“Sure.” O’Shea grinned as he and Drake stepped around them. “We’ll be outside.”
Carter bit back his own grin, hoping Lincoln’s request for privacy was cause for a rewind. “What’s going on?” Carter asked, once the door swung shut.
“Why did Dr. Fear escalate?”
Or not. The disappointment hammer struck again, but Lincoln’s question was a valid one, the primary thing Carter should have been thinking about. Not how he’d warm up Lincoln’s lips with his. He gave his head a single, hard shake, forcing it and himself back into the case. “Because their cycle was hijacked.”
Lincoln tilted his head. “Why the notes to us? Why stay in Apex? Why not resume in DC?”
“You don’t think this is Dr. Fear? You think it’s another copycat?”
“Oh, no, I think this is Dr. Fear. I’m just trying to understand why they’re changing things up.”
“The copycat was a new trigger,” Carter speculated.
“Yes and no. There was a trigger before Baxter; Baxter just caused the escalation. Whatever set off this latest cycle, something about it feels different.” Lincoln’s eyes strayed over Carter’s shoulder again. Carter rotated, following Lincoln’s line of sight to the patio door and the fingerprint dust outline there of the note. “I think maybe they mean for this to be their last.”
Lincoln’s words, the outline of the note, the significance of its location, their involvement all crystallized for Carter. He understood what Lincoln was driving at. “They mean to escape this time. For good.”
Interrogating Weathers was largely a bust. Other than recognizing his distorted voice, Clyde didn’t recognize anything else about Baxter—and he had no idea whether Stacy knew Baxter either. Aside from Stacy being an addict, Weathers had given them nothing more to solidify their theory that Baxter had used the drugs to lure Stacy to the motel. Speculation, and from there, nothing but question marks. Stacy sure as fuck wasn’t talking, and Baxter still wasn’t talking either.
Carter was two seconds from tearing apart the office adjacent to the makeshift command center, frustration at the boiling point, when the door swung open.
“We may have something,” Drake announced as he stepped into the room. Then immediately stepped back.
Carter must have looked like he was on edge. Taking a deep breath, he walked behind the desk and waved Drake inside.
Drake hesitated a moment longer, then finally entered. He laid three sheets of paper on the desk and pushed the first one toward Carter. “Property record for several acres Baxter owns just outside of Apex.” He nudged the middle sheet—an aerial photo with dotted lot lines, a large red circle, and a pin-drop inside the circle. Drake tapped the pin-drop. “Baxter’s place.” Then he tapped the circle’s edge. “The DEA’s designated hot zone for meth production in the area.”
Baxter was smack dab inside it. “Easy pickings for someone who needed to practice disappearing and murdering people.”
“I think he did.” Drake pushed the last sheet of paper toward Carter. “This graph extrapolates the data from the missing persons reports. This blue line is the rate at which we should be seeing missing persons reports, based on the DEA’s estimates of the growing meth epidemic. This red line shows a similarly steady increase in APD’s missing persons reports until this shelf spike here. It’s been above average since.”
Carter checked the date at the bottom of the graph that corresponded to the spike. “2009.” Jeff Baxter’s last year at Apex U. A year after Dr. Fear’s last cycle, after he’d found out who Dr. Fear was and began transforming himself into a killer too. Fucking hell. “Get out there,” he told Drake. “Get out there and see if he buried any bodies on or near the property.”
The younger agent rushed out, rallying the team. “Good work, Agent Drake!” Carter shouted after him. He shot off a text to Beverley and Kirk, requesting a video chat. As Carter waited for the response bubbles to materialize into words, O’Shea poked his head in the room. “You need me?” he asked. “If not, I’m going to go with Drake.”
“Go.” Carter stacked the sheets and situated himself behind the laptop. “I’m going to see if this is enough to make Baxter talk.”
“Good luck.”
O’Shea shut the door, just as the call from Beverley dinged. Carter accepted, and the director appeared on-screen, in a different suit from this morning and with even deeper bags under his eyes. Little sleep on their end either. “What’ve you got, Agent Warren?”
“Another missing couple.”
“Dr. Fear?” Kirk said somewhere off camera, as Beverley replied, “Your text said this was about Baxter.”
“It’s about both,” Carter replied.
“Explain,” Kirk said, appearing beside Beverley.
“The missing couple is Barry and Trudy Cousins, the former police chief and his wife. No one thought their absence unusual at first. They have a tendency to travel spontaneously, but when Barry’s brother, the current chief, checked out their place, there were signs of a struggle. And a diagnosis from Dr. Fear.”
“Fuck,” Kirk cursed. “They’re back.”
“They never left,” Carter said. “They’re finishing their cycle. Which is why it’s more important than ever that we get Baxter to talk, and I think I have the evidence to do that.”
Carter walked them through Drake’s findings, each man looking paler and more tired with every piece of evidence Carter presented.
