The Surviving Girls

by Katee Robert

  Right then, looking down at a dead version of herself, she could see how cowering would be a legit option. Lei took a breath and then another. No. She glanced over to find Dante watching her with an unreadable look on his face. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

  “A couple hours until the medical examiner gets here and we’re able to retrieve the bodies.” He shifted closer, eating up the distance she’d put between them. “I can send Clarke back to the house with you if you need to go. Or Isaac, since you know him a bit better.”

  She almost said yes. She wanted time and space to get her head on straight and take the necessary step back to be able to look at this as if it were a case she wasn’t directly affected by.

  No, not affected—targeted.

  But that was the exact reason she couldn’t afford to fold. This wasn’t the end. She had every suspicion that the killer somehow was watching. Even if he wasn’t, the cops were. Lei squared her shoulders. “We’ll stay.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dante could tell that Lei wasn’t really okay. It was there in her too-wide eyes and the way she held herself perfectly still to avoid shaking. Even her dog seemed to know something was wrong because he kept shooting her worried looks even as he panted happily.

  That said, she wasn’t in danger of falling apart at that moment, and the crime scene was as fresh as it was ever going to be. “If you need something, I’m here.”

  She opened her mouth like she’d shoot him down but finally gave a jerky nod. “Thanks.”

  There was nothing else to say. Hovering over her might piss her off and distract her, but it wouldn’t help these two girls find justice. He kept one eye on Lei and walked back to where Clarke and Sheriff Bamford stood looking down at the bodies. “Interesting posing.”

  Clarke nodded, her blue eyes narrowed. “This guy is supposed to be a sexual sadist, and he posed them like they’re innocents.”

  “They are innocents,” Sheriff Bamford growled.

  “Yeah, no shit.” She waved that away. “I don’t mean in reality—I mean his perception of reality. Berkley is a textbook sociopath. He sees everyone around him as a means to an end, and he saw his victims as subhuman. He got it up enough to rape them before he killed them, but that was less to do with sex than it was to do with power. He debased them and made them suffer before he took their lives.”

  Dante studied the women on the ground. “We’ll have to wait for the ME, but their poses are night and day from the others.” He’d seen pictures of how the other three victims were found. Those girls would have passed for Berkley’s victims. These wouldn’t. “Either he’s slipped his leash, or he’s so hyperfocused on Lei and Emma that he’s raised them to worship status.” Neither option was a good one. With the unsub acting as a copycat, they could at least partially anticipate his moves. If he was off the rails for some reason, he could strike anywhere, in any way.

  The thought had Dante checking to make sure Lei was in sight. She sat against a tree, Saul curled up against her leg, both woman and dog watching the proceedings with wary gazes. Clarke shifted, bringing his attention back to her. He pulled out a pair of gloves. “We have to go over this scene before something else happens to contaminate it. If we can get a good layout set up for the techs, that will make everyone’s life easier.” Not to mention get them all off this mountain sooner rather than later.

  Detective Smith returned from the cars. “They’ll be here in”—he glanced at his watch—“a little over an hour.”

  “Plenty of time to get started.” They’d taped off the part of the clearing where Saul had led them through—which meant the unsub had most likely hiked in that direction. He knelt next to the tape, careful to keep himself off the trampled weeds. Dante wasn’t much of an outdoorsman, but he’d spent enough time around outdoor crime scenes to know what to look for.

  “Clarke, come here.”

  “What’s up?” She joined him on the ground.

  “This looks like two sets of prints, doesn’t it?” He pointed to the indentations where someone’s heel had pressed into the ground as they strode forward. About a foot to the right of it was a second set of much smaller footprints. But only one. Dante whipped around. “There’s blood under the girls.” It had turned the ground a dull red, though their bodies covered most of it.

  “And?”

  “And Saul didn’t need their clothes to track them up here. He tracked a corpse.” He met his partner’s gaze. “If one or both of them were bleeding, they’d have left a trail that even you or I could have followed—and they would have run dry long before they got here.” He’d need the ME to confirm, but Dante knew he was right. He felt it in his gut. Though he didn’t believe in the woo-woo the same way some cops did, enough experience honed a person’s instincts. Murder was his job—in a lot of ways, it was also his life. “One of those girls walked up here, and he killed her here.” The question was why.

  Actually, no, that wasn’t the question at all. Easier to carry one dead body than to carry two. Equally easier to subdue one terrified woman than to subdue two. Smart of him. But if he was weighed down with a body, the other girl could have . . . Dante leaned forward, noting the depth of the footprints. Those girls weren’t particularly large—they were actually on the lean side. Unless one of them had disproportionately large feet, there wasn’t a damn reason the smaller set of prints should be deeper than the larger.

  Unless she was carrying the dead body.

  Goose bumps rose in a wave down his arms, and he fought down a shudder. What the unsub had done to the other three girls was horrific. But forcing a girl to carry her dead sorority sister up several hundred yards into the woods and then killing her . . . There weren’t words to describe how monstrous that was. “Mark the prints.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.” But there was no bite to Clarke’s voice. She must have realized the same thing he had, because her blue eyes took on a haunted look. “We’ll find him, Dante.”

  “I know.” Even as he said the words, memories rose. They didn’t close every case. There were always ones that drew out too long and went cold. Sometimes a new killing would revive it years later, but in some the unsub never revisited that MO. There was no closure for the families and no peace for the victims.

  This would be different. He wouldn’t allow Lei and Emma to live the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders for the predator who seemed focused on them.

  They moved around the clearing in ever-widening circles, but aside from the prints, there was no convenient note left detailing the unsub’s plans or a knife with his prints and the victim’s blood on it. The bodies themselves were the biggest clue, and they didn’t want to shift them until the ME arrived.

  Dante checked his watch and then looked at Lei. Her adrenaline rush couldn’t last forever, and if he let her crash here, he’d have to convince her to let him carry her out of here. It wouldn’t do a damn thing to help her feel more in control—but getting her home would help. “Why don’t you take Lei back?”

  “Me?” Clarke shook her head. “No way. I don’t do the babying—that’s your department.” She hesitated, her blue eyes losing some of their edge. “Hell, Dante, why don’t you just talk to her? She looks like she needs it.”

  He couldn’t argue that, but it felt like the height of selfishness to take even the smallest moment away from the case, especially with the two dead girls lying there in witness. “You have this handled.”

  “That’s not a question, so I’m not going to treat it like one. No shit, I have it handled. I could process a crime scene in my sleep, and even these three guys aren’t enough to irritate me more than normal.”

  “Be careful. We don’t know where he went. He could still be around.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I could say the same to you. It’s not me he’s fixated on. It’s her.”

  With that comforting statement, she turned back to speak in low tones with Sheriff Bamford.

  Dante walked to Lei, letting Saul see
him coming. The dog hadn’t left her side once she’d stopped throwing that ball, and he must have picked up on everyone’s tension, because his big body shook with a silent growl when Dante got too close. He raised his voice slightly. “Lei.”

  Her eyes flashed open. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Aside from the obvious. He held out a hand. “Let’s go.”

  “They haven’t finished processing the scene yet.”

  From the stubborn set of her shoulders, she was as likely to bite his hand off as take it if he offered to help her up. Too damn bad. Dante leaned forward, blocking out her vision of the bodies. “Emma is probably worried sick, and your dog is hyped up from how rattled you are. You can’t do anything more for these girls here. Let’s go back to your place. We’ll call Britton, talk, and figure out a plan of attack.”

  Her gaze sharpened on him. “A plan of attack.”

  Knew those would be the magic words. Lei didn’t do well with inaction, and if she wouldn’t accept traditional comfort, he’d give her something else to focus on. “Yes. We’re not going to sit here and wait for him to strike again. He’s not a ghost. He’s a man, and men make mistakes. We’ll find it, and we’ll exploit it to find him.” He held out his hand again. “What do you say?”

  “I say that sounds like a plan.” She carefully placed her hand in his and let him pull her to her feet. “Saul, come.”

  They turned and walked back the way they’d come. Dante watched everything and nothing, trying to follow any sudden movements between the trees. If the unsub had been there to see them find the bodies, he doubted he’d stuck around. The man was too smart to be caught so easily, but stranger things had happened.

  “He’ll have wanted to watch.”

  Surprise flared at her mirroring his thoughts, and then he kicked himself for feeling surprise. Lei’s need to face down everything she feared would have resulted in her doing plenty of research on the kind of monster Berkley was. Her job would only further that requirement for knowledge. “You’re good at this.”

  “I have to be.” She shrugged and stepped over a fallen log. “I didn’t know. I was dating Travis for months, and I had no idea that he was capable of what he did. I’ve done everything I can to make sure I never make the same mistake.”

  He understood it, even if she was wrong. He’d bungled trying to explain that last time they talked, so he chose his words with care. “There are degrees of predators. From Gein to Dahmer to Bundy. Some of them you might not look twice at, but if you have a conversation with them, red flags will start flying. And some of them can fool people who train most of their lives to hunt killers.”

  “Travis is no Bundy,” she said flatly, her voice stripped of all emotion.

  He wasn’t so sure. Berkley’s spree killing was too over-the-top to be compared to Bundy’s long years of murder, but they shared key similarities when it came to personality. “Knowing what I do about his family, he was taught to lie from birth. That kind of social conditioning makes it easier to fool people who aren’t expecting it. You didn’t know to watch for it before—you do now.” Dante should stop there, but something about this woman disconnected the brakes between his brain and his mouth. “Do you trust anyone besides Emma?”

  “I trust Britton.”

  He smiled despite himself. “He does inspire trust, doesn’t he?” Britton was larger-than-life. Every single person on his team admired him, even if they didn’t always agree with him. Some of them downright worshipped him. He’d played the role of savior to countless victims over the years, though usually in cases not as extreme as Lei’s and Emma’s.

  Just a little normal murder. Right. I’ll make sure to bring that up in conversation next Christmas—further proof of just how far I’ve walked into the shadows.

  Lei ducked under a branch. “Britton was the first one who looked at me without any doubt that I was telling the truth. That kind of thing makes an impression.” She breathed out what might have been a sigh of relief as they reached the access point where they’d parked the cars. “We made it.” Dark humor lit up her eyes. “I don’t suppose the killer will decide to try his luck and ambush us so we can put an end to all this bullshit here and now?”

  Dante made a show of looking around. “It doesn’t seem like it.”

  “Pity. I have a lot of aggression to work through.”

  Lei drove. Once they hit the main highway, she knew these roads better than Dante did, and she had too much nervous energy to just sit in the passenger seat and hold still. Through it all, she kept shooting looks at the man beside her. She hadn’t misread his dry humor before. When they’d first met, she’d had him pegged as a by-the-book kind of guy, and nothing she’d seen since then had disabused her of the notion. It wasn’t that he had a stick up his ass, exactly, but he held himself a little too tightly. This wasn’t a guy who relaxed with a beer after work and kicked up his boots on the coffee table to watch whatever sports game was on.

  No, she’d bet her last dollar that Dante spent his free time going over cold cases or doing further work on whatever active case he had.

  She . . . liked that about him. She liked that he took the job seriously, that he’d been doing it long enough to be good at it, but not long enough for bitterness to take hold and sour him to the world. He still cared. He might have created a careful shell around himself to keep the darkness at bay, but in the center of it, he was still a good man.

  It drew her like a moth to a flame. No, that wasn’t right. Her attraction to Dante wasn’t dangerous, exactly. It was more the feeling of coming home to find a single light left on and knowing with utter certainty that she wasn’t alone in the world.

  But then he looked at her, and the carefully banked heat in his dark eyes gave the lie to all her thoughts of comfort and safety. Dante might not burn her to ashes . . . but he might light the match so they could burn together.

  How selfish can you be, Lei? You just drove away from two dead girls who were only in that place because of you. Ogling the beautiful FBI agent and thinking about how you’d like to burn for him . . . No. Just no. He’s not for you. No one is.

  The voice in her head sounded a whole lot like Travis.

  To distract herself—distract both of them—she checked on Saul in the backseat—asleep and twitching with doggy dreams—and said, “How does a rich kid end up in the BAU?”

  Dante huffed out a soft laugh. “You sure you didn’t get some training from Britton on the side?”

  “Nope.” Though Britton had offered to give her a tour of BAU offices if she ever made it to the East Coast. She knew what he was trying to do, and she wasn’t exactly opposed to the idea of being a federal agent . . . but she had Emma and Saul and their business in Washington. She couldn’t leave all that behind to run off to chase serial killers, and the BAU didn’t have a canine division. Her skill set wouldn’t fit, and she’d be starting from the ground up.

  She still thought about it sometimes, though.

  “How did you know?” When she hesitated, he shifted in his seat to face her. He’d managed to control the heat she’d seen earlier, and he was every inch the professional Fed again. It made her want to ruffle his feathers. Dante gave a slow smile. “Walk me through it and I’ll answer whatever questions you have.”

  He had to know how tempting that was. She had a lot of questions. “No circling. No changing the subject.”

  “Deal.”

  Like shooting fish in a barrel. “Your suit is a little too big, but it’s a much higher quality than your partner’s. Your grammar is damn near perfect, and the way you carry yourself is as if you’re used to being listened to and watched. It’s easy to fake having money, but you downplay all these things, which makes me think your parents aren’t too thrilled that their son joined the FBI instead of following in his daddy’s footsteps to be a”—she considered—“doctor?”

  Dante grinned, his teeth a white flash against his dark skin. “Brain surgeon.”

  “Of co
urse.” She’d bet Dante was just as meticulous as his father had to be in order to excel at a profession like that. He’d no doubt done his research on her, but she felt compelled to offer, “My father is a professor of psychology at UCLA, and my mother is a licensed therapist.”

  His eyebrows rose, though there was no surprise on his face. “Makes for living your childhood in a fishbowl.”

  “That’s what it felt like sometimes.” Perfect Lei Zhang, daughter of two equally perfect parents, in their devastatingly perfect life. Except when it wasn’t perfect. They might have saved their fights for behind closed doors, but there were still fights. Not that they’d allow anything so imperfect for their only daughter. There was no room growing up for messy emotions, because her mother would force her to sit down and talk through it until she wanted to rip out her hair. Some things needed to just be felt without being analyzed to death, but that wasn’t a luxury she was allowed. Poor little rich girl.

  Dante settled back into his seat. “People come to the FBI from all walks of life, so coming from money isn’t exactly a point against me, but we also deal with a large variety of law enforcement agencies. I don’t try to hide it, exactly, but there are enough things about me to get people’s hackles up without throwing money into it.”

  Because he was a black man. She opened her mouth, paused, and shook her head. Keep it light—as light as it can be, considering the current circumstances. “Let’s be honest—no one likes the Feds.”

  He laughed. “That’s true enough. Okay, you have questions—let’s get to them.”

  She checked the time. They had barely fifteen minutes of driving left. No chance to circle around what she really needed to know, so she didn’t bother. “You met with Travis.”

  Instantly, Dante was gone, and the FBI-agent mask replaced his warm smile. “Yes. We found the photo in his cell.”

  She didn’t want to ask, but she made herself do it anyway. “I need to know how that conversation went.” I need to know when he’s coming for me.