“Sounds like whoever’s taking them is counting on that.”
Her mouth fell open on a soft gasp; he’d surprised her. That hadn’t been his intention. It just seemed a nobrainer to him that somebody was making these girls disappear. Any decent law enforcement officer should reach the same conclusion.
“You really believe that’s what’s going on?” she asked, her voice shaking the tiniest bit, as if she wasn’t quite prepared for someone else to come over to her side in this whole ugly situation. From the sound of it, she and her editor at the newspaper had been fighting a two-man battle for a long time. It really was no wonder she’d sought him out, if only to bolster the number of people on the side of the good guys.
Huh. He was thinking of a reporter as one of the good guys; maybe because he already liked her. This was, indeed, a banner day. Physical attraction, now actual liking? All wrapped up with a woman whose profession he loathed? He never would have believed it.
“Aidan?” she prompted.
“Yes. I do think you’re right. I certainly don’t believe all these missing teenagers left of their own free will. Someone took them, though I’m not certain that means we’re dealing with a serial killer. We can’t reach that conclusion yet.”
“What else . . .”
“There are a lot of places in the world—including some right here in this country—where attractive young women command a high price.”
Every last bit of color fell out of her face. “Human trafficking.”
“It’s possible,” he said, trying to be gentle. “The girls could have been kidnapped and sold. And the chances of them ever being heard from again are very thin, Lex.”
Her eyes drifted closed for a long moment as she acknowledged that reality. It was the first sign of helplessness he’d seen in the woman since he’d met her. But he wasn’t sure whether she found that possible explanation better or worse than the one she’d convinced herself was true: that the missing teenagers were all dead.
“They could be alive, then,” she finally said.
“I doubt it,” he admitted, sounding as grim as he felt, “but it is a possibility.”
Even if they were still drawing breath, he couldn’t be sure that would count as living. Existing, at most. Sexual servitude couldn’t be called much more than that.
“There’s something else,” she said softly. “Something Walter told me tonight.”
As she told him about her boss’s story regarding the discovery of human bones, her face paled. It had become real to her, all too real. Until recently, she’d been focused only on the professional aspect, the story, the mystery. She hadn’t fully allowed herself to consider the missing girls as murder victims.
Now it was hard to do anything else.
“I’d wanted to keep a low profile for a day or two, but we’re going to have to confront the chief on those remains,” he said.
“I know.” A long exhalation said she didn’t relish the prospect, though he knew she wanted the information. “At least I know it can’t be Vonnie. Not this soon.”
Very doubtful, but technically not impossible. But he wasn’t about to go there. Discussing methods of dissolving a human body down to bone just wasn’t a conversation either of them needed right now.
She cleared her throat. “About Vonnie.”
He knew what she was about to ask. It was the one question he had been waiting for. The one he still wasn’t sure how to answer, mainly because he didn’t know the answer himself.
“Have you had any feelings about her? You mentioned that your hands touched when she waited on you at the restaurant. Does that mean you could possibly ‘connect’ with her? Wouldn’t that be one way of finding out what’s happening here?”
Aidan hesitated, not sure how much to share. Yesterday’s experience in his kitchen remained strong in his mind; if he focused, he could still hear the missing young woman’s voice. He no longer doubted that he had opened a channel of communication with Vonnie.
But the evidence was so thin, the clues so tantalizingly obscure. A few scents, the word
king
, that strange, breathless sensation just before they’d been cut off? Those things could mean just about anything. Or, as much as he hated to admit it, nothing. After all, the last big case he’d worked on had shown him just how unreliable these visions could be. Still, it was worth at least checking one thing. “In your research on Vonnie, did you happen to stumble across anyone named King? Or somebody with that nickname?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing. Why?”
“Just a possibility that occurred to me,” he said.
He heard her sucked-in breath as excitement hit her. “Something happened. You felt her, didn’t you?”
“I haven’t experienced anything that leads me to draw any conclusions,” he finally said, not telling her the whole story, but not lying, either. “She might be alive; she might not. The best way to find out is through good, intensive detective work. For instance, paying attention to the tiniest details, which might not seem important at the time. Especially if you’re so close to a case you can easily miss them.”
She stiffened. “Are you saying I overlooked something?”
Flipping through the file, he pointed to the disc that contained the audio files she’d brought over earlier today. “Have you listened to these again? Once the heat of the story wore off, I mean?”
She shook her head. “Not since I got shut down. It seemed pointless. Not to mention frustrating. Why? What do you think is on there?”
Aidan didn’t know for sure that anything was, but he had a suspicion. “It seemed to me that several of the missing girls had something else in common.”
“Beyond having crappy home lives and living in the Boro?”
He nodded.
Appearing anxious, she reached for her own hand-written transcriptions of the interviews. “What? What did I miss?”
“It didn’t stand out quite as much in your notes, but it definitely did in their voices.” Wondering if she’d feel the same tingle of interest he had when he’d stumbled across the common refrain that had so interested him, he explained. “Most of the girls’ parents commented that it wasn’t the first time their daughters had dropped out of sight.”
Her lips tightened and her green eyes flashed as if he had accused her of some wrongdoing. “For no more than a night, two at the most, and always with warning that they were going, or else a reason they might go. This is a completely different . . .”
“I’m not criticizing you,” he said, waving off her defensive explanation. “Not accusing you of intentionally leaving out details. It wasn’t every girl and you’re right, a teenager fighting with her mother and being gone overnight is not the same as one who goes out on a normal day and never comes back.”
She relaxed a little in her seat, but continued to eye him, still somewhat wary.
Aidan pulled the transcripts from her hand and thumbed through the pages, pointing at small sections he’d highlighted. “It’s the way they said it. Not ‘Sometimes we’d fight and she’d stay out all night,’ but ‘One time she left a note that she had somewhere to go, then disappeared for two nights and we never found out where she’d been.’ ” He found the next one he’d noted, reading aloud again. “ ‘She scared us once, disappearing one Saturday night and she just seemed really unhappy when she came back.’ ”
That one had bothered him. A lot.
“Then there was the mother who said, ‘Something happened last summer. She was supposed to be at a friend’s one weekend, but she wasn’t. She would never talk about it or admit where she really was.’ A total of seven of the families made similar comments. Strange, don’t you think?”
Her brow was furrowed as she thought about it; then she slowly began to nod. “Okay. I see what you mean. That’s not the standard my-teenager-threw-a-fit-and-took-off complaint.”
“No, it isn’t.”
She closed the file, her slender hand resting on top of it, murmuring, “So what does it mean? Where did they all go, and what happened while they were there?”
“That’s an excellent question.”
Maybe it didn’t matter. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the disappearance of all these girls. But it was a link among them, a tiny red flag, and often in an investigation, those small flags led to interesting discoveries. “It’s definitely something that will require some good detective work.”
She snorted. “Not one cop who works for Chief Dunston will help us.”
“I wasn’t talking about those detectives.”
No, he had a much more highly specialized group in mind. After all, Julia Harrington had asked him for plenty of favors over the years. It was about time he called in one of his own.
EXtreme Investigations had resources police departments and other private investigation firms lacked. Their investigators were uniquely qualified to handle things like this, where the questions of the case far outweighed the leads. Not to mention where the circumstances were highly unusual. If there had ever been a crime meant to be solved by the XI group, this was it.
Strange that just a few hours ago, he was determined to stay out of anything resembling a missing person’s case. He didn’t know whether it was because he’d met and remembered Vonnie, or because he truly believed Alexa Nolan had uncovered a mass conspiracy, or because there were just so damned many of these girls. Maybe also because it was a chance to show the local cops for the corrupt fools they were. All of these, perhaps. But most likely it was because he felt Vonnie’s terror for himself. Whatever the reason, he suddenly found himself anxious to get back to work.
Julia had been saying for months it would happen, that he could never give up his old life completely. He’d thought doing a little crime solving from afar would be enough. He knew now it wasn’t. Not when a case this huge, this important, had landed right in his own front yard.
For some reason, he had chosen to pack up and move to a town that had turned out to be a deathtrap for teenage girls. And Aidan’s own background, his intense curiosity and his strong sense of justice demanded that he try to do something about it.
Which meant it was time to get to know a few more of his new neighbors.
Chapter 6
Friday, 8:05 p.m.
Now that the cat-and-mouse game with Vonnie was becoming so entertaining, he had hated to leave her there, all alone in the pit. He had obligations, however. He couldn’t miss tonight’s big football game at the school, not without somebody noticing.
Then again, perhaps it was just as well that he’d had to leave the girl alone. Keeping his pretty guest on her toes made her that much more interesting. Besides, he’d wanted to see how people were taking the latest disappearance.
“Hey, everyone, great night for football, huh?” a passing parent called to the crowd.
He smiled slightly, mumbling, “Every night’s a great night for football!”
Too bad Vonnie wasn’t here to enjoy it.
He’d known this one would get more attention. Her disappearance was bound to reignite the fire that had been doused by that idiotic, bought-off puppet of a police chief, who’d managed to shut down the investigation right when it seemed about to begin.
Funny that he liked the spotlight now, considering he’d spent the past couple of years trying to avoid detection by anyone except a very choice few. At first he’d wanted to arouse the suspicions only of those who knew
exactly
what all those missing girls had in common. He wanted them afraid, wanted them to realize someone else knew their secrets.
Most of all, he wanted to punish them. Slowly, deliberately. He intended to drive away their security, their sanity, one chunk at a time until they turned on each other like rabid animals, wondering if they had a traitor in their midst.
Tormenting those men had given him a great deal of pleasure. It was just what they deserved for what they’d done, the murderous lengths to which they’d gone to protect themselves and their diseased friends.
Of course, his other pleasure was in having all those pretty girls to play with. How lucky for him, since torturing pretty girls had been one of his favorite pastimes even before he’d moved here to Granville.
He’d been satisfied with all of that—revenge, and his time spent with those young ladies. Fear of his own capture had been enough to keep him from ever going further. All had been well, until Alexa Nolan had begun putting things together.
When that had happened, he hadn’t panicked. He’d simply watched. Soon realizing his revenge plan had been helped by the attention, not hindered, he’d loved thinking about all the others in this shit- heel town who
would
be in a panic. Not because they gave a damn about the missing teenagers, but because any investigation would almost surely shed light on their own dark, dirty doings. Their fears were coming true. He could almost hear their whispered phone calls and secret meetings, could see it even through the public masks they wore over their hideously ugly, true faces.
What fun
.
Then the chief had fouled everything up. Sure, Dunston had inadvertently provided
him
protection from discovery by shutting the story down. But he’d also removed that thrilling, exciting element that had him watching as his enemies squirmed.
He’d known he had to get people around here talking again. And that’s exactly why he’d chosen her: Yvonne Jackson. Pretty Vonnie. Because while it upped the danger for him, it also put a lot of pressure on other men in this town . . . men who owned that police chief and pulled his puppet strings. Men who were undoubtedly pissing into their expensive leather shoes, wondering if this might be the card that knocked down their entire wobbly, degenerate house.
“Can I get you something from the snack bar? Popcorn, or a hotdog?” asked a kindly voice.
How nice. The locals were so thoughtful, the ladies predictably feeling sorry for him, a man alone with no little woman at home to take care of him. If only they knew he had a little woman locked in his basement right now, fulfilling his most deadly needs.
“Thanks, but I’m okay.” He patted his stomach and grinned. “Gotta watch my figure.”