Page 16 of So Deadly
“Honestly, no, but I have to do my due diligence.I might not call him, but he should be prepared in case I do.”
Barbara took the card and shoved it in her sweatpants’ pocket.“All right.Take care, Special Agent.”
“You too,” Faith replied.
As she and Turk walked back to Hayes’s house to rejoin Jessica, Faith played Barbara’s words over in her head.Margaret Hayes was, by all accounts, a rude, self-centered, entitled woman.A Karen.
But hurting.Faith wondered why.And she wondered what hurt might have prompted her to buy a fake service vest for an animal that was clearly a guard dog.Maybe knowing the answer to that would help her find Hayes’s killer.Maybe it would only help her understand Margaret a little better.Either way, it was worth the effort.
But what had hurt the killer enough that they tore a woman literally to shreds?Maybe Faith was better served answering that question and ensuring that they didn’t walk into any more scenes straight out of a horror movie.
CHAPTER EIGHT
David looked through the binoculars at the facility.He and Jayce were about a mile away, hidden in a stand of trees that grew just south of the former oil field.From here, David could see the security officers not visible on the satellite images Jayce had shown him.
“Looks like ten,” Jayce said.
“Ten?I only see four.”
“Sweep your field glasses over the whole facility, not just the gate.”
It took David a moment to remember that binoculars were called field glasses in the military.He moved the binoculars across the property and found the other security officers Jayce was talking about.A single pair at a side gate, and two patrolling pairs walking around the long central building.The guards were armed with assault rifles and wore bulletproof vests.
“I’m guessing they don’t care to masquerade as an abandoned oil field anymore.”
“Oil fields often have armed guards,” Jayce explained.“If people saw this, they’d just assume that the company struck paydirt again, and they’re getting ready to pull.”
David looked at Jayce incredulously.Armed guards?At a civilian business in the United States?
He was about to ask why, but it didn’t really matter for their mission.He just realized how little he knew about the world, or rather how sheltered his own world was.Or had been before Sierra walked into his exam room.Even before when serial killers threatened and nearly killed him twice, it hadn’t hit him this hard.
Because they weren’t normal.I could convince myself I was just unlucky and things weren’t usually like that.
“Heads up,” Jayce said.“We’ve got company.”
David’s heart dropped to his feet.He swung the binoculars wildly, looking for the approaching enemy.Jayce grabbed his wrist and gently pushed the binoculars to the right until David saw a convoy of trucks approaching from a service road to the east.He reddened slightly.“Oh.You mean people are approaching the base.”
“Yes.Not us.And the guards are all coming to the front to see what’s going on.Which suggests poor training which suggests these are garden variety CIA toughs, not Marines and definitely not SOG.That isverygood news.”
“What’s SOG?”David asked.
“CIA special forces.Verydangerous.They recruit from the Green Berets, Delta Force, and SEAL Team Six.Think of the most dangerous person you’ve ever met.Those guys are more dangerous.”
David thought of Franklin West, the first of the two serial killers he’d encountered.West wasn’t much to look at: slim, on the shorter side, thinning hair already in his thirties.He’d nearly beaten David to death, though, and grinned through the whole process.
He had no frame of reference for people who were dangerous in the military sense.Once more, it struck him how utterly in over his head he was.
“Oh shit,” Jayce said.“Okay, don’t freak out.”
David frowned.“Why?What’s…”
His voice trailed off when he saw what was leaving the trucks, or rather who.Dozens of dogs were led from the vehicles.They moved calmly but in stilted fashion, as if they were marionettes of dogs rather than actual animals.Handlers stood nearby, watching them intently as they walked into the building.David looked closely for Colonel Chastain, the head of the 93rdTesting Brigade, and Staff Sergeant Miranda Whitaker, the handler of Asset Sierra-9, the dog whose behavior and scars had first tipped David off to the terrifying “work” being done by the brigade.
He didn’t see them, and the dogs were too far away for him to identify Sierra clearly.He counted fifteen German Shepherds out of almost fifty dogs, and any one of them could have been her.
Fifty dogs.Nearly four times the number he’d known about before.
“I told you,” Jayce said, once more seeming to read David’s mind.“They’re expanding.”
