The air was cool and dry, and the sun felt good on her face. She took the road heading away from town, running on the edge of the asphalt. The river appeared occasionally through breaks in the trees, but the sound of flowing water was ever present. After a quarter mile, her heart rate was in the target range, and her mind began to drift. It almost felt like meditation, until the questions barged in.
Who is this killer, and what is his motive?
Is he finished, or is he just getting started?
Is there a connection between the victims?
There was an ugly truth about hunting a killer: the more people he murdered, the better the chances were of catching him. Finding a link that tied McGrath and Coughlan together might be the best hope for discovering a person with motive to kill them. If it existed, that connection was likely to be something nefarious. Something the victims would have taken steps to hide. For the moment, Rachel was betting on drugs, but only time could tell what they would find.
Rachel came to a bend, and the view opened up for several miles to the west. She stopped to catch her breath and took in the scenery, tried to imagine the killer planning last night’s murder. The Coughlan residence was situated at the edge of a neighborhood. High-density housing with lots of potential witnesses.
The best way to get in and out without being seen would have been through the woods behind the house. But with Jen Coughlan awake upstairs, it was only a matter of time before she discovered her husband dead on the floor. Rachel was betting that the killer wouldn’t have wanted to risk trekking through the woods for very long, knowing that the police would soon be searching for him. He would’ve wanted a vehicle nearby. A quick getaway before they could respond.
As her eyes swept the tree-covered mountains and the foothills below them, she thought about trying to find her way through that terrain in the dark. How easy it would be for someone who didn’t know the area to get lost. Then she thought about the roads cutting through the rugged landscape and how few there were to choose from.
After her run, Rachel stretched out on the motel room floor to cool down. Then she showered, got dressed, and tried to reach Braddock on the phone. When he didn’t pick up, she hopped in her Camry and left for the sheriff’s office. A hunger pang hit her on the way, so she stopped at a gas station and bought one of the prepackaged chicken salad sandwiches that had yet to expire. She pulled into the office parking lot and finished eating in the car before she went inside.
Braddock was in his office. “Sorry I missed you,” he said as soon as she walked in. “Ted and I were on the phone with the DA when you called.”
“How’d that go?”
He shrugged. “You get any sleep?”
“Yep,” she said. “Just enough to recharge. Even went for a run.”
“Lucky you.”
“Gave me some time to think about our killer.”
“Come up with anything good?”
“Maybe. Not sure if it’ll amount to much, though. Did they finish processing the house?”
“Yeah. Nothing to report there.”
“That figures. What’s Shane up to now?”
Braddock stood up and said, “Come on. You’ll get a kick out of this.”
She followed him to the conference room where Fisher and Melissa Howard, the deputy assigned to help index the case file, were huddled in front of a laptop. There were pages of notes, sketches, photographs, and canvass questionnaires spread out across the table.
Fisher looked up and said, “Hey, Chief, Rachel. We’ve just about got our spreadsheet knocked out. Next we’re gonna work on sorting through all these pictures. I’m thinking we can make a grid layout of the crime scenes and then number the photos according to what coordinates they belong to. Carly took so many of ’em, I figured it would help us to know what we’re lookin’ at.”
Braddock leaned toward Rachel and said, “I think you created a monster.”
For the first time in her career, Rachel worried that she had overemphasized the importance of organization. “I think that’s a great idea,” she said, “but I’m surprised to see you doing it now.”
“Why?” Fisher asked.
“Well . . . I thought you’d be busy trying to learn as much as you can about the victims. Looking for a connection between them.”
He gave Braddock a perplexed look.
Braddock said, “There was a little development while you were at the motel. SBI is sending us an investigator tomorrow. Ted thinks it’s best if we take some time to get our paperwork in order before he gets here.”
“I see.” And Rachel understood the subtext as well. Pritchard was eager to put the investigation in the SBI’s hands, and he didn’t want his detectives making any mistakes the day before they arrived.
Fisher turned his attention back to the computer screen, and Braddock said, “Let’s take a walk.”
They went outside, and he led her down a sidewalk toward the corner of the building. Once they were far enough away from the entrance, he said, “I don’t really like the idea of us sitting on our asses while we wait for this guy to show up, but Ted and the DA are both in agreement. Apparently you’ve done too good of a job convincing them that this case is going to hinge on the victimology. They don’t want us conducting any interviews without SBI being involved. So that thing you were telling me about a few minutes ago . . . the thing you thought of while you were running . . . any chance it’s something we can look into without talking to anyone who knew the victims?”
“Did your patrol captain know either one of them?”
“If he did, he hasn’t said anything to me about it.”
“Let’s go talk to him.”
Curtis’s office was next door to Braddock’s. He was sitting behind his desk looking over an arrest report when they walked in.
“Anything interesting?” Braddock asked as he closed the door.
“Drunk driver,” Curtis said, scratching his chin. “What are you all conspiring about?”
“Best to let her explain.”
“We were hoping you could help us with something,” Rachel said.
Curtis laid the report on his desk and leaned back in his chair. “All right.”
“Last night, you helped coordinate the search with the city police?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I was thinking the killer had to park somewhere close by, but not in the neighborhood or he would’ve risked someone seeing his car.”
Curtis’s mustache tilted with a half smile. “Makes sense.”
“And I figure he probably used the woods behind the house as cover for his approach and escape.”
He seemed to study her for a moment, then he glanced at Braddock, sat forward, and began working the mouse on his desktop. He made a few clicks and spun his monitor so Rachel could see the screen. It was a satellite image from Google Maps. An overhead view of the town surrounded by an ocean of undulating green.
“We were thinking the same thing,” Curtis said. He zoomed in on the neighborhood and pointed the cursor at a tiny rectangle. “This is the house. We had deputies going all through the woods behind it this morning. They found a little valley that makes kind of a path through here.” The cursor moved across the screen and stopped at a spot on a winding two-lane road. “Comes to an end right here at Peachtree Creek Drive.”
“You think he parked his car there?”
“Not there. At least not without blocking part of the lane. The shoulder’s not wide enough to park anything bigger than a bicycle. The nearest spot with enough room for a car is about three hundred yards away. We think that’s probably the best bet. But it’s mostly gravel, so we didn’t find any tracks there. We also had deputies canvassing all the houses in that area, looking for anyone who might’ve seen a strange vehicle parked on the road last night. So far, nothing.”
“I don’t think he would’ve wanted to walk along the edge of that road for three hundred yards,” she said. “He seems too careful to take a chance on someone
spotting him or his car. Mind if I take a look?”
Curtis slid his chair over, and she took control of the mouse. She zoomed out and scrolled the map, then moved the cursor across the road as if she were extending the path the deputies had discovered. She spotted a line cutting through the trees and zoomed in. It was a faint trail. One that emerged onto a grassy field near a gray road. She followed it to the nearest intersection and said, “Captain, do you know where this is?”
He tilted his head and squinted at the screen. “I’ll be damned. As a matter of fact, I think I do.”
She looked at Braddock. “Anyone up for a ride?”
18
Braddock slowed the Tahoe once they hit gravel. Curtis, in the passenger seat, craned forward to search for the trail. Rachel was in the back seat looking at her phone, thankful to have a better signal than she’d had at the McGrath crime scene. She watched the blue dot on the Google Maps app and said, “We should be getting close.”
Curtis said, “I think . . . yep, that’s it. Right up there.”
Braddock stopped, and they got out, studying the ground as they approached on foot. The trail was a pair of parallel tracks that stretched into the trees on the right side of the road. The grooves were deep, as if they had been there for years, cut into the soil by truck tires making hundreds of passes.
“Any idea where this goes?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t think it goes anywhere,” Curtis said. “Looks like an old hunting road. Probably just comes to a dead end in the woods.”
“Yeah,” Braddock said. “Good money there’s a tree stand back there somewhere.”
“It’s not hunting season now, is it?” she asked.
“Not till September,” Curtis said.
She knelt down next to a sandy spot where one of the tracks merged with the gravel. “Then I think I might have just found a partial of our killer’s tire tread.”
“I’ll do you one better,” Braddock said, pointing at the ground a few feet away.
Rachel walked over and saw it immediately. A perfect impression, the full width of the tread and nearly two feet long. “Call Carly,” she said.
“On it.” He was on the phone a moment later.
Rachel turned to Curtis. “Think you can get a deputy out here? Looks like we just found ourselves a crime scene.”
Curtis waited by the Tahoe while Rachel and Braddock followed the trail into the woods. The tracks ended just before the path became too narrow for a vehicle to pass. Rachel stopped to look around and said, “I think he parked here.”
They walked in circles and searched the ground for a few minutes but didn’t find anything. Braddock said, “Let’s keep going.”
The footpath descended to a valley. Rachel looked at the steep incline in front of them, then at her phone and said, “If you go up to the top of that ridge and turn about forty-five degrees to the east, you’ll have a straight shot out to the road. Directly across from where the deputies came out of the woods this morning.”
“No shit?” Braddock looked at her phone for a minute and said, “Damn, you’re right.”
Rachel’s eyes traced a path up the hill between staggered boulders and trees. “You’d have to be pretty nimble to hike your way up there in the dark.”
“That tells us something.”
“Yep.”
“You think we’ll find anything if we keep going?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But there’s only one way to know for sure. Think you can handle it?”
“After you.”
They climbed to the ridge, turned, and made their way down to a stream. There were dimples in the bank, a recent disturbance of the wet sand, but the water had washed away any shoe impressions. Both Rachel and Braddock took pictures with their phones, then they hopped across and continued onto the road.
“He was right,” Rachel said as she stepped around a bush onto the shoulder. “There’s no room to park here. How long did it take us to get this far?”
“Less than ten minutes.”
“Would’ve taken a little longer at night. But that’s not a bad tradeoff, considering how secluded that spot is.”
“Hell,” Braddock said, “we never would have found it.”
* * *
The deputy was at the scene, talking to Curtis, when Rachel and Braddock got back. Carly pulled up a few minutes later. Rachel showed her the tire tread impressions and said, “We need some good pictures of these. Also some soil samples from here”—she pointed down the trail—“and back there where we think he parked. If we get a suspect, the lab can compare the samples to any dirt we find on his tires or his shoes.”
“Easy enough,” Carly said. She went through her kit and found a scale—a yellow ruler that opened up to an L shape. She laid it down next to the larger tread mark and took several shots. She checked them on the screen to make sure the numbers on the scale were legible, then moved to the smaller impression. After shooting it, she checked the photos and put the scale away. “You want me to cast them?”
“Uh . . . is Bruce on the way?”
“He left to go back to Asheville an hour ago.”
Rachel realized that Carly hadn’t bothered to call him. “Okay . . . have you ever done one before?”
“Several. In class.”
“What kind of material do you have?”
“Dental stone.”
“And you have everything else you need? Plastic spray? Oil spray? Reinforcing material?”
Carly nodded and said, “Yep.”
Rachel was still hesitant. Making a dental stone cast of a tire tread wasn’t the most difficult task in evidence collection, but there was only one chance to get it right. She looked at Braddock and said, “Your call.”
“All right, Carly,” he said, “show us what you got.”
* * *
While Carly was working, Rachel approached Braddock and said, “That tread is more than ten inches wide, and the pattern looks like an off-road type. Like those big custom wheels you see on full-sized trucks or SUVs with lift kits.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think you’re right.”
“You know what I’m thinking right now?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t need you here.”
“That hurts my feelings, Danny.”
He laughed. “What’re you thinking?”
“Cameras.”
“Okay.”
“I’m thinking we should find every route the killer could’ve used to get to and from this location. And McGrath’s house too. There aren’t that many. Then we find a camera on each one of those roads . . . a gas station, an ATM, whatever . . . and we collect the footage from the time frames of the murders. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch a shot of a big truck driving by.”
“Hell yeah,” he said. His mouth formed a thin smile. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
19
When they got back to the office, Braddock printed out a map and gave it to Fisher.
“I don’t know, Chief,” Fisher said. “I doubt all these roads are gonna have cameras on ’em.”
“Maybe not, but it’s all we’ve got to work with right now,” Braddock said. “Hit every place along every route he could’ve taken, and let’s hope you get lucky. Where’s Tina?”
“Should be on her way back. She took a late lunch.”
“All right. Get her to help you. And ask Melvin to give you a couple of guys too.”
Fisher left, and Braddock said, “I don’t think he’s quite as excited about this latest development as we are.”
“I’m sure he’s getting pretty tired by now,” Rachel said. “Speaking of which . . .”
Braddock yawned and rubbed his eyes. “I’m good. Just need some coffee. Another half gallon or so, and I’ll be right as rain.” He checked his watch. “We’d better find Ted and give him an update.”
Pritchard was in the conference room looking through the crime scene photos. When Braddock told him about the tire tracks and the search for came
ra footage, he said, “Well, damn. That’s a lucky break.”
“More like good detective work,” Braddock said, glancing at Rachel.
“Right . . . of course.” He looked back at the photos. “I hope it helps us find this son of a bitch before he does this to someone else.”
Braddock yawned again.
“You should get some rest,” Rachel said. “There’s not much you can do here right now, anyway.”
He shook his head. “We’ve got a press conference in an hour.”
“I can handle that,” Pritchard said, looking up. “And she’s right. You look like hell. Go home and get some sleep. That’s an order.”
He stared at the floor for a moment, like he was deciding whether to protest, then he said, “All right. Y’all call me, though, if anything happens.”
Rachel followed him outside. A news van was sitting at the curb with its side door open. The cameraman leaned against the fender, smoking a cigarette, while the reporter paced up and down the sidewalk with a phone pressed to her ear.
“Kinda glad I won’t be here for that,” Braddock said. “What are you gonna do?”
“Go to the motel,” she said. “Make some notes. Think a little. See if I can come up with any ideas.”
“Call me if you do.”
* * *
Rachel went back to the Fontana Lodge and thought about the killer. She sat on the bed with a notepad and wrote down everything she knew about him.
Or her?
She couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was a woman, even though the big truck with the custom wheels suggested a man.
He/she is careful. Disciplined. Has a high degree of self-control. Doesn’t display rage toward the victims.
He/she knows the area. Is able to climb and move quickly over difficult terrain, even in the dark.
He/she knows the victims’ routines. Might be able to pick locks. Understands forensics.
She stared at her notes for a few minutes, then dropped the pad, fell back on the bed, and closed her eyes. She revisited the crime scenes in her mind and thought about how much the killer had to know about his victims. McGrath was easy. Anyone who went to the Riverside Pub would have known his work schedule, would have known when to catch him coming home alone at night.
Among the Dead Page 8
