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He’d been waiting for over an hour.

  To the best of his recollection, Micah was never late. It was one of the things they’d had in common. Because of the directions that life had taken them, they both believed that time was a tool to be used, not frivolously ignored or disregarded.

  Micah wouldn’t be late. If the mercenary wasn’t here it was because he couldn’t be here.

  Which meant that something was wrong.

  Which in turn meant that he, as the special agent who had recently been put in charge of this case, couldn’t put off the inevitable for very much longer.

  The only thing that Micah had confirmed over the phone was what he’d already just learned: that all the victims were women from Cold Plains. In order to conduct the investigation properly, he would have to go up to Cold Plains, Wyoming, himself.

  Looks like the prodigal son is coming home, he thought wryly.

  Except that, in this case, he hadn’t been prodigal so much as smart. Leaving Cold Plains had been the smartest thing he’d ever done. By the same token, returning might turn out to be the stupidest.

  Hawk looked at his watch again. When he’d gotten here—and found the room empty—he’d mentally promised himself to give Micah approximately ninety minutes to show up. But right now, he was feeling way too antsy to wait for sixty more minutes to slip beyond his reach.

  With a sigh, he crossed back to the hotel room door that had been deliberately left unlocked for him.

  Damn it, Micah, I hope you haven’t gotten yourself killed, he thought irritably. Because he was fairly certain that nothing short of death would have kept Micah Grayson from keeping an appointment that he himself had set up.

  He needed to see the county coroner before he made his way to Cold Plains, but a visit to Cold Plains was definitely in his immediate future.

  Biting off a curse, Hawk let himself out of the room and closed the door behind him.

  It seemed rather incredible to Carly Finn that the two times she made up her mind to finally, finally leave Cold Plains, something came up to stop her.

  And not some mild, inconsequential “something” but a major, pull-out-all-the-stops “something.”

  The first time she’d been ready to test her wings and fly, leaving this soul-draining speck of a town behind her and eagerly begin a fresh, new chapter of her life with the man she knew deep down in her soul she was meant to be with, her infinite sense of obligation as well as her never-ending sense of responsibility to her family had added lead to her wings and grounded her with a bone-jarring thud.

  The problem then was that her father had been a drunk, a dyed-in-the-wool, leave-no-drink-untouched, hopeless alcoholic, and while there were many men—and women—with that shortcoming who could be considered by the rest of the world to be functioning alcoholics, her father hadn’t fallen into that category. He hadn’t been even close to a functioning alcoholic, and she knew that if she left with Hawk, if she accompanied the man she loved so much that it hurt so he could follow his dreams, she would be abandoning not just her father but her baby sister to a very cruel, inevitable life of poverty and, eventually, to homelessness. The baby sister she had promised her dying mother to look after all those years ago.

  So she knew that in all good conscience, she had to remain. And remain she did. She remained in order to run the family farm and somehow juggle a job as a waitress, as well, the latter she undertook in order to bring in some extra, much-needed money into the household.

  She remained while sending Hawk Bledsoe on his way with a lie ringing in his ears.

  There was no other choice. She knew that the only way she could get Hawk to leave Cold Plains—and her—so that he could follow his dreams was to tell him that she didn’t love him anymore. That she had actually never loved him and had decided that she just couldn’t go on pretending anymore.

  Because she knew that if she didn’t, if she let him know how much she really loved him, Hawk would stay in Cold Plains with her. He would marry her, and eventually, he would become very bitter as he entertained thoughts of what “could have been but wasn’t.”

  She couldn’t do that to him. Couldn’t allow him to do that to himself.

  Loving someone meant making sacrifices. So she’d made the ultimate sacrifice: she’d lied to him and sent him on his way, while she had stayed behind to do what she had to do. And struggled not to die by inches with each passing day.

  But the day finally came when she had had enough. When she had silently declared her independence, not just from the farm but from the town, which had become downright frightening in a short period. Cold Plains had gone from a dead-end town to a sleek, picture-perfect one that had sold its soul to the devil.

  She’d reached the conclusion that she had a right to live her own life. That went for Mia, the baby sister she had always doted on, as well.

  She didn’t even want to pack, content to leave everything behind just so that she and Mia could get a brand-new start. But she was in for a startling surprise. Somehow, while she was doing all that juggling to keep the farm—and them—afloat, Mia had grown up and formed opinions of her own—or rather, as it turned out, had them formed for her.

  When she had told Mia that the day had finally come, that she’d had enough and that they were leaving Cold Plains for good, her beautiful, talented baby sister had knocked her for a loop by telling her flatly that she was staying.

  It got worse.

  Mia was not just staying, but she was “planning” on marrying Brice Carrington, a wealthy widower more than twice her age.

  “But you don’t love him,” Carly had protested when she had finally recovered from the shock.

  The expression on Mia’s face had turned nasty. “Yes, I do,” her sister had insisted. “Besides, how would you know if I did or didn’t? You’re always so busy working, you don’t have time to notice anything. You certainly don’t have any time for me. Not like Samuel does,” she’d added proudly, with the air of one who had been singled out and smiled down upon by some higher power.

  The accusation had stung, especially since the only reason she had been working so hard was to provide for Mia in the first place. But the sudden realization that while she’d been busy trying to make a life for them, trying to save money so that they could finally get away from here, her sister had been brainwashed.

  There was no other term for it. What Samuel Grayson did, with his silver tongue, his charm and his exceedingly handsome face was pull people into his growing circle of followers. Pull them in and mesmerize them with rhetoric. Make them believe that whatever he suggested they do was really their idea in the first place.

  Why else would Mia believe that she was actually in love with a man who was old enough to be her father. Older. Brice Carrington was as bland as a bowl of unsalted, white rice. He was also, in the hierarchy of things, currently very high up in Samuel Grayson’s social structure.

  Maybe Brice represented the father they’d never really had, Carly guessed. Or maybe, since their dad was dead, Mia was looking for someone to serve as a substitute?

  In any case, if Mia was supposed to marry Brice Carrington, it was because the match suited Grayson’s grand plan.

  The very thought of Grayson made her angry. But at the moment, it was an anger that had no suitable outlet. She couldn’t just go railing against the man as if she was some kind of a lunatic. For one thing, most of the people who still lived in town thought Samuel Grayson was nothing short of the Second Coming.

  Somehow, in the past five years, while no one was paying attention, Samuel Grayson and a few of his handpicked associates had managed to buy up all the property in Cold Plains. At first, moving stealthily but always steadily, he’d wound up arranging everything up to and possibly including the rising and setting of the sun to suit his own specifications and purposes.

  These days, it seemed as if nothing took place in Cold Plains without his say-so or close scrutiny. He had eyes and ears everywhere. Anyone who opposed him was either asked to lea
ve or, and this seemed to be more and more the case, they just disappeared.

  At first glance, it appeared as if the man had done a great deal for the town. Old buildings had been renovated, and new buildings had gone up, as well. There was now a new town hall, a brand-new school, which he oversaw and for which he only hired teachers who were devoted to his ideology. And most important of all, he’d built a bright, spanking, brand-new church, one he professed was concerned strictly with the well-being of its parishioners’ souls—and that, he had not been shy about saying, was the purview of the leader of the flock: Grayson himself.

  To a stranger from the outside, it looked like a pretty little, idyllic town.

  To her, Cold Plains had become a town filled with puppets—and Samuel Grayson was the smiling, grand puppeteer. A puppeteer whose every dictate was slavishly followed. His call for modesty had all the women who belonged to his sect wearing dresses that would have been more at home on the bodies of performers reenacting the late 1950s.

  Maybe her skepticism was because she’d grown up listening to her late father’s promises, none of which he’d ever kept. Promises that, for the most part, he didn’t even recall making once a little time had gone by.

  Whatever the reason, she didn’t trust Samuel Grayson any further than she could throw him. And he was a large, powerful-looking man.

  Her sense of survival was urgently prompting her to leave before something went wrong—before she couldn’t leave.

  But no matter what she felt about Cold Plains’s transformation and no matter what her sense of survival dictated, she was not about to leave town without her sister. And Mia had flatly refused to budge, declaring instead her intentions of staying.

  She was, Carly caught herself thinking again, between the proverbial rock and hard place.

  Common sense might prod her to make a run for it, but she had never put her own well-being above someone else’s, especially that of a loved one.

  That was why she’d lied to Hawk to make him leave Cold Plains and why she was still here now, doing her best to pretend to be one of Samuel’s most recent converts even though the very thought made her sick to her stomach.

  In her opinion, Samuel Grayson, once merely a very slick motivational speaker, was now orchestrating a utopian-like environment where allegiance to him was the prime directive and where, by instituting a society of blindly obedient, non-thinking robots, he was setting the cause of civilization back over fifty years.

  Women in Samuel’s society were nothing more than subservient, second-class citizens whose main function, Carly strongly suspected, was to bear children and populate Grayson’s new world.

  She’d heard, although hadn’t quite managed to confirm, that Samuel was even having these devoted women “branded.” Horrified, she’d looked into it and discovered that they were being tattooed with the small letter D, for devotee, on their right hips. That alone made the man a crazed megalomaniac.

  Although it sickened her, Carly knew she had to play up to Samuel in order to get her sister to trust her enough so that she could eventually abduct her and get her away from this awful place. Nothing short of that was going to work—and even that might not—but she had no other options open to her.

  Hoping that Samuel would eventually grow tired of his little game—or that someone would get sick of his playing the not-so-benevolent dictator—and send him on his way was akin to waiting for Godot. It just wasn’t going to happen.

  So she’d gone to Samuel and insisted that she was qualified to fill the teaching position that had suddenly opened up at the Cold Plains Day Care Center. A smile that she could only describe as reptilian had spread over Samuel’s handsome, tanned face. Steepling his long, aristocratic fingers together, he fixed his gaze intently on her face.

  He paused dramatically for effect as the moment sank in, then said, “Yes, my dear, I am sure that you are more than qualified to fill that position, and may I say how very happy I am that you have come around and decided to come join us.” He’d taken her hand between his and though his smile had never wavered, it had sent chills through her. Chills she wasn’t quite sure how to dodge. She’d never felt more of a sense of imprisonment than she had at that moment.

  “You will be a most welcomed addition,” he had assured her.

  She remembered thinking, Over my dead body, and she had meant it.

  The problem was she was fairly certain that the coda, although silently said, would not be a deterrent to Grayson. He was a man who allowed nothing to stand in the way of his plans. To that end, he was perfectly capable of cutting out a person’s heart without missing a beat.

  She had to get Mia away from here. And she would, even if it wound up being the last thing she ever did.

  Chapter 2

  “Hi, Doc. This is going to have to be quick. I’ve only got a few minutes to spare,” Hawk said by way of a greeting as he walked into the county coroner’s office.

  In reality, since Micah hadn’t shown up for their appointed meeting, he should have skipped coming here altogether and gone on straight to Cold Plains. But the coroner had called, saying there was something that he needed to tell him. And if he was being honest and had his choice in the matter, he would have gladly stalled and remained here indefinitely, at this temporary FBI outpost. But he didn’t have a choice, and he could only spare a few minutes.

  At this point, he would have welcomed being sidetracked by anything, and this included an earthquake, a tornado or a tsunami, none of which ever occurred in this rough-and-tumble region of Wyoming. But although he would rather do anything than go on to Cold Plains to investigate exactly how these five murdered women were connected, Hawk was first and foremost a dedicated FBI agent, and he wasn’t about to let any of his past personal feelings get in the way of his trying to solve this case.

  Not bothering to shrug out of his jacket, Hawk crossed over to the coroner. He’d only met the man a few days before but the coroner took his job very seriously.

  “Why did you call me?” Hawk asked. “Did you find out anything new?”

  “Not exactly,” Dr. Hermann Keegan replied, measuring his words out slowly, as if he wanted to be sure they were absolutely right before he uttered them. He looked at Hawk over the tops of his rimless reading glasses. “Actually, what I found was something old.”

  His mind on the ordeal that lay ahead of him, Hawk had very little patience with what sounded like a riddle. “Come again?”

  “Once the fact that they were all connected came to light, I pulled the autopsy records of the other four victims,” he explained. “Were you aware of the fact that the ‘tattoo’ the deputy coroner found on victim number two’s right hip washed off when he was cleaning the body?”

  Victim number two was the only female they hadn’t been able to identify yet. All the others had names, but this one was still referred to as Jane Doe four years after she’d been discovered. The woman’s DNA and fingerprints turned out not to be a match for anyone currently in any of the FBI databases.

  “Tattoos don’t wash off,” Hawk pointed out.

  Doc Keegan smiled, making his spherical, moonlike face appear even rounder. “Exactly. According to the notes, the letter, a d, appeared to have been drawn in with some kind of permanent, black laundry marker or maybe a Sharpie.” He raised his eyes to Hawk’s. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Hawk answered crisply. “Either this woman had a penchant for marking up her body—or she wasn’t really one of the cult’s followers but was pretending to be for some reason.” Being a law enforcement agent, the first thing that struck him was that Jane Doe might have been one, as well. “She might have been undercover,” he concluded.

  Keegan’s head bobbed up and down. “My money’s on that.”

  Hawk looked at the five manila folders that were fanned out on top of the coroner’s extremely cluttered desk. Each was labeled with the name of a different victim. Besides Jane Doe, there was Shelby Jackson who had been found fi
rst in Gulley, Wyoming, five years ago, Laurel Pierce, found in Cheyenne three years ago, Abby Michaels, discovered in the woods outside of Laramie last year and Johanna Tate, found in Eden last week.

  Johanna Tate.

  Micah’s former girlfriend, Hawk suddenly remembered. The name had been nagging at him ever since he’d heard the news. Was that why Micah had called him? Because of Johanna?

  Did Micah know more than he’d alluded to? Had he decided to take matters into his own hands? Going outside the law had become a way of life for him, and he would have thought nothing of avenging Johanna’s murder. Had it backfired on him because he’d let his emotions get in the way?

  Damn it, he needed answers, Hawk thought, frustrated. Nodding toward the folders, he asked, “Mind if I take those with me?”

  Stepping away from Joanna Tate’s lifeless body he’d finished sewing together, Keegan scrubbed and then pushed the files together into one pile. “Be my guest,” he told Hawk. “I’ve already made copies of them for you.”

  Hawk scooped up the files. Already familiar with all the victims, he wanted to review the files in depth and was grateful to the coroner for making copies for him. Still stumped, he needed all the input he could get his hands on.

  “You’re pretty thorough,” Hawk commented.

  Keegan raised his slopping shoulders and let them fall again. “I’ve got the time to be. This is the most amount of action this office has seen in a very long while.”

  “What do you do the rest of the time?” Hawk asked, curious what occupied the man’s time when he wasn’t conducting an autopsy. He sincerely doubted that Wyoming was a hotbed of homicides.

  Keegan’s answer surprised him.

  “I’m a vet,” the older man replied. “Technically,” he explained as a look of disbelief came over the special agent’s face, “I don’t even have to be a doctor of any kind in order to become a coroner. I just have to be unusually observant and display a high tolerance when it comes to the dissection of dead bodies. Like this one.” He nodded at the draped body on his steel table.