“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I should call the university and get them to send my students home. I should have done this before, but first I thought…” Noah Smith’s face hovered before her and she stopped herself. “First I didn’t know if Noah was the killer. Then, I thought my students wouldn’t be in danger because the killer was after you, after us. There’s no excuse. They’ve worked so hard for this clinical time and it’s almost the end of the semester. They want to get this over with. That’s the way I felt when I was a student nurse. But they can make it up in the summer. They’re all potential targets of this Charles Whitaker.”
“I think you’re right,” he said.
“Do I have your permission to tell them there’s a killer at large?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
He smiled. “I’m already in trouble. It’s my middle name. William Howard Taft Trouble Borders.”
“Then, I’ll be at loose ends,” she said. “They probably won’t even pay me for the rest of the semester.”
She watched him carefully. His eyes looked so tired.
“Maybe if you’re not sick of my company,” he said, “we could…”
She smiled. “I’m not sick of your company, Will.”
“If you want to leave, I understand,” he said quietly. “Now would be a good time because…”
“I don’t!”
She spoke over him, regretted it, because he might have thought she didn’t hear the rest of his sentence.
“I’m falling in love with you, too,” she said. “You’re the bravest, truest man I’ve ever known. I lost my temper back there because I can’t stand to hear you talk about yourself that way. Maybe a year after my daughter died, a friend of mine was talking about something in her family, and she said, ‘I guess everything happens for a reason.’ I asked her if she really believed that, because at that moment I thought the whole universe was so fucked up that nobody knew why anything happened. That’s how angry I was for years, and I still don’t know why these things happen, why life is so unfair. I know how much discomfort and pain you’re in. I know how hard it is to stand and walk and make it look easy. You carry it off with such grace. I’m not sure I could. But you do it every day. You can tell me stories that make me fall in love with this city all over again. You’re a wonderful lover. You’re kind. But more than any of that, Will Borders, you stand for something good. You’re willing to fight for it. In this fucked-up, unfair universe, the only hope and protection we have are people like you. And if your bosses are acting like assholes, it’s not because of your physical condition. It’s because they’re assholes.”
He ran his hand across her hair, touched the curve of her cheek, and brought his lips to hers. The kiss lasted until they heard a tap on a horn. A marked police car behind them was saying, move along, get a room. When the cop swung alongside, she waved and Will saluted back.
She laughed. “No displays of affection in an official police vehicle.”
Will’s phone rang. He answered it and listened, then put it away.
“Well, that was short but pleasurable. I hope it was good for you, too.” His voice had a cutting tone. “That was Dodds. Turns out Charles Wayne Whitaker has been in jail in Indianapolis for the past month. Hell.”
Cheryl Beth sighed. “So back to square one?”
He dropped the shift into drive.
“Maybe not,” he said, “Let’s go catch a killer.”
Chapter Thirty-four
The Seven Hills Marina sat on the other side of Lunken Airport, where Kellogg Avenue crossed the Little Miami River. It was separated from the river by a tree-lined sandbar. Hills covered with more thick trees rose up in every direction. Through the marina’s mouth, a boater would steer into the brown Little Miami, turn south, go around a bend, and the big Ohio River awaited: running fast nearly a thousand miles from Pittsburgh all the way to the Mississippi near Cairo, Illinois. There, the Ohio was actually the larger river.
The marina seemed in the country and a little down-market for Kenneth Buchanan, although it was fairly close to his house. Aside from parking lots, outbuildings, storage sheds, and boats for sale, it had room for five sets of floating berths, each one having several slips. They had wide walkways in the center and then narrow walks out to the boats. You learned many things working homicide and from a case several years ago, Will knew the narrow walkways were called fingerfloats.
He also knew from the reports of the detectives that had already been out here where Kristen’s boat had been moored. It was gone now, evidence. Buchanan’s big boat was tied up and looked deserted. About half the slips were empty. In others, groups of people were aboard their boats, either coming back or preparing to go out. It was a warm afternoon and everyone looked happy. Will parked where he had a view and turned off the engine.
“What are you looking for?” Cheryl Beth asked.
“I don’t know. I keep thinking about the river…”
“Mind if I make phone calls?”
He didn’t mind. While she called her bosses and explained the situation, Will watched.
When his phone rang, he stepped outside to take the call.
“Detective Borders?” It was a man with a heavy Southern accent, a harsh sound with none of the lilt and music in Cheryl Beth’s voice.
“This is Special Agent Ricky Northcutt with the FBI,” the man said. “I’ve been out on vacation and only got back to Atlanta yesterday. I saw your ViCAP request.”
Will leaned on the hood and his pulse picked up. “That’s right. It came back with no matches.”
“That might not be quite true,” the fed drawled. “There was nothing for metro Atlanta. But we had a case in Athens two-and-a-half years ago. A coed at the University of Georgia was kidnapped and her body turned up the next day. It had the same genital mutilation you describe. And the scene was clean as a whistle. Not a damned bit of DNA or much other evidence.”
“Much other?”
“She was restrained,” he said. “Her wrists seemed to have been tied with duct tape. There were marks on her wrists and some duct-tape fiber. Works for everything, right?”
“How far is Athens from Atlanta?” Will had never been to Georgia.
Northcutt said about sixty miles. “I’m not sure if that’s any help to you. I would have called sooner, but our resources are stretched so thin now on criminal cases. Anti-terrorism is the priority…”
“Any suspects?”
“Not a one. The other thing that caught my eye about your report was the word ‘deathscape.’ There was an index card pinned on this girl’s forehead that said, ‘Deathscape Number One.’ It was written in block letters with a felt-tipped pen.”
Will stood and nervously walked around the car, taking the information in.
“Was she a nursing student?”
“No,” Northcutt said. “I think she was computer science. But she was out on a secluded trail near campus, riding alone on her bicycle.”
Will heard the women’s laughter before he saw the boat, a sleek new model with several young women wearing bikinis and acting as if everything they heard or saw was the funniest thing they had ever experienced. The boat slowed and came to a halt three slips down from where Kristen’s craft would have been docked.