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