by Rachel Lucas
By five o’clock the next morning I had given up trying to get any more sleep. I dressed and walked down to the front lobby of the hotel, noticing several armed law enforcement officials standing guard. I wasn’t surprised to see Logan helping himself to a cup of coffee at a beverage bar near the front desk. His tired smile was a welcome sight.
We hadn’t had any personal time for weeks. Between this investigation and his responsibilities with his own police department, we were lucky to exchange more than a brief glance. Now, in the nearly empty lobby, with the morning sun still hiding behind the eastern horizon, maybe we could steal some time together.
“Herbal tea, right?” He poured hot water into a paper cup and showed me a small assortment of teas in small packets.
I smiled in gratitude and picked out one of my favorites. We stood silently next to each other for a moment, stirring the hot drinks. Sometimes, with Logan and I, nothing needed to be said between us. Just having him near had a way of calming me and reassuring me.
“How are you holding up?” It was the same question he had asked before when we had been in similar situations. The question was casual but loaded. He knew what an emotional roller coaster I had been on. He knew my fatigue, shared my frustration and worried about me just the same.
“As well as can be expected, I guess.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but Logan didn’t always need one.
The lobby had a large fireplace to keep the cold away on chilly desert nights. A few stuffed chairs and a small couch were placed around it. We sat together on the couch, close enough to touch but not to draw too much attention. I sat my drink down on a small coffee table while it cooled.
“You’re doing an amazing job.” His quiet words, spoken from someone like him that dealt with crime for a living, meant so much to me. He knew I doubted myself, that I questioned my instincts and judgment. I looked over and met his dark, blue-gray eyes and saw the truth in his words. “I’ve been a detective for more than eight years now, and this is far and above the most difficult case I’ve ever worked. Even some of our veteran federal agents are struggling with this one. You’ve really done well, though. I don’t know if we would have made it this far if it hadn’t been for you.”
“We’ve been so close a few times,” I leaned my head against his solid shoulder. “She was just a few feet away from me this time. I didn’t even know she was there. If I had known she was there sooner, if I had known she was in the drive through…”
“You used yourself as bait and it worked,” he still wasn’t happy with me that I had done that, but I knew he was glad for the results. “I’m just grateful she didn’t get any closer to you than she did. If anything had happened to you, if she had hurt you again…” He grabbed my hand and gave it a good squeeze. “It was brave but stupid. You can’t take risks like that again.”
It was a plea as well as a demand. I reached up and placed my hand on his stubbly cheek. He’d probably been up most the night too and hadn’t taken the time to shave. The love and concern in his eyes was apparent. I leaned over and gently brushed my lips against his.
The rustle of papers tossed onto the coffee table before us broke us apart before we could go any further. I looked up to see a tired Director Phillips standing a few feet away then down at the table.
On the table were several enlarged, grainy photographs, all about 8 x 10. They had probably come from a surveillance camera.
“This was taken at the border crossing in Juarez a few hours ago.” He took a heavy breath, stretched his weary shoulders and ran a frustrated hand though his close-cropped hair. “She might be in Mexico.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
The lighting on the photographs wasn’t the best. It was obviously night time and there were only tall street lights at intervals along the walkway. There was a regular stream of pedestrians going both directions.
The focus of the pictures seemed to be a woman of average height. She wore a light colored T-shirt, possibly white and had on dark pants, perhaps jeans. She also had on a cowboy hat and dark sunglasses. I studied the photographs for a moment then looked up at the director.
“Aside from the obvious, what makes you think this is her?”
“Same description as the employee at the coffee shop gave us.” He seemed to want to pace the floor in front of us. I could feel the energy vibrating from him. He was a man of action. He had another lead to follow. “The border is only about a half hour away from here between El Paso and Juarez. She could have reached it in time. Then there are the sunglasses.”
Logan and I both glanced down at the photographs again. Yes the woman in the picture was wearing sunglasses, but so did most people that lived in sunny climates.
“These photographs were taken at one o’clock in the morning. Who wears sunglasses in the middle of the night unless you’re hiding something?” He had a good point, but still, everyone owned sunglasses. Cowboy hats were pretty common in the Southwest too.
“Any sign of the white truck?” Logan asked. It was one of the few other clues we had to go on.
“The parking lot at the boarder was filled with white trucks. Every Ford, Dodge or Chevy you could ask for. Without a license plate, it’s like trying to find a grain of sand in the desert.” His frustration was only barely kept in check. “We also know she’s been to Juarez before.”
My gaze snapped up to look at the director. He had my full attention.
“Juarez sounds familiar.” I conceded. Where had I heard it before?
“After the Texas murder, we traced a cell phone signal from her. It came from a cell tower near Juarez. She’s been there before. Do you have any idea why she might be going back there?”
For a moment, I sat there quietly and thought about it. Was there any connection between Elizabeth and a Mexican border town? I raked through my memory, conversations we’d had, information her mother might have left. I couldn’t see any connection. There was only one thing that made sense.
“The first time she came through Juarez, she had just killed the man who had molested her as a child.” The director nodded in agreement and I continued. “I think even then she was searching for her biological father. She must have been looking for Robert Marshall then. She might not have been able to find him but she knew she was close. She knew he had moved to New Mexico after he left her and her mother.”
There was the connection. Now it seemed to make a little more sense. The director had a determined gleam in his eyes. He pointed back down at the pictures still in my hands then pierced me with that direct gaze of his.
“Take a closer look, Caitlyn, is there anything about this person that seems familiar? Anything you recognize?”
I studied them again, leafing through the five or six pictures. I knew the director wanted me to make a positive identification. I felt the pressure of my ability to identify her weighing on me.
It was hard to say. With just a still figure, I couldn’t see the way she walked, her movements and mannerisms. It was hard to judge her exact height with little to compare it against except for other people. Even the features of her face were shadowed and blurry from being enlarged. I couldn’t make that call.
“It’s hard to tell from just a few dark photographs.” I handed them back to Phillips, unwilling to confirm it was her unless I was really certain.
He took as step back, trying not to show the disappointment I was certain he felt.
“Well, I have some our best forensic photographic analysts working on this and we’re using some of the most advanced facial recognition software we have.” He took the pictures back. “We might be able to get some actual video footage that might be more helpful. We’ve already alerted the Mexican authorities and sent a few of our agents across the border as quietly as possible. Of course, if we do find her, extradition can be a nightmare when dealing with the Mexican government.”
His voice took a hard edge to it. He looked right into my eyes as he said the next words. I think he really wanted me to understand
what he was saying.
“What she’s done could be a capital offense. We could possibly be going for the death penalty. Mexico won’t extradite if it’s a death penalty case, they don’t believe in that.”
Chapter Seventy
It was the first time that anyone had ever really talked about the aftermath to all this. I had been so focused on just finding her, of stopping this nightmare of a killing spree she had been on. I hadn’t taken the time to think about what would happen after we found her, if we found her.
She had viciously murdered numerous people. This was a death penalty case if I had ever seen one. Did I have what it takes to be there for a trial and watch her get convicted and sentenced to death?
Logan must have felt me tense next to him.
“She could just as likely plead insanity,” he suggested quietly, “it might save her life.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and thought about that. The first time she had been about to go to trial, when she had been suspected of her mother’s murder, she had fought the insanity plea. I had been willing to help her because she had been so convincing of her innocence. This time though, I wouldn’t fight it. It might be the only thing that kept her locked safely away while sparing her life.
Did she deserve to die for what she had done? It wasn’t my decision. If she was caught alive, if she was brought to justice, I was grateful I wouldn’t have to sit on that jury and make that kind of a decision. I had too much emotionally invested in this to be impartial and to make a rational decision.
“Well, there won’t be a trial if we don’t find her.” Phillips gave a resigned sigh. “I’m going to see if we can get any more footage at the border crossing. I’ll keep you posted.”
He was gone again, his stride confident and determined. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know if he ever slept and it seemed he rarely ate. Did he have a wife and family back home somewhere? I realized that I didn’t even know where he was from.
As he was leaving the hotel lobby, he passed Madeline as she was entering it. They paused and spoke quietly to each other for a moment before he continued down the hall and she approached us. I guess we weren’t the only ones with insomnia.
She sat down on a stuffed chair across from us. Her cream-colored blouse was without wrinkle, her camel-colored pants loose but tailored to her small height. She hardly looked as though she had been combing through a bloody crime scene with me just the day before.
“It looks as though I’m not the only one having a hard time sleeping.” Her tired smile was the first indication that all this was affecting her too. “Phillips just brought me up to speed. So they’re thinking Mexico now.”
She let the statement hang. I was familiar with Madeline’s methods by now. She never said too much. She wanted others to come to their own conclusions in their own way. She was asking for my opinion on whether or not I through Elizabeth had really gone into Mexico. She wanted my insight.
Had she fled south? We’d thought of the possibility before. It just didn’t seem like something she would do. I shook my head at the thought.
“I don’t see a reason for her to cross the border.” Logan was quiet beside me, listening to me. “I can’t think of a reason why she would want to go there. Besides, I don’t think she would want to risk possibly being identified. When we were at the crime scene, we talked about how see seemed to be even more frenzied than before. She’s driven, she’s not about to lay low in Mexico for a while.”
Madeline nodded in agreement.
“The note she left you at the coffee shop.” Logan had a look on concentration on his face. I knew that look. “She was trying to tell you where she was going next.”
“Do you still think she’s heading north instead of south?” Madeline asked.
“We had every major road going north out of Las Cruces closed as soon as we could yesterday,” Logan pointed out, “we would have spotted her.”
“I don’t know.” I stood up and paced a bit around the sitting area. “If you think back, most of the times she gives me specific clues, they end up being accurate. Elizabeth might not have a clearly drawn out plan as to what she’s doing, but she’s not completely random either. She said she was going to destroy the first people who rejected her. Her mother is gone. She just killed her biological father. I think we need to go back further.”
“I think you’re right.” Madeline stood up too, ready to put things into action. “I doubt there’s much more to do here anyway, unless they find her soon. I’m going to go see what it will take to get a flight to Iowa.”
Chapter Seventy-One
It took most of that day to arrange a small flight out of Las Cruces to Albuquerque. From there we were going to take a commercial flight to Chicago. Once there we would have to drive about three and a half hours to get to Dubuque, Iowa. We decided it would be best to fly to Chicago, stay the night there then drive on to Iowa tomorrow.
It would just be Madeline, Logan and me. Director Phillips would be staying behind in New Mexico. He was still convinced that Elizabeth had crossed the border. All available resources were still in the area, searching, hoping they could find her before any other lives were lost.
I didn’t have much to pack since we had made the trip here in such a hurry. My over-night bag was ready to go in just a few minutes. There wasn’t much to do while we were waiting for Madeline to make our travel arrangements.
Logan was monitoring the tip hotline, wanting to be available if any important information came from an eyewitness calling in. So far, most of the calls were either crank calls or people genuinely seeing a female in a white truck but the driver was just a local resident. Anything even remotely viable was followed up on as quickly as possible. The local authorities seemed to be genuinely trying to make up for not taking the situation seriously enough before.
Phillips was coordinating the agents sent across the border, making certain they kept a low profile. They didn’t want to have any trouble with the Mexican government if at all possible. They also didn’t want to start a panic if the residents there thought were was a serial killer in their mist.
There was little more for me to do than watch the news. It seemed as though the local media had been tipped off and were now starting to make a connection between Robert Marshall’s murder and a string of other murders that had taken place recently in other states. They must have had a reporter on standby at the crime scene around the clock, filming footage for their almost non-stop newscasts.
One local station had also caught on to where the FBI was staying during the investigation. Armed officers had to be kept at all the entrances of the hotel to keep the media away and we couldn’t even step out to get something to eat without a camera and microphones shoved into our face.
Madeline and I had decided to brave the reporters and try to walk across the street from the hotel to try a local Mexican restaurant. Two different reporters followed us, asking us questions as we walked.
Were we here for the Elizabeth Marshall investigation? Was it true that Robert Marshall was her father? Did we believe that she killed him? Did we think she was responsible for the other killings that had taken place in Texas and Washington? Was she a serial killer?
I lost track of how many times we said: “No comment”. It still didn’t seem to faze the bulldog reporters, anxious for an exclusive.
“I really do think the term ‘serial killer’ is over-used these days,” Madeline commented once we were shown to our table and a young Hispanic girl took our drink order. The media didn’t seem to be hurting the local businesses. The small restaurant was filled to capacity.
We had a table next to a window facing the front of the restaurant with a clear view of the hotel across the street and the news vans filling the parking lot. After we placed our order we snacked on the chips and salsa.
“Is the term over-used or is there an increase in the number of serial killers?” I asked in return. The chips were still warm and the salsa had just enough he
at.
“It’s a question we debate quite a bit among my other colleges at the bureau,” she took a sip of her ice tea and continued. “Are there more serial killers now because of the media hype? We turn them into national celebrities, their names become household names. They all have a middle name and the average citizen knows more about them than they do the people they elect into government. Are we feeding the hype? Are there those that become serial killers for the recognition it will give them? Because they want the celebrity?”
I thought about her words. They were good questions. I didn’t answer but asked one of my own.
“Or is the easy access to instant communication just giving more of a spotlight to crimes that few people would have known about a half a century ago?” I asked.
“Exactly.” She smiled at my insight as our plates of food were placed before us. “We’ve done extensive studies about the effects that constant violence in the media has had on society. There’s no question it’s had a drastic impact on the increased crime in this country as well as other nations. It wasn’t that long ago that a crime would happen in a small town and it might never be heard about beyond the next town. Now, a tragic event happens on the other side of the planet and we know about it almost instantly. With all the attention and notoriety the media offers these days, there have been a number of serial killers that we believe have just killed for recognition. We give them nicknames to feed the media, like ‘The Night Stalker’ or ‘The Boston Strangler’. But are we also feeding the ego of the killers?”
I could name several right off the top of my head that I knew by their nicknames. She was right. Almost all were called by their first, middle and last names too.
“We’ve even had a few that were so caught up in the attention they were receiving that they started confessing to crimes they didn’t commit.” I remembered following a few stories in the news about serial killers that had made false confessions. “It seems like some sick contest to see who can have the highest body count.”
