A man stood with his back to the window.
He turned.
The blinds raised higher.
Through the glass their eyes locked.
His were brown.
He was short . . . and balding.
She stared at him, uncomprehending. Pressing her hand to her throat, she tried in vain to swallow. The man she dined with on Monday night had blue eyes and a full head of curly blond hair. Adrenaline flooded her system, sending her into a near panic. But panic was a luxury that only the weak would indulge. And she wasn’t weak.
Not anymore.
She slammed her fist into her chest, as if to restart a useless heart, then turned and bolted for the door.
Chapter 25
Friday, October 25
8:15 A.M.
Task force headquarters
Highlands Hotel
Denver, Colorado
“Let’s move to the war room.” Caitlin touched Spense’s shoulder. It was time to get started on that profile and most of what they needed was there: autopsy reports, case photographs, witness interviews, and more. The amount of paperwork associated with Laura’s cold case made Caitlin’s head spin. It seemed if you stacked the boxes, they’d fill a skyscraper. Sorting out the relevant facts was overwhelming—a bit too overwhelming, to her way of thinking.
Hatcher checked his phone. “Meet you guys later. The commander’s on the horn.”
Spense trailed her to the war room, and they settled down in the back, surrounded by mountains of old case files. Twenty minutes later, she still hadn’t located Angelina Antonelli’s autopsy report. She kicked one of the more substantial cartons. “If I go postal on you, try not to take it personally.”
Spense reached down, grabbed her ankle and laughed, then he waved an accordion file marked Antonelli triumphantly beneath her nose. “This smell like what you’re looking for?”
“Yes!” She ripped it from his grasp.
“Keep in mind for later, you owe me big.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She flipped through the materials in the file, her chest deflating. “This can’t possibly be all of it.”
“Only one box with Angelina’s name on it, and that’s the only file I found inside that’s actually related to her. There are probably some additional items, mixed in with all this other stuff, but this looks like the only folder dedicated to Laura’s nanny.” He gave her an exaggerated wink. “I was hoping you’d be more grateful.”
She’d asked Spense repeatedly not to flirt with her on the job, but he never seemed to learn—and apparently neither did she. She found herself grinning back at him. The devil in his eyes was simply too hard to resist. She gave herself exactly ten seconds to enjoy the warm, sexy tingles now populating her solar plexus, then forced her mind back to the task at hand. “Be serious, Spense. This doesn’t seem right to me.”
“What doesn’t seem right?”
“All these boxes filled to the brim about Laura, and this one tiny little accordion file with a handful of photos and an autopsy report for Angelina. Even the autopsy was half-assed.” She pointed to a lab report. “Just look at this tox screen. Super basic. No special substances requested.”
“Hatcher already explained that.”
She wanted to strangle someone herself right about now—the cold case ME who didn’t order the proper tests. “Right. Angelina was in on it. No need to bother checking to see if she’d been drugged. They never considered her a victim at all, and yet, she’s the one who wound up dead.”
Spense’s expression turned thoughtful. “Wonder how her family feels about that. It must’ve been hard on them to lose her, and then have her murder go virtually ignored. I’m surprised they didn’t push back.”
Caitlin passed one of the handful of papers in Angelina’s file across to him.
“Aha. Only child. Both parents deceased,” Spense said.
“Angelina had no one to look out for her.”
“Until now.” Spense first checked over his shoulder, then tucked his finger beneath her chin, lifting her gaze to his. “I have a feeling you’re going to do a pretty good job of that from here on out.”
She looked away, her breath accelerating from just that small touch from Spense. “We both will.”
“Agreed.” He dropped his hand and sat back in his chair. “But Caity, don’t get too attached to Angelina. We gotta stay objective. Look at all sides.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t think anyone looked at this case from her side at all. I don’t think it was handled objectively.”
“People did get a little carried away by the Chaucer family being so prominent in the community.”
“Exactly. Between the talk shows and the obsessed bloggers, there were a million crazy theories. But you and I both know most crimes are simple and motivated by common human themes. Usually one of the big three . . .”
“Money. Sex. Power.”
She wagged her foot, thinking. “Let’s make it the big four. I wouldn’t count out revenge. But look at all the resources that went into chasing down false leads, like Chaucer’s business partner who’d never even left Tokyo for goodness’ sake.”
“Agreed. With all the wild ideas being thrown around, the cops got distracted from the basics. A young woman was murdered, and no one really cared, because Whit Chaucer’s daughter was kidnapped. And even though Angelina was never tried or convicted for her involvement in that kidnapping, she was presumed guilty,” Spense said.
“What evidence is there that she was really an accomplice?”
“According to the experts, the handwriting in the ransom note—and its phrasing resembled hers.”
If Caitlin’s mother hadn’t raised her better, she would’ve spit. Handwriting analysis was soft science at best. “Even if a good attorney manages to get his handwriting expert on the stand, most judges won’t allow that expert to present a conclusion as to the author’s identity. They can only state whether certain characteristics do or don’t resemble supplied samples. It’s nuts that one thinly supported hypothesis—Angelina might have written the ransom note—changed the course of the entire investigation.”
“You make some mean points.” Spense stood and stretched, then resumed his seat and began to study Angelina’s autopsy photos. “So you think Angelina was an innocent victim.”
“I think the cops should’ve considered the possibility.”
He brought one of the photographs closer to his face. Laid it down. Slid a magnifying viewer over it. “Stab wounds on the torso and genitalia. Like our Jane Doe in the wilderness. Wonder if they were postmortem, too.”
“According to Angelina’s autopsy report, they were inflicted after death. Despite the number of wounds, there was very little blood. And Angelina’s hyoid bone was broken—cause of death: asphyxiation due to strangulation. Sound familiar?”
“Yeah. And very personal. Overkill.” Spense steepled his fingers and rested them beneath his chin. “That could support the accomplice theory. What if Angelina turned on her partner? Let’s say she wanted the money all to herself.”
“Or she had second thoughts and wanted to let Laura go.”
“Either way. Then her partner kills her in a fit of rage.”
“Maybe.” But it didn’t feel right. It didn’t explain their Jane Doe being found in the same area where Angelina had been found, practically on the anniversary of her murder. “What if Angelina’s death was a sexual homicide? Strangulation. Stabbing. That definitely fits with a predator. No semen, but our UNSUB could’ve used a condom,” she said.
“Or the stabbing, itself, is what turns him on. He doesn’t need to complete the act to get sexual gratification. In any case, he left no trace DNA. We have a very clever UNSUB on our hands.”
“More like diabolical.” Caitlin leaned forward, certain she was onto something. She could feel it in her bones. “We know our UNSUB had access to GHB because it was found in Laura’s system. If Angelina was also drugged, she could’ve been rap
ed, and we wouldn’t see clear evidence of it, since she was, presumably a sexually active female.”
“Like today’s Jane Doe, Angelina showed no defensive wounds. Both women were strangled and stabbed but didn’t fight back. Our first ME screwed up.”
She slammed the file down. “Dammit. He should’ve run a more complete toxicology screen on Angelina. What if it was Laura, not Angelina, who was the collateral damage? What if Angelina was abducted for the purpose of sexual gratification, but somehow, Laura got in the way . . .”
“So the UNSUB grabbed her, too?”
“Laura has always maintained that Angelina would never have hurt her. That she couldn’t have been part of a kidnapping scheme. If Laura was right, then the UNSUB forged the note to make it look as though Angelina were in on it.” No one seemed to have listened to Laura, and that made Caitlin want to pull out her boxing gloves.
“Would’ve had to have been someone with access to Angelina’s journal. And clever enough to predict that the police would latch on to her as suspect. It’s simple, but one miscue can throw an entire investigation off course.”
“Victimology isn’t just key to profiling, it’s key to crime solving. If the police were focusing on the wrong victim, that would explain their inability to come up with a viable suspect.”
Spense turned his palms up. “What bothers me about Angelina as victim is the ransom.”
“We’ve covered that—”
Spense shook his head. “Not the ransom note. The ransom itself—it was paid, remember? And Laura was released unharmed. That doesn’t fit with Angelina being the primary target.”
No, it didn’t. “I don’t think we have all the pieces to this puzzle, yet. But we do have something.” Caitlin laid out Angelina’s autopsy photos on the table. Then one by one, she scrolled through the photos of their Jane Doe that she’d snapped on her phone before the body was moved.
Spense downed the remainder of his coffee and crumpled the paper cup in his hand. “Same MO. Same location. Same victim age and physical type.”
“Our UNSUB just might be a highly intelligent individual driven by sexual compulsion: a sadist clever enough to come up with the idea of leaving a ransom note to make his crime look like a kidnap instead of a murder-rape. Then he makes use of the ransom paid, because why the hell not? He releases Laura alive, and that takes the heat off. She’s been drugged, so she can’t identify him. It all fits with a kidnapping, so the police never realize who and what he really is.”
“I’ve never heard of a sexual sadist like that.” Spense pulled his cube out, solved it, returned it to his pocket. She knew he was taking her hypothesis as seriously as she was or he wouldn’t be working his cube. “Maybe he’s more like what Hatcher called The Opportunist.”
She didn’t have a Rubik’s cube, nor could she solve it if she did. She had to make do with doodling circles with her finger on the table instead. A few beats passed in silence, and then, she could practically hear something snap into place in her head. “What if we’re both right. What if we’re dealing not with a sexual sadist per se, but rather with a sexual opportunist?”
“Is sexual opportunist an actual diagnostic category, because I’ve never heard of it.” Even as he challenged her with his words, he was nodding an affirmation. He couldn’t dismiss the facts as coincidence any more than she could.
Imitating one of Spense’s favorite mannerisms, Caitlin turned her palms up. “If it isn’t, it sure as hell ought to be.”
“And if we’re right, that Angelina’s death was sexually motivated, I can tell you one thing for sure.” His voice lowered ominously. “Somewhere out there, there are other victims.”
Caitlin met his gaze. “And if we don’t catch this monster soon, there are going to be even more.”
Chapter 26
Friday, October 25
8:15 A.M.
Campus Ridge Apartments
Denver, Colorado
Laura rubbed her chest. There was a sore spot where her heart was trying to drill a hole through her rib cage. She’d run all the way from campus. Now, like a kid who’d gotten the wind kicked out of her by a schoolyard bully, she collapsed into a heap on the ground. She was breathless, and she was scared to pick herself up, because she had no idea what would hit her next.
On instinct she’d come straight here—to her apartment building—the first and only place that had ever been hers alone.
It was walking distance from Holly Hill College.
It was familiar.
It’s freakin’ dangerous.
On Monday night, she’d been kidnapped from this very building.
Easing herself into a full upright stance, she realized she could breathe a lot better this way. As oxygen returned to her brain, she could think a lot better, too.
Best not go inside. Her monster might be waiting. Best to stay here in the bushes like a hunted rabbit until she could figure out what to do.
Youth hostel.
That’s right. She’d had a plan when she’d woken up this morning. She could still find a youth hostel and stay there overnight, though spilling her guts to Ronald Saas was no longer an option. Apparently she’d never met the man, and she certainly couldn’t trust him with the locks of hair she had in her pack. The dinner had been a setup, and the real Saas might very well have been in on it, too. Her stomach clenched. This was a major setback, since she’d been hoping to find an ally—someone who could help her investigate and get to the truth.
Unbidden, the face of the woman with the blazing, energetic eyes—Caitlin—flashed across her mind.
Maybe she can help me.
In any case, she’d have to think about that later. For now, she had other things to figure out. Like who was the guy who’d bought her a prime rib dinner on Monday night.
The answer didn’t take a nuclear scientist to figure out, and it made her chest hurt again: her monster . . . or if not, then her monster’s minion.
In order to lock it safely into her memory, she closed her eyes, forcing herself to catalogue the details of her dinner companion’s appearance. He was tall, at least six feet, and older than she’d expected. He was dressed in a decent but ill-fitting dark gray suit and white dress shirt. His complexion was weathered, his nails tobacco-stained. He had unruly blond hair. His watery blue eyes had surprised her. They were hard—like they’d seen a lot of things most people hadn’t. At the time, she’d told herself the man had been wizened from his life as a newsman. But now, as she thought about his eyes, she decided she should’ve known something was off.
That window to the soul thing was really true.
Too bad she hadn’t tried harder to glimpse inside his.
She opened her eyes and shifted her stance to get the sun out of her face, and that’s when she saw him. Not her monster.
Cayman.
Her pulse bounded harder, and she instinctively took a step toward the man who’d protected her for so many years. But she quickly thought better of it and shrank back into the bushes to observe.
She should’ve been more observant all along—about everything and everyone around her. She shouldn’t have opened up at Monday’s dinner about her theories to a man she’d never met. And it shouldn’t have taken her so many years to open her eyes to the evil that seemed to follow everywhere she went. She wouldn’t make the mistake of trusting blindly again.
Not even Cayman.
Cayman approached the Campus Ridge apartment building with long purposeful strides and then disappeared inside.
Now would be a good time to run—if she wanted to go on being a rabbit.
She bit her bottom lip, hard.
She was done with that.
She was on a mission, now.
It felt good to choose, and she was choosing not to be the rabbit.
Now she was the hunter, and she liked it.
So what next?
Hunting required patience. So she waited, and for lack of anything better to do, she counted. When she got to fou
r hundred, Cayman came back outside with Ben, the nerdy grad student who managed the off-campus apartment building. Cayman and Ben walked right past her, halting on the lawn just a few yards away from her hunter’s blind.
“Like I told you Tuesday, I haven’t seen Laura in a while,” Ben said.
Even though there was nothing in the papers, she knew people were looking for her. After all, she’d been gone for days. The police had been at the cabin. She was sure they’d found the dress, and probably, by now, they knew it was hers. And if they’d found the note . . . her throat closed, and her legs turned to jelly. She mentally gave herself a hard slap.
Don’t think about that now.
She dragged her mind back to the issue at hand.
Okay. What were they saying? Cayman had been looking for her since Tuesday. But everything was fine until Monday night. The timeline didn’t quite fit. How did Cayman know that she was missing so quickly? It would’ve taken time for people to notice that she hadn’t been around. It wasn’t as though she had a job and a boss, or a large group of friends who would miss her.
Ben stood close to Cayman, like he was comfortable. Like he knew him.
There were a lot of good explanations. Maybe one of her teachers worried when she didn’t show up for class and called her parents, and her parents sent Cayman down to find out what was up . . . only . . . this wasn’t grade school. In college, skipping class was no big deal. No one called your mommy and daddy.
There could’ve been a ransom note.
Like last time. But—why would Ben seem so relaxed if he thought she’d been kidnapped? So how, exactly, did Cayman know she was missing so fast?
Her mind kept circling around one explanation. It wasn’t the only possibility, but she just couldn’t shake the idea, that maybe, just maybe, Cayman had been in Denver all along. There was that time she’d thought she’d seen him at the student union. She’d looked down to grab her books, and when she’d looked up again he was gone. She’d convinced herself she’d imagined him, there, lurking behind a newspaper. Because that was what she did. She was always telling herself she was imagining things. After all, that’s what she’d been trained to believe.
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