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Chapter Text

Victoria Randall scrambled desperately through a clump of thick underbrush, lost her balance and fell into water just deep enough to cover her. It strangled her cry of shock, and when she managed to find her footing on the treacherous muck of the Everglades, she did not repeat it. The sound of her ragged breathing was as loud in her ears as the imagined footsteps she knew were right behind her, right behind her, right behind her. She struggled on through the murky water, praying for the mercy of an alligator, a panther, a snake.

Instead she found gravel and sand under her fingers, a slope, the spiny branches of the roadside brush nipping angrily at her bloodied fingers. She sobbed against the incline, quietly, terrified, her breath visible in the night air.

A gunshot echoed over the ‘Glades, somewhere far from her, and she squealed as if she’d been on the receiving end, scrambling forward and up, above the embankment, onto the road. She wend down on hands and knees, running her palms over the gravel, weeping in relief as she recognized the unlit road for what it was: a Park access road, open only to Park personnel.

She stood up, then, a short, slender girl, covered in mud and scratches, clad in a flimsy nightie, barefoot and panic-choked. Her feet could feel the indentation left in the unpaved road by the coming and going of passing vehicles, and aligning herself to it, she began to walk, then to jog, and finally broke into a stumbling run.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The Hummer came to a stop between a muddied Jeep with the sigil of Park services on the flanks, and one of an easy dozen police cruisers, There were flashing lights along a good stretch of road on both directions, but the Hummer’s driver fixed his attention immediately on the ambulance surrounded by a whirlpool of uniforms like precious cargo amidst a pack of watchdogs.

Horatio Caine stepped down from the Hummer, eyes taking the measure of his surroundings by the yardstick of the ambulance even as he moved towards it. He saw a familiar figure coming to meet him halfway. “Frank”, he greeted Detective Tripp. “So is this good news or bad news?”

“I’m not sure myself.” Frank’s voice had roughened after trying to maintain some semblance of organization and priorities amidst the many different parties milling about. “Remember the Jane Doe we found a month ago couple of miles down from here, MGW?”

Horatio’s expression hardened minutely before falling back into his usual calm, inexpressive lines. He didn’t like Jane Does – he didn’t like the whole Doe family, particularly when he was the one who had to add to it. Unfortunately, in the case the detective had just brought to mind, there had not been enough for them to go on: it had been a slim season for the natives of the Everglades, and all the MDCSI had been able to determine was that several high-powered bullets, not the ‘gators, had killed the girl. “I never forget a case, Frank. Does least of all.”

“Well, I’m thinking you can take that case out of the freezer. Park patrol found the girl running along an access road a little over twenty minutes ago. She said she got kidnapped from her bedroom on Saturday, and whoever took her released her a while ago somewhere in the ‘Glades with two other girls. They were told to “run and be hunted”, or be shot where they stood.”

Horatio stopped, and slowly turned to face him. “Are you telling me someone was hunting this girl like game?”

“That’s why I thought of the Jane Doe”, Frank nodded. “High-speed, hunting ammunition.”

Horatio started moving towards the ambulance again, his pace more urgent. “Are the S&R units out yet?”

“All over the place. Chopper’s on his way, too.”

Horatio felt more than saw the detective fall a couple of steps behind him, allowing him to face the girl alone and positioning his fairly solid frame so as to grant them some measure of separation from the three-ring circus all around them. He took a slow breath, and as the air moved in and out of him he let the sight of the girl do the same, filtering in and out of his mind, leaving burning paths of knowledge and information etched within it.

She was still muddied under the emergency blanket someone had wrapped about her, although there was a damp, dirty towel next to her as she huddled on the back step of the ambulance. Her hair had become plastered to her head under a fine layer of silt and vegetation, and there was not an inch of her that was not covered in scratches and welts, each one a testament to every misstep she’d taken in her desperate flight. She’d identified herself as Victoria Randall, and she was twenty-six years old.

Her nails were broken, he noted, caked with dirt. She’d been doing some digging.

Then he frowned, because she had not turned to face him for all that he was less than three steps away; she simply stood hunched inside her blanket, shivering in either cold or shock. He rather thought the latter. As he moved closer, he saw that her eyes, sunken in red and black pools of exhaustion, were a muddy green, and the pupils were near-invisible pinpricks, useless to her in the moonless night. “Victoria?”, he called softly, watched her jump and turn to face in his direction, reacting as only someone for whom sightlessness is not a fact of life can. “Victoria, I’m Horatio Caine. I’m with the Miami Crime Lab –”

“C-can you fix my eyes?” Her voice had a soft burr Horatio couldn’t immediately place but the stark terror in it was unmistakable. “They won’t tell me - you’re with a lab, right? Am I – am I gonna be blind?”

He made his voice as calm and soothing as he could. “Victoria, you’re going to be fine.”

“B-but my eyes…”, she stammered.

“Your eyes, yes, can I have a look?” Slowly, he reached out to cup her chin, felt her start under his touch and made a mental note to himself, wondering how long it’d been since someone other than whoever had found her, and perhaps the EMTs, had touched her. He shone his flashlight into the muddy green of her gaze and saw her pupil stubbornly refuse to react. “Did the people who did this to you inject you with anything, Victoria?”

“No.” She was docile under his hands. “I think it was some kind of powder, someone blew something on my face before… It was just, it was really dark where I was, and it felt like someone blew on my face before it started to burn. It burns a little still.”

Horatio sighed quietly. He was pretty sure he was looking at the effects of an opiate, but if it had been applied as a powder any trace of it would be long gone after the girl’s trek through the ‘Glades. “Well, Victoria, I’m sure your eyes are going to be fine, but until we know what it was they used on you, it’s safer if we don’t do anything that might hurt them, Ok?

She nodded, unhappy but resilient.

“Can you tell me anything th-“

The gunshot, for all that it came to them like a distant, distorted echo over the water and sawgrass, still cut through voices, sirens and night sounds alike. The girl shrieked and flailed blindly, panic-stricken, and in a moment Horatio had her in his arms.

“It’s Ok. It’s alright. It’s Ok, Victoria, you’re safe. You’re safe.” Even as he held her, trying to comfort that trembling heart and the shuddering sobs, part of him noted that even tears were not clearing her eyes. “Frank?”

“On it.” The detective, like most everyone around, was either running for the nearest all-terrain vehicle or jogging towards a readily available means of communications.

The EMTs closed in on Horatio; apparently, crime scene or not, they were ready to take their charge somewhere less bullet-prone. But when he tried to let go of Victoria, she clung to him with a panicked, disjointed plea. He took her flailing hands in his. “Victoria. Victoria, listen to me. Listen to my voice, alright? Are you listening?” He focused on the sense she was most heavily relying on at the moment, and waited until she nodded. “We’ve got to get you out of here. You’re going to the hospital, and I’ll come see you there, after they’ve cleared your eyes. You’re going to be alright now, you just need to go with the ambulance, Ok?”

“Ok.” Her voice was a ragged, tiny whisper. As the EMTs secured her into the ambulance, she fixed her sightless eyes on him. “Please help them.”

“I will.” He stared at the doors as they closed, at the empty space where Victoria’s plea hung in the air after the ambulance had gone, louder than the gunshot. “I will.”

Chapter Text

“Looks like your girl got all the luck”, was Alexx’s greeting to Horatio when he finally made it to what had been pinpointed as the site of the gunshot by the evidence before the Park personnel’s eyes. False dawn was quickly giving way to the real thing, and under the gold-and-silver light the CME saw Horatio’s face tighten perceptibly as he caught sight of the body.

Whoever she’d once been, the girl had ceased to be, likely under the command of that single, ringing shot. The body had been found by a Park swamp boat, facedown in the still waters, surrounded by the dark red of her blood, her skin very pale in the dawn light under a baby blue tee and a pair of cutoff denim shorts. She had one sandal still on, the other one gone who knew where, and like Victoria Randall she was covered in scratches and welts.

Her head and both her hands were missing.

The patrol who’d found her had pulled her onboard and done their best to preserve her condition for Alexx by wrapping her in a tarp and, as Horatio came onboard, did their best to stay as far away from the grisly discovery as they could.

“Horatio”, Alexx said softly as he crouched next to her. “Tell me you’re going to catch the animals who did this to her.”

“Yes, Alexx, yes I am.” His voice was quiet. “What can you tell me about her?”

She shook her head, hands running lightly over the girl’s body. “She was a fighter – her bruises can tell that much. Except for these.” She lifted a slender arm, showed him under a flashlight the terrible void there. "These are postmortem, and whoever did it used something sharp, and heavy. Not the same tool as for the head, that's ragged, though that's postmortem too."

“CoD?”

“These.” She turned the body on its side and pointed at two unmistakable holes on the girl’s back and shoulder, where the fabric of her shirt was deeply stained. “I’ll only be sure after post, but I’m thinking the first shot was this one, shoulder-high. Then the second, right through her heart.” She looked at the wound. “It came from so close the bullet just… slid right through her. High-speed ammunition. Through-and-through.”

Horatio looked around, briefly considered the task of finding one bullet in the immensity of the ‘Glades, and stopped that line of thought before it overwhelmed him. “Where's the first one?”

“I don’t know.” Alexx frowned, then smiled at him. “Wouldn’t it be something if she’d managed to hold onto it for us.”

Horatio smiled grimly back. With the Jane Doe from the previous month in both their minds, with a girl claiming she’d been used as a shooting target in some sickening hunting exercise, and with the proof of high-powered weapons and high-speed hunting ammunition in front of their eyes, they both knew it was unlikely they’d find any such lucky evidence in the girl’s body.

“Horatio!”

Horatio looked up to see a flashlight bobbing at him from about thirty yards away, and thought he couldn’t see him he knew that tone in Eric Delko’s voice usually meant good news.

“She came this way”, Eric told his CO as soon as Horatio had made landfall onto the springy island of reeds. He shone his flashlight on the spot for Horatio’s benefit. There was a small oval of trampled vegetation, and blurs in the muddy compost of the ground that only people who knew what to look for would have known as the places where a body had lain, curled up and on its side, and where someone had crawled forward on hands and knees. They could both see in those faint traces, clear as if under broad daylight, as the dead girl, at that time still alive and very much terrified, had moved through the reeds. “She knew she was being stalked… she was bleeding.” Eric shone the light on the telltale stains against the vegetation; the damp soil had soaked up any other traces of blood. As he crouched down to swab the stains, he sighed. “She stopped here for a while… why’d she move again? She was invisible here, she could’ve waited them out.”

“She was waiting for her eyes to clear up.” Horatio turned slowly, taking in the sight around him, seeing it as the dead girl couldn’t have seen it, wondering what parts of it her other senses had revealed to her. “And she got up because she realized they weren’t going to… and she was bleeding too badly.”

“She got scared, she ran… right into them. They stalked her, H.”

“I know.”

They were both silent for a moment, angry at the casual, cruel brutality that would end a human life for the mere thrill of it.

“That much blood in the water,” Eric said at last. “we’re lucky we got to her before something else did.”

“Luck is a fickle thing, Eric.” The sun peeked at last over the horizon, almost painfully bright, and Horatio paused to put on his sunglasses, wondering if Victoria could see the sunrise as he did, if she ever would. “Let’s make sure we can fill in the gaps when it quits on us.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Despite Horatio’s lack of faith in Entropy, Calleigh found herself summoned to the examination rooms. “Hey, Alexx – you rang?”

“Yes.” They crossed a smiled. “You’re not going to believe this.” Alexx offered here a small metal container. “I got a bullet.”

“You’re joking! Not a rifle?” She peered at the container. “No, that would definitely be hunting ammunition. Where did you get it from?”

Alexx gestured to the body before her. “The bullet entered at a slightly lower angle, under her shoulder blade and arcing upwards; it hit her collarbone and broke it. And that”, she shook her head, “is where it goes into strange territory. Instead of shearing through the bone or breaking apart, the bullet bounced off her collarbone against her shoulder blade, broke that, bounced again and got caught in the silicone embrace of a modern girl’s mighty weapon of choice.”

“Implants?” Calleigh was bagging the bullet, and when Alexx nodded she added thoughtfully, “We can use the serial number on those for an ID. That is… one seriously strange act of pinball Providence.”

Alexx nodded again. “With so much bouncing around, hunting ammunition or not, the bullet lost enough momentum that she managed to hang onto it and bring it to us.” She laid a gentle hand on the dead girl’s shoulder.

“Now we can use that and get that much closer to whoever did this to her”, Calleigh finished in a hushed tone for both of them.

Chapter Text

Horatio knocked softly on the door, as if the police officer standing by its side to keep an eye on the room’s current occupant were not as important as whatever welcome Victoria Randall chose to give him. As he slipped into the room and she turned to look at him he smiled, glad that this time she could see him do so.

“Victoria. I’m Horatio Caine, with the Miami Crime Lab. We’ve met before.”

“Oh, yes.” She managed a smile in a lovely face made grim by barely controlled fear. “I remember your voice.”

Horatio sat next to the bed, his eyes kind. “How are you doing? How are your eyes?”

“My eyes, they flushed them with something, they’re fine. I’m –” She paused and pressed a hand to her mouth as tears spilled from her eyes, unnoticed. With a shuddering sigh she abandoned the platitude she’d been about to say. “I’m not fine. I’m not. I’m, I’m terrified still. They’re saying, the police, they say I’m a witness, that whoever did this might come back because…” Her voice failed her, her hands wound into tight knots. “I didn’t see anything, I don’t know how I can help you.”

She was, Horatio knew, an aspiring model, covering a day job as a secretary and a weekend job as a waitress. She lived alone, and was putting herself through night school. She came from Oregon, and when she’d been processed for evidence earlier that morning she’d had nothing to offer but mud.

She was a fighter. So had been the dead girl.

“Victoria, it’s Ok. It’s alright.” He caught her eyes and held them. “It’s alright to be scared, but don’t you think, don’t you believe for one moment that you can’t help, because you can. I want you to believe that you can, Ok?”

She nodded at last, wiping away her tears as if just then noticing them.

“Are you sure there were two other girls with you?” At her nod, he went on. “How do you know?”

“Um.” Her effort to focus was visible. “I heard them. It’s – you know how they say your senses sharpen when they have to compensate?” She waited for his nod as reassurance. “Well, they do – they did, I mean.”

She’d been kidnapped Saturday morning, after her waitressing shift, directly from her bedroom. Her day job had begun looking into her absence on Monday evening, and she’d been found in the early hours of Tuesday.

“When they brought us out… they threw me on the ground, and then the other girl… I heard it when she fell, and then when the last girl fell on her. I was in this little… cage, room, something, so tiny, with no light –”

“Underground?”

I don’t know. I couldn’t even sit up, it was that small, and the sides, the top, everything but the floor was concrete. The floor was dirt, so I tried to dig –“

She had not been the only one.

“- but there was wire under the dirt.”

Wire? He let that loose bit of information blaze its own little pinprick of information in the pathways of his mind. “Was there a door?”

“I know there had to be one, but I couldn’t find it.” She shuddered. “Someone would come with a hose whenever I tried to sleep… They didn’t give me food, or anything… nothing else.”

Horatio could tell she was about to collapse again. “What about that night?”

She flinched, struggled, got herself under control again, but only just. “Um… I was sleeping, I think, until someone breathed, blew something on my face.”

That would have been the drug used on her eyes.

“Then someone, or several people, I’m not sure… I got picked up, carried outside, that’s when I could smell the ‘Glades, you get to know that smell with your eyes closed, you know? There were a lot of men’s voices, but I couldn’t catch what they were saying. Then they brought the other girls out… I think one of them hit one of the guys… Or someone hit one of the other girls, I’m not sure. I was afraid, I didn’t want… I didn’t make a sound, I didn’t – ”, she began to sob.

“That’s alright, Victoria. That’s Ok.” Horatio gave her a few moments. “What happened then?”

“Then the men came over, they were quiet this time. A-a-and…”

Then the rifles being cocked. The swamp boats revving. And those terrible words.

“He sounded so c-cold”, she whimpered. “Like he didn’t care either way.”

Run and be hunted, or be shot where you stand.

As far as she could tell, all three of the girls had done exactly that. There would have been strength in numbers but, blind and terrified, they had not been able to keep track of one another. Horatio comforted her quietly, and left her leaning back as a nurse administered a mild sedative; it would take stronger medicine, he knew, to heal the real damage, the fact that her world had crumbled to shambles around her to reveal a place where people would hunt her down for entertainment.

He stepped out of the hospital and looked up, sifting through the vastness of information she’d given him. Sight is only one of five senses.

This, he knew now, was much larger than a simple snatch-and-shoot. But the Everglades could hold so many bodies, so many secrets – God knew how many girls. The thought made him grind his teeth.

These people had shot and killed a girl with a host of law enforcement personnel not two miles from them; they had paused long enough to sever her head and hands with a blade for which they had no match in the database. They thought themselves inviolate, untouchable, apex predators. That thought brought a tight smile to his face, predatory and humorless, a death’s head grin behind which his mind raced towards his choice of prey. He was not a half-bad predator himself.

There were priorities, though; and foremost in his mind was that third girl, still out there, runnin- no, fighting. Fighting for her life.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“Mister Wolfe.”

Ryan looked up at the sound of his CO’s voice. Horatio looked tired, but he also had that unmistakable air about him of a hungry carnivore on a promising scent. “I’ve got the tox report from Victoria Randall’s blood, confirmed by her doctors.” He handed Horatio a fresh printout.

“Thebaine?”, Horatio’s eyes flew over this new bit of knowledge.

Ryan nodded. “It’s an opiate, one of the rarer ones, usually gets thrown out along with the chaff because it’s a stimulant, not a narcotic. Vic claims someone blew on her face, which makes me think they used it in powder form, but as with most opiates, it’s got a pretty good absorption rate – fine enough powder exposed to the optical membranes, enough will be absorbed to cause the typical pupil contraction effect. I looked at the Jane Doe from last month, and she was found two days after the new moon, which got me thinking – under the influence of any opiate, pupils closed so very little light goes into the retina, moonless night…”

“Their prey is effectively blind.”, Horatio followed Ryan’s train of thought easily.

“And under the effects of a mild adrenaline jolt from the stimulant effect of the thebaine.”

“Well, what would be the point of prey that doesn’t fight back”, Horatio said, his voice deceptively soft.

“I compared it with the tox report from the body we found that night. Also positive for thebaine. It’d’ve been hard to find considering blood loss and… other issues,” he stumbled momentarily over the words. “but her attackers had to use a much higher dosage on her.”

Horatio’s eyes flew over the second tox report. Why the higher dosage -?

Because the girl had been used to opiates.

How long? How long had they kept her, how long from the moment she’d been snatched away until she’d been found dead? If the tox report had found traces of her heroine habit still in her system, not very long. Not very long at all.

“Very good work, Mister Wolfe. Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to look at any Missing Persons reports that have come in within the last forty-eight hours, and any that happen to come in within the next forty-eight, matching her body type, that originate in the Miami Dade area – she’s local, she was dressed to mingle, not to stand out, and her tan’s honest.”

“Yes, sir.”

It vaguely amused Horatio that, after being worked to the bone and beyond as a CSI under his command, Ryan still replied to his assignments as if they were orders and he a patrolman. Old habits die hard, older habits even harder. He stepped out onto the hallway and headed for Ballistics, and Calleigh all but ran into him as she came out. “I was going to come find you. I’ve identified the gun.”

“What did you find?”

“I have interesting news,” she handed him a slim folder “and more interesting news. The bullet was fired from a Benelli R1 semi-automatic hunting rifle, very accurate, top of its line, relatively new.”

“New means rare.”

“In this case, it also means expensive. The barrel of this type of rifle is treated cryogenically, subjected to such a cold temperature that the metal is altered at the molecular level, which gives the bullet a clearly recognizable striation, as well as most of the qualities hunters want in their guns. It’s a bit light on penetration, but since they’re shooting people instead of things like elk and bear, it doesn’t make much of a difference. It still wouldn’t be the kind of thing you’d find ‘gator poachers carrying, though.”

Both their pagers went off in tandem.

“And the other interesting news?”

“Well, a rifle’s not a concealed weapon, but Benelli does register any sale of its guns. There’s no R1s in Florida; the nearest registration is for South Carolina, made to Dream Hunt Fishing and Hunting tours. Neat little company hiring out to rich people wanting to shoot something pretty for their walls – you pay enough, they get you the license, transportation, the gun, I imagine they might even shoot the game for you.”

“Charming.”

“To top it off, Dream Hunt’s been trying to get a permit to expand its offices into Florida, and has been rejected seven times already.”

“Seven times, they’ve made enemies. Why are they being refused?”

“I thought I’d ask them.” Calleigh smiled at him. “Turns out one of their VPs is in town, presumably to plead their case again although the company lists him as away on vacation. His name’s Gary Blox, which means he’s a relation of the company’s CEO.”

He smiled at her, reminded once again of how similar the tracks of their minds were.

Then they stepped into the examination room, and felt the discordant twang of Alexx’s anger like a slap.

“Alexx”, Horatio greeted her cautiously. He’d rarely if ever seen his CME in a temper, but she was a force to be reckoned with when it did surface.

She’d turned to face them, the elegant lines of her face set taut. “The through-and-through on the dead girl from the Everglades? It’s not back-to-front, it’s front-to-back”, she said, snappish in her anger. “Those bastards ran her down like a deer –”

“- and looked her in the eyes when they shot her.” Horatio finished for her, his expression unreadable, his eyes as cold as Alexx’s were blazing.

In Horatio’s mind, Eric and him were walking on that tiny island, surrounded by water. Here, she’d stopped to rest, to wait for her eyes to clear, her shoulder in shambles, her body in shock, but perhaps not in pain – too much opiate in her system, extra-strong dose. Then crawling forward, to the edge of the water. The island rose over the waterline, though not by much.

Victoria, her hands bunched up in her bedsheets, a frightened child clinging to her safety blanket.

How does a child slip into the water?

Horatio speed-dialed Eric, who was currently taking a shift with the S & R teams. “Eric, she was shot while on the island, getting into the water – she sat on the edge and slipped in, which means the bullet’s somewhere on the edge, in the ground. That bullet is directionality.”

“I’m on it.” Eric turned the Hummer on the narrow access road he’d been patrolling and headed back to the ranger station to get a swamp boat.

Horatio considered. So much information. No way to measure chaff from gold.

He looked at Calleigh. “Let’s go see what Mister Blox has to say.”

Chapter Text

Daylight made the girl’s struggle that much more obvious to Eric’s eyes. The torn reeds where she’d scrambled out of the water, blind; the hollow where she’d laid down; her path to the water, again, keeping to a straight line somehow, clever girl. He crouched down, looking for the bullet. How close had they been when they’d shot her? Close enough to see her face?

His own boat passed slowly by, the rangers in it keeping a close eye on any predator that might get too close to the lone human on foot, and Eric shook his head. It was nothing short of a miracle that the ‘gators had not flocked to her body. He walked up to the edge. Here: blind, wounded, frightened, she’d felt the water, realized she was on an island; she’d sat down and slipped into the water feet first, trying not to stir it, not to reveal herself, to keep her shoulder and the telltale blood from betraying her to any of the predators around her.

The bullet had dug a neat little crater around the dirt, a few inches over the waterline, directly in line with her footsteps. Eric crouched down and stared at it for a long moment before fishing it out, bagging it and standing up. One quick look around found the rangers. “Hey!”

The swamp boat edged closer to him. The Everglades rangers did not like hunters, and they liked even less to be thought of as managers of an easy-access body dump. They’d been happy to cooperate with the Crime Lab, who did not treat them anywhere near as impolitely as MDPD sometimes had. “Something wrong?”, one of them asked.

Eric stuck one of his targeting rods into the hole, made sure it was braced in the soft turf, then turned back to them. “Stand up, would you?”

The ranger straightened up, looking puzzled. The thin red beam, however, sailed over his shoulder. Eric frowned. Certainly the shooter had not been in the water with the girl, the angle was too steep. He stared at the boat, and saw it. “Ok, can you climb up on the chairs?”

The rangers understood at that, and one of them obliged. The crimson pinpoint was still low, but one of the rangers maneuvered the boat abruptly so that it started veering sideways towards the island, and Eric had his match.

The shooter had been standing on the chair, towering over his victim like a triumphant conqueror, less than ten feet from her. He nodded to himself as he gathered the rod and hopped on the boat, thanking the rangers. The swamp boat turned to head back to the ranger station, and Eric, sitting by the prow, felt more than saw one of the men approach him.

“Hey.” The man was at least twice his age, and Eric doubted any rightful hierarchy in the world would faze him. “Listen… The… Well, with the body… in the shape it was and all… Is this a crazy person? I mean… he took her head.”

There were words and thoughts people much preferred never to contemplate, let alone speak out loud. For all that Eric had dealt with serials before, he didn’t blame the ranger for his unease. And her hands, he added mentally before sighing and facing the man. “They took the head as a trophy. They were hunting these girls, like game.”

The rangers all crossed serious looks. “That’s just sick.”, the older one said stoutly.

“Yeah.” Eric rubbed at his face, feeling tired. “But it also means they’re more likely to have solid evidence on them, once we catch ‘em.”

“You Crime Lab guys have to see a good side to all this craziness, I guess.”, the ranger said thoughtfully. “Where to now?”

“Well, it’s open water, but let’s try to see if she hit any more solid ground before she got here.” He pointed the way the girl had come. “That way.”

In his mind the question turned and turned like a lure in water. Why had they taken her hands?

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Gary Blox was in his early thirties, fit and tanned under his business suit, with ash blond hair casually swept away from clear eyes and a narrow, well-defined face. He wore his passion for fishing in the weather lines over his features and the calluses in his hands. He was the nephew of Dream Hunt’s CEO, Alexander Blox.

DH was a typical pampering hunting tour company; they even offered taxidermy and shipping services. Catering to the rich, however, is never easy: money tends to lend its owner a certain false sense of security, the certainty that all problems can be made to disappear for a price. Dream Hunt paid a small fortune every year in legal fees, fines and settlements, because their customers where not in the habit of holding their shots just because their target happened to be on this side of the end of the species line.

Horatio watched the man as he and Calleigh stepped into the interrogation room; he did not measure them, as a hunter might, but neither did he flinch from them, and he frowned mentally: here, then, was a fisherman, with the breed’s infinite patience. Their link to Dream Hunt was desperately slender. On instinct he stepped off to Calleigh’s side and, out of long practice between the two of them, she stepped forward, suddenly on the lead, without Blox any the wiser.

“Hello, Mister Blox, I’m Calleigh Duquesne. How are you liking Miami?”

The man responded to Calleigh’s friendly tone and bright smile almost immediately, instinctively: his posture eased, he smiled back, and while still guarded, he seemed willing to believe everything was alright with his world. “I’m liking it just fine. I try to come to Miami at least once a year, the deep-sea fishing here’s one of the best.”

“So this is a pleasure trip?”, she asked mildly.

His smile turned slightly bland, decidedly professional. “Little business, little pleasure. I’ve some meetings to attend to for the company, but…” He spread his hands. “It’s hard to keep a fisherman off of good waters, you know?”

“All these meetings, would they be about trying to get a permit for Dream Hunt to expand into Florida?”

“That’s right.”

“I understand you’ve been turned down several times already.” Blox’s expression faltered, but not by much – the attack had been sudden, but he was businessman as much as fisherman. “Why’s that?”

“That’s not information I feel comfortable disclosing –”

“You don’t have to.” Horatio had been looking out of the window, listening more to Gary Blox’s tone than to his words, though he’d also filed those away for later examination, but he turned around to see the man’s expression as Calleigh offered him a file where, in carefully recorded detail, each and every one of Dream Hunt’s requests and their corresponding rejections were documented.

“Reasons cited are almost as varied as the loopholes you’ve used to try to get your request through,” Calleigh’s smile had faded “but they all boil down to the fact that you want to bring a company whose customers have a bad habit of shooting endangered species, and whose guides don’t seem interested in stopping them, into a state with no less than twenty endangered and fifty protected species.”

Blox had expected friendliness from Calleigh. The sudden shift in gears was what Horatio had wanted to see, and he saw the man wince visible. “Dream Hunt has cleared each and every complaint with all legal and economic measures –”

“And settled out of court and out of sight whenever they could. How many Benelli R1 rifles does Dream Hunt own, Gary?”, Horatio’s voice was a quiet, low storm.

“I – I don’t know, that’s not – I’m not into the hunting side of the company, I’m a fisherman.”

“You”, Horatio stared at the man through his sunglasses. “are the Vice President of Public Relations for your company, and you don’t know what kind of weapons you’ve been handing out to your costumers? Now, why, Gary, do I find that hard to believe?”

“Rick’s the one that deals with that!” Blox suddenly pressed his lips together. He’d fallen, as so many fell, but there was the fisherman reasserting itself, and Horatio knew they’d get not much more out of him.

“That’d be Richard Gerler, your brother-in-law?”, Calleigh asked mildly.

A breath hissed between Blox’s teeth. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“Not yet.” Horatio cocked his head at the man.

“Are you accusing Dream Hunt of anything?”

“Nothing it hasn’t been accused of before.”

Blox’s hands tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Horatio noted the man’s reaction as he’d made a note of everything else. “It means, Gary, that someone’s made a choice, a very poor choice, to use my backyard to play a very dangerous hunting game, and when I get my hands on them, there won’t be enough money in the world for you to throw about and fix the problem.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“He got defensive in a hurry,” Calleigh said as she and Horatio left the interrogation room after Blox had stormed away.

“He’s got a lot to be defensive about”, Horatio said mildly. “But there was no reason for him to lie about the rifles.”

Ryan intercepted them. “Got an ID on the Everglades vic”, he said, handing Horatio a thin sheaf of papers. “From the implants’ serial numbers; it took a while to convince the clinic it wasn’t anything to do with them.”

Horatio read; the first paper was an ID profile, and he found himself looking at a lovely, round-faced girl with vivid blue eyes and short, curling strawberry hair. Her makeup was subtle and she was looking at the camera with sweet wisdom. Her name was Tabitha Flynn and she’d been one month shy of her twenty-fifth birthday.

“Missing Persons report was filed Saturday afternoon. And I also got a couple of hits from the database, for Possession.”

“So her vice was a thing of record.” Horatio stared at the grainy shot of the MPR, and the ID picture of the clinic. “Mister Wolfe, these look like professional shots, was she a model?”

“I left the computer looking into that”, Ryan admitted.

“Please do, our survivor is looking into a modeling career herself.”

“Lots of girls, all trying to look their best, leaving plenty of information behind – it’d be perfect for picking and choosing targets”, Calleigh noted.

“Hm.” Horatio frowned at the MPR. “How often would you say you’ve seen a MPR filed by someone other than a family member?”

“That’s rare.” Ryan ran mental odds on that.

“So it is. Calleigh, I’d like a word with Miss Natalie Ancherge, I’d like to find out why she thought it necessary to report Tabitha Flynn as missing.”

Chapter Text

Horatio watched Natalie Ancherge pace in the small interrogation room: she was a short, stocky brunette with strong features, dressed in elegant charcoal, fingers twitching for a cigarette she knew she was not allowed to have. She was twenty-eight years old, assistant manager for a real estate firm with countrywide offices. Under her sober makeup her eyes were tired, sleepless, and red.

He stepped into the room and she spun on him like a cat. “Oh, thank God. This is about Tabby, right?”

“Miss Ancherge –”

“Look.” Her voice was strong and sweet, like good black coffee, and her tone pleaded. “She promised, she swore to me if she got in trouble again, she’s gonna let me get her in one of those programs, get herself cleaned up –”

“Miss Ancherge.” It was his tone, not his volume, that stole her voice. “Natalie.” Horatio looked at her with immense kindness. “Please sit down.”

“Oh….” She half-slid into a chair, some part of her suddenly aware of the blackness in the horizon. Her voice faded. “Oh, no… She’s… she’s in bad trouble, isn’t she?”

Horatio watched her eyes fill, watched her bite her lip very hard to keep control of herself. A fighter, like Tabitha, like Victoria. “Natalie, I’m sorry.”

“No, wait, I’m sure we can fix this.” The words tumbled out as if she could drown him and the truth under them. “I m-mean, we can fix this, there’s got to be something, she just got this great job –”

“Natalie.”

She overran him, desperate to avoid hearing him. “She’s wanted to be a model pretty much forever, it’s just this, this –”

“Natalie.”

“This stupid thing!”

‘Thing’? Horatio couldn’t help but feel the young woman’s impotent grief that she’d so qualify a heroin habit as a ‘thing’. “Natalie, Tabitha –”

“NO!”, she shrieked at him suddenly. “Don’t you DARE!” Sobs burst from her as if she’d be torn apart by them. “D-don’t you t-tell me, don’t you s-say it -!”

“I’m very sorry, Natalie.” For a long time he simply sat by her as she wept, and only when he felt the first edge of grief slowly receding did he lean closer. “Natalie, were you two close?”

“We’re –” She caught herself with a wounded smile which was, Horatio knew sadly, the first of many. “We were sisters. Well, not really. I was a foster with her family.”

“You two grew up together.”

“Yeah.” She brushed the tears off her cheeks, apparently unaware she was still weeping. “She want… ed to be a model, so she moved to California, and Mom and- her family didn’t… Well, they had a falling out back then. But, you know, she’s my sister. When she came back… ” Natalie shrugged helplessly.

Horatio felt an old ache twist inside him, and nodded. “She had a heroin –”

“It’s just a thing she picked up in California.” She all but overran him in her haste, and Horatio had to wonder how often she’d made excuses for her foster sister. “I mean, God, we fight over it at least once a week when she comes by my place from wherever she’s staying.” She looked at the ceiling as if by turning her face up she could stop the tears from flowing. “Then Friday she calls me and tells me she’s got an offer, and I thought… I t-thought this would be the thing, you know, to get her to clean up…” What little self-control she’d mustered shattered, and she burst into tears again.

Horatio gave her time again. “Natalie… where was Tabitha going? Which studio?”

“Some place… she’s done stuff for them before, or for one of the people who work there, I’m not sure. I don’t… I can’t remember the place off the top of my head, I have a business card for them back home.”

“I need you to get that for me, alright?”

She nodded. “Can I -?”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea for you… to see her, Natalie.” Her held her eyes on his, and in the end she relented.

“Did they… the agency…?”

“I don’t know yet, Natalie, but I am going to find out, and I will let you know as soon as I can. I just need a little bit more information, a few more questions.” When she nodded, he went on. “When did you last see Tabitha?”

“Friday.” She suddenly bit her lip, her eyes wide as she realized what she’d just admitted to.

Horatio smiled. Technically, a MPR should not be filed until 72 hours had passed, but he got the feeling Natalie had known her sister well enough to know by Saturday that something was wrong. “How did you know that you should report her missing so quickly?”

She looked guiltily at her hands. “She always calls me when she gets good news, and this shoot thing, this is as good as it gets for her, a chance to finally become a model. I took her out to dinner Friday after she called me, I wanted to celebrate and to… you know… talk to her about cleaning up. But she never called me on Saturday. I knew something was wrong then. I didn’t… I mean, it’s not like it was a lie I told the police when I filed the report, I knew something was wrong –“

“Natalie, it’s alright.” He smiled reassuringly at her. “I…” He considered. “I am going to send you home with a patrol so you can give them the information of the studio.” And so they can make sure you don’t get snatched as well, he thought, but would not have said it out loud. He escorted her out of the interrogation room and the MDPD building, to her car, introduced her to her escorts, and waited until she was on her way, gone down the street, looking about himself and thinking.

He had so much information, but it refused to coalesce. Was there something he could discard? Not yet. Was there something he should add? Calleigh was following up on Dream Hunt and the rifles; Ryan was sifting through the victim files; Eric was on his way back with the last of the field data, and another bullet to work into the guilt of the killers when they were caught. They were inching closer, readying the final leap and sprint.

Faceless, the last girl haunted the corridors of his mind.

His phone rang, and he saw Eric’s name on the Caller ID. “Eric.”

Four words followed, and suddenly he was runaway lighting, sprinting for the second CSI Hummer. “I’m on my way!”

Chapter Text

Eric nearly ran the girl over.

His mind as he drove the Hummer out of the ‘Glades, on an access road made muddy by the S&R teams going back and forth, was on the bullet, the height, the proximity, the mind-set necessary to stand so close to a living human being and shoot them with no more concern than one would when shooting a deer. Part of him (a very small part), kept an eye on the road leading away from the ranger station, but without traffic he allowed himself to be distracted by his thoughts: the worst that could happen would be he’d hit a ‘gator, and that might actually be equally bad for the Hummer as it’d be for the reptile. No one-sided contest there –

In the dusty, mucky road, one more splash of mud would have never caught his attention. It was the stain of rich crimson edging the brown that triggered his instincts and snapped him to attention, stepping hard on the Hummer’s brakes and pulling at the wheel so that the vehicle fishtailed at his touch, and even so there were only a few inches to spare between the bumper and the fallen body when he finally wrestled the Hummer to a halt. He leapt out into the cloud of dust he’d raised, his gun in his hands, scanning the brush and woods around him. How far away had she left her would-be killers? How desperate, how close would they be, if anywhere near her at all? He radioed for support as he sidestepped up to her, using the Hummer as shield as best he could. “Miss? Miss! Can you answer me? Can you get up?” For a moment he feared their luck had at last run out, but a heartbeat later he heard her whimper quietly, a wounded animal too tired to run anymore. In two steps he was by her side, crouched down. “It’s ok, miss. Miami PD.” She was bleeding from somewhere under the shreds of a knit sleeveless top, covered in mud from crown to bare-feet toes, her fingers were bloodied and she had enough welts to claim she’d crossed the entire state on foot and make it stick. “Can you walk?” He saw her mouth move; her voice was hoarse and nearly non-existent, but the message was obvious: she was barely conscious, let alone in any shape to walk anywhere.

Briefly Eric considered the landscape, the girl, the Hummer, himself. He was about to compromise the scene, but life came before evidence. He picked her up lightly and brought her to the passenger’s side of the Hummer, tucking her against the seat and latching the seat belt around her battered frame. As he ran around to the driver’s side he grabbed his phone and speed-dialed. “H, I found her!”

He waited only for the curt acknowledgement before switching to the local lines, trying to find out where, if anywhere, a medical vehicle might be as he scrambled into the driver’s seat and leaned sideways to strap the girl in.

The bullet crashed through the rear window, leaving its fantastic galaxy effect on the windshield; the thunder of it was deafening, and Eric felt the passage of it brush the hair on the back of his neck. He didn’t even bother to look; he turned on the engine and, shielding the girl as best he could with one arm, stepped on the gas. The Hummer surged forward even as another bullet pinged against the back and wreaked havoc on the kit on the back seat. Something stopped it before it got to them – God knew what, because this time the shooter had aimed low, for their bodies, not a head shot. He let go of the girl and got hold of the phone again, hoping someone, anyone, would be close enough to reach them and step on the killers like the cockroaches they were.

Their luck, however, apparently didn’t stretch quite that far. The S&R chopper had been refueling, and barring Eric, the closest ones to the site had been the rangers at the station he’d left from. They were the first ones on the scene, but by then there was little they could do barring giving him a sense of safety in numbers.

The second Hummer arrived as the ambulance finally did, and Horatio leapt down, cutting through the growing flock of personnel like an arrow to get to Eric. “Eric, are you Ok?”

Eric had been examining the path of the second bullet, which had hit the back door and then his kit before bouncing off for parts unknown. He was calmly photographing the damage, but sparks were all but visibly flying off of him. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He looked at Horatio at that, shaking his head, gritting his teeth. “That’s twice, H. Twice!” He slammed the door shut as hard as he could.

“I know.” Horatio took heart from Eric’s anger – it takes some degree of health to get that righteously indignant, though these people and their smug disregard for who they shot at and where made it easy. After making sure Eric was well enough to finish documenting the scene, he moved around the Hummer to the passenger’s side, where the girl was being examined by an EMT whose job it was to decide whether she should be hurried off or not. “Miss, are you Ok?”

“No”, she croaked at him, her eyes on the EMT.

He paused, caught off-guard by that very plain and stark response, then leaned closer. “Can you see?”

“Some”, she replied. She was a miserable huddle under her emergency blanket, mud-covered and bloodied. Experience told Horatio her wounds were the result of an argument about dietary habits with a small alligator.

“We’ll take you away from here now, miss.” The EMT gestured to his partner.

“Wait…. wait” At that she turned to Horatio’s voice, who lifted a hand to stop the EMTs, though he knew in a moment they’d remember they had the right of way. Her eyes were bloodshot, her lashes covered with fine silt, the circles around them black as bruises, but as she fought to focus on him Horatio saw her pupils shift, if only minutely. In what was left of her voice, she gave him the words he’d been dreading to hear.

“They’ve got more girls.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Her name was Rowan Means Murphy, she was badly dehydrated, starved, had caught herself in something poisonous and spiny, and had had two words with a juvenile ‘gator which had left her with fractures on her right foot and a row of nasty gouges over her lower left ribs. Apparently she seemed to think this meant she had won the argument. She had also refused anything but a cast and stitches and asked specifically for homeopathic medication.

When Horatio and Eric were allowed in to see her for processing, she was lying back on the hospital bed with her eyes half closed, breathing slowly and deeply.

Meditative exercises against the pain, Horatio thought.

She was a short, round-faced creature with very pert features and potentially dark auburn hair under the mud. Not having allowed the hospital to rinse her eyes with anything but water, the CSIs had been warned that her vision was nowhere up to par, but she turned towards the sound of their footsteps, squinting fiercely.

“Miss Means, I’m Horatio Caine, this is Eric Delco, we’re with the Miami PD Crime Lab.”

She frowned. “You were there when I got picked up, right? I think I remember your voice, both of you.”

“That’s right.” Horatio and Eric smiled. “We would like to ask you a few questions if you feel up to it.”

“‘Feel up to it’?” She looked up at the ceiling again. “I feel chewed, is how I feel. But if it helps you catch these… people, better now than later, right? What do you want from me?”

Her eyes were mismatched, one blue, one a silvery gray. It was noticeable only because of the opiate contracting her pupils, but it caught Horatio’s attention for all that he couldn’t have said why. “Anything you can think of. You said they had more girls?”

She nodded. “I could hear them… inside wherever they were holding me.” He saw her fingers curl tightly over the edge of the sheets as Eric ran the trace comb over her muddied hair. “Did… Has anyone else…”

“Yes”, he replied, and saw her brighten up, subtly but unmistakably. “What can you tell me about the place where you were being held?”

She shrugged, then started when Eric took her hand and started on her fingernails – unused to touch as much as Victoria had been. “Dark, pitch black, I mean. I couldn’t see my own hand if I’d hit myself with it. It smelled damp, but not swampy –” She opened her mouth, closed it again.

“Miss Means –”

“Please don’t call me that”, she begged in an earnest tone that startled them both. “It sounds awful. Murphy’s fine. Or even Rowan.”

“Rowan, there’s no information you can give us that we can’t use.”

She rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. “I’m just guessing here, you understand, but I don’t think it was underground. There’s a smell that sinks into anything, even concrete, in an underground room. I think it was just a building, a big building. And the dirt on the floor… There was wire underneath it. It made me think of a litter box.” Color rose in her face. “You know, chips in a tray.”

“Alright.”

“When I was –” Her breath caught, and both men paused, waiting for her courage to rise up again. “I was in this little box, I couldn’t even sit up without banging my head on the top but… Have you noticed there’s always an echo in an empty room, no matter how small? There wasn’t one. I know it felt like all the walls were solid, but I don’t think they were. I think there was some sort of trapdoor that was just… the whole side. Or top. I’d bet on the top. It felt like concrete, but… slippery.”

“How did they pull you out, that night?”

Muscles on her throat and shoulders twitched at the memories. “I don’t know. I was trying to sleep, then suddenly someone’s blowing something on my face and all at once my heart’s pounding, my face burns, and my eyes feel like they’re about to pop out of my skull. Then someone, a lot of someones, started tossing me about… I lost track of most everything. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Horatio rather thought she’d been overwhelmed by tactile input on purpose… much as the killers seemed to wait until the sleep-deprived girls dozed off to snatch them off their cages. “Can you think of anything else?”

She nodded. “I’m not from here… I’ve only been twice before, and that was a long time ago, but… you know, even though we were somewhere in the Everglades, I smelled brine. Not just swamp.”

“Where are you from, Rowan?”

“New Mexico.”

Horatio straightened up in shock. Eric, swabbing clothes, looked up at him curiously before his mind caught up with what she’d just said.

“How long… how long would you say these people had been holding you, Rowan?”, Horatio asked, his tone unchanged.

Her expression fell into lines of exhaustion. “I don’t know. I think they meant for us to lose track of time. I was walking the beach on Wednesday afternoon, I always do before dinner, and someone jumped me, I never saw them.”

“Which Wednesday?”

Her head snapped around for all that his tone still had not faltered. “The 15th.” Eric drew in a surprised breath. “How long has it been?!”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“They snatched her nearly two weeks ago from across the country… this just went from bad to worse, didn’t it.” Eric and Horatio hurried down the hospital’s corridors.

“Very much so.” Horatio was already on the phone. They would have to widen the net, check missing persons reports from every state, try to find a profile, break the case, and the killers, before they were pulled from his hands. He had to widen his net, yes, but he felt fairly certain that he could start tightening the weave.

Brine, she’d said.

Once back at the lab, he found himself in the Layout Lab, staring at a map of the ‘Glades, staring at the four spots where the victims, living or dead, known or unidentified, had been found.

How fast can a frightened person run through a swamp?

Even providing for the possibility that all three girls had run directly away from one another, and given that there was no way to know where the fourth one had come from, the search area was limited. Horatio felt he could narrow it down even further.

Dirt over wire. Like a litter box.

He rather thought it was to absorb water whenever the tide rose too high.

Calleigh appeared at his door as if summoned by Providence. “Calleigh.”

“You were right, Dream Hunt already owns property in Florida; it’s been sitting there waiting for them to get their paperwork through.”

“Do they own anything in this particular area?” Horatio pointed at the wide oval he’d drawn on the computer’s screen.

She checked against her printouts. “Couple of boat shacks… it’s pretty far out in the middle of nowhere.” She frowned as she heard her own words.

“Yes, yes it is.” Horatio speed-dialed. “Frank? We need to make a house call.”

Chapter Text

Horatio and Calleigh were first at the gate leading to the first of two properties Dream Hunt owned straddling both sea and swamp. The gate and the fence were both overgrown, but one quick look showed them the weeds all had knotting tissue where they grew over the gate hinges. There was nothing overgrown or unused about the heavy padlock in place.

Frank Tripp’s car and a police cruise pulled up behind the Hummer. Seeing Horatio at the gate, the detective lifted a hand, showing him the warrant. A moment later Horatio had vaulted the low gate; when Calleigh and Frank followed him, they found him crouched over the mud-and-gravel access road. “Will you look at that.”

Frank looked in puzzlement, at a neat strip of gravel marred by muddy pools of muck. “At what?”

Calleigh smiled. “There’s no weeds. The fence’s all overgrown, but the road isn’t. Someone probably raked it to erase treads.” They turned to look at the building, a long, broad concrete rectangle where small boats could be stored and dry-docked for repairs. Between it and them the muddy puddles trembled in an occasional breeze.

“I wonder how thorough they were”, Horatio mused.

The big access door to the building was also padlocked, but the smaller service door on the side had had its lock broken. Inside, the building overlapped the water as most boat shacks do. A simple concrete pier split the water in half, and several wooden offshoots provided stalls for six swamp boats, sleeping under heavy tarps, their shape unmistakable. The concrete floor had white marks on it, which all three knew at once as water damage: someone had left water to dry upon it, leaving either limestone or salt to turn to powder once the liquid was gone. Calleigh bent down to swab one. “Limestone. It’s fresh too, no more than a day, I’d say, it hasn’t fully stained.”

“So they washed the floor and raked the road.” Horatio moved towards the boats, sliding his gloved hand under the edges of the tarps. “Neatness can be a virtue…” He paused when his fingertips found a very different feel under one of the tarps from the slick damp that brine evaporation leaves behind, and yanked it off to find water beading on the inner surface, with the slight rainbow shine that only soap can leave behind. “Or a vice.”

The boat shone in the sunlight coming in from the open side of the shack, black, elegant, impeccably maintained, the DH emblazoned on gold on its sides.

“Sure doesn’t look like it’s been left to rust while they get their permits, does it.” Frank was staring at the boat with a critical eye, not aware of soap or limestone residues but very much noting the clean, slick surfaces of the vast fan beneath its wire mesh cage.

“No, it does not.” Horatio slipped carefully on board, his eyes roaming.

“Deck’s been washed, engine’s been oiled.”

Horatio cocked his head, and crouched down by the low railing of the boat. “It’s just as well ‘neat’ doesn’t always mean ‘thorough’.”

Blood had seeped into the railing’s inner groove, escaping the cleaning process. Horatio swabbed the tiny crimson trail. As he put the swab away he caught sight of the drain of the boat, tucked behind the center seat. He unscrewed the stopper and leaned closer, examining the ground-in paste embedded in the treads – and smiled. “You can find treasures in the strangest places.”

Two more boats showed signs of recent maintenance. One for each girl, Horatio was thinking as he finished scraping the drain treads of the last one. He stood up, stepped back onto solid ground and came out of the building in time to watch as Calleigh finished draining the muddy water out of the last puddle, ever so carefully, then knelt next to it to take several photos. He walked up to her.

“I’ve got imprints.” She didn’t look at him, fully focused on the camera. “I don’t know how good they are, but at least they’re there.”

“That’s all we need, Calleigh”, he said quietly. “For the evidence to be there.”

Frank was walking back towards them after answering a hail from the cruiser outside. “Want to hit the other location? Seems our welcoming committee got confused and ended up over there instead.” All three of them crossed a smile; it wasn’t often they got to work so smoothly after serving warrants to a firm with a battery of lawyers three deep.

“Do we know them?”, Horatio stared about himself.

“Nobody local.” Frank shook his head. “Likely Dream Hunt brought them in special.”

“Excellent”, was all Horatio would say to that.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Eric was going through his new kit, trading in whatever had survived the merry visit from the killer’s bullet, when Ryan swung by his door.

“Hey… you Ok?”

“Yeah, I’m… Yeah.” Eric looked at one kit, then another, dropped his hands on the table and shook his head. “Just mad, you know? These guys didn’t care. They didn’t care there was every kind of cop in the area when they shot the second girl, they didn’t care they’d have to go through me to get the third one. They don’t think we can touch ‘em, and so far they’re right!” He slammed the kit’s lid closed hard enough to make everything on the table jump.

“Just means we’ve got to prove ‘em wrong.” Ryan’s tone was mild. “They’re getting smug, they’re getting careless, leaving plenty behind for us to use.”

“Yeah.” Eric blew the word out along with a long breath before turning to him. “How’re you doing with the modeling agency?”

Ryan shrugged, still seemingly casual…. then slouched against the doorway.

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing. The phone number Natalie Ancherge gave us belongs to Sight Seen, which does have Tabitha Flynn’s records on file, but didn’t have a shoot scheduled for the weekend. They released their records with a minimum of fuss – none of their photographers was doing any independent work either. And they’ve never even heard of Victoria Randall or Rowan Means. For that matter,” He stepped into the Trace Lab to give Eric a slim folder, “Means has never even been interested in a modeling career, she’s a, erm, different kind of career girl.”

Eric leafed through the folder and began smiling in spite of himself. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope.” Ryan shrugged. “She’s even registered with her local CoC, has a license to run a business as a “witchcraft practicioner”.”

“A license?”, Eric asked in amused disbelief. “A license for what, her broom?”

“I don’t write ‘em, I just print ‘em, read ‘em, and pass ‘em on,” Ryan said. “And it still doesn’t help me figure out the connection between all the girls.”

“Well, it’s there. Just gotta find it.”

“I know it.”

Both their pagers went off at the same time; one look told them all they needed to know. “H’s got something”, Eric said softly.

“At least someone’s still getting lucky” Ryan replied as they both headed to the Layout Lab. “I’m feeling all left out.”

“Yeah, well, speak for yourself.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

It fell to Ryan to analyze the blood sample Horatio had found, while Eric sifted through the debris collected from the boats’ drains. Calleigh had the tire treads to chase, and Horatio found himself for a moment with no sure path of information to chase. Before he could throw himself onto another scent, however, he got a call from the officers stationed at the Dade Memorial.

He found Victoria Randall as she stepped out and waved at a cab. “Victoria!”

She turned to look at him, eyes wide in her heart-shaped face, the welts fading to bruises. She’d tied her hair back with a blue scarf and was wearing dark pants, a white blouse, and sensible shoes.

“Victoria”, he said very quietly when he reached her side, the world in his tone, and her eyes skittered away from him. “The police escort assigned to you tells me you are leaving the state.”

“Look, you’ve found the other girls –”

“Who told you that?”

“- so you don’t really need me – ”

“Victoria, who told you about the other girls?” There was sudden, subtle steel in Horatio’s voice.

She lost what was left of her breath at it. “I… Just this woman… Nice dress. Some sort of lawyer.”

Only one source for interfering lawyers in the vicinity, and Horatio made a mental note. “Victoria, these people had no problem with shooting at one of my CSIs to get to a girl that got away from them, they had no problem killing a girl less than two miles from where we found you, we cannot protect you from them if you leave now.”

“But I didn’t see anything, I can’t help you, I told you that!”

“Victoria –”

“No!”, she burst out, shaking her head, tears spilling out. She finally met his eyes.

The fight had gone out of her, and Horatio knew he’d lost her no matter what he said or did. He was silent, wishing for that nicely dressed lawyer-woman so that he could shake her like a terrier shakes a rat.

“Look.” She wiped the tears away angrily. “I left my information, I’m not leaving forever, I just don’t want to be here right now. I’m going to my parent’s place in Oregon.” She tried to smile. “I’ll be safe there, I’ll be fine.”

They both knew she would not be fine for a very long time, but he allowed her the lie.

“I’m sorry”, she stammered at last and slipped into the cab.

He closed the door for her and tapped the roof of the cab out of sheer habit, and was left standing alone on the sidewalk, desperately trying to find a way to bring her back under the uncertain protection he could no longer give her.

Chapter Text

“You don’t look so good. Or else I’m still blind.”

Horatio paused at the door to Rowan Mean’s hospital room, somewhat taken aback to be so easily read, and smiled at her.

She cocked her head, closed one eye –the blue one, he noted, her right one- and stared at him. “And up goes the mask.”

Once again he paused, then looked down, shook his head and sat by her bedside, looking piercingly at her. “How are you doing?”

She leaned back and stared at him a moment longer, both eyes open, before shrugging. “Fine. Sore. Natural remedies just take longer but”, she waved a finger at him. “I don’t get any nasty side effects.”

He cocked a brow at her emphasis. “You, um, you have a license with the Nopal Creek CoC.”

Her eyelids fell to half-mast, and he grinned at that. “So fine.” She sighed in exasperation. “Go ahead, I’ve heard all the jokes. I wouldn’t have stayed in my line of business if I couldn’t put up with them.”

“I’m not exactly sure what to make of your business to begin with.”

She bristled. “You know, I don’t imagine I could walk into your office tomorrow, look at whatever machines or stuff it is you use to do whatever it is you do, and understand any of it, let alone work with it.”

There was a brief, sharp silence between them.

“I’m sorry, that was –”, he began.

“That was rude of me, I didn’t mean –”, she began almost simultaneously.

He smiled while she looked at her hands. “Rowan, what is it you do?”

She drew in a deep breath. “You know, I don’t rank much higher than a phone psychic in most people’s opinion”, she began quietly. “Nine out of ten calls I get are cranks asking if I’m for real. Half are just plain cranks. And nine out of the remaining ten are from some irate wife who wants a curse put on her cheating husband, or a husband who wants a love charm put on his cheating wife.” She half-glared at him, but there was a smile behind it. “Funny how it always, always splits right down the gender line.”

“I take it it doesn’t work that way.”

She leaned back. “No, it does not work that way, at all. I don’t make love potions, I don’t make good luck charms, I don’t put curses on people. Even if I could I wouldn’t do it for money, and if I could do it, don’t you think I’d have done it back there at… wherever? Whoever?”

“But you did do something?”

It was her turn to stare piercingly at him. “If I answer that question, are you going to believe the answer?”

Horatio ducked his head. Foremost in his mind was her credibility as a witness: he knew all too well that once they caught the killers and their lawyers got wind of her job description, they’d tear her to shreds before she ever got to testify.

“You know, you’re the first cop of any kind that’s actually given that answer some thought.”

He looked up at her then, to find her giving him that peculiar wink, blue eye closed. She blinked. “But you won’t. Of course you won’t, man o’ science that you are.”

“Why were you looking at me like that?”

“To see which way your mind was going to get made up.” As his brow furrowed, she gestured vaguely. “To see your odds.”

“My odds?”

“Yes, your odds. Why do you look like it’s so weird? Everything in life is odds, whether you get up when the alarm rings or hit the snooze button. Tea or coffee? Eggs or OJ? Maybe all of the above? Which way’s gonna be faster to get to your work? Where’s the traffic going to be at?”

She had Horatio’s attention, if only because he was a bit startled at the ring of truth in a field he had not considered. “And what do you do with those odds, Rowan?”

Once again she looked dubiously at him. “Hypothetically speaking, of course.” He spread his hands helplessly. “I look at them. It’s like staring at a spider web that’s always moving, with everything connected.”

“So you… look at odds, and see which way the dice will come up? You should’ve moved to Las Vegas.”

“I value my sanity as much as my insight.” Her voice chilled immediately. “I live out in the middle of nowhere because that way I don’t get swamped by everyone always trying to twist fate, cheat luck, squeeze a little bit more from here or there even if there’s no more luck to be had. There’s nothing but luck in Vegas – the closest I ever got was ten miles away and I’m lucky my brain didn’t explode, who knows what’d have happened to me if I tried touching it.”

“Touching it. So you do affect it.”

She pursed her lips. “When I can, yes. When there’s room, when there’s give on the web.” Her tone and her glare were a challenge. “If I can smooth out one place and move the odds to somewhere else, then I do, as best I can.”

“That’s… That’s an interesting way to put it.” He caught her mismatched gaze with the steel of his own. “If everything goes wrong, that’s just bad luck, but if anything goes right, you can take credit for it.”

She flinched not a whit from his challenge, but he saw her eyes go to ice and snow, felt the tentative friendliness between them vanish like sea spray. “Tell you what: I did what I could, back there in the ‘Glades. There were three of us and a lot more of them. I touched what I could, how I could. And when – not if!- when push comes to shove and you get that one-in-a-million shot, then you can come back and show me how solid the rock of your scientific disbelief still is, but until then, since I don’t see why you need a quack and a weirdo like me for anything else until you’ve got a trial or something, I’d appreciate it if you got busy somewhere else other than my room.” With that, she turned pointedly away, settling down in the hospital bed and giving every indication she expected to drop off to sleep and have him be gone like a bad dream any moment.

“Rowan.” He couldn’t let it end like that – he couldn’t let her slip away and into uncertainty like Victoria. “Rowan.”

“What?”, she asked tartly.

He was silent, at a loss for what to say that would not betray him and would not belittle her.

“You know….”, she said tiredly into the long silence. “Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There’s animals on this word with brains the size of our teeth who see into the light and radiation spectrum farther, more precisely, than we do, unless we use machines. Why is it so hard to believe that a human being can see something, just because you can’t?”

“I think that’s because”, he said slowly, “what you see is something that cannot be measured by any known machine, on any known spectrum.”

“What a weird thing for you, of all people, to say.”, she replied in the same tart tone. “On what machine do you measure the comfort you give the people you help when you put a criminal away?”

He looked sharply up, but she had not turned around.

“Why’d you come see me, anyways? No one’s said I can even leave.”

He sighed, back on solid ground. “Because Victoria Randall just checked herself out, and is planning to leave the state.”

“Ah.”

“I would like to ask, Rowan, what are your plans for the future?”

Her shoulders moved lightly. “I don’t know. I can’t stay long, Miami’s a very expensive city compared to Nopal Creek. I don’t know if I could start my business here, and even if I could, no one would take me seriously. And it’s too big a place anyways, too… complicated.”

“Rowan”, he said slowly, gently. “ I don’t think these people have given up. I don’t think they’re willing to give up. I would like you to stay here, where I can keep an eye on you, until we’ve caught them.”

“I’ve got nowhere I can stay.” She cocked her head to peer at him over one shoulder. “Unless you count the beach, and that’s illegal, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you worry about that, you let me worry about that, but I want to know… I want to know that you’ll let me watch over you until this is over with.”

She did turn at that, to stare at him with those mismatched eyes. There was deep exhaustion there – but also plenty of fight left. “You don’t take no for an answer very well, do you?”

“Not if I can help it, no.” He smiled again.

She buried her face in her pillow with an exasperated sigh. “Oh, fine. Can’t be worse than the time I ended up sharing a house with a Scientologist.”

She startled a chuckle out of him with that.

Chapter Text

Ryan swung into the Trace Lab to find Calleigh and Eric there. “Blood sample from the boat is a match to Tabitha Flynn.”

“That puts her in a Dream Hunt boat.” Calleigh turned to look at Eric.

“The material from the drains is fresh enough to put the boat on active duty within the ‘Glades.” He nodded at her.

“Well, that should be enough to get a warrant for the rest of the Dream Hunt properties.” She tapped her fingers thoughtfully on the table.

“Well, if you get it, you go ahead.” Eric turned back to his workstation. “I want to see if I can get anything else from the drains.”

Calleigh and Ryan left him before a vast spread of sample trays and vials, each one information waiting to be found.

Fibers, hairs, fluids would be best, but hardest to come by, he knew. The bigger stuff would have gotten the most attention from the cleaners, but anything else could be disputed as having filtered in from the ‘Glades, rather than out from the boat. Sizable material would have a harder time making its way up the wrong way in the drain treads. He started on the sample of the boat where Horatio had found Tabitha Flynn’s blood, separating the heavier inorganic material, then filtering out the grosser organic stuff as he put the heavies through a spectrum reading, just in case. As he pulled apart a tangle of half-composted grass roots, he found a thin hair tangled amidst them, and smiled.

Then he heard an unexpected chirp from the analysis unit and turned with the hair still in his tweezers. He cocked his head in puzzlement at the readout on the screen, then smiled crookedly.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“I thought we were checking out Dream Hunt properties in the city”, Ryan pointed out as Calleigh drove them and their escorting police cruiser into one of the sprawling suburban neighborhoods of Miami.

“We are.” She smiled brightly at him as they came to a stop before a gorgeously whitewashed, single-story house with dark wood paneling on the windows and an impeccably maintained lawn.

A young man answered the door and stared at them in puzzlement. “Can I help you?”

“Hi. I’m Calleigh Duquesne, this is Ryan Wolfe, from the Miami Crime Lab. You are?”

He blinked at them. “Um, Brad. Bradley Blox.”

Ryan blinked in surprise, but Calleigh seemed unfazed, and he began to get an inkling of why there were checking out a house rather than warehouses or office space. “Hi, Bradley, we –”

Gary Blox appeared behind what was obviously a younger version of himself. His expression went from curious to guarded in the blink of an eye. “Oh, it’s you people.”

“Mister Blox –”

“Look, I spoke with the Dream Hunt lawyers, and they’ve advised us not to speak with you guys without legal counsel present.”

“Well, I guess it’s just as well we’re not here to talk, then.” Calleigh’s smile, for all that it remained unfailingly cheerful, was full of ice. “Just to search the premises and collect a few DNA samples.”

“Wait, you can’t – You can’t just come in without a warrant or something!”, Gary protested.

“But we do have a warrant.” Calleigh produced it. “To search any Dream Hunt property within the state of Florida, and to collect DNA from any Dream Hunt employee present within the state at the time of the murder. And since the lease on this house lists Dream Hunt as the current beneficiary, that means we can come in. See, I think you did that so you’d be able to list the rent as a company expense, Mister Blox.” Her tone had dropped to that velvet soft quality Ryan knew meant she had found the bull’s eye and was merrily making her sure way towards it. “But the end result’s the same.”

Gary took the warrant with a scowl. “Brad, go call Angela, I want her here for this.”

“You can call anyone you want, but I’d be much obliged if you don’t go very far, Bradley. See, you both are also listed as Dream Hunt employees. If you’ll excuse us?” She moved smoothly past him into the house, Ryan right behind her.

Ryan had a moment’s thought as to how very much like following an avalanche it was to watch Cal in action – sometimes you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor saps that tried to stand in her way.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

It was a bachelor’s house, every room giving off that indefinable ambiance that let guests and visitors know someone else, not the resident, had been paid to buy and place every piece of furniture and every item of decoration. Ryan swept his eyes over the kitchen, wondering if any sort of food preparation had ever taken place in it. Brad was trailing sheepishly after him, he imagined under whispered orders from his older brother; Gary himself was following Cal, and occasionally he could hear their voices. “So, Brad, do you go fishing with your brother?”

Bradley started as if a bomb had gone off next to him before rubbing at his hair. “Um, no. No, not really. I’m –” He shrugged. “I’m bad on boats, I get motion sickness. The bad kind.”

“Ouch.”, Ryan commiserated. “Was wondering if he was a catch-and-release kinda guy.” He pointedly ran a finger over the thin layer of dust on the kitchen counter.

“Oh, that.” Brad flushed. “We’ve got someone comes in once a week. When Gar goes fishing he uses the grill outside, but he hasn’t gone out this time yet – he just got here a coupla days ago.”

“Does he prep it outside too?”

“Sometimes even at the boat. I think it’s like a fisherman ritual with him.”

“Care to show me where?”

Belatedly it occurred to the younger Blox that perhaps he should not have said anything, and Ryan followed the realization through his handsome features easily, but after a moment Brad merely shrugged and led him past a sliding door into the vast backyard of the house. The grill was set next to a kidney-shaped pool, and was a polished-stone and steel affair, immaculately clean. Leaning closer Ryan saw that the surfaces had seen use at some point in the distant past, and that dust had settled over them since. He could only hope Cal was having better luck.

“Alright… want to give me that DNA sample?” Ryan fished for the swab as he considered where else he might find something, anything.

As he looked up with the swab, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Bradley had cocked his head to examine him, and suddenly the hair on the back of his neck fluttered uncertainly – but a moment later Brad was staring at the swab with ill-disguised nervousness. “Dude, relax.” He lifted the swab. “Just open your mouth and say ‘Ahh’.”

Some relief slipped into Brad’s expression, and he obeyed. He watched as Ryan put the swab away, but whatever had triggered the CSI’s instincts, if it had been anything at all, didn’t return. “Um, do you need anything else?”

“Just one more thing. I want to see your garage.”

“Sure.” Bradley led him to the only other part of the house he’d seen so far, barring the grill, that showed signs of use. Between a sleek two-door BMW in royal blue and a muddy, steel-blue SUV, a Kawasaki 750 racing bike sat like a sulking cat, its body work shining in changing shades of green and blue as Ryan moved. “Nice bike. Yours?”

Brad smiled. “Yeah. Car’s a rental, Gar’s. The SUV’s mine, for when I have to get to the outlying properties… not that there’s much to see out there.”

“Hm.” Ryan crouched down to shine a light over the floor and sighed quietly when the opaque black radiance of fresh tire polish swallowed the beam of light whole. “So you’re, what, the on-site supervisor? Would you hit the lights, please?”

Brad scoffed as he obeyed. “More like a glorified janitor.” Ryan had half-slipped under the truck, then saw Brad peering at him from the side. “What are you doing?”, the young man asked him, more in puzzlement than any sort of challenge. “What are you looking for?”

Ryan slipped out. “I don’t know yet.”, he admitted, moving his eyes in methodical arcs over the garage, finding nothing more than the usual wear and tear of such a room, and some impeccable cleaning done overall. If the truck was the vehicle being used, someone had washed its outside with exquisite care. “Are the cars unlocked?”

“Truck is, car’s not.” Brad hesitated again, shrugged once more. “I’ll go get the keys from Gar.”

“‘kay.” Ryan waited until the younger Blox was gone before turning to the SUV and opening the rear door. There were only two things he could think of that might have survived the rather thorough once-over the cars had gone through, and he ran several dusting pads over the obviously shampooed and vacuumed carpeting, then turned to do the same over the back seat.

Paradoxically, he found the hair in neither: it was stuck to the jam of the door; it was very short, very black, and Ryan could see how it had been left behind, how someone tall and likely not used to the SUV had hit the top of his head against the frame on getting out. Just one hair, and so very much within it.

Nearby, he heard the voice of Gary Blox, angry and low, and guessed Brad was being lectured on the finer points of legal cooperation. He’d just finished sliding the side door closed when Bradley came back in, looking mutinous. “Got the keys.”

“Great, thanks. What do you normally carry in the truck?”

Brad shrugged. “Tools, if I need ‘em. Mostly shears and stuff to keep the weeds off the fences.”

“No guns?”

“Dream Hunt’s not licensed to hunt in Florida”, Bradley replied, instantly wary.

“I don’t mean the company, I mean yours.” Ryan had seen, however, the unease tightening of Bradley’s back. He stared calmly at him for a moment. “They’ve got guns on site, don’t they.”

Bradley stared at the motorcycle.

“Where are they?”

A long sigh. “Some building, custom-built. It’s not part of my schedule, they’ve got some local security company hired for it.” Bradley shrugged. “Not my problem, so I didn’t bother with it.”

“Do you know if they keep any custom-made, expensive stuff?”

Once again Brad scoffed. “Do you know what a spot in a DH tour costs? Everything they own is freaking expensive.”

Ryan was staring at the garage again, blue car, blue truck, blue bike, all in the wrong order for a proper color scheme. He realized he was getting twitchy just staring at them and decided that, tire polish or not, it wouldn’t hurt to ‘fingerprint’ them. Once he was done he went looking for Cal and found her in the bathroom.

“Hi.” She beamed at him on the mirror. “Found anything?”

“You mean other than dust? All the vehicles have gone through a massive cleaning in the past twenty four hours, though I’ve got some trace I want to run at the lab. He was well aware of Gary loitering a few feet away, so he slipped into the bathroom and lowered his voice. “You get the feeling the house is just for show?”

“It probably is”, she replied just as quietly as she opened the medicine cabinet and stared at the odds and ends of occasional disease. She snapped a few shots before considering her meager options for potential swabs. “Pretty place to bring customers, investors, potential partners. Not a home, just a house.”

“It was Bradley you wanted to see.”

She smiled at him. “Well, not just Bradley. Both of them. Dream Hunt might be an expensive babysitting service for wanna-be hunters, but it’s still run as a family business.” She sighed at the medicine cabinet. “This is all ancient… look at this aspirin, the box’s not even opened and it expired nearly a year ago. I’m going to swab all this, want to take the spare bedroom?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

The main bedroom was kept for Gary, for all that he presumably spent his time running a business in a different state. Ryan took pictures of the photos framed on the walls, showing Gary and his fishing trophies, sometimes accompanied by an older man with the same sharp blue eyes and finely edged cheekbones, sometimes with a group of people that changed from picture to picture. He and Bradley were not shown together. There was a half-empty suitcase next to a walk-in closet that didn’t need any more clothes, and a long duffel bag full of fishing supplies that gave off the unmistakable fishy smell of long use for its obvious purpose.

The spare room was Bradley’s – and what, Ryan wondered, did Brad think of that? He stepped in and stared at the bed, took a couple of shots, and paused, straightening up.

There’s OCD, and there’s abandonment.

There were three framed posters on the walls, no pictures, no mementos. The bed sheets had been rumpled and thrown aside, but he would have sworn Bradley didn’t sleep in that bed any more than he did. The clothes in the walk-in closet were plain, casual, and likely got washed once a week by whoever cleaned the house to get the dust off of them. “He doesn’t live here.”, he said quietly to himself. Not, he thought, unless his brother’s here.

He heard the doorbell right. Then he paused and wondered what it was he was smelling, because it wasn’t a swab, a reactive, or fingerprint powder. He checked the camera. No, not that, either. It was faint, sickly… cold, if such a thing could be said of a scent. On hands and knees he tracked it to the closet and found a pair of battered work boots giving it off. These, too, had been carefully cleaned, but tiny droplets of something had stained the heavy brown.

Somewhere, a cell phone began to chime Wagner’s Ride of the Valkiries. He peered out of the door and saw Gary speaking quietly to a tall, caramel-skinned woman dressed in a severe, charcoal-colored business suite. Then Bradley squeezed past them, threw him a wary look and came to the bathroom’s door. “Um… miss? Is it Ok if I go? I just got a call that the lock in one of the boat shacks is busted, and your, uh, friend already did the DNA thing.”

Ryan heard volumes in Calleigh’s silence, but he didn’t get to find out what her answer would be: the woman by the door charged forward. “Their warrant entitles them to your DNA, Brad, not to hold you hostage in your own home. You go right ahead.” She stepped between Bradley and Calleigh, which opportunity the younger Blox took to step away.

“Bye, Brad!”, Calleigh called after him, her tone light.

Chapter Text

The full team met before the Dream Hunt’s main equipment warehouse, where the supplies it would need to start its business operations were presumably stored. On paper that could have easily been interpreted as office equipment and supplies, had Bradley not pointed out to Ryan that it was the only place for which Dream Hunt had hired a professional security company. They had with them a police cruiser and three men from Hawson Security, as well as two unsmiling Dream Hunt lawyers who had gone over Horatio’s warrant with a fine-tooth comb and, having nothing good to say, were saying nothing at all.

“You have the only keys to this warehouse?”, Horatio asked the short, blocky older gentleman who’d introduced himself as Walter Grund, Hawson’s overseer for the warehouse.

“Only set of keys in the state”, the man nodded curtly. “Dream Hunt HQ has the only other set that I know of. It’s an easy job mostly, just coming in and making sure the temperature and humidity control machinery is working fine.” He pointed to the side of the warehouse. “Once a month I go in just to make sure no one’s gotten inside, rodents, thieves, but the walls are solid concrete and the door’s just shy of half a foot, it runs on hydraulics.”

“That’s an awful lot of security for some office equipment.”, Horatio said mildly.

“I guess they don’t want their guns out on the streets adding to their already bad rep.”, Eric said.

“Now there’s a cheerful though.” Frank stared at the door. “Thugs with hunting rifles.”

Grund went over three locks, two of them electronic, then ran an ID card over a fourth. The deceptively light-looking door hummed and rolled aside.

Horatio’s lips twitched. “And here’s Christmas come early.”

Fluorescent lights were coming in as the door slid open, and as they walked past it Grund offered Horatio a manila envelope. “Inventory. Last I checked, it was all here, but I don’t look inside the crates, just check the reference numbers.”

“Thank you, Mister Grund.” Horatio took the envelope and pulled out a somewhat battered collection of sheets. He was willing to believe Walter Grund was exactly what he looked like, a no-nonsense man doing a no-nonsense job. Under the cool lights he could almost see the building as Dream Hunt meant it to be at some point, a private, no-guests office area and storage vault for critical and dangerous equipment, equipment which they then happily handed over to people who might not have any idea how to keep the danger of it limited to themselves and their quarry. That Dream Hunt didn’t seem to care, seemed to think the money their customers lavished them with would fix any problem, angered him deeply, and he knew, and meant to have it be known, that even if the company had nothing to do with the murders, a great part of the responsibility was unequivocally theirs.

There were no office partitions, though at the back of the warehouse several vaults stood open, their doors propped open and the lock mechanisms still in their boxes inside them. Exceptionally neat piles of equipment were lined up in five long rows, each stack composed of identical products or closely related ones, and while some of it was indeed office equipment, the vast majority of the crates showed the arms of the most prestigious hunting and fishing equipment suppliers in the world.

“Twenty two Benelli R1 semi-automatic rifles, custom stocks, individually engraved.” He passed the inventory to Calleigh as she went by him and took the row next to hers, Ryan heading down the one of the other side and Frank and Eric at the other side of the warehouse, while Grund and the lawyers hung back by the entrance.

Horatio wondered as he stared at the crates, if he had closed the net too tightly, if something important might not have slipped from him. The modeling agency had been cleared, and that was the number Natalie had provided him with. Even the photographers, who sometimes did their own shoots, didn’t know who Tabitha had been by name, only by her looks. ‘Too sweet’, had been the general opinion. Victoria was a complete stranger to them. And Rowan had neither the looks nor the interest in a modeling career.

How were they finding the girls?

They held them somewhere in the ‘Glades, somewhere where sea and swamp overlapped. Neither of the boat shacks had provided further information, other than to let Horatio know Dream Hunt was hiding something.

Innocent people don’t usually get their lawyers involved so very quickly.

Disoriented, drugged, blind, the girls were released to be hunted on the night of the new moon, likely two or three at a time. He wondered how much of a head start their killers gave them, and how they tracked them through the vastness of the ‘Glades. There’d been no electronics in Tabitha Flynn’s body, unless they had been taken with her head, or her hands.

Why take the hands?

“Found ‘em”, Calleigh called from somewhere ahead of him.

As they moved towards her, Frank’s cell phone rang uncertainly. He looked at it and shook his head. “Walls, probably, this place’s built like a bunker.” He nodded to Horatio. “I’ll step out a sec to take this.”

“Yes, sir.” Horatio’s eyes were on the long, slender silver cases Calleigh had discovered. She was already busy with her camera, and as Ryan joined them he started snapping shots from the other side. The rifles stood alone not on a pile, but on jet-black, heavy duty shelving with foam padding to prevent the cases from being scratched. Horatio saw Eric appear from the back of the warehouse and start photographing the back of the shelves as he slipped on gloves and lifted, ever so carefully, one of the cases Calleigh had already photographed. The weight of it had left a deep indentation on the foam… but only one.

“Twenty two Benelli cases.” Calleigh crouched down over the lowest shelf, staring at the ruby-red square on top of each of them, with a thin, long black wedge missing from each. On closer examination she realized the black was the outline of a rifle – the Benelli coat of arms. “We’ll have to take them all for ballistics tests.”

“Of course.” Horatio paced the length of the shelves.

“It doesn’t look like anyone’s even opened the cases.” Ryan paused. “Some of these are still factory-sealed.” He snapped a few shots of the plastic seals stuck over the cases’ clasps.

“That’s because they didn’t take the cases”, Eric’s voice countered from behind the shelves. When they peered at him, they found him dusting the hinges of one of the cases.

Calleigh grinned. “I don’t think I’ve popped a hinge to get to what I wanted since I was six!”

“Yeah, pop the hinges, take the rifle, leave the seals intact.” Eric stared at his handiwork momentarily before trying for a print – he couldn’t be sure he’d even have something to work with, but the tiny scrapes and scratches on the back of the case made him hopeful.

“I think we need to have another chat with Mister Blox.” Horatio stepped back to let his team go over the back of the cases, and noticed Frank coming back in, his step brisk. “Frank, would you do the honors?”

The detective looked at them all, then at Horatio.

Horatio felt something inside him falter painfully, an hourglass from which all the sand had run away without his noticing it.

“I’ll have him picked up.” Frank’s expression was grim. “Someone just ran Victoria Randall and her friend into the freeway wall.”

Horatio was silent, but the surge of his anger brushed against them like the prelude of a hurricane. He drew his lips in a taut line and then surged forward. “Mister Wolfe, you’re with me.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“Oh, sweetie.” Alexx brushed Victoria’s hair away from the bruised, bloodied face; the scarf had been taken away from her hair by the force of the collision. “You were supposed to stay away from me.”

She felt Horatio behind her before she saw or heard him: he was a cold storm front coming into focus as he closed the distance between them. “Alexx?” His voice was quiet, and behind it there was fury waiting for a target.

It was near impossible to completely shut down any one of Miami’s busy freeways, particularly so close to the airport, but a good section of it across three lanes had been fenced off for the Crime Lab. With the police cruises, plainclothes cars, emergency vehicles, the ME van and finally the Hummer, it made for a very tight fit.

There was a vast void around Horatio that no one seemed inclined to fill.

“Multiple blunt force trauma”, she said calmly, her hands telling her a terrible, inescapable story. “Almost all the bones on her right side are broken.”

“She was the passenger.”

“If the car’s old enough, being inside’s almost as bad as being outside.”

“No airbags?”

She cocked her head. “See for yourself.”

Horatio looked up at what was left of a cream green, very old VW Beetle, then back at the freeway. In his mind’s eye he could see the old car making its way towards him and past, towards the airport, except that before it could reach either of its goals something had made it veer sharply away, from the third lane in –

He cocked his head. The Beetle had veered three times, once from the third lane into the second, again between the first and the second, and one last time before its collision against the concrete wall. “Where’s the driver?”

Alexx stood up to hand him Victoria’s wallet. “Still in the car. Go ahead.”

The Beetle had hit the wall with punishing force, crushing the passenger side and turning when the bumper had caught on the irregularities of the concrete, upending once and ending up on its blown tires. The girl on the driver’s seat was short and plump, with very curly brown hair cut in a pert bob, and she had been betrayed only by her elderly vehicle’s inability to protect her; unlike Victoria, she was strapped in. Horatio noticed Ryan was not staring at the car, but at the freeway, and approached him. “What do you see?”

Ryan shook his head absentmindedly. “Something…” He stared at the Beetle’s path in time. “Something startled her, there, on the first skid mark; she was trying to pull out of traffic, either to stop or to get off the freeway. Then she pulled back on the wheel, there must have been cars right on her other side.”

Horatio nodded. Someone had been level with the Beetle’s drivers, had done something to startle her into yanking on the wheel to get away from them. Then, likely, the drivers on the first lane had beeped at her, startling her into yanking back so as to avoid a collision on that side, but being forced to remain close to whatever threat she’d been trying to avoid. That threat had closed in again, and the horror of it had caused her to yank on the wheel one last time, trying for the dubious safety of the shoulder and grossly overshooting.

Ryan was shooting the Beetle when the camera lens showed him a massive stroke of luck. “I’ve got transfer.”

Horatio turned at that, watched him swab lightly against a black welt on the pale green of the Beetle. Ryan stared at the swab. “That’s not paint.”

Horatio crouched down next to him, frowning. “This is.” He pointed lightly, took the swab Ryan offered him and ran it over a single long, curving scrape before handing it back. It caught the afternoon light and glittered uncertainly.

Ryan held it, and himself, very still. His C.O cocked a brow at him, and he rolled the swab lightly between his fingers. In response to the motion and the changing angle of the light, the flecks of paint danced between dark aqua and bright blue. Suddenly the black substance from the first swab fell into place. “I’ve seen that shade of paint before.”

Chapter Text

Rowan was sitting on the very edge of her bed, talking to her nurse, when Horatio got to the door of her room escorted by two police officers. He’d called ahead and was not surprised to find her dressed in dark green capris, one sandal and a plain white shirt, her expression as she caught sight of him puzzled and the healing scrapes very red against her skin.

The nurse left and he stepped into the room alone.

“Hi.”, she greeted him, her tone not a greeting but a question.

He smiled at her, saw from her expression she was wholly unconvinced, and looked up calmly. “The doctor tells me that you can leave now, if you’d like.”

She was silent, staring at him, for a long moment. “Which you’d like me to do, since you called.”

“I would like to take you to a safe house.”

“There’s cops at my door twenty four seven, that’s not enough? What’s happened?”

“I think…” He considered his words very carefully. “I think these people may be coming after you now, Rowan.”

“More than they were going to?”

He did smile honestly at that, at the fighting spirit in her voice, at the acceptance, but never the surrender, of her continued danger. “I’m afraid so.”

She looked away from him, and he saw her close one eye – the gray one this time. Then she looked down, blinking. “Oh… fine, I guess. It was nice to have breakfast in bed while it lasted.”

He helped her off the bed and out onto the hallways, down to the entrance, awkward in the foot cast after she refused a wheelchair. The short walk to the Hummer and the cruiser parked right outside the hospital’s door seemed as long as a minefield.

“It’s just a few yards.”, she said quietly from his side.

He realized she’d picked up on his unease, and smiled. “Let’s make them short ones, then”, he replied.

His hackles rose the moment they stepped outside, into the sunlight. It had to be now, he knew. It had to be now, because he would not give them another chance. He caught not a glint of metal, but a brief, errant spark of sunlight on glass – the late afternoon sun’s catching on the rifle’s sight. “Get down!”, he yelled, yanking her down and under his body as the first shot thundered out. Two more followed before any of the police officers with them could get their guns out; Horatio kept his eyes on that stray wisp of reflection as he pulled his own gun, even though he knew the distance was too great. He heard one of the officers calling the attack in, and saw the blinking telltale vanish. “Rowan?!”

“I’m fine!’, she snapped, apparently frightened and furious in equal measures.

“Stay with her!”, he yelled at the officers as he ran to the Hummer and roared out of the hospital’s access way and onto the street. He reached the spot where he’d seen the shooter and braked roughly, scanning his surroundings.

The bullet hit the reinforced windshield and couldn’t breach it, making him duck instinctively even as he gunned the heavy vehicle and launched himself after his prey, a dark maroon SUV. He called out directions and descriptions as the two vehicles howled down the streets, trying to guess where the chase would take him, when it came to a halt he had not foreseen: the SUV came to a wrenching stop next to a weed-filled lot backed against a canal, and two figures leapt out and raced for the water. They were counting, he imagined, on the slight lead the SUV had on the much more powerful Hummer, a lead they were bound to lose if the chase went on for much longer. He slammed on the brakes so abruptly the Hummer half-spun with a shriek of complaint from the tires, jumped out and took aim. “Freeze!”

They ignored him. The faster of the two leapt into the water and Horatio’s expression tightened before he lowered his gun a fraction and placed one shot into the second one’s left leg.

There was a strangled cry as the fugitive stumbled, just enough for Horatio to sprint forward by a few yards and see that whoever it was was wearing full hunting camo. Then, limping, the second figure launched himself into the water as well.

He forced himself to race even faster. Blood in Floridian waters had to rank somewhere up there with electric devices in a bathtub. But even as he reached the abandoned SUV he heard another, very powerful engine closing in and saw a high-speed boat roaring up the canal towards the shooters. One quick look into the SUV noted the small radio abandoned on the passenger’s seat. He aimed at the boat as it closed in. There were three people –

He saw the fourth, kneeling against the boat’s railing, almost before he registered the sleek black shape and the fact that the fourth person wasn’t kneeling as much as steadying himself. The bullet slammed into the door of the SUV, a hair’s breadth from his head, so that he felt the flecks of paint and chassis lifted by the impact prickling against his cheek, and ducked behind the car’s bulk, crouching down. Before he could try for a low shot another bullet slammed into the ground next to his feet, forcing him to wince away. He heard the boat’s engine revving low, then gaining strength again as one more bullet slammed against the SUV’s bumper – the gunman’s angle was turning bad as the boat sped away. Horatio stepped out the moment he realized this, and took aim at the boat as it raced up the canal, then realized his own shot was no better and lowered the gun with a grimace.

A few minutes later he was surrounded by at least five cruisers. He had not moved, had not taken his eyes off the canal; he doubted they’d find either boat or shooters, but he could smell desperation in their wake, he could feel their shadows in his grip, and the closeness grated against his patience.

His phone rang as Eric and Calleigh got to the scene. “Mister Wolfe, one moment please.” He turned to face the two other CSIs.

“H, you Ok?”

Horatio smiled humorlessly; it was a smile they knew from experience had no more humor behind it than a lion’s as it settles down before its prey. He turned away, to stare at the canal. “Eric. We need to go over that SUV very carefully, it’s the first vehicle they’ve left behind that they did not have a chance to clean.”

“I’m on it.”

“Calleigh…” Horatio stared at the canal again.

“Escort called the lab, Miss Means made it to the safehouse without any further incident.”

He ducked his head and smiled honestly at that. “Thank you.”

“DNA results came back on the rifles and the cases. We’ve got multiple donors for the rifles, but only two for the cases.”

“Bradley?”

“As well as a Hawson employee, Allan Madison – which is not his real name.”

“Do tell.”

“We pulled him from AFIS; his real name’s Allan Palmer.” She handed him a printout.

“Apparently Mister Palmer’s an expert at taking other people’s property”, Horatio noted as he scanned a list of crimes that read like a family tree for robbery. “Where is he?”

“He was nowhere to be found when the police went to pick him up, Frank’s looking into it.”

“Alright, I think… I think we both know where he went. Calleigh, that was a high-speed, open water boat they were using, and they were heading inland.”

She followed his train of thought easily. “They won’t be able to take it very far before the propeller starts getting clogged.”

“Which means they are going to go someplace where they can either go to ground, or get some sort of transportation that can take them further.” Horatio dreaded the thought that, spooked, his quarry might decide to kill however many girls they still had trapped. “I’m going back to the boat shacks.”

“I’ll call for an air search”, she replied, already on the phone.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

For all that he felt his quarry coming closer by heartbeats, neither of his CSIs had anything to offer; Ryan had merely called to report his lack of findings - and, Horatio rather thought in wry amusement, to make sure his C.O was still in one piece. Horatio maneuvered the healthy Hummer around and roared away as fast as he could. When his cell phone rang he picked it up and stared at the ID in puzzlement for a moment. “Yes, Alexx.”

“Horatio, I think I figured out why they took the girl’s hands”, the sweet voice of the CME said. “There’s some sort of substance on them that fluoresces very brightly under black light, Victoria’s hands still do.” She had dimmed the lights in the Examiner’s rooms so she could better see what she was trying to describe, the faint purple-bluish glow concentrated around Victoria Randall’s hands and, mostly, her nails. “The pattern I’m looking at and the fact that it’s persistent makes me think it was administered over several days and absorbed through the skin.”

Dirt over wire. Except not just dirt.

“Initial tox reports say it’s hyaline. Horatio, with a kid’s black light flashlight, these poor girls would have been as easy to see as a deer under a bright sun.”

“Hyaline?” For once, knowledge didn’t readily come to him. “Why didn’t we find this elsewhere in their bodies, Alexx?”

“To begin with, because it’s not found anywhere else in their bodies. The dye isn’t on their skin or their nails, Horatio, is in them; hyaline is essentially chitin, and when it was absorbed it bonded naturally with the surrounding tissue where it more or less matched, mostly their fingernails. I think they took Tabitha’s hands not so we couldn’t get fingerprints, but so we wouldn’t find out about this.”

“And I think you’re right, Alexx.”

“It’s just luck we caught it this time”, she said bitterly, turning on the lights and gently brushing Victoria’s hair. “God knows how long they’ve been playing their sick games without anyone the wiser, only to mess up with three girls in one night – what are the odds of that?”

The Hummer swerved momentarily on the road, its tires complaining.

“Horatio?”

“I’m here. What’s bad for them is good for us, Alexx. Keep me posted.”

“You bet.”

Chapter Text

The access gate on the boat shack where they’d found the boat with Tabitha Flynn’s blood had been thrown open, and Horatio swerved to a halt next to it, jumping down and drawing his gun. Both the main door and the service door were wide open as well, and next to the second was a much abused, elderly Volvo of indefinite color under a layer of grime. From inside the boat shack he could hear a loud voice arguing with thin air in tones that bespoke both anger and fear.

Now here’s someone, he thought, that is just beginning to realize how deep the pit is he’s dug himself into. He made sure the car was empty, then moved to the service door in time to see a man running from one boat to the next, tugging off the tarps one-handed while he yelled into a cell phone that ‘this was not what he’d signed on for’. As the man ended the conversation by throwing the phone aside in a fury, Horatio slid into place not five steps behind Allan Parker and called out calmly, “And what exactly did you think you’d signed on for, Allan?”

The man froze; Horatio saw his shoulders tighten. “Don’t do it!”, he warned, moving half a step to the side to throw Allan’s aim off if he decided to be stupid.

Fortunately, Parker chose wisely, and lifted his hands to allow Horatio to close in and cuff him, taking away the 9 mm standard issue he –and most Hawson employees- carried. “Who were you on the phone with, Allan?” Horatio asked as he shoved the man away from the boats.

Parker stared blankly at him. “I want a lawyer.”

Horatio’s expression hardened into a death’s head mask. “Allan. I cannot imagine how many girls you’ve put through this sick hunting game of yours, but if you do not answer my questions and, by your silence, you get even one more girl killed, no lawyer in this world is going to keep you safe from me, do you understand?”

Something got through, either the fury in the CSI’s very cold tone or the hard truth in his eyes, but Parker folded like a house of cards in a stiff breeze. “Look man, I don’t know anything about it – all I had to do was get Grund’s keys to them and then put them back.”

“Lying to me right now”, Horatio said very softly, “is a very bad life choice, Allan. We have your DNA on the rifle cases, now where. Are. The girls?”

“I don’t know!” Parker’s voice cracked. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be like this, I just moved the equipment around, got the boats ready, carried the stuff!”

“That…” Horatio had seen resentment flash through the fear in the burglar’s eyes. “ That must have made you feel so important, didn’t it?”

“I thought they were hunting ‘gators, you know? Or panthers.”

Horatio hissed, bodily picking up the man and wishing he could shake him. “You knew, Allan. You knew exactly what they were doing.”

“I don’t know where they keep the girls, I just get the stuff loaded up and bring it to the bivouac camp!”

“Camp?”

“Yeah, but, you know, rich-people style. It’s a building, business park, where they can pretend they’re camping.”

“The name, Allan.”

“Crescent Glades Business Park.”

Horatio half-carried him to a wall and slammed him face-first against it. “Don’t. Move.” He pulled his phone out and speed-dialed. “Mister Wolfe. I need you to check a place called Crescent Glades Business Park.”

There was a silence on the line, then a quiet, surprised sound from Ryan.

“Mister Wolfe?”, Horatio prompted, quietly, feeling the net spiraling closed, feeling the substance of his quarry drawing ever so very close.

“We… just followed Gary into the Park.”, Ryan sounded very perplexed. “It’s not listed as a Dream Hunt property because they don’t own it, they just leased space in it, except the holding company folded and the place was abandoned.” He was sitting in a plainclothes car next to an officer that had somehow –he didn’t know the details and knew better than to ask- been convinced by his CO to help him tail Gary Blox. As they moved past the entryway to the Park, however, and came around to the back of the building, he caught his breath and let it out in a quiet whistle. “That’s some very expensive abandoning”, he said quietly, staring at nine or ten of some of the most costly cars in the market.

“That is supposed to be the bivouac camp for these people, so I want you to be very careful in checking it –” His phone beeped urgently at him, and one look at the ID told him why. “One moment, please.” He switched lines. “Frank.”

The detective’s voice was full of angry frustration. “Boat shack’s empty, Horatio. How’s yours?”

“I have a friend here who could use an escort to the station.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Alright.” Horatio switched lines again. They had the boats. They were going for the girls. They had to be intercepted, and they had one last chance to do it. “Mister Wolfe –”

The first shot made both Ryan and the officer next to him jump in their seats, impossibly loud as only a high-powered gun can be. Horatio heard the unmistakable sounds of both of them jumping out of the car, heard the officer calling over the radio, heard the immediate response of a second unit, and then a second gunshot.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Someone else, Ryan was thinking as he ducked instinctively against the car’s door at the second shot, would have been yelling for information and being very distracting, instead of the careful silence coming from his CO. He realized they were not being shot at and ran for the building’s back door, gun at the ready, the police officer on his heels. “Shots fired inside the building.” He spoke curtly into the phone, shot a look at his companion and waited only for his nod. “Backup’s on the way.”

“Ryan, I want you to be very careful. These people like killing.”

“Yessir.” He put the phone away and gently tested the back door, unsurprised to find it open. He and his backup stepped into a vast break room which had surely been meant to be elegant and luxurious but lacked the decoration and finishing touches for it.

There were, however, square metal boxes on the ground that had apparently been used as fire pits, and muddy scuff marks on the tiled floor. “Try not to step on too many of those”, he asked the man behind him with an apologetic shrug.

“Got it.”

They slipped down the hallway, past twin bathroom doors; the smell coming from behind them told Ryan they had definitely seen use. Light came fitfully through occasional skylights set at regular intervals, as well as from the end of the hallway, where it opened out onto a lobby as partially elegant as the break room. Here were a mess of sleeping bags around more metal boxes, and the smell of human bodies packed in close proximity. The bags, he noticed, were the three-hundred-dollar variety. Beyond the double doors that led out to the front of the building, he could see Gary’s blue BMW. He wondered if Gary had known what he’d find at this place, if that was the reason he’d come here. The light was poor, the angle of the doors was wrong, and he lit his flashlight. There was one hallway leading away from the door, at a right angle to the one he’d come in from. He followed it, gun leading, past office space that had, from all appearances, been turned into impromptu apartments. Someone’s idea of roughing it apparently involved a roof, AC, running water and space-foam mattresses.

The hallway ended at what seemed to be a much larger room, window-lined and much more brightly lit. Ten steps from it Ryan caught the twin scents of gunpowder and blood and tightened his grip on the gun.

The big room had likely been meant as a conference or AV room – one of its walls was painted a flat off-white, as if it had been meant to be used as a projector screen. On the opposite end of the room Gary Blox was sprawled on the floor in the middle of an ever-spreading pool of blood. Ryan moved gingerly towards him, all too aware of how desperately meager his cover was with all those windows around him, and grimaced as he crouched next to the man. He checked for vitals anyways before getting his phone out. “Horatio.”

“Are you alright?”

He fusses, Ryan thought in grim amusement, almost as much as we fuss over him. Not that we’d admit to any of it. “I’m fine, Gary Blox is not. He’s dead, he was shot twice, once on the head –” He leaned closer and saw the tiny telltale signs he was looking for. “- from very close range. “And… I’m not the expert, but I’d swear this wasn’t done by a Benelli. It looks… bigger.” He looked around himself; somewhere in the distance he could hear sirens. “Someone’s definitely been using this place as a base of operations.”

Horatio could hear his own backup tearing their way down the dirt road, but Ryan’s voice snapped his attention back to the phone in a heartbeat.

Ryan was staring curiously at the off-white wall. “I think… I think we might be able to figure out where they went. Is anyone at the lab right now?”

“In fifteen minutes, I will be.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

One of the cars, a sleek black Mercedes CL was unaccounted for, although Ryan was sure they could get an ID on it from the dashboard camera of the plainclothes car. He was far more interested on the wall before him, and on making sure his camera, his cell phone, and the main computer back at the AV lab were all in speaking terms with one another. “The whole front wall is of a softer material, and it’s painted to be used as a projection surface. I think they pinned a map to it and then marked important sites on it, there’s clustered scoring over several spots.” He ran gloved hands over the wall. “We might have the site where they’re keeping the girls, except we don’t have the maps.”

In the AV lab, Horatio confirmed the connection and turned to look at the main screen. “We know they hunt in the Everglades, and that they are close enough to the sea, or a reflux channel. We also know at least one of their obligatory stopovers.”

“This building. What about the boat shacks?”

Horatio had called up a map of the state, and considered it briefly before reducing it to a map of the ‘Glades.” “Let’s get the photos here first and decided once we have something to go on.”

As Ryan moved on a slow pattern, the AV lab’s computer began to create a grid on a secondary screen, painstaking piecing together the photos he was sending through, keeping the detail fine enough that the tiny pinpricks could be noticed. Horatio stared at a cluster of pinpoints that could, or could not, be Crescent Glades. There were at least five more heavy clusters. He considered two of the lightest ones, their proximity to one another.

Someone had raked ever so carefully the access road to the boat shacks. Why had they bothered?

He overlapped the map on the grid, matching the twin light clusters to the boat shacks. The map enlarged and fitted itself to the grid neatly. Crescent Glades was a battered galaxy. Bradley and Gary’s home away from home was even lighter than the shacks.

Far above them all, South of the boat shack, a comet trailed spattered tails of black dots, and Horatio’s blood turned cold even as the computer sent the overlapped pictures to Ryan so he could confirm with the real thing. He stiffened at the vast radial pattern. “Tell me that’s not what it looks like.”

“Those are estimated escape routes for the girls.” Horatio called up the list of Dream Hunt’s Florida properties, got no matches, and called up a second query even as he reached for his phone.

Vacant lot – to be developed He stared at the information, in large bold letters, and then noticed a realtor’s contact information was listed underneath in much smaller print.

And, just like that, the net turned into a funnel, wandering paths and bursts of information within his mind twisting and turning and coming together so that he could see the whole story before his eyes as if he’d been there every step of the way.

He was half-running as he called the Park rangers and the rescue personnel. It was dusk, short and swift as it can only come to the neotropics. He wondered if they’d take the time to blind the girls. He wondered if they’d all been locked away long enough to mark their hands; he wondered if they’d let them run, one last blood-pumping hunt with the law breathing down their necks. He was half out of the door when he realized he knew the two patrolmen coming in – he’d sent them on an errand of mercy (so very long ago, it seemed!). He paused just long enough to send them back whence they’d come with new instructions. Everything, everyone, had to come back. He would not let one single girl down for lack of one more pair of eyes to find her.

Chapter Text

The rangers were waiting for him, glad to see him, eager to go, swamp wolves itching to defend their territory. “We’re getting these guys, sir?”

“Yes, sir”, Horatio told the ranger calmly as the swamp boats began to accelerate into the ‘Glades. “Yes, we are.”

The chopper Calleigh had originally called to search for the getaway boat on the canal dashed past them, low and fast. One of the rangers handed Horatio a radio. He had to all but shout to be heard over the fan. “We’re looking for a building, concrete or steel, unmarked, but they may also have released the girls.” He was unsure as to whether the chopper would be able to find so small a target as a human being, or if the crew would be able to tell the difference between the rangers’ boats and the killers before some very powerful guns came to bear.

Once within the search area the boats spread out, their numbers increasing as more and more personnel managed to make it to the scene. Horatio was on the phone when he wasn’t on the radio: there were too many bases to cover for him to have his team backing him up, and he’d been forced to let Calleigh hold the fort rather than having her on-site while the evidence from the SUV and a small memento he’d picked up along with Allan Parker were processed. His boat had just entered into a small area where trees grew in a tight knot over a single partially-dry chunk of ground that curved into a crooked half-moon when they heard the thunder of a gunshot echoing towards them.

“That was not a rifle.” Horatio pulled off his sunglasses in the dying sunlight, squinting.

“Nossir.” One of the two rangers with him agreed. “Shotgun, I think.”

“Really. I guess they’re making do without their expensive toys. Let’s go.”

The boat roared forward; they came out of the knot of trees. “There!”, the other ranger shouted, and Horatio’s head snapped around.

He knew that boat, the sleek and polished hull in black and gold, the well-maintained engine. One of the rangers handed him a bullhorn; instead of taking it he took the man’s arm and pulled him down. “Get down!”

Two guns barked, one definitely a shotgun and likely out of range, but the other had the distinct staccato of an automatic gun. The Dream Hunt was turning to flee, and Horatio peered frantically around, caring not a whit about prey that couldn’t go anywhere.

Where was the girl? He had to find her before they did -!

A flash of vivid pink against the crimson of dusk caught his eye. She was scrambling through waist deep water, hidden in the sawgrass, but not for long. Not for long. “Boat 12”, he spoke urgently on the radio. “The girl is on your ten, fifty yards or so into a patch of sawgrass, and she’s almost out in the open.”

His own boat and their support unit, Boat 12, surged forward. Horatio saw the occupants of the Dream Hunt boat gesturing wildly, saw a gun being lowered. He lifted his own and fired in a single motion, and while he had no range the shot apparently came close enough to convince the shooter to duck behind the protection of the fan. Even as his boat and several others, converging on the area, surged forward in pursuit of the Dream Hunt killers, Horatio felt a tremendous pang of relief as he watched the girl being pulled into the police swamp boat. The radio was crackling with the sighting of another girl. They were closing in, he could feel it; they were close to the starting point.

Another shot, impossibly loud and all too familiar to Horatio, who was far more familiar with the sound of sniper fire than he’d ever wanted to be, followed by a thin shriek. “That way!”, he yelled at the rangers over the roar of the fan. The boat veered sharply away from the main pursuit, alone, heading towards what to his eyes looked like a solid wall of mangroves, and he suddenly realized how close they were to the coastline at the sight of the brine-loving trees. “Do we have to go around all this?”, he asked the rangers.

“Nossir.” The boat suddenly slid into what he’d thought to be solidly packed vegetation.

This, he thought, is what they’ve been counting on. He ground his teeth in a feral grin. They know that anyone coming into the ‘Glades, looking for them, without a knowledgeable guide, wouldn’t have known of all these secret passages, hiding spots, shady nooks and reed-choked crannies –

The girl burst from the weeds, gasping, coughing, the water on her right side a violent red. “Helpmehelpme, ohgodhelpme –!”

Horatio caught her flailing arms and bodily scooped her up and into a tight embrace. “It’s alright, sweetheart. It’s alright. It’s alright, it’s over.” She barely looked twenty, dressed for the beach, and had a ragged gunshot wound high over the ribs of her right side. Even as he helped her stagger to the meager protection of the swamp boat’s deck and an emergency blanket, he realized he was looking at lines that didn’t belong to the vegetation around them. He cocked his head, then turned to the rangers and pointed. “Call it in! We’ve got the building!”

The swamp boat surged forward, and found solid ground; Horatio leapt gingerly down, his gun at the ready. The building was low, concrete on all sides, and as he peered around it he realized he was at the back of it, and that it was half again as long as it was wide. It had no windows nor, that he could see, doors, and the roof was covered with camouflage nets. This was the den of his prey, but that prey had teeth and a passion for blood, and his only backup at the moment was one of the rangers, the other staying with both the boat and the sobbing, shell-shocked girl. He flattened himself against the wall of the building, peering occasionally ahead, trying to figure out where the door was. As he approached the front of the building he smelled it, iron and heat, and his expression hardened as he came up to a small area where the grass had been trampled and the dirt compacted, and where blood pooled in small puddles here and there, not even tacky if he could judge.

Had they even let them run?

He peered around the corner as far as he dared. The camouflaged nets extended all the way down to the water and past, to hide a small, wooden dock and an idling swamp boat, marked in the black and gold of Dream Hunt. Somewhere very close by he could smell what Victoria and Rowan had both described to him, the unmistakable, cool dampness of a large enclosed space. There was a door there, but it was likely recessed in the wall and he couldn’t quite see it. Above it all the scent of the ‘Glades and the smell of the sea, nearby but invisible. Beneath it all a cold, sickly scent that it took him a moment to identify.

Formaldehyde. The same substance Ryan had found staining the work boots of Bradley Blox, for all that he’d washed them ever-so-carefully. What, he thought, were you working on in your working boots, Bradley?

He turned to the ranger and, very quietly, said. “Alright, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to stay three steps behind me at all times, and if it comes to it you are not to give these people any opportunity to reach for their guns.”

The ranger, the younger of the two with him, nodded, and Horatio felt a familiar, deep ache, a wound that hadn’t healed and likely never would. He turned again and slid around the corner. The door was on well-oiled tracks and had been partially opened. Somewhere beyond it he heard two men arguing in strangely calm, business-like tones. Then he caught motion from the other side of the building and aimed his gun instinctively.

A massive swell of relief went through him when he saw the familiar, solid bulk of Detective Frank Tripp slip out from behind a curtain of cattails. Behind him came Ryan, who first noticed Horatio and tapped Frank lightly on the back. The detective nodded curtly and Horatio nodded back, gesturing to the idling boat. Behind the two men came several police officers; Frank gestured to two of them to secure the swamp boat. They met by the sides of the door, and Horatio gestured for them to wait.

“ – will not go over well if they get caught.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying ‘even bad publicity’s good publicity’”, another voice replied, startling Ryan: it was Bradley Blox. Horatio nodded at that for them to move in, leading the way, checking for steps at the door, knowing the building had to be riding low on the waterline. “However many they catch, each one’s going to turn into a legal nightmare, and what we need right now is time to relocate –”

Ryan had the evidence; he knew as well as Horatio that the building was likely to sink, that there would likely be steps or a ramp to deal with. Frank knew that walking into any building where a CSI was leading you was likely to be a very uncertain proposition. All three of them found and dealt silently with the three steps leading down from the entrance of the building to the floor.

The officer behind them was expecting a level building. In the dim light he couldn’t see the men before him, and he overbalanced as he stepped in. Light as the sound was, it was enough, and the voices vanished.

Horatio took two steps forward to a wall he could barely see. They were in a tiny cubicle of a room with a narrow doorway leading into the main building and a small metal door on the side from which came, strongly, the smell of formaldehyde. He saw Ryan run a hand over it, lean ever so gently against it and shake his head. Then he heard a rifle being cocked, loud as if it had been fired. “Down!”

The shot went off, and by the muzzle flash they caught sight of a second gun being leveled at them from the dark. Two more shots rang out, spraying bits of concrete from the wall over them all.

Somewhere inside, a woman shrieked.

“Miami PD!”, Frank yelled, wishing he could kick the shooter from the keys back to Texas instead. “Put down your weapons -!” Another shot from the first rifle forced him to duck again.

The lack of light was their greatest enemy; the people inside were used to the darkness, and to them the CSIs were clearly outlined against the meager light coming in from the open door behind them. Horatio turned to the ranger. “Close the door!”, he whispered at the man, who scrambled back and obeyed. They left daylight behind with the quiet click of the door at their backs, and found themselves not entirely blind. The sickly glow of black lights came from the main room before them, and the floor here and there seemed spattered with a pale purple-blue fluorescence. Amidst it all they heard a steady clicking sound and, as best they could, crossed a puzzled look.

“What is that?”, Ryan murmured.

Horatio cocked his head, and suddenly realized they were out of time when he finally realized where he’d heard that sound before. “That’s another door.” He lunged forward into the darkness as sudden daylight blazed in and several shots rang out, to more panicked screaming.

The door was on the only side he had not had time to check, hidden beneath cover of brush and reeds. Horatio saw half a profile and the long lines of a rifle, and dropped to one knee. “Drop it! Drop it!”

A bullet shrieked by him and he ducked. From the doorway Frank returned fire and the gunman ducked. Frank paused and, predictably, the rifleman peered in to try to get another shot in – and stepped almost directly into Ryan’s line of fire. Ryan fired once. The man grunted, stood his ground, and fired, making them all growl in vexation.

Armor, was their immediate thought. The shooter vanished and Horatio inched forward.

“Horatio!”, Frank called, knowing that big square of light for the trap it was, knowing his friend was likely to happily chase his prey into Hell if need be, and none too eager to explain to any of the CSIs if anything happened to him on his watch.

Unlike Horatio, neither Frank nor Ryan knew one of the girls was out there, now dangerously close to the two riflemen, with no other protection but a single Park ranger. Horatio stepped out to the sound of the swamp boat’s fan roaring as it accelerated, and rounded the building in time to see its would-be second passenger firing at the fan: apparently, being left behind had not been part of Bradley Blox’s plan. “Bradley! Drop it – drop it!” Horatio saw the young man turn and lift the rifle, and fired first, his potential targets woefully limited by the armor. Bradley caught the shot on his shoulder, right at the edge of the armor, which was a bit too big for his frame; it nonetheless threw him back, partially out of sight. “Stay down, Bradley”, Horatio warned, much too late as the younger Blox scrambled out of sight and into the reeds. As Frank and Ryan came racing out of the building, Horatio raced after Bradley. “Ryan, there’s someone still in the building –” He saw the ranger’s head peer out from the cover of a gnarled mangrove, the girl hidden behind him, and pointed them out. “Frank!”

As he ran around the building he heard another shot. The policemen watching the idling boat on the front of the building had expected trouble to come from the now closed door in front of them, not from the side. Horatio found one of the scrambling to drag his partner out of the water and onto solid ground, leaving a heavy trail of blood behind, and took only a second to note that both men were conscious before racing past them and onto the narrow dock.

“BRADLEY!”, he yelled as he came to the end of the bobbing planks. The boat had turned already, its fan bending the vegetation and blowing grit into Horatio’s eyes. The young man at the helm turned to look at the CSI, his eyes flat and uncaring, his expression concerned only, if at all, with Horatio’s potential interference with his getaway. One quick glance was all Horatio merited before Bradley turned his attention to bringing the fan up to full speed.

Horatio lifted his gun, grimaced, hesitated: the swamp boat’s vast fan and the wire cage in which it was housed stood between him and the younger Blox – two steel walls for all intents and purposes. Somewhere behind him someone, probably the uninjured officer, opened fire, and three bullets pinged off with sparks. The swamp boat began to make headway; Bradley didn’t even acknowledge the fact that he’d been shot at.

He aimed as if there were nothing in his line of sight, and fired twice within the same second. Bradley grunted and staggered forward; as his weight fell on the rudder, the boat veered sharply to the side. Then he slid off to the bottom of the boat, and the pressure eased from the throttle so that when the boat finished turning and hit the wooden dock Horatio was standing on, it came to a sulky but final stop.

Gun at the ready, Horatio slipped onto the boat with the uninjured policeman right behind him. Bradley was lying in a heap on the boat’s muddy bottom; tucked next to him, though he seemed unable or unwilling to reach for it, was the last of the black, sleek Benelli rifles.

Horatio crouched down to check for any other weapons; under camouflage hunting gear he felt the hard lines of an armored vest. The younger Blox was bleeding from a shoulder wound: the first shot had apparently hit him on the armor, but with enough force that he’d fallen forward just enough so the second shot had slipped in through the armpit and shattered his shoulder. The pain had to be excruciating, but where once Tabitha Flynn had valiantly struggled to survive with a nigh-identical wound, Bradley laid on his back and looked up at Horatio in shocked puzzlement, a wounded animal unable to comprehend why his body has betrayed him.

“Well, Bradley.” Horatio kept his gun level as the officer killed the engine and tied the boat to the dock. “I guess you make an even worse prey than you make a predator, hm? Officer, would you book this man, please.”

“Yes, sir.” The policeman bent down to patch Bradley’s shoulder before dragging him away, but he spared Horatio a perplexed, admiring look. “Hope you don’t mind my saying so, sir… that was a helluva shot.”

Horatio paused at that.

The chopper burst overhead, flattening the vegetation all around the hidden building, its very presence a beacon upon which the massive operation could converge. Swamp boats gathered in clusters all around the area, some taking terrified girls out of the water, others arguing with people who suddenly showed no interest in measuring guns against very angry, very numerous, very well armed law enforcement personnel. He caught sight of Frank and the ranger escorting the wounded girl to a boat with EMT personnel, saw Ryan in passing as he escorted another girl, wrapped in his jacket, out of the building.

He started laughing then, very, very softly. “One in a million, officer. One in a million.”

Chapter Text

“It’s turned into a legal nightmare”, Calleigh greeted Horatio at the door of the MDPD Crime Lab building. “I don’t think there’s a single high-priced lawyer outside these walls.”

“They’re all here, hm?” Horatio spared a look at the interrogation rooms where, like hornets coming out of a broken nest, rows and piles of men in expensively tailored suits and women in severe business outfits were making sure the MDPD found their job very, very difficult to do. They were entirely unaware of the infinite patience the MD CSI team could exhibit under the right circumstances.

“It’s going to take forever to even get started processing them.”

“Which is what Bradley and his partner were counting on, that their customers would keep us away from them.” That was the one black spot in Horatio’s day – the one boat that had gotten away, protected by its ranger ID. It was not, however, a spot he expected would last very long. He was certain the same cool and incredibly smug attitude that Bradley had exhibited would bring the other half of this equation to his door. “Where is he?”

“Hospital still, under very close watch. His father’s here. And I’ve got something I thought you’d like to see before you went in to talk to him.” She handed him a folder. “Hot off the press.”

Horatio leafed through the folder as they walked. “Well now, this… this is interesting. Thank you, Calleigh.”

“I need to run the rifle you recovered from the swamp boat as fast as I can before someone here comes up with a reason why I shouldn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t. Unless you want me here?”

“No, let’s do that first.” As she walked off he turned to the policeman watching the door to the interrogation room he was about to step into and gave him some brief instructions. He stepped in and closed the door softly, somehow seeming to leave the chaos outside behind it. There was a single man sitting at the table, tall and gaunt, with thinning silver hair and, he noticed, the Blox nose and sharp blue eyes. “Mister Blox, I notice you have no lawyer with you.”

Alexander Blox stared at Horatio with patrician disdain. “I think there’s enough of that going around out there already. And I thought I would give you a chance to explain why you seem determined to hound both my family and my company in one go.”

Horatio cocked a brow at the man, and that familiar, feral smile came to his lips. He was silent.

“I understand you are directly responsible for putting my youngest nephew in the hospital.”

“Your nephew is responsible for the murder of two young girls, Mister Blox.” He laid down a few sheets of paper from the folder Calleigh had given him. “And by the time we’re done with him, they won’t be the only ones.”

Blox barely dignified the printouts with a glance. “I won’t belittle your expertise.” He waved a disdainful hand over the documents. “I will simply accept that you’ve been given incorrect information.”

Horatio stared very calmly, very coolly at the man. “Your nephew has been using Dream Hunt property, specifically your Benelli R1 rifles and your swamp boats, to hunt human beings in the Everglades in a very sick variation of a canned hunt, Mister Blox. He –” He threw on the table the pictures Ryan had taken once the tiny, metal door had been unlocked and Bradley work area had been revealed. “- even took a page out of your book, Mister Blox, and preserved the trophies for his customers.”

Blox was apparently ready to, once again, barely glance at the photos, but this time one glance was all it took. He winced, shoving the photos away and looking aside. “Good grief, man –”

“Don’t. You. Look. Away.” Horatio’s voice lashed out, black and cold. “Don’t you dare look away from what he did to those girls.”

They squared in a tense silence. Blox drew in a deep breath and seemed to brace himself anew. “At worst this… this…” Words seemed to fail him, so he moved hastily on. “This only makes him guilty of dealing with… with dead… bodies.”

Horatio smiled tightly; he could feel Blox’s armor of denial cracking, failing. “We can place him at the scene of the crash that killed Victoria Randall and Sarah Pierce.” He offered the stills from the surveillance cameras on the freeway; like any good hunter, Bradley had used the surrounding traffic as cover until the last moment, but he had not been able to stay hidden when Sarah had failed to crash the first time, merely veering away from him when she’d seen the Benelli rifle slung at his back. He’d had to come out in the open to finish the job, to face down another girl with her wits about her and a fighting spirit, to terrify her into a deadly mistake. They would never know if he’d meant to shoot at them or not, the threat had been enough. The stills were grainy, they could be disputed, particularly by the host of high-priced lawyers in Dream Hunt’s keeping.

But as he’d herded them, Bradley’s bike and its unique paint job had struck Sarah’s elderly Beetle.

That was why, when Alexander Blox stared at the gray stills and said, “That could be anyone!”, Horatio was willing to let it go.

“Maybe”, he said, taking out the printouts Calleigh had added to the folder literally as he’d come through the door. “But the rifle, the rifle that shot a girl to death last month, the rifle that shot at me and at a survivor while she was being taken into protective custody – that rifle was found in Bradley’s possession, and it has his DNA well-worked into it, Mister Blox. You see, this time, he didn’t have time to clean up after himself.” There was a polite knock on the door. Had he known Horatio, Blox might have known it didn’t mean the respite he thought he was getting when the CSI looked up at the officer guarding the door and nodded. “I believe Mister Gerler handles the hunting and legal interests of your company?”

Richard Gerler rushed into the room, not even acknowledging Horatio. “Al, what’s going on? Why don’t you have a lawyer?” Belatedly he seemed to notice Horatio, caught up to his questions. “I’m VP of acquisitions for Dream Hunt, and I do believe we need to leave.”

He was a very tall and fit man, green-eyed with very black, very short hair. He looked, Horatio thought, trim, rich, and freshly showered. Not that it mattered. He smiled thinly. “That would mean that you’re responsible for how those acquisitions are used, wouldn’t it? When they’re used? Who they’re used on?”

“Now that’s enough –” Blox started.

“I hired” Gerler gestured pacifyingly at his boss. “enough security to keep those weapons as safe from misuse as humanly possible –”

“Yes, you did”, Horatio countered swiftly. “Which makes me wonder how they got out in the first place.”

“Enough!” Alexander Blox snapped at Horatio in a tone that, likely, did wonders to shut unruly VPs and disobedient family members up. “I would think you’ve got enough targets without coming after Rick as well! Isn’t Brad –”

“Brad?!” Gerler turned in alarm. “What about Brad?”

Blox gestured at all the documents on the table. “He says they have Brad’s DNA –”

“Christ, Al, why didn’t you bring Angela in on this?” He turned to face Horatio, snorting his disdain. “If you have anyone’s DNA involved in this mess, it’s probably Gary’s, not Brad’s!”

“Rick!” Alexander Blox apparently wasn’t willing to trade one nephew for another, and he glared angrily at his VP.

Pity, Horatio thought as he saw Eric walking fast towards the room, that the choice was made for him. He gestured Eric in, who handed him a bulky manila folder. “Records confirmed our suspicions.”

“Thank you, Eric.”

“Oh, now what.” Gerler rolled his eyes heavenward, ignored them, and turned back to kindly, but firmly, defend his point. “Al, I’m sorry, but where would Brad had even had access to the rifles? Gary had access to the keys, and he travels down here –” He suddenly realized he was the focus of attention in the room and paused.

“Actually, Rick, I believe everyone at Dream Hunt’s main office could have had access to those keys, isn’t that right?”

Gerler paused. Horatio willed him forward, willed him to believe himself safe. Willed him not to know about that single hair Ryan had found in the SUV. Willed that smug overconfidence into overdrive.

At last, the man shrugged. “Any VP, yes.”

“Doesn’t that include you?”

Gerler smiled and gave a long suffering, why-am-I-humoring-you, sigh. “I don’t like Florida. Too many regulations.”

“Yeah, you head to California instead.” Eric stared hard at the man. “Must burn you up, though, all those fancy, custom-made guns sitting right there, and you can’t even touch them.”

“I’m a pro.” Gerler stared coolly at Eric. “I have my own equipment. It may not be as fancy, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Name brand is what you give the customers to keep them happy.”

“A pro.” Horatio smiled tightly at that. “Yes, I guess you are, aren’t you, Rick. You own a Weatherby Vanguard, a bolt-action rifle, rather than the semi-auto action of the Benelli. The only real money you’ve spent on it was to customize it prior to a hunting trip you took to Africa – you had it customized to handle a larger caliber. That seems like an odd image to present to your costumers, Rick, such an important man with such a… simple gun.”

“I prefer to think of it as a classic”, Gerler replied through gritted teeth, sensitive as any man to a slight upon his prized possessions.

Horatio had turned to stare at the vast mayhem outside the clear walls of the interrogation room. He wondered if Calleigh was right, if every lawyer worth the name was already spoken for – he was banking so very much upon it. When he turned to face the two men at the table he had a battered cell phone in a clear plastic bag in his hands. “This classic of yours, it’s cost you quite a bit of money, hasn’t it, Rick.”

Eric set a folder on the table. “Dream Hunt customers aren’t the only ones shooting protected and endangered game.”

Gerler didn’t even open the folder. He shrugged, spreading his hands, smiling calmly – uncaringly. “Heat of the moment. And I’ve paid all the fines; what are you gonna do, sue me?”

“W are going to do a lot more than that, Rick, a lot more, because all those heat-of-the-moment bullets, all those little errant shots and fines, all of them to the last documented one, match the two bullets the Medical Examiner pulled out of Gary Blox.”

Horatio opened the folder to the last photos added to it and placed it before both men, but he was not looking at Gerler; he knew the man was guilty, and he knew what part he’d played in the whole affair.

He was staring, ever so carefully, at Alexander Blox.

He saw the older man stare without understanding at the pictures of Gary Blox as he’d been photographed on the examination table, saw his armor crack like brittle china as realization seeped in at last, saw grief overwhelm him. He held pity only for the man who’d likely seen in the young Blox brothers the children he didn’t have. Alexander Blox picked up one photo and stared numbly at it, his voice a whisper. “Gary…?”

“People can lie”, Horatio pointed out, ever so quietly. “Bullets never do.”

Richard Gerler had twice started to argue, or to excuse himself to his boss, or to say who knew what, but at that he closed his mouth and very blandly stared at Horatio and Eric for a moment. “I think this conversation has gone on long enough without the Dream Hunt legal team here.”

“No.” It was only the one word, ragged with grief, but sure and cold, and it was the one word Horatio had been hoping to hear.

Gerler turned to Blox, blinking. “Al –”

Alexander Blox had laid a hand over the pictures of his nephew in a vain attempt to blot out the truth. “Rick…” His voice failed him, but only for a moment; he leveled a wounded gaze on a man that, Horatio guessed, he’d thought of as a best friend until that moment. “Rick, get your own damn lawyers.”

“Good luck with that.” Eric had the smug smile Horatio was not quite allowing himself to show. “Looks like all the good ones are already spoken for.”

Horatio put the bagged cell phone on the table. “Rick, do you know what this is? It’s a phone we got from Allan Palmer, one of the people you hired to keep an eye on all those guns. Then, you hired him to ferry your equipment around. See, Bradley had the idea, and you had the equipment, but you both are used to having someone else do your heavy lifting – and he, Rick, he is being very cooperative. When we found him, he was on the phone with his boss – should we see who it was?” Before Gerler could reply Horatio pressed the redial button.

Hidden somewhere in the pockets of Gerler’s expensive business coat, his own cell phone began to chime.

“Go ahead, Rick”, Horatio dared the man in a very quiet tone. “Pick it up.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Horatio felt Eric’s anger as they left the interrogation room where Richard Gerler was being arrested and Alexander Blox stood amidst the ruins of his life. “We got lucky with Gerler”, Eric said darkly. “Everyone else is going to tie this up as long as they can manage, it’s a feeding frenzy out there.”

“Not everybody”, Horatio said calmly as he nodded at the two officers he’d sent on their hasty return errand, and who were at the door of another interview room.

Natalie Ancherge looked up at him at once. “Did you – did you get them, the people – whoever did this?”

“You know, Natalie, I think we did.” He sat down slowly in front of her and measured her very calmly.

“What?”, she asked uncertainly.

With a quiet sigh, he fished a single piece of paper from his folder. “Natalie, you… You’re doing very well, for an administrative assistant.” He showed her the printout, a list of her bank account activity.

“I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with Tabby?”

“I was wondering what all these deposits are.” He pinned her with a steady gaze.

She skittered away from it. “I… I’ve just been doing a little mix-and-match.”

“Mix and match.”

She sighed, staring at her hands. “I just... You know, rich people, just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they don’t go looking for houses and apartments and beach condos the same way everyone else does. I just… got them the information.”

“Which you took from records of the realtor where you work.”

“I know it’s illegal” She said sharply. “You need a license and all, and I’m getting mine – I am! This was just a little –”

“This is by no means little.” Horatio let the numbers speak for themselves, as they had to him.

“They’re just commissions –”

“I am sure they are, Natalie, but they are not for any kind of mix and match, are they? You were looking for very specific information on realtors’ databases, and you… you were selling that information, information on girls living alone, girls who wouldn’t be missed. You… You were the one who found the girls these people were hunting.”

“No.” When she saw his expression her tone grew angry. “No. I –” Her voice broke and tears spilled and Horatio saw the veneer of whatever ignorance she’d cloaked herself with fade away. “Oh, God, I thought –”

“Natalie.” Horatio slowly placed before her the pictures, beginning with Sarah Pierce. “You sold these girls’ lives, including your foster sisters, for a few thousand dollars.”

“Not Tabby!”, she shot at him, her voice shrill. “Not her, I wouldn’t -! It – No! He s-said he was from a-a-a roommate service…!”

“You knew he wasn’t, though, didn’t you.”

“I d-didn’t, Ididn’tididn’t -!”

“You knew every time you found a girl who fit their requirements, you knew, Natalie, that you were putting them in harm’s way.”

“I didn’t give them anything on Tabby!”, she shrieked at him. “Just the other girls!”

“How many?” When she hesitated, he leaned closer, a very angry predator. “Natalie. How many?”

“I don’t know”, she sobbed brokenly. “Maybe twenty or so, I d-didn’t… I don’t –”

“You know, Natalie, I do believe that you wouldn’t have given them any information on Tabitha.” Horatio spoke with calm finality. “But she came to see you often, often enough that you fought at least once a week over her heroin addiction, and I’m betting she came by to see you at work, and I think, Natalie, that at your work is where they saw her. You… You were useful to them”, he said implacably into her wide, wounded eyes. “She… was just prey.”

Chapter Text

It took, as far as Horatio was concerned, entirely too long to sort the day’s legal mayhem. There would be enough legal loopholes thrown about later: most of the hunters involved in the horror were exactly what one would expect of clientele recruited from Dream Hunt’s customer rosters – obscenely rich and utterly convinced the law did not apply once you had enough zeros in your bank account. Of their core suspects, though, Horatio took comfort in the fact that only one might prove to be an uphill battle.

Whenever they felt their patience wearing thin, the CSI team turned to numbers they could understand: the nine girls rescued from the ‘Glades, or the two girls taken from the hidden building. Whenever word of a deal came up, Horatio turned to only one number.

Twenty girls.

He was desperately tired by the time the whole circus wound down to what little closure he was going to get that day, and when his cell phone rang with an ID he couldn’t readily identify he found himself fretting at his office. “Horatio Caine.”

He listened briefly, most of his attention still on the sounds and sights of the lab around him, seeking for something he might have missed. Then the words caught his full attention; he frowned – and realized he was feeling the post-case blues. He smiled ruefully, at himself and at the officer on the other side of the line. “I – no, that’s fine. Hm. Did she say where she was going?”

‘She’, according to her escort, had heard the news about the case being blown wide open and the killers being caught, and had thanked them most politely before hopping a bus for the nearest beach.

He found her sitting against the low stone wall separating beach from sidewalk, the early morning wind ruffling her white blouse. She had one sandal in one hand and had propped her cast against a small rock she had, according to the tracks, rolled closer for that specific purpose. “Well”, she said as he approached her, squinting into the early light.

He smiled, coming to lean against the wall next to her, staring at the rich pinks and oranges still on the horizon. “Well.” He paused, enjoying the scent of the city at his back and the sea before him – home. “They tell me that you’ve refused further protection.”

Rowan shrugged lightly.

“Does that mean you’re heading back home?”

There was a comfortable silence between them. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“I thought you didn’t like big cities.”

“I don’t. It’s…” She stared at the surf. “It’s different here. It’s not what I expected at all. All the other places I’ve been to, there’s always this drive… Always rushing, always reaching, always wondering what life’s cheated you out of that you need to cheat life out of back.” After a while she smiled. “Not that it’s wrong, but…” She shook her head. “I thought it’d be like that here, but it’s not. It feels as if… As if it’s Ok not to rush sometimes. To stop in the wind and the morning sun every now and again, even if it’s just for a moment.” Her smiled turned crooked. “It’s not even as expensive as I thought it would be, if you don’t mind the swamp for a neighbor.” When she saw him smile at that, her own grin turned honest. “He lives! He’s not asleep on his feet. Yet.”

“Yet”, he agreed. “Are you going to be alright?”

She shrugged. “I can see the odds, not the future. And you don’t need to fuss over me, you know. Just because I look like a crazy on your papers doesn’t mean I can’t hold a normal job.” When he smiled, she gave him a mock-glare. “And don’t go thinking just because I’m around you get all the luck. You got your one-in-a-million shot. Not that you believe it.”

They stared at the sea for a long time.

“It’s nice to have a little luck every now and again”, Horatio said quietly at last, the best he could offer her.

She leaned back to stare up at the sky with her mismatched eyes, and smiled. “Just a little”, she agreed.

He slipped on his sunglasses, stopping in the wind and the morning sun for that brief moment in time. “Just a little.”