“The teenager?” Shelley asked.
Zoe shook her head, frowning. “Nothing here that I can read. But there was a reason he wanted to get this kill over and done with, why he would have exerted so much force as to cut her neck open this fast. I think they were together. He needed to finish one and go for the other as soon as possible.”
Shelley nodded, moving the pendant of her necklace up between her lips and speaking around it. “He took her.”
It was not a question. With the facts that Zoe could see, there was no disputing it. Even if the two women had entered the parking lot separately, there was evidence that the killer wanted to move on fast, and the girl was no longer here.
“He came back around after we left last night. This body is less than five hours old. He must be desperate. Maybe he did not want to take a risk on not finding a victim tonight. If he takes a hostage with him, he can be sure that he will be able to carry it out.”
Shelley shuddered, getting back up to her feet. “She must be terrified. If she saw her coworker getting murdered…”
Zoe inclined her head in agreement, though she did not see what bearing it had on the investigation. It would not help them to find her and save her life. “Look at the woman’s arm. There is a slight indentation above the left elbow. Do you see it? She habitually carried something there, likely a handbag. The muscle is also marginally thicker on this side. No bag left here, however.”
“He took it with him to delay the identification process, probably,” Shelley said.
“Buying himself time to get further away. Yes, he definitely took her.” Zoe nodded, turning and looking into the distance for their local help. All three men had their backs to them, searching. The sheriff was almost completely out of sight in the trees.
“Should we call them back?”
“No, the search has to be done. We have to be thorough. Can you hear something?”
They both turned and looked through the woods again, to see the sheriff raising a radio to his face and speaking into it. Afterward, the crackle came again, the same sound that had filtered to them through the trees. Before another moment had passed, he was moving toward them, taking a determined stride between the tall, smooth trunks.
“Got a hit,” he shouted to them, not waiting until he was within hearing distance to pass the message on. “Trooper on patrol last night saw a man come in the parking lot on foot.”
“Why did he not stop him?” Zoe asked, bristling immediately. Had this killer once again slipped out from right underneath their noses? Twice in one night?
“Hold on,” the sheriff said, coming to a stop close by to them and slightly out of breath. “Trooper, repeat again what you just told me.”
“Yes, sir,” it came back over the crackle and hiss of the radio. “I saw a gentleman walking through the parking lot after midnight. I asked him what he was doing and he said he’d lost his wallet. I told him to come back in the morning and he began to walk back to his car, which was parked a short distance away.”
“Description of the vehicle?”
“A Ford Taurus.”
“Color?” Zoe asked.
There was a pause. “Uhh… It was parked on the side of the road, away from any lights. I’m not sure.”
“Green?”
“Yeah, could be.”
“What about the suspect?” Shelley interrupted.
“Slightly above medium height, maybe five foot ten or eleven, skinny guy. Dark hair, cut pretty close. I would put him mid-twenties.”
“Anything else?” the sheriff asked into the radio. “Anything that might identify him?”
“Not that I can think of, sir. I checked my dash cam. There’s a glimpse of him, but only his body. He was wearing a gray sweater and dark pants. That’s it.”
The sheriff sighed and thanked the man, rubbing his tired eyes. “I’ll put out an APB.”
“It will not work,” Zoe said, chewing her lip and looking out toward the horizon. “He is too smart to get caught now. We would have gotten him last night. He knows we are onto him now. It will be that much harder.”
The sheriff gave her a hard look. “No offense, Agent, but I’ve got to protect the citizens of this county. I can’t keep running after your theories and missing him every time. You pulling the wrong man last night let this woman die.”
He had gone too far. That much was clear. A sheriff didn’t speak to a member of the FBI like that, no matter who had superiority. But by the time Zoe could get past the fact that he wasn’t wrong, he had turned his back on her to issue orders into the radio, getting his men moving.
Shelley reached over and placed a momentary hand on Zoe’s arm, as was becoming her habit. Zoe nodded sharply in response, listening in to the sheriff as he set up a dragnet.
“There’s always a chance, I suppose,” Shelley said, trying to find some comfort. “We should cover all angles.”
“We are still missing something,” Zoe said, knowing it with certainty now. “There was no green Ford Taurus in the parking lot at the fair. We would have seen it.”
Behind Zoe’s words was another nagging certainty. The killer struck every night—and only once every night. There was every likelihood that the teenage girl was still alive.
An alert buzzed on her cell phone, and she opened it to see the photograph of the missing teen, circulated to her number as well as any law enforcement in the area. A fact list named her as Aisha Sparks, seventeen years old. One younger brother. She was a dancer and loved children, wanted to go to college to become a social worker. A good kid.
Zoe stared down at Aisha’s sweet smile, in a photograph clearly taken at school for a yearbook, and knew that she had to save her. So many had died already. So many who should have been saved.
If she couldn’t save Aisha, Zoe knew, it would all be on her. All her fault. If she was going to redeem herself in any way for letting it get this far, letting him claim more lives, then she had to stop him from taking this one.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Shelley was tired of looking over the case files in the investigation room, going over all of the old clues that they had already seen before. The latest autopsy was nowhere near being complete, and they were still waiting for final reports from Rubie’s body. There was nothing new here, nothing that they had not already seen with their own eyes before.
It wasn’t that Shelley didn’t see the benefit of going back over the information—there were many ways that data could take on a new face when you had more clues to go on, when you had seen more victims. Insignificant details could suddenly become the key to unraveling a whole case.
What she objected to, however, was the fact that it was she who had to do it. They were only on their second case together, but already she could see how gifted Zoe was. Shelley was never going to be able to compete with that. She would be better off doing the legwork, physical stuff that didn’t require looking at the complex clues. Talking to people. That was what she was good at.
It wasn’t that she could really, fully understand what Zoe did. It might as well have been witchcraft, for all it made sense to her. But Shelley was beginning to grasp that just because she didn’t understand something, didn’t mean it was wrong. She would take anything that she could get to help save lives.
And there was something about Zoe, something that triggered her own mothering instinct, even though Zoe was older than her. Something a little broken, vulnerable. Shelley had known that Zoe had gone through a lot of partners before her. Been warned about it. Now she could see why, and she wasn’t going to be the latest in a long line to just abandon Zoe because she had something that set her apart from everyone else.