ll add it to the ever-growing list of things we need to do,” Baldwin said.

  “There’s a detective down in Lynchburg named June Davidson. I can’t tell you for sure that he’s on our side, but he’s the only person we’ve met so far who seems to know anything about Matcliff’s recent years. We need to talk to him first.” She looked at her watch. It was nearly 8:00 p.m. “Maybe he can tell us how Ellie Scarron is doing.”

  Sam’s stomach growled, loud enough they all heard.

  Baldwin laughed. “When’s the last time you ate?”

  She thought back. Xander supplied the answer. “You had that bag of cashews we grabbed from a Shell station on the drive back up.”

  “You both must be starving. I’ll have something brought in. We don’t need you passing out during the interviews.”

  Chapter

  33

  WHILE THEY WAITED for the food, Baldwin called June Davidson using the speakerphone in the center of the conference table. It looked like a three-sided gray flying saucer. They all stared at the device, waiting. The Lynchburg detective answered after five rings, sounding tired and more than a little annoyed.

  “Yeah, this is Davidson.”

  “Detective, Supervisory Special Agent John Baldwin, FBI. I have Dr. Owens and Sergeant Whitfield with me. We’re calling for an update on Mrs. Scarron, and anything else you have on the attack.”

  Davidson sounded weary. “When did the FBI get invol
ved? What happened to Detective Fletcher?”

  Baldwin deflected him nicely. “Detective Fletcher is working on the task force searching for Rachel Stevens. How is Mrs. Scarron?”

  “Not good. I’m here at the hospital now. She’s not waking up anytime soon. They’ve put her in an induced coma because of some edema on her brain. She was oxygen deprived for a while before we got there. She’d started to come to, but the swelling began and the docs thought it was safer to knock her out and put in a stent. The only reason she’s alive at all is Dr. Owens’s quick work. That was pretty impressive, Doc. Sorry you had to rush off like that.”

  “Duty called,” she said lightly. “Did you find anything on the cameras at her house?”

  “We did. I have a decent still shot of the guy who broke in and tried to kill her. I can email it. He’s a big son of a gun, looks taller than me, buzzed light-colored hair. We don’t have an ID, but he was definitely in the house a half an hour before we got there.”

  “I’ll have the photo run through our facial recognition system, see if we can’t find a match,” Baldwin said.

  “Sounds good. So why’s the FBI involved with this?”

  Sam filled him in as simply as she could, running him through everything that had happened over the past few hours, then broke the news about Savage’s background and alias.

  “Seriously? He’s ex-military, ex-FBI? I wonder if Mac Picker was telling us the truth about the name Timothy Savage not being in their client databases. Maybe he did it under the name Doug Matcliff, and only Benedict knew. I’ll have to go over there and have a talk with Mac—it’ll have to be in the morning, though. Everyone’s buttoned up tight for the night here.”

  “That’s fine. We’ll touch base about it then. June, we need you to start from scratch with Matcliff, and his son. Do we have an idea of who this kid’s mother is?” Sam asked.

  “No. It was common knowledge she was dead. I never saw the need to investigate it further. I will now.”

  “Great. We haven’t found Henry Matcliff, so we’re up in the air until we do. Look into their background in Lynchburg. Give us some information so we have an idea of what’s been going on down there. Everything and anything you can muster up, property records, physicians, dental work, schooling. You said you thought Henry attended Randolph College—can we get his transcripts?”

  “Sure, I’ll get on it. I’ll have it all for you as soon as I can get it in the morning. By the way, you’d asked about Frederick McDonald. I ran the name through the system, and there is a Frederick McDonald here in town. He’s clean, has a couple of minor traffic violations, owns a Mexican food joint out on Highway 29. Nothing strange about him. I gave him a call, told him what’s going on. He’s never heard of Savage, doesn’t have any idea why he’d be on the list. I offered him a protective detail until this gets resolved, but he said no. I’ll follow up on the Matcliff angle. Listen, I gotta run, Ellie’s coming out of surgery. Have a good night.”

  He hung up and Xander shook his head. “We’ll still want to go down there. I’m not one hundred percent convinced he’s telling us everything.”

  Sam touched his arm. “I think he is, Xander. He’s just caught in the middle of a very strange case and doesn’t know who to trust. Sort of like us.”

  A young agent knocked on the door with their food, three bags of Chinese takeout. The smells were heavenly. Sam settled into some fried rice, the hole in her stomach closing with each bite. But while the hunger was being appeased, she couldn’t shake the feeling there was something more going on here. Something much bigger.

  She waited for the guys to get some food in them before she said, “Baldwin, speaking of people not telling us everything, are you being entirely forthcoming about the history of this case? I feel like we’re missing something.”

  “She’s right, you know,” Xander said. “Are you going to tell us what’s really going on, or let us keep operating in the dark?”

  Baldwin swallowed and set his chopsticks across the top of his white cardboard carton. “You always were too insightful for your own good, Sam. What we haven’t shared with the media, or anyone else, for that matter, was the content of the note found at Rachel Stevens’s house. This is why we’re going full bore on this case.”

  Sam stopped eating, as well. “The note was found at her house? I thought it was found at the scene.”

  “No, that was a purposeful mislead. We’re holding back the real details. It was actually tacked to her bedroom door. It read, and I quote, You lose one, you replace one.”

  “Jesus,” Xander said.

  Baldwin tapped the file folder, then took a deep breath. “What I’m about to tell you can’t leave this room. It gets worse.” He opened the manila folder and laid five clear evidence bags on the table. “We have five notes just like it.”

  Sam was dumbstruck. “Five more? Five more girls are missing?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “When? Where? And why haven’t we heard anything about them, about their cases?” And then it hit her. The secrecy. The nondisclosure agreement. The stricken faces of Baldwin and Thurber. Her blood pressure spiked.

  “Have you been covering this up because you think Doug Matcliff, a former FBI agent, is behind the kidnappings? Because you thought he was your suspect all along? And he’s had Kaylie Rousch captive all these years?”

  Baldwin put his hands up in defense. “We didn’t know where he was, if he was even alive. We weren’t covering anything up.”

  “So why haven’t you been shouting this from the rooftops? And why wouldn’t Thurber and Blake tell us there are more girls missing? This is rather important, don’t you think?”

  He didn’t answer right away, and she figured she’d hit it right on the nose. They weren’t going to admit it, but that’s why they were keeping things so quiet. The FBI actually thought the suspect was one of their own.

  “They were under my instruction not to share this part of the story,” Baldwin said.

  “Why?”

  “The truth is, Sam, this is all you need to know, and I wasn’t sure you wanted to stay involved. Technically, you can walk away right now. You’ve fulfilled your end of the deal with Matcliff. You did his autopsy, found the only remaining copy of his will. Even saved Ellie Scarron’s life. You told me you didn’t want to work with me, with the FBI. I respect that. You can go home. We’ll put someone on the house to keep you safe until the acute part of the case is through, but...” He trailed off and shrugged.

  Jesus. He was right. All her claims, all her posturing that she didn’t want to be a part of law enforcement anymore, didn’t want to be working on homicides, had gone right out the window the minute she was presented with a juicy case to sink her teeth into.

  She should get up and leave. Go home with Xander, go back to her new, quiet, safe life.

  She sensed Xander watching her, snuck a look at him from under her lashes. He had a crooked half smile on his face, slightly wistful, as if he knew the decision she was about to make.

  Baldwin was sitting silently, his hands folded on top of the file, watching her.

  Both of them waiting for her to make a choice.

  She took a quick breath in through her nose. “We’re staying. And hiding this information from us was ridiculous. I need to know everything if you expect me to help.”

  Baldwin didn’t miss a beat, but his smile was blinding. “Good. I’m glad to have you.”

  “Just this case, Baldwin. After this, I go back to being a boring old college professor.”

  He nodded, and the look on his face told her he didn’t believe her for a second.

  She ignored that. “Let’s get back to it, then. Tell me about the missing girls.”

  “All right. The pattern is very specific. The victimologies are incredibly similar, the handwriting on the notes l
eft at the scenes match, so there’s little doubt the same person is behind all the kidnappings. It’s been going on since 1998. I think Kaylie Rousch was the first. All six girls—seven now, if we include Rachel—had similar physical characteristics. Strawberry blond hair, light eyes. All were taken when they were between six and ten years old, so we’re dealing with a pedophilic mind-set. If you think about the way they were, for lack of a better term, replaced every few years or so, that tells us the ages of six to twelve are the specific ideation for this suspect.”

  “I’m not hip on all the lingo here, Baldwin,” Xander said. “What do you mean, specific ideation?”

  “I mean this particular pedophile likes prepubescent girls between six and twelve years old. Once the child ages and loses the physical characteristics he likes—in other words, enters puberty, which begins changing the body into the more adult female form—she is no longer attractive to the suspect, and he discards her in favor of a child who fits into his specific ideal. With the rate of frequency of these kidnappings, I believe the girls are being replaced, but we haven’t found another body since Kaylie. And with her sudden resurrection, I could be wrong. All of them may very well be alive.”

  “What are the odds?” Xander asked.

  “Bleak. But yesterday, they were nil.”

  “Do you have any idea whose body you found, the child you thought was Kaylie Rousch?” Sam asked.

  “We honestly don’t know. We’re going to have the body exhumed, but that can’t happen until next week. We have to get a court order, and the parents’ permission, even though it seems that impediment might be gone now.”

  “Do you think this cult is behind the kidnappings of these other five girls? That Doug Matcliff ran away with them after the mass suicide? And have you found any other bodies?” Xander asked.

  “NRM. No more bodies, no. And as of this morning, when I found out about Kaylie Rousch, I have to change everything I think about these cases.”

  “You’re dodging us, Baldwin. Why? You can trust me, you know.” Sam gave him a smile, which he returned.