“So, Maddie.” He wiped his fingers on a napkin and leaned his elbows on the table. “Now that the sex thing is off the table, can I ask you a question? Friend to friend?”
Her gaze narrowed at the word choice. But his expression was bland.
“Sure. What?”
“Why’d you get divorced?”
She drew back, surprised. She hadn’t expected something so personal. She hesitated a moment before answering. “We grew apart.”
He didn’t react, but she instantly regretted giving him such a canned answer.
“It was Emma, mostly.” She looked out the window, at the hustle and bustle of people going to lunch. “After what happened, I don’t know, we just . . .” She hesitated. They had grown apart, but that was such an inadequate way of describing the chasm that had opened between them.
Plus, if she was being honest here, it wasn’t really accurate.
Maddie sighed. She looked him in the eye. He was watching her now, very carefully.
“Everyone tells you people grieve in different ways.”
He nodded.
“Turns out, Mitch grieves with his penis.” She looked out the window again, because all these years later, she still felt the sting of embarrassment. “He had an affair. Several, actually. The one I found out about was a twenty-five-year-old nurse.”
“Ouch.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m not sure I even blame him, really. I was a bitch to live with.”
“That doesn’t excuse infidelity.”
She sat back now and looked at him.
“What? It doesn’t,” he said.
“I’m surprised to hear you say that.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe because he was a guy—a young one—she’d expected him to be a little looser in the morals department.
It was a dumb assumption.
“Anyway, it was a messy divorce. Not to mention humiliating.” She picked up her drink and took a slurp.
“Doesn’t sound very amicable.”
“It wasn’t.”
“So why’d you keep his name?”
She put the drink down. How had they gotten into this extremely personal conversation? It probably would have been easier if they talked about sex.
Then again, they were friends now. Friends talked about things. If Brooke or Kelsey had asked her the same question, she wouldn’t have thought twice about answering.
“Emma was two.” She paused, searching for words that would make sense to someone who’d never been a parent. “She didn’t have anyone but us. Her family.” And Mitch didn’t count anymore. He’d moved on. Maddie felt the familiar burn in her chest.
Brian was watching her intently. “You feel connected to her. By keeping her name.”
She nodded, relieved not to have to verbalize it. This was harder to talk about than she’d thought. She saw something in his eyes . . . something she recognized, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. Not pity, really. Empathy. This man had a heart, and that simple realization made her feel a swell of regret over the way they’d left things.
“What was she like?”
“Who, Emma?”
He nodded.
Maddie smiled. She looked out the window at the traffic, but her thoughts went to one of her favorite memories. They’d gone to a nursery to pick out shrubs for the yard. It was spring, and millions of monarch butterflies were migrating through the area. The nursery was swirling with them, and Emma had stood among the lantana, entranced by all the black and orange wings. Maddie’s eyes welled up.
“She was . . . a ray of sunshine wrapped in a little girl.” She smiled at him. “She could never sit still, ever. Unless she was asleep. And she had this infectious laugh . . .” A tear leaked out, and she swiped it away. “Sorry.”
The look of tenderness on his face made her throat ache. But he didn’t look uncomfortable. He didn’t look sorry he’d asked, and that mattered to her. It mattered a lot.
She looked away and regained her composure. She couldn’t believe they were talking about this. Most people never asked about Emma, never even mentioned her name.
Where did he get all this maturity? Maybe it had to do with fighting in a war. He’d seen death up close. He’d seen suffering. For all she knew, he was suffering from some unhealed wounds of his own that he didn’t talk about.
He was watching her, and she looked down at her untouched sandwich, suddenly desperate for a change of subject.
“We have a new lead from Vega.”
She pounced on the topic. “The detective in California?”
“LAPD.” Brian nodded toward her food. “Aren’t you going to eat that?”
She picked up the sandwich. “What’s the lead?”
“Turns out the victim, Gillian Dawson, had just rented the apartment where she was murdered.”
“Okay.”
“The previous tenant at that address was Nicole Sands, a twenty-two-year-old from San Marcos. Her physical description is a lot like Gillian’s: five-two, blond, blue-eyed.”
“No way.” Maddie gaped at him.
“Turns out, Nicole was a high school classmate of Katya and Jolene. She went out there for college, dropped out her sophomore year.”
“Oh, my God, Brian. Where is she now?”
“We’re looking.”
“And you think she was the intended victim?”
“It’s a strong possibility.”
“What other possibility is there? We need to find this girl!” She grasped his arm. “Brian, she could be next on the list!”
“Believe me, we’re working on it. We’ve got half a dozen agents out in LA dedicated to the task.”
She sat back and watched him, both shocked and alarmed. Another potential victim. Or maybe Volansky had already realized his mistake and found her.
She closed her eyes.
“That’s not all,” he said.
She looked at him, and something in his expression made her think that his bumping into her today was no accident, that maybe he’d specifically sought her out to tell her something.
But why hadn’t he simply called? Maybe he’d assumed she’d try to dodge him—which she would have.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We’re working a theory. Sam’s not sure about it, but I’m pretty convinced. We think these murders are all about silencing witnesses. Katya, Heidi, Jolene, and now Nicole. He’s tracking these girls down. Torturing them for information, in some cases. Then eliminating them.”
“But again, what information? We’re talking about college kids here. What could they possibly have on him that could be damaging enough to risk committing four murders?”
“We’re working on it,” he said, for the nth time.
From the floor, a chime. Maddie dragged her purse into her lap and checked her phone. “Damn.”
“What is it?”
“The sheriff needs me out in Wayne County.” She stuffed the phone back into her purse. “I have to go.”
“One more thing. Where’s your gun?” The look on his face chilled her.
“At home. Why?”
“Keep it with you.”
She looked at him.
“Okay?”
“But I don’t even have a permit—”
“You know how to use it?” he asked.
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Keep it with you.”
He scooted his chair back and stood up. Maddie stood, too. “You’re serious?”
He nodded.
“But what—”
“I don’t know what. I’ll tell you when I do.” He took her coat off the chair and handed it to her. “Until then, you need to be careful.”
Brian watched her dash across the street and pluck the parking ticket from her windshield. She muttered something he would have liked to have heard as she stuffed the citation into her purse and slid behind the wheel.
His phone buzzed.
“Yeah.”
&nbs
p; “You talk to her?” Sam asked.
“Yeah.”
Brian glanced across the park toward the bank, where he’d left his car. The place where all this had started. He surveyed the bank entrance and wished more than anything that he could turn back the clock.
“Well, how’d it go?”
Worse than he’d hoped for. About how he’d expected. He pictured her talking about Emma. The guilt there ran deep. It was painful to listen to. And he knew her guilt over her daughter was what drove her to spend her career working her ass off for perfect strangers.
“It went fine,” Brian said. “She agreed to start keeping her gun with her.”
And he’d make sure she did it, too.
“Okay, and what about the bank?”
“Another dead end,” Brian reported. “But I thought of something else, talking to Maddie. I may try Delphi again. I met the computer guy over there, and he seems pretty sharp. Think I’ll take this to him, see if we can get anywhere.”
“He does photo enhancement?”
“He does a lot of things. Most of them on computers.”
“Well, take it wherever you want, but do it soon. We’re racing a clock here, Beckman. And we’re running out of time.”
CHAPTER 17
Maddie emerged from her Bikram class energy-sapped and soaking wet. Hot yoga was a bitch, and although she’d been doing it for months, she still hadn’t quite bought in to the concept of exercising in 105-degree heat.
She stepped into the drizzle and tipped her face up to the moonless sky. The water felt good against her skin, and for a moment she just stood.
“See you at seven, Mad.”
She turned to see Kelsey making a run for the parking lot.
“What’s at seven?” she called over the rain.
“A skeleton recovery. You said you wanted pictures.”
“What if it’s wet?”
“Even better.” She smiled. “We’ll put up the tarp, and my students can get a sample of adverse working conditions.”
Maddie waved and hurried for her car. She slid behind the wheel and toweled off, regretting her recent interest in bone photography. Although an early wake-up call was a great reason not to stare at her phone all night. And an even better reason not to give in to temptation should a hot FBI agent come knocking on her door.
Right. As if that was going to happen.
Maddie stuffed her towel into her gym bag and retrieved her phone from her purse. She’d just missed a text from her sheriff deputy friend Craig Rodgers.
An even better reason to resist temptation—she had a call-out. She didn’t bother plugging this one into her GPS. It was an intersection she’d been to many times before, one of those spots in the Texas hill country where curvy roads and steep hillsides made for scenic views and fatal collisions. She texted Craig that she was en route, set her trip odometer to zero, and headed for the site.
As she listened to the swish-swish of the wiper blades, she mentally inventoried what she had with her. She should be good, provided Craig had already put out road flares. She thought about the rest of her supplies and reviewed standard ops for a motor-vehicle accident.
READ the scene. Reconstruct, eye level, angles, damage. The mantra had been drilled into her by her forensic photography instructor, whose voice always accompanied her on the way to a call.
Reconstruct. She would approach the scene, looking for road hazards or weather conditions that might have contributed to the crash. The obvious factor was rain, but there could be more, and she braced herself for a tedious night. One of the challenges of accident photography was that the conditions that contributed to many accidents also made it tough to get good pictures.
Eye level. Figure out which vehicles were involved, and get photographs from each driver’s eye level. In the case of a sports car, that meant crouching down. With an eighteen-wheeler, she might need a stepladder.
Angles. Shoot all relevant angles, including north, south, east, and west, and also corner photos of the vehicles. Corner shots would include two sides in the same picture, to provide perspective. Then she had to get interior views, which might show anything from seat belts that weren’t fastened to cell phones or empty beer cans. Also, she needed the license plates, which were highly reflective and tricky to photograph at night.
Damage. This was a biggie. She had to get debris, tire impressions, skid marks. In the case of a hit-and-run, it was critical to track down any blood or trace evidence. Sometimes an entire case could be built around a few chips of paint or a few shards of glass.
Crash work was challenging, but Maddie never cut corners. Photos were especially important, because the people involved were often shocked or injured. Sometimes their memories were fuzzy. Sometimes they lied.
Maddie curved around a bend. Through the veil of rain, she saw yellow lights whirring in the distance. A tow truck had already made the scene, and she hoped nothing had been moved. As she got closer, she spotted the wreck—a white hatchback nose-first in a ditch. She didn’t see an ambulance, so maybe the injured motorist had already been rushed to the hospital. She parked on the shoulder, flipped on her hazard lights, and went to get the gear from the back.
Reconstruct.
She scanned the scene as she zipped into a jacket and gathered her wet-weather gear. Steady rain. Slick turns. This patch of roadway was known for collisions, but she didn’t see a second car, only the tow truck. She grabbed her phone from the console and dialed Craig. Voice mail.
“Hey, I’m on the scene. Call me.”
She surveyed the patch of road illuminated by her headlight beams. Raindrops shimmered in the light. Where was the tow-truck driver? She looked over her shoulder. What about the first responder?
The back of her neck prickled. READ the scene. Maddie was reading everything about this scene, and something felt off.
Doing a slow three-sixty, she tried to penetrate the gloom of the surrounding woods. She glanced at the phone in her hand as she walked back to her car. On impulse, she dialed Brian.
“Beckman.”
She could tell by his voice that he was in the middle of something.
“Hey, it’s Maddie.”
Static. “—hear you.”
“It’s Maddie. Sorry to bug you, but—”
Crack.
Searing pain. She dropped to her knees.
Crack.
Gravel flew up, stinging her face. She pitched forward and caught herself on the bumper of the hatchback.
Gun. The word slammed through her brain. She hurled herself into the ditch. Pain lanced up her arm as she bumped against the car.
Dear God, I’m hit.
Another sharp crack. She looked around frantically. Car. Branches. Mud. She crouched motionless, trying to absorb the unreal reality as icy water swirled around her ankles. Someone was shooting at her.
Panic expanded in her chest like a balloon. She darted around the side of the car and cowered beside the engine block, panting. She looked across the road and saw her phone and equipment bag on the gravel, spotlit by her headlights and getting pelted by rain.
Her chest heaved up and down as she looked around wildly. Her ears rang. And then the high, tinny noise changed into a low grumble that could be heard over the drizzle.
Truck.
Her heart jackhammered. Terror gripped her as she crouched in the ditch and searched the highway. No headlights, but the noise was getting closer. Every cell in her body screamed for her to move.
She scrambled up the slippery embankment and darted for the cover of some bushes. Thorns pricked her legs through her yoga pants. She looked around desperately. Where was she? Where could she go? She was surrounded by branches and tree trunks, everything yellow in the chaotic swirl of tow-truck lights.
She plowed deeper into the woods. She peered through the trees and spotted her Prius. Was the passenger door unlocked?
A pickup halted beside her car. A large dark figure leaped from the truck bed. He stepped in front
of the headlight beams. She caught a glimpse of the gun gripped in his hand just before he leaned into her car and switched off the lights.
Maddie sucked in her breath. Her heart pounded madly as she listened to his shoes crunch over the gravel. When he hurdled the ditch, she turned and plunged into the woods.
How many were there? Was she surrounded? The branches reached out like tentacles, grabbing her clothes, her hair, her feet, as she pushed through the brush. Her arm was on fire. She knew she’d been hit, but she shoved the thought away as she plowed through the thicket. She had to move. She had to hide. She had to—
The ground vanished, and she was on her butt, slipping down a hillside. Something stabbed at her, snagged her hair. She tumbled to the side as the ground grew steeper and steeper, and she felt herself gaining momentum. She bumped over rocks, tree roots. She flailed with her hands out, grasping for vines, branches—anything to slow her—but the force pulling her was getting stronger. She was losing control. Her stomach dropped out as she actually caught air. She hit the ground again and tumbled through the stabbing darkness.
She smacked into something hard. Her chest seized. She couldn’t breathe. For an endless moment, she felt numb.
Then a giant wave of pain rolled over her. Her pulse roared in her ears. She gasped for breath. She managed to get a ragged gulp of air into her lungs as a burning sensation pulsed up her arm.
She clenched her teeth and tried to block out the pain as she rolled onto her side. The air smelled wet and loamy. Her face was pressed against something cold. Leaves? She reached her hand out, and another bolt of pain hit her. It took a moment to catch her breath. She extended her fingers and encountered something hard and textured. Bark. She’d crashed into a tree.
Her skull throbbed. The world was jarringly off-kilter, and she realized her head was positioned lower than her body on the steep slope. Another nauseating wave of pain hit her, and she was sure she’d vomit. But she swallowed down the bitter taste.
She closed her eyes, which made the world only slightly dimmer. She was in the woods. It was dark and rainy. She could hide here.
She could also die here.
Terror washed over her as she remembered the gunshots, as she remembered dropping to her knees. He knew she’d been hit, and he was still out there, coming for her.
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