“I hope. Tell Noah…” Eve’s cheeks warmed. “Tell him to be careful.”
“You bet. Now get out of here. You’re safe with Kane. I trust him with my life.”
Blinking away her fatigue, Olivia watched them go. Six dead women, two Lincoln Navigators, a lunatic Farmer, and a drug dealer named Damon. And now they’d added one Irene Black to the mix. She’d pulled out her cell to call Abbott when it rang in her hand. It was the DA’s office. “Sutherland.”
“It’s Brian Ramsey. I’ve got a little good news. I’m authorized to deal with your dealer, Damon. Meet me in Interview in twenty. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Olivia set out to meet Ramsey, calling Abbott on her way.
Thursday, February 25, 11:30 a.m.
Eve’s mind was still racing as she and Kane went down in the elevator to his car. “All right, so we have Irene Black, but it still comes back to the list. Whoever did these murders had access to that damn list.”
“Jeremy Lyons did and he’s missing,” Kane said.
Eve sighed. “Donner did and he’s dead. I guess knowing he was sick puts some of his responses into a different light. He was running out of time.”
“He wanted to leave a legacy,” Kane said quietly. “Most people do.”
“True. I wonder if he really believed we were testing often enough or just convinced himself we were. I tried to tell him that we were affecting people’s lives, but without the personality testing scores, he wouldn’t believe me.”
“I doubt it would have mattered.”
She looked up at him as the elevator doors slid open. “What do you mean?”
Kane shrugged. “He was dying. Desperate. Desperate people do unexpected things. It’s possible he would have ignored the results even if you’d done the tests.”
“No, he couldn’t have ignored them. He wouldn’t even have seen them. The results went straight from the independent third-party therapist to the committee. It was part of the checks and balances. If personality tests started showing huge swings, as they would have done with the red-zones, the committee would have stopped the study.”
“My car’s on the right,” Kane said as they walked through the parking garage. “So who was this third-party therapist?”
Eve stopped. “I don’t know. I wasn’t supposed to know, just as I wasn’t supposed to know the subjects’ real names.”
Kane had stopped, too. “Would Donner have known who it was?”
“Yes.” She let out a breath. “And what Donner knew, Jeremy knew. He told me so.”
“And would that person have had access to the list?”
Eve opened her mouth to reply, then watched in shock as Kane dropped to the cement floor of the garage like a rock. She looked up, stunned.
Between two parked vehicles a man wearing a fedora was sliding a club into his coat pocket. In his other hand he held a gun with a silencer. “I’d say he almost certainly would have access to that list.”
She stood, staring into a face she knew. But that she had never quite trusted. Then instinct surged. Run. Eve swung her computer bag at his arm, knocking the gun from his hand. His grunt echoed as the gun skittered a few feet away.
She turned and ran as fast as she could. Then stumbled to her knees on a cry of pain when fire bored through her thigh. Goddammit. He shot me. She pushed herself to her feet and had gotten a little farther when he came from between two parked cars and dragged her backward. His arm was over her throat, bending her backward, cutting off her air.
Eve grabbed at his arm over her throat, trying to breathe, trying to drag in air to scream. Then she felt a prick on the side of her throat. In seconds her body went limp, her vision blurred. From far away she heard his voice in her ear, distorted and slow.
“Eve. Didn’t your parents teach you not to get into cars with strange men?”
Thursday, February 25, 12:10 p.m.
Noah burst into the bullpen, followed by Abbott and Micki. His heart was pounding out of his chest. Eve was gone. “What the fuck happened?”
Kane sat at his desk, an ice bag on his head. Olivia stood at his side, pale, but her eyes were clear and focused.
“Status?” Abbott demanded. He’d barked orders into both his cell and the radio the whole way back from Virginia Fox’s house while Noah drove like a bat out of hell.
“Garage is locked down,” Olivia said steadily. “BOLO is out, cars all over the city are on alert. I put a watch on the interstates and roadblocks at the major arteries out of town. State patrol is en route with air support.”
Abbott’s nod was tense. “Good work.” He gave Kane a visual once-over. “You didn’t see him?”
Kane shook his head miserably. “No.”
“What happened?” Noah bit out.
Kane looked up, pain in his eyes. “One minute we were talking, the next I was waking up.”
Olivia sat next to him. “Kane came to about seven minutes later and called it in. I looked at the security video right away. Somebody came up behind him and hit him with a club. Eve slung that computer bag of hers at him and ran. She knocked the gun away, but he got it back.” She hesitated and Noah’s heart stopped.
“What? What happened?”
“He shot her in the thigh, then dragged her away.” Her hands were shaking. “A different camera showed him put her in a black BMW, plate registered to Donner.”
Noah wouldn’t think about what he’d just seen, the grotesque butchering of Virginia Fox’s eyes. He wouldn’t think about what a killer was doing to Eve, right this minute.
Except it was all he could think about. Don’t hurt her. Just don’t hurt her. But he would hurt her. He would kill her. Stop it. Be a cop, for God’s sake. Noah clamped his fingers into his head and made himself look up. “How badly was she bleeding?”
“Not gushing,” Olivia said, “so it’s unlikely he hit anything vital.”
He hit something vital. He hit Eve.
“I’m sorry, Web,” Kane said hoarsely.
“Not your fault.” Numb, Noah sank into a chair. “What did he look like? He was on the camera, for God’s sake.”
Olivia shook her head. “Not when he was hitting Kane. He came up between a minivan and an SUV. All you can see is Kane dropping. Once he’d shot Eve, he kept between the cars and when he dragged her he was bending over. He’s on the short side. I’m guessing he’s five-eight. He was wearing a beige overcoat with the collar up and a black fedora so you couldn’t see his face. I already asked for the video to be sent up, so we can look at it again. I put everything we have in the BOLO. Everyone is searching.”
“How did he get out of the garage? How did he pay?” Noah asked desperately.
“He was there less than thirty minutes,” Olivia said wearily. “He put his ticket in the slot and the arm went up. No charge. God, Noah, I’m sorry.”
“Then he’d parked here before. He knew if he was there less than thirty minutes that he’d be able to exit without needing a credit card or going through the attendant booth.”
“I thought of that. Right now security is checking the tapes for that BMW on other days that it might have parked here.”
“And I put a team in the garage,” Micki added, “in case he left something behind when he struggled with Eve.”
He nodded numbly. “Dell. He knows something. We need to make him talk.”
“We tried all night,” Olivia said harshly. “He won’t talk.”
Let me talk to him, Noah thought viciously. He’ll talk to me.
“Don’t even ask,” Abbott warned.
Noah looked away. Think. “What did we find on Dell? In his vehicle?”
“The GPS tracking screen,” Olivia said. “Kurt Buckland’s cell phone and a couple of untraceable cell phones. A copy of MSP. Newspaper articles about you and Jack going way back. All your cases. Transcripts of times you’d testified in court.”
“Lots of pictures,” Micki added. “Going back months. We found cameras in both Dell’s and Harvey’s cars, so they were both surveilling.”