Cut & Run (Cut & Run #1)(115)
Author: Abigail Roux

“Did you see my welcome back present?” the voice asked abruptly.

The question made him sound almost hopeful, like he was trying to please.

Ty was silent, listening to the odd scraping sound as a violent shiver went through him. “I did,” he finally answered softly, sensing that talking about Zane would get him nowhere. “I especially liked the confetti.”

Another soft laugh greeted his words. “That took a lot of planning. I wanted you to know how much I appreciate people who paid attention.” There was a thoughtful pause while the scraping “work” continued. “Shame. If you hadn’t found my file so quickly, you would have been able to keep going.”

“Your file?” Ty asked hoarsely.

The man hummed in response. “I’m in that little stack you have; Baltimore ’01,” he answered regretfully. “I understand you’re the one who caught on to Poe, as well. Bravo, Ty, I must say. I expected Zane to get it first, him being the brains of your operation and all.”

Ty frowned. If he knew about both the files and the fact that Ty, and not Henninger, had been the one to figure out Poe, then he had to have taps.

Probably all over the Bureau.

“You’re still trying to solve it, aren’t you, Grady?” the distorted voice asked in amusement. “You were enjoying yourself, weren’t you? Maybe not your partner, but you were loving this case,” he said with confidence. “Where did you stash Special Agent Garrett, by the way?” he asked slyly, as if he might have already known the answer. “I do hope he’s safe.”

Ty swallowed heavily and licked his dry lips. As their conversation continued, the man still sounded completely sane. That was possibly more frightening than even his situation. It would have been easier to deal with him if he had been delusional or something.

“He’s safer than you are,” Ty murmured, cursing his earlier stupidity.

If he’d been thinking clearly he would have told the man Zane was dead or severely injured from the wreck. Now, he had practically sealed Zane’s death sentence as well.

The scraping stopped, and the voice that responded was one of pure sympathy. “He’s hurt, isn’t he? He’s hurt, and you left him behind to go work on the case, didn’t you, Grady?” He tutted in disapproval. “You just couldn’t let it go, that need for revenge. Oh, don’t be surprised. I knew about you and Sanchez. He found the Baltimore connection, too. He even put a call into his old Recon buddy Ty Grady down in Maryland to ask him about it, but you never answered your phone, did you, Ty? You’ve been wondering what that call was about since you got here, haven’t you? You weren’t there for Sanchez, and you won’t be there for Garrett.”

Ty closed his eyes and lowered his head, pain lancing through his chest at the killer’s accusations.

“Ah. You did leave him, didn’t you? Embarrassed, are you? That’s no way to treat a partner. You should be ashamed of yourself. What will he think when you don’t come back? He’ll think you abandoned him; left him because he was worthless.”

Ty licked his lips and opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.

He swallowed with difficulty and then tried again, managing a hoarse, “I’m sure he’ll be relieved to be rid of me.”

“Hmmm. I’m not sure I believe you, Grady. Who else will he work with? Who else would work with him? He’s a loose cannon.” There was a soft chuckle. “But then, so are you. At least you’re firing real ammunition. He’ll be even easier to take care of without you around.”

Again, Ty was silent, and the odd sounds started up again. It was a slow, squishing sound, like a shoe stuck in the mud, and then a long scrape followed by several shorter ones. Ty couldn’t quite identify it, but as he listened, he accepted with a sinking sensation that he was going to die.

SEARS brought Zane another glass of juice while he sat and flipped through the pages of the leather Poe anthology Ross had found. Ross sat with a pen and paper, making notes as Zane searched for similarities between the cases and the stories he read.

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he said softly.

“The ME,” Sears provided with a wince.

“Right. In the story, one woman’s head is practically cut off. The other was stuffed into the chimney.” Frowning, Zane shook his head.

“The location is what’s important there, right?” Ross asked as he made a note.

Zane nodded and moved onto the next. “Ligeia,” he announced. “First thing, the wife in the story dies,” he said woodenly. He grimaced and kept reading. “The man in the story remarries, but he’s convinced that his new wife is the old one, reincarnated or something, and he slowly poisons the second wife, who then dies as well. The second wife was described as raven-haired.

The first wife was blonde,” he stated in clipped tones.

“The dye-job roommates,” Ross said with a nod without looking up from his paper. “That wasn’t location; it was body positioning.”

“And the wife thing explains the plastic wedding rings,” Zane supplied tiredly. “Hooked together to symbolize they were really one person, no doubt.”

“Jesus,” Sears murmured with a shake of her head. She was thumbing through the files that sat nearby, making notes. Henninger had pulled only the files of anyone who had lived in or around the Baltimore area in 2001, which included large areas like Washington, DC. The stack was huge.

An odd feeling of dread settled into Zane as he looked at the files. It was like searching for one particular needle in a f**king needle factory. How would they know which file was relevant? Even Ty’s file was in that stack, and Zane’s fingers itched to search for it. Instead, he paged through the book and found another story, one he’d read over and over while in school. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he announced.

Both agents looked up from their notes. Zane didn’t need to explain that one.

“YOU’VE been a fine conversationalist, but it’s almost time for me to leave.”

The distorted voice was more muffled, and the light had grown very dim.

It took a while, but Ty had finally decided that he knew what the sound was. In hindsight, it bothered him that it took him so long to figure it out. He had spent one summer when he was thirteen years old helping his father build a small outbuilding on their property. It had been nothing but cinderblock and beam, but they had still needed mortar and a trowel. He had grown to love the sound of laying the mortar that summer. He was trying to come to terms with the fact that that sound would be one of the last ones he heard.