The Surviving Girls

by Katee Robert

  He climbed out of his car and headed inside. As he strode down the hallway to the autopsy room, the scent of the building clung to the back of his tongue. Death and chemicals and something like sorrow. It had always seemed strange to him that sorrow had a smell, but he’d spent enough time around murder victims and their families to recognize it.

  Detective Smith had arrived before Dante, and he spoke softly into his phone just outside the doors leading to the bodies. He held up a hand to stop Dante and hung up. “Heard about your partner from Sheriff Bamford. We’ll do what we can from this end, too.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  Smith looked through the narrow windows to where Dr. Franco stood next to the two victims. “This doesn’t sit right, you know? This bastard is playing games.”

  “Yeah, he is.” He wasn’t in the mood for small talk, but obviously the detective was, so Dante forced himself to smooth away any impatience. The locals wouldn’t share information if he antagonized them, and snapping at Smith for no damn reason would do exactly that. “Have there been any developments?”

  “There were some fibers found on Luna, but God knows how long it’ll take the lab to process.” Detective Smith snorted. “Won’t matter anyways. Fiber and hair aren’t good enough evidence to link a crime to a person. Did you know that shit?”

  “I did.” New technology had proved that both fiber and hair samples were inconclusive when it came to matching up with their sources. Realizing how many cases had been solved with inconclusive evidence had sent a lot of people into a frenzy. “It still helps to have as much information as possible.” Even if they couldn’t link the fibers back to a specific vehicle or piece of clothing, they could narrow down a number of other things. It would give them a place to start. Hopefully.

  Smith huffed. “Guess so. We want this freak caught as quickly as possible. Both the college and the girls’ parents are breathing down my neck. The rest of the sororities want a statement saying that their girls are safe.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “I can’t make assurances like that. We don’t know where he’s striking next. We don’t know who he is or if he knew the girls. We don’t know shit.”

  “We know that he’s connected to Berkley. And to the survivors.” He belatedly realized he hadn’t updated Smith on the break-in. “We need to talk about that.”

  “After the autopsy.” Detective Smith gave himself a shake and strode through the doors, leaving Dante staring after him.

  It couldn’t be clearer that Smith wasn’t happy about being tied to this case. He was the kind of old-school cop who preferred to find the perpetrator, close the case, and move on to the next. No fuss, no muss. No politics.

  Unfortunately, politics were the least of his worries at the moment. With every death the unsub racked up, the public’s fear and anger would grow, and it would turn on the cops investigating before too long. These cases were never solved fast enough. It didn’t matter that Smith had played things right from the start—calling in the Feds at the first sign that these murders weren’t what they seemed was better than most cops did. No one liked to share or admit that they weren’t totally capable of doing the job without help. It created a whole hell of a lot of resentment when they had the truth shoved in their face and had to ask for FBI assistance.

  It was neither here nor there. He couldn’t worry about the future or the past or Clarke. Right now, the victims demanded his full attention, and they deserved better than to have him distracted.

  Dante made a conscious effort to let go of all the baggage clinging to him and headed through the doors after Detective Smith. The man had taken up the same position he’d held for the last autopsy—he leaned against the counter with his arms crossed and brows lowered. For his part, Dr. Franco didn’t seem bothered by the detective’s glower. He nodded at Dante. “I have bad news and worse news.”

  “Let’s get to it.” He moved closer so he could look down on the two girls. Even bracing himself for it, the shock of their features still set him back on his heels. At first glance, they were shockingly close to Emma and Lei. It was only when he looked closer that he noticed the blonde’s hair was a little too uniform to be natural, and she was a little thinner. The other girl’s skin was a shade too dark to be Lei, her face wider and her jaw more defined.

  Still . . . too close.

  “They were both killed with a slash to the throat, but their deaths were a good six hours apart, give or take.” Franco moved to a point between the gurneys and motioned to their throats. “Nearly identical slash from left to right, and judging from the angle and the depth of the cut, I’d say he stood behind them while they knelt. Either that or he’s at least six five.” He shrugged. “They’re not particularly tall for women, but I suspect we don’t have a giant on our hands.”

  They didn’t know what they had on their hands, so they couldn’t afford to rule out the possibility that he was extremely tall, but Dante was inclined to agree with the medical examiner. The unsub would get off on the power of standing over a helpless woman, of being well out of the way so he could enjoy the way the blood arced across the ground in front of him . . .

  Dante frowned. “There was a lot of blood on the ground, but there wasn’t on either of the front of their clothes.”

  “I noticed that, too. With the blonde it makes sense, since she was killed earlier, but he had to have stripped the other, killed her, and redressed her. Or she was dressed differently before she died . . . Not my department. That’s for you two to figure out.” Franco pointed to two sealed bags sitting on the counter. “Their effects.” He made a visible effort to brace himself. “Remember how the first murders were weird? These ones are, too. Just . . . different weird.” He touched the blonde’s hair. “This is freshly dyed. It’s possible that our girl decided to do it the day before she died, but judging from her school ID, she’s naturally a dark brunette. To get this color blonde takes some serious time, and the lightening products would agitate the skin on her scalp. There’s none of that, which makes me think it was done postmortem.”

  “She died first.”

  Detective Smith roused himself from the counter. “How the hell do you know so much about hair, Franco?”

  The medical examiner gave him a sour look. “My sister went through beauty school a couple years back. Trust me, I know more about hair than any man needs to.” He turned back to the other girl. “Which leads me to this one.” He held her hair up. “See this? It looks like it was hacked off all at once, the way you see people cut through ponytails. Unless this girl up and decided to cut her own damn hair, the killer did it as well.”

  It was roughly the same length as Lei’s. Dante walked to the bags with the girls’ effects and dug out their IDs. He held them up. “Close, but not close enough.”

  “Eh?”

  “He wanted these girls to look like the two who survived the Sorority Row Massacre twelve years ago. The other three weren’t quite right. These two were, but he needed to make some superficial changes.” Now that he thought about it, they’d been wearing clothing that could have come from college-age Lei’s and Emma’s closets, at least according to the earlier pictures he’d seen of them in the case file. The blonde, Jennifer, had on a cheerleading outfit, and Luna had worn a bright-yellow sundress. “He was sending a very specific message.”

  Franco looked down at the girls. “Not the kind of message someone wants to get.”

  “No. Definitely not.” He tamped down on the urge to text Lei to make sure she was still okay. She was fine. If she needed him, she would call. His hovering didn’t do a damn thing but drive her nuts. The insane urge rose to call his father and ask how the hell the man’s calm never broke during surgery. Surely there were times when the patient looked a little too close to someone he knew, or maybe was someone he actually knew.

  He already knew the answer.

  His father’s calm had never faltered. The man’s distanced attitude didn’t even falter in their home, so why would it at
work?

  Set it aside.

  Dante studied the dead girls, wishing Clarke was there. He needed her acerbic comments to keep him focused on the present and not everything that could go wrong if he made a misstep.

  Another misstep.

  He’d already made a few. Being around Lei made it hard to focus, and he kept missing things he had no business missing. It wasn’t unusual for Clarke and Dante to split up to work different aspects of the cases they were called in to assist with, but . . .

  No use to whip himself over it now. He’d made the choices he’d made. There was no changing them. “What else can you tell me?”

  “Luna was raped before she was killed, but Jennifer wasn’t. He didn’t cut them up the way he did the first three, and if this wasn’t obviously connected, I wouldn’t have any kind of way to confirm they were connected.”

  Luna was raped. Luna, who’d had her hair hacked off to give her an approximation of Lei. Bet he waited until after he cut her hair to do it. And he probably killed Jennifer first to keep Luna in line—and to give himself time to dye her hair.

  He’d kept them somewhere. Would he risk bringing them to a place he owned, or would he do something like rent a hotel room? The hotel room. Easy enough to give the wrong name if you pay cash, and any place that doesn’t require ID isn’t going to have much in the way of security cameras. Another lead that wouldn’t take them back to the unsub if they tugged on it, but he’d bet if they found the hotel room, they’d find the first murder site.

  The unsub also had access to a car—though they’d known that by the distances he seemed to travel with ease, from Seattle to Stillwater to the access road that had led them to the bodies. Hard to say if he’d rented it, but Dante’s gut said he’d already owned it—the better to prepare for the plan being enacted now.

  He’d raped Luna.

  Dante came back to that, to the significance behind it. His gut already knew this unsub was unhealthily focused on Lei, specifically, but this just further confirmed it.

  “With one exception.”

  He focused on the medical examiner. “What exception?”

  “Here. Remember how he carved up the other three girls? He didn’t do that with these two, but he did leave this.” He pulled off the sheets covering the girls so that Dante and Smith could see the jagged wounds carved into their pelvic areas. It took his brain several seconds to register what his eyes were seeing. “That’s a T and a B.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “B as in Berkley,” Smith muttered. “T as in Travis.”

  Or Trevor. Whoever the hell Trevor was, if he even existed.

  Franco grimaced. “He’s one hell of a fan.”

  Or maybe he just doesn’t want us to realize he’s been part of this from the very first murders twelve years ago.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Make one goddamn mistake and get trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Time had lost meaning for Clarke. The last thing she remembered was talking to Dante as she pulled out of the rest station, and the next she woke up in someone’s basement, her hands and feet bound. He must have been in the backseat. Usually, she did a full walk around her vehicle before she got in, just to be safe. There were far too many cases out there of women being assaulted or murdered because they didn’t realize they’d locked the predator in the car with them. She hadn’t bothered this time because it was a rental and she was at a deserted rest stop in the middle of the mountains.

  If I live through this, I’m never going to hear the end of it from Britton and Dante.

  She smiled through her dry lips at the thought. It was a nice thought, definitely not at home in this dingy basement. It looked like thousands of basements across the country—concrete floors and walls, broken only by a few beams running from floor to ceiling in an approximation of where walls would be if the owner ever got around to finishing it. She was dry enough, but the whole place gave off a damp vibe that Clarke couldn’t shake.

  The sole source of light came from a short, rectangular window situated high on the wall. Since Seattle was perpetually cloudy and drowning in rain, it was shit for illumination. Clarke shifted, testing her bindings.

  Coarse rope fastened her wrists together, her hands palm to palm. Between the thickness of the rope and the complicated knots, she didn’t have a hope in hell of gnawing her way free. The bastard had taken both the knives she kept on her person at all times.

  Even if she could get her hands free, the manacles around her ankles were the real problem. Fucking manacles. Who the hell does this guy think he is? Her bravado felt brittle, even in her head. The chain bolted to the floor had just enough give that she could theoretically make it to the bucket situated under the window, but going any farther was out of the question. Clarke really, really didn’t want to think about the acrobatics involved in that, so she focused on how the fuck she was going to get out of this mess.

  He had to come back eventually. If the only thing he wanted was to kill her, he could have managed that easily enough while she was unconscious. There was no damn reason to bring her back here and put time and effort into this setup.

  Though with whatever he has planned, I might be wishing for death by the end of it.

  No. She wouldn’t think like that. She couldn’t think like that. Despair might not kill as quickly as a knife, but it was just as deadly. The minute she gave up was the minute she signed her own death warrant. Dante would be frantic to find her, and Britton would send reinforcements. There was help coming.

  But that didn’t mean she’d sit here and wait like some goddamn princess in a tower.

  Clarke shoved her hair back as best she could and shuffled to her feet. There had to be something in this basement she could use to her advantage. It was just a matter of taking a step back and looking at the situation. She’d faced worse odds before.

  She just couldn’t remember any specific time off the top of her head.

  Damn it, no. I’m not giving up. There’s a way. I just have to find it.

  She refused to believe anything else.

  Saul’s barking brought Lei running from the kitchen. She’d finally managed to convince Emma to eat something, and now it looked like they had company. She opened the door and watched as Isaac’s cruiser crawled to a stop in their driveway. “We’re going to have to hold off on breakfast,” she called. “We have a visitor.”

  Emma appeared in the doorway leading into the kitchen with a butcher’s knife in her hand. Lei stared. God, we are so broken. She forced a smile. “Honey, I know you’re not keen on Isaac, but maybe let’s not threaten a police officer with a deadly weapon before ten in the morning?”

  She looked down at the knife as if seeing it for the first time. “Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t even realize I grabbed it.”

  Oh, Emma. Lei didn’t know how to fix this. She couldn’t even fix herself, let alone her friend. Some things a person just had to live with. What they’d gone through was one of them. She didn’t bother to try for a smile. “Why don’t you put that away before he sees?” As Emma disappeared back into the kitchen, Lei turned to face Isaac.

  He walked up the steps as if there were twenty-pound weights attached to his feet. Isaac swept his hat off his head as he walked onto the porch. “Lei.”

  “Isaac.” She didn’t want him there, didn’t want anyone in their house. Dante was one thing, because his presence didn’t . . . ruffle things. It was too early to really trust him, but something inside her relaxed when he was around in a way she wasn’t able to quantify. She felt like she could trust him, which was a revelation in and of itself. The only other person who’d made her feel like that was Emma, and only because some days it felt like they were two halves of a sick mess she had no name for.

  Isaac wasn’t like that. She didn’t have a lot of faith in his ability to do his job in the current situation. He was more than able to handle the various petty crimes that came from living in Stillwater, but they’d bypassed normal four murde
rs ago. Her stomach lurched at the thought, but she kept her unease off her face. “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing to worry about—just a shift change. I sent Rick home to catch a bit of sleep, so I’m taking over.” He seemed to notice her tension. “Is everything okay?”

  The temptation rose to spill everything, to tell someone that not only had the killer broken into their house and threatened Emma, but he’d been there all along, poisoning their safe space so thoroughly, she didn’t know how it would recover.

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t expose the throbbing nerve of her fear to Isaac. Eventually, she had to tell someone, but it would be Dante when he finally showed back up again. He, at least, knew the full story to date and had the knowledge to help predict the killer’s movements.

  And if Isaac knew how scared they were, he’d set himself up in their parlor or on their porch and never leave. It was the kind of man he was. He saw a need and he filled it, regardless of whether his brand of help might hurt more than fix things.

  Lei felt Emma’s presence at her back, bolstering her. It gave her the strength to smile and push off the doorframe. “We’re as good as can be expected.”

  “Yeah, it’s bad business.” He was mangling his hat in his shifting hands, his nerves getting the best of his usual good nature. And why not? Serial killers were supposed to be the stuff of titillating fiction. They weren’t supposed to crop up in small towns in Washington State where Sheriff Bamford made his home.

  She stepped back. “You want to come in for coffee or something? We have a lot of work to do today, but we can spare a little time.”

  “No, no, that’s okay. I just wanted to let you know I’d be out here so you weren’t startled by Rick’s being gone.” He stepped back, and his gaze went over Lei’s shoulder. His smile lost its strain. “Morning, Emma.”