Going Twice. Sharon Sala
Benton was in the den eating salted cashews and nursing a bottle of beer. The television was on CNN, and his wife, Nola, was in her art studio, working on a commissioned painting. He was coming off of a long, drawn-out kidnapping case that had ended badly, so when his cell phone indicated an incoming text, he almost didn’t answer.
Then he glanced at Caller ID and the skin crawled on the back of his neck. The last thing he expected was a message from the Stormchaser.
I am not dead, so do not weep. It was not my time. I have vows to keep.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and immediately forwarded the text to his partners, Cameron Winger and Wade Luckett.
Within moments his cell phone rang. It was Wade, and he had Cameron conferenced in.
“We’re absolutely sure it’s him?” Wade asked.
“It came from the same phone he used to use,” Tate said.
“I didn’t know the agency kept that old phone activated,” Cameron said.
“That’s on me. I told them to,” Tate said.
“I turned on The Weather Channel,” Wade said. “There’s a tornado outbreak along the Texas-Oklahoma border.”
“Do we wait for the bodies to begin showing up or go now?” Cameron asked.
“He’s already killed or he wouldn’t have sent the message. But we won’t know for sure that’s where he is until the medical examiner makes that determination,” Tate said.
“I’m packing tonight anyway,” Wade said. “I’ll be ready when you call.”
“I’m going to talk to the Director and then I’ll let you know what he thinks,” Tate added.
“I’m with Wade,” Cameron said. “I’ll pack and wait for you to tell us when and where to meet up. And just for the record, this sucks big-time, even though it means I’ll probably see Laura again.”
There was a click in Tate’s ear, and then the line went dead. It appeared Cameron’s attraction to the pretty Red Cross worker they’d met last year was ongoing. He knew the rest of his news wasn’t going to set well with Nola, but he had to tell her what had happened. After the hell the Stormchaser had put her through last year, he hated to let her know the bastard was starting up again.
He smiled when he walked into her studio. The painting she’d been working on for several weeks was almost finished, and the child’s face, which was the subject of the work, looked alive.
“Hey, pretty lady, do you have time to be bothered?”
Nola looked up and smiled. There was a smudge of paint on her cheek and more on her fingers.
“I always have time for you. What’s up?”
“Not-so-good news.”
She frowned. “Oh, no. Please tell me you’re not going to be leaving again so soon.”
He showed her the text and watched the blood drain from her face. Then, without speaking, she put the brush in cleaning solution and began wiping her hands. When she looked up at him, she was trembling.
“I thought for sure he was dead. I wanted him to be dead.”
“So did I, honey, so did I,” Tate said, and slid a hand beneath her hair to rub the back of her neck.
“Do you have a location?” she asked.
“Not yet. There’s a tornado outbreak on the Texas-Oklahoma border, which might be where he is, but we’ll have to wait for the autopsies to know for sure.”
“Dear Lord. Those poor people,” Nola said, and wrapped her arms around him.
They held each other without speaking, lost in the memories of what they’d gone through before.
“You have to stay safe,” Nola whispered.
“I will, honey. He’s not after us. We’re part of the package that feeds his ego. If we’re dead, he doesn’t have anyone to needle, you know?”
“Okay...I get it, but still, he’s not normal. I was with him, remember. He talks to his dead wife like she’s right there beside him.”
“I remember. I remember everything—including thinking I was going to lose you.”
“Am I in danger again?” she asked.
“I don’t think so, but I’ll know more once we find out what he’s done.”
Nola hid her face against Tate’s chest. “I hate this. I just hate this.”
“So do I, honey, but we won’t quit until we get him.” He hugged her close, then leaned down and gave her a quick kiss. “I need to call the Director.”
“And I need to make sure you have enough clean clothes,” she said, and began cleaning her brushes and covering up the painting.
He frowned. “I didn’t mean to mess up your work.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t work now if I had to. I’m going to do laundry. I have this overwhelming need to do something for you to make it all better, and that’s all I’ve got.”
He watched her leave the room with her head up and that familiar take-charge stride, and knew she would be okay. It was the Stormchaser’s latest victims he was worried about.
After a quick phone call to the Director to let him know what had happened, he was given the go-ahead to proceed as the team saw fit and told to stay in touch daily.
He went back into the den and changed channels until he found one giving early reports of the storm front that had just gone through Wichita Falls. It had produced three funnels, one of which had cut through part of the city. Victims were being taken to the local hospitals, and so far two bodies had been taken to the morgue. Tate knew all they could do now was wait and see if the Stormchaser was truly back.
* * *
It took exactly sixteen hours for the news to break that storm victims had been murdered, and by that time five bodies had been pulled from the rubble, three of which had been identified as having survived the storm and killed afterward. And they were all nude, which was a new twist to his M.O.
Tate called his partners, then made a call to the local police in Wichita Falls to tell them what they were dealing with, and that the team was on the way.
Keystone Lake, Oklahoma
Hershel was no longer in the state of Texas. He drove all of the next day, following the storm front as it moved into Oklahoma. According to the National Weather Service, the chances of storms firing up in the northeastern part of the state were high, so he’d set up his campsite at Keystone Lake, near Tulsa. The camping area appeared to be a popular one. He’d chosen a site on the far side of the campgrounds in the hopes that the sound of his portable generator would not disturb nearby campers. He had a waterproof, two-room tent with zip-up windows and a heavy-duty floor, a fan for hot, muggy nights, and a laptop computer with a satellite connection for streaming live TV and keeping an eye on weather systems, as well as the FBI’s investigation of the Stormchaser murders. He liked knowing the media had given him a special name, and he liked hearing that the agents were catching fire for not stopping him last year in Louisiana.
The sun began to set as he was cooking his supper. He ate a solitary meal in the growing dusk, listening to a pack of coyotes announcing their arrival for an evening hunt, yipping in a high-pitched tone that morphed into brief howls.
The mournful sound made Hershel shiver. He wasn’t by nature a man who enjoyed sleeping out under the stars, and the thin walls of his tent weren’t much more reassuring. As it grew darker, he put out his fire, started up his generator and went into the tent to settle in for the night.
He kicked off his shoes at the front and padded across the floor to the sleeping bag