After a slight knock, the door opened and Georgina stuck her head inside, holding up a cup of coffee.
Josie waved her in, mouthing 'Thank You.'
"Yes ma'am, I understand your sister is ill and is worried. Nevertheless, as I have said, Aiden is a grown man. No ma'am, I am not being rude. I have my hands full at the moment, as does every law officer, fireman, rescue squad member and volunteer in Rawlings and every other town within a fifty-mile radius of the tornado touchdown zones. We were not the only area hit. If you want to put out a missing person's report on your nephew, you may do so. Yes, ma'am." Josie pushed her finger down on the receiver button. "Please, give me a break from over-protected momma's boys!"
"Mrs. Greer?" Georgina asked, rolling her eyes.
"The one and only," Josie said, sucking down her coffee with a loud slurp. "It seems she took over for her sister when it came to molly-coddling Aiden. Good grief, the man must be forty! Anything else going on I should know about?"
"Nothing the guys can't handle," Georgina said, sitting down in the chair across from Josie's desk.
"Nice blouse," Josie said. She eyed Georgina's low-cut, but not indecent, ruffled red number. "Did you give up on wearing the uniform?"
"I decided it was too confining and restrictive," Georgina said with a smirk. "It's a little difficult to find matching lipstick that goes with boring beige."
"Tan," Josie corrected. "Men prefer calling it tan or khaki. It's a more macho name for a color."
Georgina shrugged. "It's boring. Those damn tornadoes cost me a date!"
"Anybody I know?" Josie asked, looking interested.
Georgina smirked. "Clay. We were supposed to go up to Holbart for dinner, but that was before all hell broke loose. That damn tornado messed up our plans, and all the deputies have only had one eight-hour shift off in the last forty-eight hours. Clay said if he has time this evening, he'll come over and help clean up my yard."
"That sounds promising," Josie said with a smile. "I'm glad you got him that far. Don't let him slide backwards now."
"I don't intend to," Georgina snapped. "It's already taken me eight months to get this far. I swear that man thinks we're still living in the 1950s. Honestly, who thinks in terms of color nowadays? I keep telling him it doesn't matter and besides, as soon as I can get that man past my front door—I'll have him in bed in a matter of minutes. When I get through with him, the last thing on his mind will be skin color."
Josie laughed. "Good for you! Bring me the manpower schedule. I'm going to have to revamp it. We need to get all the guys scheduled for some off-duty time to rest."
Georgina fixed Josie with an evil eye. "Don't you dare mess with my evening plans, in fact, you'd better schedule a nice long rest period for Clay—he's going to need it."
Josie tossed up her hands in defeat. "I wouldn't dare, but you might want to let him get some sleep before you seduce him."
Georgina laughed and turned to leave when she noticed the board Josie had posted on the back of her door. "Is that all those murdered women?"
"Yeah," Josie said.
Georgina gave her friend a look over her shoulder. "You haven't been investigating, have you?"
"No," Josie denied. "I wanted all the known facts posted. Sometimes the least little clue can solve the case. Although what that would be, I have no idea. Most of those murders happened long before I came back to town."
Georgina walked over closer and peered at the photographs. "I'll tell you one thing," she said with a shiver. "If I were you, I'd stay glued so tight to Jack that I'd be wearing his skin."
"Why?"
Georgina turned around. "Well, first, because he's the biggest, sexiest hunk in this town, and second, because every single one of these women looks like you."
"What?" Josie rose out of her chair and walked over to the chart. "They don't."
"They do," Georgina insisted. "Look at those pictures: long, straight black hair, high-cheek bones, light eyes, some gray eyes like yours, some blue. The jawlines, and the noses, honey, these women are ringers for you. They're all almost the same height, maybe only off an inch or two. It's downright scary! Oh, my board's lighting up, got to go."
Josie stared at her crime board for a long time while a shiver ran up her spine. The victims did look like her. They were not exact matches, but there were definite similarities. Suddenly another similarity stood out to her—each of the women was born within a three-month span from November 1979 thru January 1980. Her birthday was December 15, 1979. Rubbing the goose bumps on her arms, Josie forced herself to return to the job at hand. She had a manpower schedule to complete.
Jack, Buck and Alex showed up before lunchtime bringing submarine sandwiches for everyone in the office. It was a nice break, and Alex didn't seem any the worse for wear after his morning of labor. In fact, he seemed quite proud of himself. Buck and Jack told Josie that the Captain of the High School football team, Rawlings young football hero, had stopped by where they were working and asked if they needed help. When they'd told him they could handle it, the seventeen year old had shaken Alex's hand and thanked him for helping out. They hadn't had a peep of complaint out of the boy since.
Out of the corner of her eye, Josie caught Clay and Georgina talking head-to-head over by the coffee pot, and she smiled. Shy, laid-back Clay and outgoing, brassy Georgina would make an odd couple. She made sure Clay's time off coincided with Georgina's.
Josie's afternoon went a lot like her morning, except she took a patrol car and went on a few calls simply to get out of the office for a while. The town was cleaning up quickly with everyone pitching together. The high school kids were organized into teams; the Future Farmers of America Clubs were out with hammers and tools, fixing fences and roofs and whatever they could fix. The members of Moose Lodge and the Lions Club were out in force helping out, and so were several other organizations and church groups. The women's groups were out, supplying food and helping people clean up the inside of their houses as necessary.
Josie was wearing her badge again, something that was taken for granted by the townspeople, but not by her. She had taken a deputy's badge out of the lock-up box in the office and told Clay she did not intend to usurp his authority. In his calm, sweet manner, he told her to keep her badge. There was plenty of work for both of them. They would figure everything out later when things calmed down.
Josie went into her little office thinking that although she missed being sheriff a little bit, she did not miss the pain-in-the-butt issues. She had spent another twenty minutes trying to calm down Aiden Roland's aunt because she was frantic. Josie told her again to fill out a missing person's report. Mrs. Greer didn't want to do that since she did not want to upset her nephew. At the same time, she thought the sheriff's department should spend all their time looking for him, or as she so vaguely termed it, doing something to find him since he was the mayor.
Her phone rang and after looking at the name and number, she picked up, her throat going dry. "Sheriff Raintree. How can I help you, Agent Coulter?"
"We have a report on another missing woman, and this one is real," Agent Coulter said. "Have you checked your emails?"
"Not yet, I only walked in the door a minute ago," Josie said, sitting down at her desk and opening her email. She opened the message labeled URGENT.
"Layla Blackcrow," Bill Coulter said over the phone. "This one is a kidnapping. She was leaving from her family owned business last night, when someone abducted her from the parking lot. Footage from a camera across the street shows her abductor carrying her off the lot. Unfortunately, they went out of camera range, so we didn't get the vehicle type. The film was too grainy to ascertain much. The labs are working on it. We're already interviewing everyone she knows. There is a recent disgruntled boyfriend, but so far, we don't have a name. In about an hour, we'll release the film footage to the news stations. Do you have any ideas about this one?"
"None," Josie said, disheartened at the news and looking over at her crime chart behind the door. "You mig
ht check on Aiden Roland again. He seems to be missing, too. He hasn't been seen around town for three days. I'm not accusing him of anything. It could merely be a coincidence, but—"
"It's too much of a coincidence for me. We'll check it out," Agent Coulter agreed.
Josie tapped her pen on her desk blotter. "Agent Coulter, what's the description on the new woman?"
"Close to the others. I attached a picture to the email," he said gruffly.
Josie opened the picture to see yet another woman with similar facial features to all the others. She glanced at the date of birth—she was one year off in age. She hesitated before asking, "Agent Coulter, have you noticed a similarity in all the women?"
"It's my job to notice, Sheriff Raintree," the agent responded.
"I mean to me," Josie said softly. "Have you noticed a similarity in the murdered women—to me?"
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. "Talk to me," Agent Coulter ordered, but less gruffly.
Josie swallowed. "It could be merely one of those things, but all these women look like me. Their height, weight and the ages when they were killed, match me at every point in my life. Each victim was exactly my age at the time of her murder. The age progression is unusual because the victim's ages are consistently within ninety days of my age. If you put these pictures through a morphing program, their features would overlay mine with very little difference. The killer buried them all in my hometown. It's spooky."
"It's damn spooky," the agent said grimly. "Sheriff, don't take any chances and stay alert. I'm putting my team on this ASAP. With your background in law enforcement, it could be revenge."
"No, I don't think so," Josie said. "The first four girls were killed before I went into law enforcement. The first girl was only fifteen or sixteen. I was still living in Rawlings and still in high school."
"Those coincidences lend credence to it being a local killer somehow connected to you. Stay alert, Sheriff," Agent Coulter snapped. "I'm giving this top priority.
Chapter 11
Josie printed out the picture of the new victim and pinned it to her crime chart, only to rip it off the board fiercely. The woman had not yet been identified as dead! She unpinned the entire chart from the back of her door and dropped it down behind the filing cabinets.
She went back to her desk and brought up the set of reports she needed, but she couldn't concentrate. She stared at the computer screen in front of her, but she didn't see the spreadsheets.
She was in another place, tied down, beaten and listening to her captor—realizing that she was going to die soon, but not before she was tortured—not before she was—
"Josie," Georgina popped her head around the door. "Mr. Hudson is on the phone and he's hopping mad. He claims Mr. Reber stole his garden tools during the storm. He says if someone doesn't get out there soon, he's getting his shotgun out and going after Mr. Reber. Do you want to take this or should I call Clay?"
Josie snapped out of her flashback, pulled her gun out of her desk drawer and put it in her holster. "No, I'll take it."
Georgina stared at her for a moment. "Honey, are you okay? You're as white as a sheet!"
"I'm okay," said Josie, pulling herself together. It had been a while since she'd had a flashback. "Getting out of this office will do me some good. Call Mr. Hudson and tell him if he has his gun out when I get there, I'll arrest him on the spot. I don't want any trouble from those two old farts, and I'm not taking any."
Georgina grinned, "Can I tell him that exactly?"
Josie smiled. "No, you have to clean it up, be nice and polite."
Georgina snapped her fingers in disappointment. "Have you seen the report on the missing woman?"
"Yes I did," admitted Josie and suddenly she turned and stared at the wall of filing cabinets. She stood there spaced out and unfocused again.
"Josie? Yo!" Georgina said, glancing over at the wall where Josie was staring. She didn't see anything.
Josie snapped out of it again. It had come to her suddenly, the missing piece that had haunted her for weeks. "I'm going to stop by my house on the way over to Mr. Hudson's. I have something I need to check on first. Make sure you call him and tell him to keep his gun locked up, or he's going to have to deal with me."
"I will," said Georgina, watching as her friend went out the door. She turned and looked at the wall of filing cabinets again, but still she saw nothing amiss. She shrugged her shoulders and went back to her dispatch board.
Josie disabled the house alarm and turned on her computer as she went through the family room. She headed straight upstairs to her childhood bedroom. Somewhere in the jumble of disorganized boxes, she might find what she needed. She carelessly tossed the contents of several boxes aside because they didn't date back far enough. She dug through more boxes, and when she found some old college term papers, she knew she was getting close. She'd kept a journal starting on her first day of class at Wayland Baptist, and she'd kept it going until she'd become a police officer in Oklahoma City. She'd only been sixteen years old, when she'd been thrust into an environment with older college students. She'd been only sixteen when she had decided on her life plan. She'd been alone, with no parents, no relatives and no close friends to advise her. Her journal had been a lifeline as she progressed from a frightened teenager to a capable adult. She found the old memory stick where she saved her journal when she had erased her old computer before donating it to a church rummage sale.
She plugged the memory stick into a USB port and brought up the program searching for key words she might have used and jotting down dates on a yellow legal pad, creating a timeline chart. She sat back in her chair, closed out the program and opened her email.
The dates matched. The first murder of fifteen-year-old Leigh Jamison occurred only days after her fifteenth birthday, but there seemed to be no correlation to her whereabouts since she was still living in Rawlings. It was after she left Rawlings that the dates triggered her memory. With her accumulated credits from her last two years of high school and summer school, she had only needed one semester of classes at Wayland Baptist University before transferring to the University of Oklahoma as a third-year student. She had come home in December during Christmas break to check on her Uncle Mason. Less than a week later, eighteen-year-old Donna Kerrigan had disappeared. During her senior year, she had returned home twice. Once during Easter break, and one week later, nineteen-year-old Penny Madison disappeared. Her second visit was over the Thanksgiving weekend, and again, a nineteen-year-old, Sharon Pitzer vanished. There was a long gap during the years she had been in Oklahoma City finishing her post-graduate degrees and going to the police academy. By that time, the County had placed Uncle Mason in a care center in Sayra, Oklahoma, and she'd had no reason to return to Rawlings. She'd visited her uncle in Sayra. She didn't return to Rawlings again until she was twenty-four when she brought her Uncle back to bury him and closeout his affairs. She'd boarded up the house and hired someone to keep an eye on the property. Not a week after she left town twenty-four-year-old Beverly Holensworth went missing.
Somehow, Josie's appearances in Rawlings coincided with the murders. Was she the trigger for a serial killer and if so, why? She had lived in Rawlings for over a year this time, and there had been no killings until they found the body in the ashes of Jack's house. Now there was another missing girl. What had triggered it this time? On the other hand, she could be way off base and simply being paranoid. She was experiencing flashbacks to her last sting operation, and that wasn't a good thing.
Josie addressed an email to Agent Bill Coulter, copying Sheriff Clay Tucker and Detective Rich Webber. At the last second, she blind-copied Jack. He would be furious if she didn't share with him what she was thinking or guessing. She hit send, shut down her computer, and pulled the memory stick and dropped it inside a small drawer that was more or less a junk drawer.
Her cell phone tune went off, and Georgina wanted to know her ETA to Mr. Hudson's place. "Seven minutes," Jo
sie promised, disconnecting the call as she walked quickly across the kitchen.
She opened the back door and screamed as pepper spray hit her directly in the eyes. Someone pushed her back as a cord wrapped around her neck. Blinded from the burning pepper spray, she clawed at the cord around her neck and heard a gurgling sound. She realized it was her—choking to death.
Jack left his cell phone in Josie's truck, which they were still using for cleanup duties. To him, a phone was a device at his command, not the other way around. If he missed a call, so be it—leave a message.
He, Buck and Alex had cleaned up five properties, so far. All those properties belonged to the elderly citizens of Rawlings. He viewed it as his civil duty and a good lesson for the boy.
All three of them looked up when Sheriff Tucker pulled his patrol car in behind Josie's truck at their latest cleanup site.
Jack was strides ahead of the other two, demanding to know if something was wrong.
Clay shook his head. "I don't know. Has Josie called or emailed you recently?"
Jack's hands went to his pocket first and remembered he had left his phone in the truck. He went to retrieve it. He listened to a voice mail from Josie along the lines of phone sex, and he smiled. Next, he read a text saying, "Read your email." He quickly opened his email and read the message she had sent him with her list of the murder dates.
He went over to Clay. "Did she send this to you," he asked, handing over his phone displaying Josie's email.
"Yes, and that FBI Agent, Bill Coulter, called to say he was on his way here. I've been trying to get through to Josie, but she's not answering. Georgina said that a little after one Josie gave her an ETA of seven minutes to arrive at Mr. Hudson's house on Green Creek Street. She hasn't shown up yet. I'm on my way over to her house. Maybe she got sick or something, although Josie doesn't usually go offline without first warning us. I called, but you weren't answering either. Then I saw your truck here, so I thought I'd better give you the heads up."
"I'll meet you over there," Jack snapped, heading for the truck while hollering for Buck and Alex.
Full Circle Page 23
