The Hunted Girls

by Jenna Kernan

  After several minutes, Clint’s grip on the wheel relaxed and the lines bracketing his mouth eased. Molly returned to the window. How had the canine known that her master needed the dog’s version of a hug? Nadine turned to watch the dog, jowls flapping, eyes half-closed and nose in the air.

  Animals were so odd, intuitive in a way she couldn’t comprehend.

  “Listen, I’m sorry if I got defensive. I know what she did. I know she’s manipulative. But she was a good mother to me and Carlie.”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “And what about you? Is your relationship with your mom any better?”

  A classic redirect, she thought, refusing to be sucked into this topic.

  “Currently, I have no relationship with her. That’s best for me for the time being.”

  He arched his brow but said nothing.

  Nadine spied a Mexican market. “Hey, pull in.”

  He did and cut the engine. “You need something here?”

  “Mexican Coke or Jarritos.” She was so thirsty after their afternoon and wanted a drink. The Mexican Coca-Cola was made with real sugar and was simply the best. But the mandarin-orange-flavored soda was a close second.

  He offered to go buy them something and she agreed to wait with Molly. Demko headed inside and she took his dog to the strip of grass and gravel so Molly could relieve herself. Afterward, they waited outside the market, in front of the windows, covered with Spanish advertisements. She suspected this was a place serving the migrant pickers that worked on the many farms and groves here.

  One handprinted poster grabbed her attention.

  The flyer taped to the window included a color photo of a smiling woman with light brown skin, long straight black hair, wearing bright red lipstick on her full mouth. She had a hand on her hip and gazed back at the photographer, her eyes full of mischief. The photo had obviously been touched up, removing imperfections along with personality to give the subject’s skin an unnatural shimmer and making her eyes larger than normal. Below her image were three words.

  Desaparecida

  Bianca Santander

  Desaparecida… as she puzzled the unfamiliar word, she knew. She was already on her feet and heading inside to find Demko.

  They had another possible missing person.

  Eight

  FRIDAY

  Demko met her for breakfast on Friday just before eight. Last night, something on an unrelated homicide investigation had pulled Demko from their dinner and she had not seen him again. They’d said good night via text, which was wholly unsatisfactory.

  “Missed you last night,” she said.

  “Sorry. Did you get the waiver logged as evidence?”

  “Gave it to Skogen’s second.”

  “Is that Coleman?”

  “Yes.” She sipped her coffee.

  “Listen, I ran a background check on that woman on the flyer from Belleview, Santander,” he said.

  “And?”

  “Nothing. She doesn’t exist,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Illegal immigrant is the most likely explanation,” he said.

  “Is that why the cashier at the market wouldn’t talk to us yesterday?”

  “Possibly. I don’t like it.”

  Neither did she.

  “Did you mention it to Skogen?” asked Demko.

  “Yes. We spoke by phone last night. He said he’d send someone over to Belleview to look into the disappearance.”

  “They won’t speak to the Feds.” He sighed. “I mentioned it to the sheriff.”

  “You think they’ll speak to him?”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it.”

  She picked at her oatmeal, wishing she’d chosen the bacon.

  “How is the profile coming?”

  “Moving along, now that I have the victims’ identities and some of their timeline.”

  “You question Arnold yet?” he asked.

  Barney Arnold was the parks’ employee who discovered the bodies.

  “He’s coming in for questioning at nine. So I’ll have a better idea after that interview.”

  “Should be interesting.”

  At the sheriff’s department, Nadine asked Skogen if they had anything on the missing woman, Santander. Until she was located or her disappearance shown to be unrelated, her absence seemed more important than interviews with suspects.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The Belleview poster. I mentioned about her—”

  He interrupted. “Oh yeah, yeah. No one would speak to my agents.”

  “Did she turn up?”

  “Unknown. The posters were taken down.”

  She frowned. “This might be connected.”

  “I can send my team again. But…”

  “What?”

  “She’s Latina and our two victims were white. Seems unrelated.”

  “It’s related until I know it isn’t.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Send a social worker. One who works with migrants and speaks Spanish.”

  “A little busy right now.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the interrogation room.

  “Okay. I’ll do it.” She lifted her phone.

  “You coming in?”

  “We’ll observe from here,” she said, the “we” referring to her and Detective Demko.

  Skogen’s eyes narrowed on her. But he strode away as Nadine called Tina, asking her to find a social worker who spoke Spanish and was willing to go to Belleview.

  “I speak Spanish,” said Tina.

  “You can go with a social worker. Not alone.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Nadine gave Tina the details, tucking away her phone as Skogen entered the interrogation room accompanied by a sheriff and one of his team, Agent Layah Coleman.

  Coleman, his second in command, was a tall, slender black woman with close-cropped hair. Today she wore a navy-blue suit with a tapered leg, accentuating her athletic form.

  “You pissed off Skogen, not following him like a puppy,” whispered Demko.

  She had. “Not his hound.”

  He gave her hand a quick squeeze and cast her a warm smile. The tingle at his touch darted up her arm and she smiled back. It was finally Friday and she planned to be certain that she and Clint carved out some alone time.

  In the interview room, Skogen took his seat facing Arnold.

  “You check Arnold’s priors?” Demko asked.

  “Yes. DUIs don’t bother me as much as the charges of indecent exposure.”

  “One including a sexual act,” he said.

  “Masturbation. Plea deal struck.”

  “Sexual offenders’ registry?” asked Demko.

  “Nope.”

  Nadine stared at the man. He was short, fit and dressed in his parks uniform, including a tan ball cap.

  He began tapping his foot before the first question. Although he showed no other fidgeting, his stutter grew worse the more he was pressed to go over the details of the discovery.

  Their request that he begin at the discovery and take them backward from that point flummoxed him.

  “I told you b-before, she was lying th-there naked. I could see her perfect ass under the branches.”

  Nadine found this description of a corpse both odd and disturbing. She jotted the word perfect on her pad.

  “You previously said the body you discovered was not covered with debris.”

  His eyes rolled up and to the left as he thought.

  Nadine leaned forward, interest piqued.

  Arnold shifted in his seat. “I mean under th-th-the tree’s b-branches. She wasn’t covered with nothing.”

  To Nadine this looked like a possible attempt to conceal his mistake. The use of a double negative could be seen as rendering the sentence a positive. A woman not covered by nothing was covered with something. Was that an unintentional blunder or just indicative of a poor education?

  “Did you touch her body?” asked Skogen.<
br />
  “No. I just nudged her a l-little to see if she was real.”

  So he did move her. By the blood pooling, Juliette noted that the second body had been repositioned after death. Postmortem, blood moved downward with gravity. The lividity—purplish discoloration on the skin—should occur at the lowest point, which in this case was the victim’s side. Yet she was found on her stomach. Was that Arnold’s doing? Nadine reminded herself to study those crime photos more closely.

  “Where?”

  “Her leg.”

  “You could see she wasn’t bleeding from her wounds.”

  “Yeah. I was close enough to see that.”

  “How close?”

  Close enough to ejaculate on the body? Nadine wondered.

  “A few inches,” said Arnold.

  “Did you move her? Change her position at all?”

  “I d-didn’t do nothing.”

  Double negative again, thought Nadine.

  She turned to the agent observing with them. “Ask him if he found her dead body arousing. Ask it exactly like that.”

  The agent left and, a moment later, entered the interview room relaying the question to Skogen. He nodded and asked her question.

  Arnold’s face turned scarlet and he slapped both hands on the desk.

  Nadine smiled. It was a wonderful show of indignation and outrage. But he’d missed a step. His first reaction should have been shock, possibly horror or disgust. But Arnold shot straight to offense.

  “Did they seize his computers yet?” she asked the agent who remained.

  “No.”

  “Hmm.” She’d bet her new plastic ID badge that there would be violent porn on his personal computer.

  “He agree to a polygraph?” asked Demko.

  “We haven’t asked, but I would guess he’ll decline.”

  Unfortunately, neither of those things made him a killer.

  “You like him as a suspect?” the special agent asked Nadine.

  “He’s showing clear signs of deception.”

  “Skogen wants him under surveillance.”

  “I agree. See if he’ll consent to a psych eval.”

  The agent nodded.

  “You guys get a DNA sample?” asked Demko.

  “He refused to provide one,” said the agent.

  The FBI didn’t need permission to collect anything Arnold discarded in public and could check the DNA retrieved against the sperm recovered from Karnowski’s remains. But a match would verify that he’d had contact with the body of one of the victims. Though not admissible in court, it would inform their investigation.

  “He’s under surveillance, we’ll get something eventually.”

  Demko dropped her at the office, where she checked in with Tina about the missing woman.

  “Did you find someone to go with you?” asked Nadine.

  “I found a woman who works with Head Start and drove her down there. We only got back a few minutes ago.”

  “And?”

  “We tracked down her brother. He told us he was supposed to pick her up after work, but his muffler fell off and he was afraid of getting pulled over, so she was planning on taking the bus. He said she called him in a panic on Tuesday around noon because an officer from Immigration stopped her and was taking her into custody.”

  “Immigration took her?” asked Nadine.

  “That’s what she told him.”

  “And they haven’t heard from her since Tuesday? Is that normal?”

  “The woman I was with said so. The family is working with an attorney. But she said sometimes they don’t hear until after deportation.”

  “Hmm. See if you can find her.”

  “Yes, boss lady.” Tina lingered. It was her first field assignment and she’d done well.

  “Thank you, Tina. You keep this up and Clint will need to get you a badge.”

  She grinned and then spun, practically skipping out of the office.

  Nadine settled at her desk. Skogen was right. Santander was undocumented and the disappearance was unrelated to their case.

  Nadine returned to her suspect-based profile.

  She believed these were stranger-attacks. The targets selected by some specific criteria. The victimization showed both a need to inflict pain and also an absence of feeling for the victims. Neither Hugo Betters nor Roger Darnell could be accused of lacking feelings for their partners. Betters displayed both irritation and worry, and Darnell certainly seemed to be grieving his wife’s death, though she could not disregard that he stood to benefit financially because of it.

  Meanwhile, the depersonalization, stripping the women, crippling and using them to lure predators, was more than horrifying, it was specific and baffling. A husband, even an enraged one, would act in passion. This seemed exactly the opposite. This more resembled indifference to the victim’s pain and suffering. The inherent lack of sympathy, and the escalation from the neck wound to the back wound, made Nadine think this killer was progressing. Learning better ways to toy with his captives and linger over their deaths.

  The killer chose to deposit his victims, in close proximity, in a place they were likely to be discovered.

  Left on display.

  Their unsub seemed intent on shocking the public or flaunting his victims to law enforcement. Perhaps both.

  He appeared to be trying to gain someone’s attention.

  Meanwhile, Arnold did not know either Darnell or Karnowski. He was a good prospect. He had reason to be in the forest. He knew the trails intimately, had a history of sexual perversion, refused a polygraph, refused to provide a DNA sample and was flashing signs of deception.

  She thought his psych eval would be fascinating if he was foolish enough to agree to one.

  Nadine had researched similar crimes, teasing out commonalities in apprehended offenders, and had compiled a list. All were stranger crimes. A sizable percentage had priors for sexual offenses, a significant percentage had prior assaults against women. Curiously, driving records were universally spotless. These were careful hunters. Many also posed their victims naked in degrading positions, as was the case with Karnowski.

  She put forth that this was a white male, living alone, intelligent, neat, employed, fascinated with porn pertaining to bondage and torture, narcissistic, possibly psychopathic, who had committed similar murders elsewhere. He would be unmarried, living alone, familiar with the forest, drove a truck with a cab. He would be average height and weight, neatly dressed, athletic, well-coordinated with archery and hunting experience.

  She set aside her suspect profile. She’d come to the end of what she could accomplish on that for the moment.

  With details on Darnell and Karnowski now pouring in, she thought a behavioral comparison of the victims was the next step. Untangling what specific actions, characteristics and physical details these two women shared might prove useful to the FBI in their hunt.

  Rita Karnowski and Nikki Darnell both lived in the area, were familiar with the hiking trails they explored in the Ocala Forest, and both had a male partner. They each had a love for the natural world. Both were dumped in close proximity and appeared to have been tortured and killed in a similar way. But after searching the available information, Nadine had unearthed no other connection between the women.

  She sat back and sighed. Stranger crimes were exceedingly difficult.

  Both her phone and Tina’s chimed with a group text from Juliette inviting them to happy hour in the hotel bar. She and Clint were having dinner together, but Nadine thought she could manage both.

  “Oh, fun,” Tina said. “I’ll see you back there.”

  Tina headed out as Nadine closed her laptop and gathered her things.

  Her team deserved a break.

  She left her office, already anticipating the drink with Tina and Juliette. Afterward, she and Clint would share a nice meal and have some much-needed alone time.

  Skogen intercepted her on her way out.

  “We got a DNA sample from Barney A
rnold.”

  “Oh, great. Voluntary?” she asked.

  “No. Discarded cigar stub he’d been chewing on most of the afternoon.”

  “Wonderful. So it’s at the lab?”

  “Already there. A match will connect him to the body. We get that, we make an arrest.”

  Which then allowed them to collect a DNA sample, regardless of whether the DNA was relevant to the arrest. Otherwise, they’d need either a confession by Arnold, a witness or evidence connecting Arnold to the victim. Then they’d have to obtain a court order based on probable cause to mandate a sample.

  “You think the DNA on the cigar will match the semen found on Rita Karnowski’s body?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Did he agree to the psych profile?”

  “Declined.”

  She wasn’t surprised, but still disappointed.

  “You heading out?” he asked.

  She didn’t like the way he was lingering.

  “Yes. Dinner with my team.”

  “Ah. Sounds nice.” He headed back toward his office.

  At the hotel, Rosie was back behind the counter and gave her a bright smile.

  “Good evening, Dr. Finch.”

  “To you as well.”

  She glanced from reception to the two empty birdcages.

  “Where’s Petunia?” she asked.

  “Happy hour out by the pool. She has a perch there.”

  “Jack-Jack?”

  “Back in his room. Those two parrots are now besties. And Petunia is much quieter with Dr. Hartfield’s bird here.”

  “Have you seen any of my team?”

  “Also by the pool.”

  “Tiki bar?”

  Rosie’s bright smile widened. “That’s right!”

  Nadine cast her a wave and found the pool deck, but the instant she crossed the threshold, she was intercepted by Tina.

  “Hey,” said Nadine. “Where we sitting?”

  “Um, hey.” She just stood there zipping the crucifix about her neck back and forth on the gold chain.

  Nadine picked up on Tina’s obvious unease.

  “Where’s Juliette?” Nadine glanced to the crowded bar area decorated with surfboards and a thatched roof.