“Moonshine?” Isabel asked curiously. “They still make that stuff?”
“Believe it or not. We’ve had the ATF out here a few times over the years because of illegal brew. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, if you ask me, but the bootleggers seem to feel it’s worth it. Either that or they just don’t want to pay The Government a cent more than they have to.”
Rafe said, “And there’s at least one survivalist group in the area. They consider it the norm to make everything they need themselves. Including booze.” He made a note on the pad before him, then handed the message slip back to his officer. “Okay, standard procedure, Ginny. I want a detective out there to talk to Tim, and let’s get a list of places she might possibly be. Friends, relatives, anybody she might be visiting. From now on, we treat every missing person, man or woman, as if he or she could be a murder victim.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the young officer had hurried from the room, Isabel said, “Is this people starting to panic? I mean, is this an unusual increase in women reported missing?”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. In the past three weeks, we’ve seen the reports jump tenfold. Most come home within twenty-four hours or are discovered visiting relatives or talking to divorce attorneys, or just at the grocery store.”
“Most. But not all.”
“We still have a few missing in the general area, but we haven’t yet been able to rule out a voluntary absence in any of the cases.”
“We’ll probably see even more of this,” Isabel commented.
“Problem is,” Mallory said, “we have to treat every report seriously, just as Rafe said. So we’ll waste a lot of manpower searching for women who aren’t really missing or who ran off and don’t want to be found. Lady last week cussed me out good for finding her.”
“Motel?” Isabel inquired sapiently.
“Uh-huh. Not alone, needless to say.”
“Still, we have to look for them,” Hollis said.
Rafe nodded. “No question. I’m just hoping it won’t muddy the water too much. Or deplete resources needed elsewhere.”
“In the meantime,” Isabel said, “those of us in this room at least have to focus on what we know we’ve got. Three murdered women.”
Rafe said, “You told me there’s always a trigger. Always something specific that sets him off.”
“There has to be,” Isabel responded. “You said yourself that five years is a hell of a long cooling-off period for a serial killer; it is, especially after a fairly frenzied six-week killing spree. A gap that long usually means either that murders in another location have gone unnoticed or at least weren’t connected to him, or that he’s in prison somewhere or otherwise unable to keep killing.”
“I gather you’re certain that isn’t the case here.”
“When he hit in Alabama five years ago, we combed through police files of unsolved murders from coast to coast. Nothing matched his M.O. except for the series of murders five years before that. We were convinced he had been inactive during that five-year gap, yet there was also no even remotely likely suspect we could find who had been in prison for exactly that length of time. And according to all the information gleaned from databases we had Quantico double-check yesterday, he’s also been inactive in the five years since Alabama. Until he started killing in Hastings a little over three weeks ago.”
Mallory rubbed her temple, scowling. “So something sets him off and he kills six women in six weeks. Then, apparently sated for the time being, vanishes before the cops can even get close to catching him. Why six women?”
“We don’t know,” Isabel replied. “The number has to be important, since it’s been exactly the same twice before, but we don’t know how or why. We can’t even be absolutely positive he’ll stop at six this time. He could be escalating. Most killers of this sort do sooner or later kill more or get more viciously creative in the killing itself.”
Mallory shook her head. “Great. Because we didn’t have enough to look forward to. So he kills at least six women. Moves on to a new location. Then waits five years-it’s not exact, is it?” she interrupted herself to ask.
Isabel shook her head. “Not to the day, no. The gap between the first and second set of murders was actually four years and ten months. The gap between the last set and this one was five years and one month. Give or take a few days.”
“Okay. But he moves somewhere new after his six-week killing spree, settles down, settles in. Which has to mean we’re looking for someone who’s been in Hastings no more than five years, right?”
“Or someone who used to live in the area and has moved back. Or someone who works in Hastings but lives outside the town-or the other way around. Or someone who takes long vacations every few years; that’s at least possible.”
“Goes on vacation to kill people?”
“We’ve encountered stranger things. He could scout out his hunting grounds in advance, maybe start picking his victims, and return later for the actual kill.” Isabel shook her head. “Honestly, if you look at a map, the two previous hunting grounds and Hastings are all within a day’s drive, despite being in three different states. So we can’t even rule out the idea that he lives in an area central to his hunting grounds and has just somehow managed to spend enough time in each to get to know his victims.”
“Oh, hell, I was hoping we could narrow down the possibles at least a little bit.”
Hollis said, “The universe never makes it easy, remember? Probably the only people we can even begin to rule out are those who have lived continuously in Hastings during the last fifteen years at least. And I mean continuously: no vacations longer than, say, two weeks; no going away to college; no out-of-town visits, no day trips fitting the right time periods.”
Mallory grimaced. “Which is just not possible. Even those of us who’ve lived here our whole lives tend to go away to school or travel or something. And day trips? Lots of good shopping in Columbia, Atlanta, other places within a day’s drive.”
“I was afraid of that,” Isabel said with a sigh.
With a nod, Mallory said, “That sort of thing is so common I doubt we could find anybody who was absent or took weekly day trips out of town during those six-week stretches specifically, not without questioning every soul in town and probably not then. Who remembers specific dates from years ago? And like I said, people travel on vacations or for business, go away to school. I was away in Georgia three years finishing college. It was four for you, wasn’t it, Rafe?”
“Yeah. And I went to Duke, in North Carolina.” He sighed. “It’s like Mal said, we’ve all traveled, been away from Hastings, most of us more than once. And people do take regular day trips, even out of state, for shopping or business. I get the feeling this isn’t going to help us narrow the list all that much.”
“Probably not,” Isabel agreed. “Although if we get lucky enough to find a suspect or two, we have some concrete questions to ask…”
Hollis didn’t intentionally tune out the discussion. She didn’t want to; despite the repetition of details she already knew, she was still new enough to the investigative process itself to find it interesting, even fascinating.
She wasn’t even aware at first that Isabel’s voice had faded into a peculiar hollow silence. But then she realized the discussion around her had gone distant, deadened. She felt the fine hairs on her body rise, her flesh tingle.
It was not a pleasant sensation.
She looked around the table at the others, watching their mouths move and hearing only a word now and then, muffled and indistinct. And they themselves appeared different to her. Dim, almost faded. They seemed to be growing ever more distant moment by moment, and that frightened her.