“Why do you say that?”
She looked up at him, fighting tears. “Because those assholes in the Loring Police Department lost the evidence box, that’s why. We don’t even know when it disappeared from the locker. No one took responsibility. But when it vanished, any hope of identifying the attacker vanished with it.”
“I see.”
Max sat down and considered the items scattered across the table. He pulled a couple of computer printouts from the pile.
“Evidently she was trying to collect reports of rapes with similar MOs,” he said. “At least back at the start. These two are dated that same year. Both victims said that their attacker blindfolded them using a cloth sack and threatened them with a knife.”
“Jocelyn was obsessed with following the news on those two crimes. They occurred on other campuses, not at Loring, so it wasn’t easy getting information.”
“Could have been a copycat situation.”
“Jocelyn didn’t think so. She actually tracked down the two victims and talked to them. She returned convinced that the assailant was the same man who had attacked her. She said she was going to try to find a pattern. But then the reports just stopped.”
“Guys like that don’t usually change the way they do things,” Max said. “But sometimes they modify their methods or try to make them more efficient.”
A little shock of unease whispered through Charlotte. Max sounded disturbingly cold-blooded, as if Jocelyn’s case were nothing more than an interesting puzzle.
But when she took a closer look at him, she realized that there was an aura of quiet intensity about him.
“Jocelyn wondered from time to time if her attacker had left the state,” she said. “Or maybe been arrested for crimes she hadn’t heard about.”
“Both possibilities.” Max flipped through some of the other printouts and clippings. “The thing we have to ask ourselves is, what does her story have to do with those two dead women, the three rape victims and the death of Louise Flint?”
“Maybe it’s all unrelated,” Charlotte said.
“I don’t think so. Coincidences do happen, but they rarely look like this.” He picked up the police report for Jocelyn’s case. “We may have another angle into this thing.”
“What?”
“Not what, who. Detective Egan Briggs of the Loring Police Department. Looks like he was in charge of the investigation.”
“Jocelyn was assaulted over a decade ago. Briggs looked like he was in his fifties at the time. He’s probably retired by now. Even if he’s still around, I doubt that he’ll be helpful. He never got anywhere with the case. No one was ever charged.”
“If Briggs is still alive, I’ll find him.”
She almost smiled. “Yes, I believe you will.”
He shrugged. “It’s what I do.”
“I understand.”
“Meanwhile, you and I are going to act like we think that Jocelyn is at that retreat on St. Adela.”
She tapped one finger on the list of names. “Because if she thinks she needs to disappear, she must have a very good reason.”
“And because one woman is already dead.”
CHAPTER 14
Louise was dead.
Jocelyn stared at the computer screen, reading and rereading the terse newspaper reports.
Victim declared dead at the scene . . . Illicit drugs and syringe found on bedside table . . . Suspected overdose . . . Toxicology tests ordered . . . Victim had a history of drug use . . . Volunteered at a local women’s shelter . . .
Murder, Jocelyn thought, not an overdose. She and Louise had been right. Somewhere along the line, one of them had made a terrible mistake. The bastard they were hunting had been alerted.
He’d always had one huge advantage, she thought. He had known her identity all along. But she had never known his.
Still, why had he murdered Louise?
Because he couldn’t find me?
The terrible weight of guilt stole her breath. It was her fault Louise was dead.
She forced herself to breathe through the ghastly pressure. When her head cleared a little, she tried to follow the logic of her conclusion. She and Louise had known that the monster was escalating. If they were right, he had murdered his last two victims. But what had made him realize that someone was tracking him? They had been so damned careful.
So damned careful, but now Louise was dead.
If he had murdered Louise, there was no reason to think he would stop there. She had to assume that he knew the true purpose of the investment club. If so, he might conclude that he had to get rid of all of them.
She had to warn the others. But she had so little to tell them. No name. No hard evidence, just a conviction that they might be targets of a serial rapist turned killer.
There was an annoying hum of activity around her, making it difficult to concentrate. It was late afternoon and the library was crowded. Much of the noise was coming from the children’s department. Story hour was in progress. The librarian in charge was encouraging audience participation, and the kids were cooperating with enthusiasm. In addition, there was a group of raucous teenagers in the video room and a constant stream of patrons coming and going from the checkout desk.
But the busiest section was the large room that provided online access. Every computer terminal was busy. She’d had to reserve one and then wait for her turn.
Due to demand, she had been allowed a mere half hour. She had intended to use the time to continue searching for information on the man she and Louise were hunting, but she had taken a moment to check the office e-mail at the foundation. That was how she had discovered that Louise had died.
The killer had managed to murder her with drugs. That could not have been easy. Louise hated drugs. She must have been overpowered, but according to the police reports there had been no sign of a struggle. That didn’t make sense, either. Louise would have fought.
Jocelyn shut down the computer and sat quietly for a moment, trying to think. Until she had discovered that Louise was dead, she had allowed herself to believe that the two of them were still in control of the situation. They had assured each other that the bastard could not possibly know that they were closing in on him.
But now she had to accept the fact that he was hunting them.
She wished she could talk to Charlotte. Charlotte was the calm, level-headed one. She thought of herself as unexciting. Having her fiancé dump her shortly before the wedding had certainly not enhanced her self-esteem. But her real problem was that she was too trusting. She tended to take people at face value.
Charlotte never lied to others, so she made the classic mistake of the habitually honest—she assumed that other people did not lie to her, at least not to her face. In her world, people were innocent of deliberate deceit until proven otherwise, which was, of course, way too late.
Even when Charlotte discovered that some people could not be trusted, her reaction tended to be disappointment, not anger and cynicism. And to top it off, she usually blamed herself for failing to perceive the truth about the other person’s character flaws.
When Brian Conroy had announced that he could not go through with the marriage, she had concluded that it was her own fault because she had allowed herself to be deceived into thinking he was Mr. Perfect. The dumbass therapist she had seen for a few weeks had reinforced that notion.
It was wrongheaded, but that was Charlotte.
Jocelyn closed her eyes for a moment, trying to steady her breathing. The thing was, Charlotte was the only person she really trusted now that Louise was gone. But she didn’t dare contact her for fear of putting her in jeopardy.
“Hey, lady, if you’re finished with the computer, I’m next.”
Startled, Jocelyn looked up and saw a scruffy-looking teenage male in running shoes, jeans and a hoodie.
“It’s all yours,” she said.
She got to her feet, took her pack off the back of the chair and moved out of the way.
“Thanks. Got homework to research.”
Yeah, right, Jocelyn thought. Kids his age all had enough tech to stock a big-box store. They didn’t need to hog the public library’s computers to do their homework.
The kid sat down in the booth and cranked up the computer with quick, skillful movements. He had obviously done it many times before.
She slung her backpack over one shoulder and prepared to head for the front door of the library. She glanced casually at the computer screen before she turned away.
The kid was already on a porn site watching naked, unnaturally endowed people have sweaty sex.
“Interesting homework you’ve got,” Jocelyn said.
The kid looked up long enough to mouth a reply. “Fuck off, lady. I got my First Amendment rights.”
So the kid liked to view porn on a public computer to make sure his parents didn’t find out how he spent his study time. So what? She had just finished using the library’s computer to research the murder of a good friend because she didn’t want to let a killer know her location. Each to his or her own. The public library was the great equalizer.
She headed for the door. It was not her job to correct the manners of the younger generation. She had more pressing issues—like staying alive.
She pushed through the glass doors and went out into the chilly afternoon. She had chosen Portland, Oregon, as her bolt-hole. She hadn’t dared stay in Seattle. Too many people knew her and, although the city had boomed in recent years, it was still a small town in many ways.
She would have given anything to buy a throwaway phone and call Charlotte, but she didn’t dare. Charlotte was safe only as long as she was not involved. Besides, she was pretty sure that Charlotte would tell her to go straight to the police. But that wasn’t an option. She had nothing concrete to take to the cops. Zero.
If there was one lesson she had learned after being attacked all those years ago, it was that there was no use going to the authorities if you couldn’t positively identify the bastard and provide absolute proof of what he had done. The cops hadn’t believed her when she had been a sophomore at Loring College. They wouldn’t believe her now.
The question was what to do next. Anxiety pulsed through her. The old fear that she had worked so hard to master gnawed at her guts. She sensed the oppressive nightmare closing in around her. Memories of the knife against her throat and the cloth sack over her head threatened to overwhelm her. She could not breathe. She wanted to jump out of her own skin.
She opened the pack with shaking fingers and took out the little bottle of anxiety meds. She swallowed one tablet dry. Predictably, it got caught in her throat. Probably just her imagination. She swallowed hard again and again. But she could still feel it lodged there in her throat.
In a full-blown panic now, she leaped to her feet and rushed back into the library. She managed to make it to the drinking fountain. She gulped water until the choking sensation eased.
She went back outside, sat down on a bench and waited for the medication to kick in. Streams of people came and went from the library.
After a while she grew calmer and began to ponder her next move. The problem was that it was impossible to know if the other members of the club were in danger. She had to assume that the bastard who had murdered Louise was after her, as well. But if he was thinking logically, he would realize that he did not have to be concerned with Madison, Victoria and Emily. She and Louise had never told any of the three about the hunt for the killer.
But there was no reason to assume that he was thinking logically. He was a rapist and a killer, after all. That meant he was obsessed, violent; maybe flat-out crazy. At the very least he was a full-on psychopath.
The only real question was why he had started to escalate a few months back. As far as she could tell, until that point he had continued to rape and terrify victims, but he had not murdered them. Something must have happened to alter his pattern.
Whatever the case, this was no longer about just her past. She had an obligation to warn the others, she decided. Back at the beginning they’d prepared a contingency plan in case things went wrong. It had been Madison’s idea. Madison was the founder of the club. One by one she had brought each of them into her exciting, secret world.
After a while Jocelyn got up and went back inside the library. She stood in line again to put a fake name down on the list of those waiting for computer access.
She hoped the clerk would not assign her the same booth that the porn-obsessed kid had used.
CHAPTER 15
The birthday party was in full swing when Max arrived. He stood in the doorway and watched Charlotte hand out slices of cake and glasses of pink punch to a crowd of seniors.
The partygoers appeared to range in age from early seventies to late nineties. One or two might have been pushing a hundred. The banner strung across the room read Happy Birthday. Balloons bobbed and colorful streamers hung from the ceiling.
An elderly woman with a helmet of white curls wheeled her walker forward and stopped directly in front of him.
“Come on in,” she said. “Join the party. I’m Ethel Deeping, by the way.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Deeping,” he said.
“Call me Ethel. The party is for everyone here at Rainy Creek Gardens who has a birthday this month. Plenty of cake and punch.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But I just came by to speak with Ms. Sawyer.”
“Charlotte?” Ethel glanced toward the cake table. “She’s right over there.” Ethel raised her voice. “Charlotte. There’s a gentleman here to see you.”
Charlotte glanced up at the sound of her name. Max thought he glimpsed a little spark of welcome in her eyes when she saw him. But maybe that was just his imagination. Or wishful thinking.
“Thank you, Ethel,” she said. She smiled at Max and held out a paper plate with a slice of cake on it. “Would you like a piece?”
He realized that every eye in the room was on him. There was open curiosity and speculation on every well-lined face. He was aware that a few of the celebrants were watching him with something that looked a lot like suspicion.
“Sure,” he said.
He walked to the cake table and took the paper plate. Charlotte handed him a plastic fork. He took a bite.
The buzz of conversation immediately got louder.
He moved a little closer to Charlotte and lowered his voice.
“Why is everyone staring at me?” he asked.
“They’re just curious about you,” she whispered.
“Because I’m a stranger?”
“Well, not entirely. I’m afraid it’s more about me than it is about you. The last man who dropped by to see me here at Rainy Creek Gardens was my fiancé. He came to tell me that he couldn’t go through with the marriage.”
“He did it here? In public? With all your coworkers and the residents around?”
“Brian said he thought it would be easier for me that way.”
Dumbfounded, Max stared at her. “Easier? For you?”
“You know, so I wouldn’t be alone afterward. He said he knew that I would be among friends who could comfort me.”
“That’s complete bullshit.”
He didn’t realize that he had spoken into one of those strange silences that can fall over a room without warning until the words were out of his mouth. By then it was too late.
The birthday crowd froze. He was suddenly the focal point of a variety of expressions that ranged across the spectrum from stern disapproval to acute interest. He was sure he heard a couple of snorts of muffled laughter.
At the back of the room a tall woman with thinning gray hair rammed her cane against the floor a couple of times.
&nb
sp; “What did he say?” she demanded in a voice that carried the weight of authority.
Max figured her for a retired professor or maybe a doctor.
“He said bullshit,” Ethel responded, raising her own voice to make sure the questioner heard her.
“For pity’s sake,” Charlotte muttered.
“Why’d he say bullshit?” the woman with the cane asked.
“Good question,” someone else said.
“This is your problem,” Charlotte said out of the side of her mouth. “You solve it.”
There was another sudden silence. Max swallowed a bite of cake and faced the crowd.
“Ms. Sawyer just told me that her former fiancé, who evidently was an asshole, came here to Rainy Creek Gardens to tell her that he was calling off the wedding. She said she thought he chose to drop the bomb on her here for her sake. She thinks the s.o.b. was trying to be thoughtful. He didn’t want her to be alone afterward. He wanted her to have friends around who could comfort her. I said that was bullshit. He did it here because he knew she wouldn’t make a scene in front of all of you.”
“Damn right,” a man declared.
“Bullshit, for sure,” another man said.
“Yep, he did it here to save his own hide,” Ethel announced. “That jerk was a coward if ever there was one. You’re better off without him, Charlotte.”
A chorus of voices chimed in, agreeing with Ethel’s conclusion.
Max looked at Charlotte.
“They’re right,” he said. “You’re better off without him.”
Charlotte gave him a steely look. “Why, exactly, did you come here, Mr. Cutler?”
“I wanted to see if we could meet after you get off work. Maybe have drinks. I have a few things to discuss with you.”
A ripple of approval swept across the room.
Ethel beamed. “Say yes, Charlotte. This one looks like a much better catch than the jerk.”