“It was a customer. But don’t worry.” She fingered her necklace, an action meant to draw attention to her cleavage. “I can take care of myself.”
“Good to know.”
“Was there something pressing that brought you here?” Abbie’s tone was pointed.
Ryne allowed his gaze to drift back in her direction. There were storms brewing in her eyes. He seemed to have a knack for putting them there.
“Is that pizza?” He walked by them to the box sitting on the stove. “Any left?”
“Help yourself.” Callie sauntered over to open the box for him, revealing four slices of pepperoni. He would have preferred sausage, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“You can take it with you,” Abbie said from behind him. She wasn’t attempting a dispassionate tone anymore. He took a bite of pizza and looked at her. She was well and truly pissed, and something inside him lightened. He didn’t know what it said about him that he’d rather see her irate than to look at him with that blank expression she had down pat, but there it was.
“Abbie, stop. The man’s hungry.” Callie gave him a slow wink. “I enjoy healthy . . . appetites . . . myself.”
Because he suddenly had trouble swallowing, Ryne continued chewing. Subtlety obviously wasn’t a trait Callie cultivated. “Did you fly into Savannah from Atlanta? Any problems with that?”
As Callie launched into an animated tale of her travels, he listened silently while he demolished the rest of the leftover pizza. And it occurred to him somewhere between the second and third slice that there was yet another difference between the two women.
Abbie had secrets. No trespassing signs were firmly planted. But she was otherwise straightforward.
Callie Phillips was a liar.
He dangled the occasional carefully worded question in front of her and she fashioned her own noose with her answers. He wondered if Abbie was catching all the discrepancies in her conversation, or if she was too irritated with him to notice.
When Callie had run down, he said, “You staying here with your sister?”
Somehow the other woman seemed closer, although he didn’t recall her moving. “Here? No, too small.” She reached up and wiped at the corner of his mouth with the tip of her index finger. “I like my privacy. And I insist on my own bedroom.” She slid a sly glance toward Abbie. “We’ve never shared a bedroom, have we, Abbie?”
“No.”
The word seemed strained. Ryne stilled, aware of the undercurrents, but unable to interpret the source.
“Maybe if we had, you wouldn’t have so many fears.” Callie’s too-innocent gaze moved back to Ryne. “My little sister is afraid of the dark. Among other things.”
He felt Abbie stiffen beside him, and abruptly tired of the game being played. “All of us are afraid of something.”
“Not me, Detective.” Callie trailed the nail of her index finger along the buttons on his shirt suggestively. “I’m not afraid of anything. You can’t imagine how . . . liberating that is.”
“If there’s nothing else, Detective Robel . . .” Abbie walked to the door, opened it. “It’s been a long day.”
But it was Callie who walked through it, after a quick glance at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to run. I’ll call you tomorrow, Abbie.”
“Wait. Do you need a ride?” Abbie followed her sister out to the back porch. “Where are you staying?”
“I’ve got someone picking me up. Don’t fuss. I’ll be in touch.”
Ryne watched the two exchange an embrace, then Callie disappeared from his view. It was another long moment before Abbie turned back to him. When she did, she didn’t bother to hide her annoyance.
“There’s an interesting new piece of technology you might have heard of. It’s called a telephone.” She held up her cell for emphasis. “Try using it the next time you’re tempted to show up unannounced.”
He folded the box and stuck it in the garbage can. “If I had called, would you have told me to come over?”
“What do you think?”
“I think that’s why I didn’t call.” He nodded in the direction of the door. “I didn’t mean to run your sister off, though.”
“Callie usually does exactly what she wants. She must have had plans.”
He regarded her steadily, but when she added nothing more, he said, “She’s lying to you, you know. She’s been in town at least all week, maybe much longer. That stabbing occurred on Monday. And she claimed there was no hassle at the Savannah Airport. There have been renovations going on there for months. You flew in there, right? It’s a major clusterfuck. I haven’t heard one person who has flown in there who can talk about it without cussing.”
She smiled without humor. “So she’s lying. You think that’s big news? It’s what she does. It doesn’t mean anything.”
He wasn’t so sure. “Did she have an opportunity to look around here? Because she knew that it was a one-bedroom.”
Her expression was impassive. “And?”
“And? And she might have known that because she has already been here. Because she’s the one who broke in.”
She let the door close behind her and leaned against it. “It doesn’t take a hotshot detective to figure that one out. So what?”
Narrowing his eyes, he wondered if she was being deliberately dense. “Did you ask her about the break-in? And the brick?”
“No. Confronting Callie is the worst way to get information. I was more concerned with assessing her . . . mood.”
The finality of her tone indicated better than words that she would say no more on the subject. Ryne felt a surge of frustration, but it was tempered by concern. “Just be careful, okay?”
Abbie just stared at him. “Why are you here, Ryne?”
It was a question he should be asking himself. He could have waited until morning to share Dixon’s revelation. Barring that, he could have called to discuss the news.
Which meant that taking a drink might not be his only lapse of judgment tonight.
“Something came up after you went home that I wanted to run by you.” In succinct terms he relayed his conversation with Dixon, at least the part pertaining to Karen Larsen and her tox screen. Abbie’s eyes widened, before her expression grew pensive.
“You mentioned that you’d looked at all the other rape reports for the last year.”
He nodded grimly. “Nothing came close to matching the elements of this case. And I would have expected the publicity of this investigation to flush out any victims we didn’t know about.”
“So she didn’t report it. Why?” She turned and hurried into the other room, leaving him to trail behind her. He stopped short in the middle of the room, recognizing the chart she had on the wall, above the desk.
It was similar to the case chart he kept at headquarters, to keep track of evidence, leads, offense dates, and locations. But other than a time line across the top, Abbie’s was covered by a large grid, with victim names on the left side and details of their lives in successive boxes. Neighborhoods, church and store preferences, occupation, acquaintances . . . she’d painstakingly lifted every detail gleaned from the victim interviews and transferred them to the paper.
He moved closer to get a better look. Instead of using the colored pins he favored, she’d used different-colored string to link victims to their information in each column. He saw instantly what she’d been depicting. Each place the lines crossed indicated a commonality between victims. There were de pressingly few intersections.
Except, of course, for the last column. Every one of the victims had a notation under “Personal Trauma.”
He jammed his hands into his pants pockets. “They’re already calling him the Nightmare Rapist, you know. The press.”
She made a face. “They were bound to sensationalize it.”
“I don’t want you to be right. About how he selects them.”
“You made that abundantly clear.” Ice frosted her words, straightened her spine. It was tempting, more tempting than it should have been, to see what it would take to melt it.
Because the urge annoyed him, he let the emotion sound in his voice. “Not because my ego can’t take it, or because it’s your idea or whatever the hell you’re thinking.” He rocked back on his heels and stared at the damn chart. And its limited intersections. “Because if you’re right, where the hell are we? We can’t exactly start Googling every female in the city of a certain age and see if there’s some trauma in their past. Unless . . .” He threw her a look. “Did any of the victims get phobia counseling or therapy . . . ?” If they had, then maybe that could be where the UNSUB had come into contact with them.
She shook her head. “It’s really only two who had actual phobias anyway, Billings to water and Sommers to enclosed places. But for all of them . . . it was like he learned enough about each of them to discover a fear, and then specifically created a torture designed to personalize it. And believe me, that scares me as much as it does you, if for different reasons.”
At his raised brows, she went on, “This is a departure for a ‘normal’ sexual offender, even given that they’re abnormal to begin with. But always, always, the rapes are ultimately about the perpetrator, not the victim. His wants. His needs. Everything else—who he chooses, how he chooses them, what he does to them—all of it stems from his own desires. Sure, he’ll stalk them to learn their routine, to make the attack easier. But it’s highly unusual for an offender to make his selections so deliberately.”
He tried to recall her words of—was it just this morning? “You said he thinks he’s suffered.”
Abbie was frowning, her attention on the chart. “Past abuse of some type, most likely. Emotional, physical, or sexual. Something messed this guy up, big-time. And now he’s returning the favor. In spades.”
“Amanda Richards and Ashley Hornby didn’t have a trauma in their pasts until they crossed his path,” he pointed out.
“Right. But Richards was all over the TV and newspapers because of the pageant wins. It wouldn’t be much of a leap to figure how a beauty queen would react to the deliberate destruction of her looks. Or how an award-winning dancer would respond to being made a cripple. As to how he finds them, there’s a bunch of archives online these days that will search hundreds of newspapers. I typed in ‘Savannah drowning’ in one and know how many hits I got?”
Unfortunately, he could imagine. “And you found the Billings story?”
“Bingo. One of your detectives had done an online search of each of the victims, but Billings was Barbara’s stepfather’s name.”
“What about Hornby?”
Her gaze strayed to the bright yellow string connecting the woman’s name to sections on the grid and shook her head. “Those awards were under Hornby, her maiden name. But I couldn’t find any mention of her in the local papers. Her neighbor said she’d been trying to get on with a Savannah dance troupe. Ashley wasn’t the type to go to bars, or have any sort of social life, according to Knudson.”
“I have a feeling she’d know.” He’d bet a twenty the older woman kept an eye on the comings and goings of everyone on her street.
“I plan to ask the other victims about personal information they might have posted online.” She went to the desk and opened the center drawer. “Chatrooms, blogs, online messaging, My Space, Facebook . . . I’m constantly amazed by the stuff people are willing to post for complete strangers to read.”
“We checked that avenue for Richards thoroughly, but we can follow up with the other victims.” He shook his head. “I can’t even believe the personal stuff women tell strange women in public restrooms.”
Withdrawing a paper clip, she closed the drawer again. “Oh, you mean when we all excuse ourselves from dinner and go in to play Rate a Date?”
He eyed her carefully, but her expression remained bland.
“Yeah, there’s this hidden signal, see, and then we all get up and meet in the restaurant restroom to assign scores to each other’s dinner companions. It’s a one-to-ten scale for several categories, based solely on our observations of the other diners. Good conversationalist. Spending habits. Stamina in bed.”
Damned if she’d hadn’t almost had him. “Very funny,” he said mildly. “But it does make me reevaluate the only meal we’ve had together.”
She toyed with the paper clip, smiling at him. “Bet you’re wondering now about all those times second dates failed to transpire, huh?”
He didn’t bother to tell her that it rarely took a second date for him to get a woman into bed. Or how long it had been since he’d met one who’d interested him enough to want to see her again.
“So where’s Larsen fit in?”
It took him a moment to follow her non sequitur. “Larsen?”
She gestured to the chart. “In the order. If she does turn out to be a victim, where does that place her in the sequence?”
He directed his attention to the time line. “I pulled up the incident report after talking to Dixon. The date of the fire was June seventh.” He watched as she placed the clip on the time line, between the dates of the Richards and Hornby rapes. Together they studied the sequence silently.
“So if Larsen does turn out to be a victim, he only waited four and a half weeks after Richards. And the next two assaults were three weeks apart,” she said slowly.