Serial Escape Read online

  SADDLE UP, they read. THE WILD RIDE IS COLD AND OLD, BUT CLOSE TO HOME.

  Raven fought a shiver. She didn’t want Lucien to think she couldn’t handle the details.

  “How did the Sandoras help you figure it out?” she asked.

  “You remember there was a manhunt underway already?” he replied.

  She nodded. “Yes. Because the VPD had Hanes’s identity from the beginning, right?”

  “Yep. But not because the task force was clever enough to figure it out. Hanes left his ID at the first abduction scene.”

  The revelation stunned Raven. “What?”

  He leaned back on the couch, and she pretended not to notice that his knee was brushing hers once more.

  “Part of his game,” Lucien said. “It was a detail we never released to the press. In fact, you’re one of about two dozen people who’re now aware of the fact. So if anyone asks, you’re an official consultant on the case.”

  Raven frowned. “Okay. But I don’t understand. He wanted you to know who he was?”

  “Only so we could use the clues he’d left. His address was invalid, and nothing about his ID helped us with actually pinning him down. He was—is—too smart for that. But knowing his name did give us access to bits and pieces of his life, all of which connected him to the victims in random ways.”

  Raven’s attention swung back to the computer, her brain searching for the meaning behind the clue on the yellow note. Something about the words jogged a memory she didn’t even know she had.

  “David Sandora...” she said. “He was found by some kids at an abandoned stable, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” Lucien agreed. “The stable had been swallowed by a sinkhole a decade earlier, and no effort had even been made to recover it.”

  “So this clue...it had something to do with what? Horses?”

  “Yep. Turned out that Hanes was a regular at the track. An employee there called our tip line to tell us she recognized his face, and it was actually the clerk who took the call that had the light-bulb moment. The clerk knew where David had been found, and she also remembered reading somewhere that he’d once worked as a horse trainer. She put it all together, brought it to the task force and suddenly everyone realized the notes were more than insignificant crazy talk.”

  Raven stared down at the screen for another moment, remembering her own clue—the only one she’d been familiar with until the current moment. She started to mention it, but before she could, her eye was drawn to something else. There was another file open behind the photograph of the note, and a small section of words was visible behind the picture. She blinked, and her breath caught a little as an idea formed.

  “Does that say that Hanes worked as a custodian at the hospital?” she asked.

  “Could be. Guy couldn’t—or maybe wouldn’t—hold down steady employment, so he went through a lot of jobs,” Lucien told her. “Why? Does that mean something to you?”

  “Do you mind if I...” She trailed off without finishing, then reached across his lap without waiting for an answer to her half-asked question, and she clicked on the other file.

  The top of the digital paper was labeled with the words Georges Hanes: Career History, and it had to have at least thirty titles listed below the header. But there was only one that interested Raven at that moment. She sought it out again.

  “Vancouver Heart Hospital,” she read aloud. “Building service worker. Morgue.” She met Lucien’s eyes. “Before he retired into the caretaker position at the cemetery Jim Rickson was a pathologist.”

  “At Vancouver Heart?”

  “I’m about 90 percent sure of it. And the clue kind of fits, too, right?” She tried not to let hope bubble up, and tried even harder not to let any of it show as she added, “If he really wasn’t talking about me, I mean.”

  “I was already convinced that he wasn’t. This just solidifies that,” Lucien said, his fingers strumming thoughtfully on his thigh. “A life for a life. And death is the morgue’s business. Good police work, Detective Elliot.”

  Her face warmed. “Funny.”

  He gave her knee a quick squeeze, then pushed to his feet and dragged his phone from his pocket. “I’m gonna give the boss a call and make some coffee. You want tea?”

  “Always,” she said.

  She watched him step from the living room to the kitchen, then turned back to the computer and flicked through the other photographed clues, only half listening as Lucien spoke with his boss.

  “Sergeant,” he was saying. “Nice of you to take my call this time around.” Pause. “Yeah, you heard me right.” Another pause. “Nope. But you’ll wanna listen to this.”

  His words faded way in the background, though, as her own clue popped onto the screen. In fact, the whole world kind of slipped away as Raven stared down at words.

  DIG AROUND. ALWAYS DARK AND FULL OF MYSTERY, MY SPARKLE IS A SURPRISE.

  She knew, obviously, what the message referred to. Hanes had driven her out to a long-shut-down mine, and that was where Lucien had found her. But she hadn’t ever looked at the note itself. Doing so now gave her a deep chill. It was impossible not to picture Hanes writing it down, a small, smug smile on his face.

  She’d been told that he confessed in court that he wrote out the obscure hints beforehand, then planted them somewhere. A fail-safe, in case the investigators were successful in their search for one victim, the clue would be there to lead them to the next. She hadn’t seen the one left in the hole with her—the one that the task force wasn’t able to decode in time to save her brother. It’d been far too dark. And her attention was elsewhere, of course. But that didn’t stop her from wondering if her mom had seen the note about her. If the serial killer had left it somewhere visible in her case.

  Oh, Mom, she thought. I kind of hope you saw it, and I hope you were sure someone would be smart enough to figure it out.

  Her heart ached sharply in her chest as it always did when she allowed herself to consider the family she’d lost. She hated Hanes for taking them from her. She wanted to stop him from ever having the power to hurt anyone like that again. The need was a burn, almost as painful as the acute loss.

  She brought up her gaze just as Lucien was setting his phone down on the counter.

  “All right,” he said, speaking as he moved toward her. “The sergeant is sending someone to check the morgue. I think it’ll—” He paused, clearly catching belated sight of her face. “Hey. What is it?”

  “Tell me how you found me.”

  Lucien looked understandably surprised. Over the two months they’d spent together, he’d tried exactly three times to tell her a little about it. And all three times, Raven had shut him down. In fact, over the last few hours, she’d talked more about Hanes and her own tribulations than she had in the past three years. But now she felt like she needed to know everything she could, so she could arm herself.

  “Please,” she said, and Lucien sat down beside her and started to talk.

  * * *

  Lucien spoke on autopilot, recounting the events that had led up to the moment he found her at the bottom of the hole in the mine. He told her that while he hadn’t been a part of the task force assigned to tracking Hanes—another case had him busy already—he had attended an all-hands-style meeting. The Kitsilano Killer had had the entire city on edge. The sergeant was growing more and more agitated, and the pressure was reaching a critical level. It’d been late in the evening on day eighteen of Hanes’s pattern. Each member of the Elliot family had already been taken. The two senior members had been found dead, and the final hours were creeping toward Raven’s demise, too.

  Some of it, he was sure she’d heard before. A fair amount of details were gone over at the trial, and she’d been present for nearly the whole thing, only excusing herself a few times when things got to be too much. She’d even been prepared to test
ify. Thankfully, Hanes’s own words were enough to put him away, and Raven was never called to the stand.

  Lucien explained it all, anyway. Carefully, but without leaving anything out. What he was more concerned with, though, was keeping an eye on Raven’s reaction to the information he was sharing.

  When he’d been acting as her personal bodyguard, she’d made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to discuss the specifics of the original Hanes case. She’d almost fallen apart once when he’d brought it up. He didn’t blame her. He didn’t push her. It wasn’t a part of his assigned task. His job was to keep her alive and unharmed, and if she preferred to steer their interactions away from her family’s murder, then so be it. It was actually probably the reason they’d gotten to know each other on such a personal level. They were able to talk about their life paths and their dreams. Their favorite movies and their pastimes. Very little had been off-limits. With the exception, of course, of the Kitsilano Killer. Now, though, Raven’s eyes were fixed on him, and she showed no sign of shying away. So he pushed on.

  “I left that emergency meeting pretty much the way I came in...” he said to her. “Without much of a clue where the search was going, or knowing if it was going anywhere at all. The task force had already been split in two. One group was focusing finding Hanes himself, and the other...”

  “Was looking for me and my brother,” Raven filled in.

  “Yes. And at the end of each day, they’d get together and try to see if any puzzle pieces overlapped. It was the final thing everyone did before they went home. If they went home. But on that day, no one wanted to do it. They knew they only had hours left to save you, and fitting the pieces together seemed too final.” Lucien paused, silently recalling the details of that particular day.

  There’d been a palpably thick sense of dread hanging over the entire station. The two rooms they’d dedicated to the case as war rooms were full to the brim. Cops. Forensic techs. Clerks. Puzzle solvers who’d come in from God knew where. No resource had been spared. There was coffee flowing, and a pile of sandwiches sat in the middle of a couple of tables in each of the rooms. A local shop had donated the food, but no one seemed to have the stomach to indulge in eating any of it.

  “Every person there was in for the long haul,” he said. “I think some of them had literally not gone home in days. I was doing my best to close off my other case so I could pitch in more, too. I’d worked through the night, and had driven out of town to follow a lead. I was in my car in an alley outside this lowlife’s house, waiting for him to come out so I could ask him a few questions. The sun was just coming up, and a guy walked up with a roll of posters in his hands. He started sticking one up on the wall, and I was kinda half watching him do it. And then the poster itself caught my attention. It was an advertisement for some event at the mining museum.”

  “Once of those coincidences you’re so fond of talking about,” Raven replied.

  He nodded. “I remember sitting there, thinking it was too obvious. Who wouldn’t have thought of a mine, the moment something sparkly was mentioned? And who knows? Maybe they had.”

  “But you didn’t wait to find out.”

  “Well. I did aim to loosely follow some kind of protocol at first. I made the call directly to the sergeant, but damn if I could get a hold of him. Or anyone important. I sat there for a half hour, thinking someone had to be about to call me back. No one did. And my witness never came out of the building in that time, either.”

  “And you broke all the rest of the rules to come and get me.” Raven’s expression grew soft, her gaze focused on him in a way that made him want to reach out to stroke her cheek.

  He closed his hands into fists to keep from giving in to the impulse, and replied, “It was quicker—and possibly a lot stupider—for me to just place a call for immediate backup, then hightail it outta there. Completely lost any chance of solving that other case in the process, by the way.”

  “Do you regret it, then?”

  Her tone was light, and he knew she was kidding. That didn’t stop a hint of fierceness from entering his response.

  “Regret it?” he said. “It was the best damn decision I’ve made my entire career.”

  Her expression faltered, just for a second. It was long enough for Lucien to realize he needed more than the hint of fierceness. Forgetting his resolve not to reach for her, he unfurled his fingers and dropped them to her hand.

  “I lied just a second ago,” he admitted.

  Her forehead creased. “About what?”

  “I told you that I called in my hunch because of protocol. That wasn’t true. The call was an afterthought. I was already pulling onto the highway when I realized that I might not get to you in time, and I wanted to make sure someone knew where I’d gone.”

  “Oh. Well. That barely even qualifies as a lie.”

  He drew in a breath. “It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, I know. But my lack of playing within the rules was an issue. The sergeant told me once that if there were a dictionary for cop stereotypes, he was sure my picture would be under hothead.”

  Raven’s frown deepened. “You?”

  He suppressed a chuckle at her obvious disbelief. “Yes, me.”

  “But you’re so calm all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you get more than a little annoyed.”

  “Acting impulsively was a bit of an issue for me for, oh, I don’t know? The first fifteen years of my career.”

  Her dubious expression didn’t change. “I honestly just can’t picture it.”

  Now he did laugh. “I abandoned my own case—and the witness I was supposed to interview—so I could chase down a lead that wasn’t even a lead. I didn’t stop and look for a connection between Hanes and the mine and you. I just did it. If that’s not the very definition of impulsive, I don’t know what is.”

  “But your instincts were right. There was a connection. Hanes worked in that jewelry store. I was in the local paper for finding and returning that engagement ring that’d been missing for fifty years. And besides that...if you hadn’t followed your gut, then I would’ve died.”

  “Sergeant Gray told me that was the only reason I still had a job. Like I said. Best damn decision I ever made.”

  “For you career.”

  “What?”

  “You said it was the best decision you’ve ever made for your career.”

  A small, dim light bulb tried come to life in the back of his head, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was trying to illuminate. There was just a flicker, and then it was gone.

  “It made all the difference,” he said. “I was a good detective before I met you. Excellent track record, actually. Except for the part where I let myself act without thinking, got write-ups for coloring outside the lines and felt the need to go toe to toe with my boss every time we disagreed. I used to be completely single-minded—just honing in on the endgame and nothing else, running over whoever got in the way. I stopped being like that the moment I met you.”

  She shook her head a little. “I don’t understand, Lucien. I made you a better cop by taking away your focus? That’s kind of a contradiction, isn’t it?”

  Once again, he struggled to find the right words. He wanted to say something meaningful. Something powerful. In the end, he settled for straightforward.

  “Knowing you helped give me a bigger view of the world,” he said. “So it didn’t just make me a better cop... It made me a better person.”

  Raven’s cheeks went a touchable shade of pink, and Lucien couldn’t resist. He dropped his fingers from her hands and lifted them to her face. The way she leaned into the caress—her eyes closing a little while her lips parted—sent a new wave of want through Lucien. He inched forward, anticipation licking through his veins. Self-control was an illusion. No matter how much he told himself he shouldn’t let anything more happen, the undercurrent
was too strong. He bent his neck a little more.

  “Lucien.” Her breathy voice just barely carried above the noisy rush of blood through his body.

  He made himself pause, his lips close enough that his reply was just a murmured vibration. “Yes?”

  “Your phone.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s ringing?”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  Lucien pulled back and glanced toward the table. The electronic device was, in fact, ringing. Loudly, actually. And even from where he was, he could see his boss’s name flashing on the screen.

  Dammit.

  The man had timing.

  For a second, Lucien considered ignoring it. As quick as the thought came, though, it was gone. Lives were in the balance. Including Raven’s. Not answering wasn’t an option, no matter how much he wanted it to be.

  Chapter 10

  Raven would’ve liked a moment to enjoy the fact that Lucien had just come as close to a romantic confession as she’d ever hoped for. Or maybe not quite as close as she’d always hoped for. But possibly as close as she would get. Except she didn’t get a moment. Because almost as soon as Lucien picked up the phone, Raven knew it was bad news. His mouth—which she’d been just a hairbreadth away from a few heartbeats earlier—set into a line as he greeted his boss, then listened for a second. He gave her knee a little squeeze, then stood up and moved restlessly through the room, talking as he moved. And she didn’t even have to really listen to the conversation to figure it out, and the one snippet she did hear clearly confirmed it anyway.

  “No,” said Lucien. “I agree. The hospital was a good conclusion. Too bad it wasn’t the right one. We’ll just have to look for another connection between Jim Rickson and Hanes.”

  It made her heart drop. They were going to have to start again. Look for something else in the clue. The idea was overwhelming.

  She tried to remind herself that the task force was diligently working on it, too. Sergeant Gray and the other VPD officers wouldn’t rest until Georges Hanes was behind bars again. They’d dedicate serious time to trying to figure out exactly what the message meant. But knowing it was still little consolation while the Rickson family suffered the consequences of the killer’s escape.