Luring

She got her suitcase and headed on out of the building, then caught a cab to the train station.

CHAPTER FOUR

Guy Dafoe didn’t particularly like getting up so early in the morning. But at least these days he was working hard to take care of his own cattle rather than the herds he’d handled for other owners. Early morning chores seemed well worth the effort now.

The sun was rising, and he knew it was going to be a beautiful day. He loved the smell of the fields and the sounds of the cattle.

He’d spent years working bigger ranches and bigger herds. But this was his own land, his own animals. And he was feeding these animals right, not raising them artificially on grain and hormones. That was a waste of resources, and production-line cattle lived miserable lives. He felt good about what he was doing.

He’d plunged all his savings into buying this farm and a few cattle to start out with. He knew it was a big risk, but he had faith that there was a real future in sales of grass-fed beef. It was a growing market.

The yearling calves were clustered up around the barn, where he’d penned them up last night in order to check on their health and development. They watched him and mooed softly, as if waiting for him.

He was proud of his small herd of Black Angus, and sometimes he had to resist the temptation to become fond of them, as if they were pets. These were food animals, after all. It would be a bad idea to get very attached to any of them individually.

Today he wanted to turn the yearling calves into the roadside pasture. The field they were in now was eaten down short, and the good legume and grass pasture down by the road was ready for grazing.

Just as he swung wide gate open, he noticed something odd on the far side of the pasture. It looked like some kind of tangle or bundle over near the road.

He grumbled aloud …

“Whatever it is, it probably isn’t good.”

He slipped through the opening and pushed the gate shut again, leaving the yearlings where they were. He didn’t want to turn his stock into this field until he found out what that strange object was.

As he strode across the field, he grew more puzzled. It looked like a huge wad of barbed wire hanging from a fence post. Had a roll of the stuff bounced off of someone’s truck and wound up there somehow?

But as he walked closer to it, he saw that it wasn’t a new roll. It was a tangle of old wire, wrapped in all directions.

It didn’t make any sense.

When he reached the bundle and stared into it, he realized that something was inside.

He leaned toward it, peered closely, and felt a sudden cold chill of terror.

“Holy hell!” he yelled, jumping backward.

But maybe he was only imagining things. He forced himself to look again.

There it was—a woman’s face, pale and wounded, contorted in agony.

He grabbed the wire to pull it off her, but quickly stopped himself.

It’s no use, he realized. She’s dead.

He staggered over to next fencepost, leaned on it, and retched violently.

Pull yourself together, he told himself.

He had to call the police—right now.

He staggered away and broke into a run toward his house.

CHAPTER FIVE

Special Agent Jake Crivaro sat bolt upright when his office phone rang.

Things had been too quiet at Quantico since he got back yesterday.

Now his gut told him instantly …

It’s a new case.

Sure enough, as soon as he picked up the phone, he heard the sonorous voice of Special Agent in Charge Erik Lehl …

“Crivaro, I need you in my office right now.”

“Right away, sir,” Crivaro said.

He hung up the phone and grabbed his go bag, which he always kept at the ready. Agent Lehl was being even more laconic than usual, which surely meant urgent business. Crivaro was sure that he would be traveling somewhere soon—probably within the hour.

He felt his heart pumping just a little faster as he hurried down the hall. It was a good feeling. After a 10-week stint serving as a mentor for the FBI’s Honors Internship Program, this was a welcome return to normality.

During the first few days of the summer program he’d been pulled away by a murder case—the notorious “Clown Killer.” After that he’d settled in to the more mundane work of mentoring just one of the interns—a talented but exasperating kid named Riley Sweeney, who had shown startling brilliance helping him on the case.

Even so, the program had passed too slowly for his taste. He wasn’t used to spending such a long period out of the field.

When Jake walked into Lehl’s office, the lanky man rose up from his chair to greet him. Erik Lehl was so tall that he barely seemed to fit into any space he occupied. Other agents said that he looked like he was wearing stilts. He looked more to Jake as though he were made out of stilts—an awkwardly assembled assortment of lengths of lumber that somehow never seemed to be perfectly coordinated in their movements. But the man had been a crack agent and had earned his position at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.

“Don’t make yourself comfortable, Crivaro,” Lehl said. “You’re leaving right away.”

Jake obediently stayed on his feet.

Lehl looked at a manila folder that he was holding and heaved a grim sigh. Jake had long since observed Lehl’s tendency to take every case extremely seriously—even personally, as if he felt directly insulted by any sort of monstrous criminality.

Not surprisingly, Jake couldn’t remember ever finding Lehl in a cheerful mood.

After all …

Monsters are our business.

And Jake knew that Lehl wouldn’t be assigning him to this particular case if it weren’t unusually heinous. Jake was something of a specialist in cases that defied human imagination.

Lehl handed the manila folder to Jake and said, “We’ve got a really ugly situation in West Virginia. Have a look.”

Jake opened the folder and saw a black-and-white photo of a weird bundle held together by duct tape and barbed wire. The bundle was dangling against a fence post. It took a moment for Jake to realize that the bundle had a face and hands—that it was in fact a human being and obviously dead.

Jake inhaled sharply.