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Alex looked at the cameraman. The fact that the reporter would have to reshoot the segment meant, at least, that they weren’t live on the air. Alex looked back to the reporter.
“I’m really—”
She tried to finish her apology but the words caught in her throat. It felt as if her trachea had narrowed, and no matter how hard she tried to speak, no words would come. It took only a moment for Alex to understand why her body was shutting down: she was staring at Tracy Carr, the reporter who had stuck the microphone in her face ten years earlier when Alex walked out of her house the night her family was killed.
She was standing face-to-face with the reporter who had stalked her for a decade, and who had earned a substantial following by offering anniversary updates on the whereabouts of Alexandra Quinlan. This was the woman, Alex knew, who had coined the nickname “Empty Eyes.” And here she was, staring straight at her.
“Sorry,” Alex finally managed. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Alex averted her gaze, breaking eye contact for fear that, despite the years since their last encounter and Alex’s physical transformation, Tracy Carr had recognized her. Alex offered no time for the woman to piece things together, quickly walking away with the sinking realization that the entire encounter, however brief, had been captured by the news camera. And if Tracy Carr suspected who had ruined her report, the woman had the digital evidence to review and confirm it. As Alex hurried away, she snuck a glance over her shoulder as she was about to turn the corner of the journalism building. Tracy Carr continued to watch her and they locked eyes for just a moment before Alex disappeared behind the bricks.
* * *
Alex spent time wandering the halls of McCormack University’s school of journalism looking for the recording studio and trying to calm her nerves. As her heart raced and her head swam with dizziness, she spotted a restroom and pushed through the door. After staggering to the sink, she splashed cold water on her face. When she looked up and into the mirror, for an instance she saw Alexandra Quinlan staring back. That teenaged girl still existed in her mind, but to actually see her in the mirror was something new and startling. The image of Alex Armstrong—with the spiked blond hair, piercings, tattoos, and wild shades of lipstick—had for years supplanted the image of her old self. To the point, at least, that when she looked into a mirror she never thought of the girl she used to be. Until now. Until moments after she’d come face-to-face with the reporter who had shattered her life.
Alex blinked a few times until Alexandra Quinlan disappeared. She realized, though, that no matter how easily her mind displaced the old image of herself, it would take something much greater to prevent Tracy Carr from piecing things together. To a casual observer with no, or little, memory of Alexandra Quinlan, glancing at Alex today was nothing more than looking at a stranger. But to the woman who had obsessed over Empty Eyes for a decade, staring into Alex’s eyes was sure to trigger recognition.
She spent another few minutes calming her nerves and finally exited the washroom to wander the empty halls until she found the recording studio. It was located on the second floor of the Westcott School of Journalism building, and just as Ashley Holms promised, the door was locked when Alex tried the handle. A window was etched in the wall and the recording studio was dark inside. Alex waited in the hallway to gauge the level of foot traffic. After five minutes, no students or faculty materialized. Alex removed her pick set and made fast work of the studio’s door lock, despite her hands still carrying a slight tremor from her run-in with Tracy Carr.
Inside, she contemplated whether she should turn on the lights or work in the dark but decided that being spotted in the studio with the lights off would be more suspicious than sitting at the dashboard with the studio fully lighted. Overhead fluorescents brought the studio to life, and Alex immediately recognized the space from her previous night’s viewing of Laura McAllister’s appearance on Wake Up America. It was hard to believe stories produced in such a small studio reached so many listeners. Ten minutes after she clicked on the lights, she had still not seen anyone walk past the studio. She went to work at the recording studio’s computer, taking a few minutes to bypass rudimentary firewalls until she was into the hard drive’s saved documents. The files were titled by students’ names and ID numbers. Alex scrolled until she located Laura McAllister’s last saved document, which was dated April 21—the previous Friday, which represented the last time anyone had seen or heard from her. The document was an MPEG-4 audio file.
Alex took a quick look through the window. The hallway was quiet and still. She removed a thumb drive from her rucksack, inserted it in the USB drive, and copied the file. The large file took fifteen minutes to transfer. Alex spent the time sitting at the studio’s table acting casual for anyone who passed by the window. No one did. When the transfer was complete, she removed the thumb drive, locked the recording studio on her way out, and was overly cautious when she exited the building. Seeing no reporters or news crews, she headed home to listen to Laura McAllister’s episode.
CHAPTER 44
Washington, D.C. Saturday, April 29, 2023 7:15 a.m.
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, JUST OVER A WEEK SINCE LAURA MCALLISTER had last been seen, and while the campus was still asleep, Professor Martin Crosby finished lecture notes for the upcoming week, answered a few e-mails, and then changed in the faculty washroom. He emerged in running shorts and gym shoes. It had been his New Year’s resolution to get into shape, and four months of his ritual of putting in an hour of work each Saturday morning before tackling a three-mile run had prevented him from losing the gains he’d made during the week. He’d managed to lose fifteen pounds since the New Year and had kept it off. He had even started to enjoy running. He exited the Reiner Faculty Building into the quad, set the timer on his watch, and took off across campus.
Thirty minutes later he was breathing heavily as he finished his third mile jogging along the forested path that cut through Horace Grove. He was feeling good and decided to push himself for an extra mile. It turned out to be a bad idea. As he rounded a turn halfway through his fourth mile, he felt a tweak in his hamstring and slowed his pace. A small clearing was just up ahead and he limped gingerly into it and bent over to stretch. Touching his hands to the ground, he noticed something shine through the leaves in the forested area next to the running path. A closer look revealed a silver ring with a green gem that appeared to be perched on top of leaves. He leaned farther and attempted to pinch the ring out of the leaves. His first attempt failed when his fingers slipped free from the stone—emerald or peridot. In preparation for a second attempt, he brushed the leaves away before noticing that the ring was still set on a finger, the hand covered by leaves.
He stumbled backward until his perspective was able to take in the fact that the hand, bleach white and overstuffed, led to a wrist and a forearm. He struggled to pull his phone from his pocket.
* * *
An hour later police cruisers blocked the running path, their lights blinking. The coroner’s van had backed into the clearing and was parked at an angle with the back doors open. Yellow crime scene tape roped off the area while a crime scene photographer snapped photos of the body. A detective stood waiting in the background. The coroner waited next to her. After everything was documented, the detective approached the body and got her first look. The victim was covered in leaves, as if her killer had haphazardly attempted to hide her body. The skin on the girl’s face was bone white and contrasted stiffly with the dark strands of hair that lay across her cheek.
“Female victim,” the detective said to the coroner, crouching next to the body and brushing the dead girl’s hair to the side. “Ligature wounds to the neck.”
The coroner crouched as well. He touched the dead girl’s neck with his gloved hands.
“Looks like it was done with a thin length of rope, maybe three-eighths of an inch,” he said. “I’ll take measurements when I get the body back to the morgue. I’ll likely recover fibers to help identify what type of rope was used.”
The detective brushed the leaves off the rest of the girl’s body. “Shit,” she said when she saw that the victim was naked from the waist down. “She was probably raped.”
“Have to assume,” the coroner said. “But we’ll know for sure once I start my exam. We’re gonna need the parents to come down to make an ID.”
Neither the detective nor the coroner mentioned the victim’s name. They didn’t have to. It was obvious to both that they were looking at Laura McAllister.
CHAPTER 45
Washington, D.C. Saturday, April 29, 2023 9:20 a.m.
ALEX HAD PUSHED FOR A COFFEEHOUSE BUT HAD BEEN OVERRULED. And since she was requesting the meeting and sniffing for details, she had no room to negotiate on the location. After her visit to the school of journalism’s recording studio, Alex had spent the previous evening listening to, and taking copious notes on, Laura McAllister’s explosive episode. She’d come across a lot of information and still had more work to do. But despite the demands of the Matthew Claymore case, she had been unable to get Byron Zell out of her mind since reading about his death. She was worried, and despite Garrett’s warning to stay away from the situation, Alex couldn’t help herself.
Benjamin’s Tavern was a cop bar hidden in the basement level of a building in Truxton Circle and frequented by law enforcement of all kinds, from beat cops to campus security, transit cops to detectives, and everything in between. To accommodate the schedules of Washington, D.C.’s finest, Benjamin’s kept odd hours. Like an airport bar that served stiff drinks to jet-lagged customers at 8:00 a.m., Benjamin’s saw a steady stream of customers all through the night and into the morning hours as tired cops finished their shifts and looked for a place to unwind.
Hank Donovan was a fifty-something divorced detective who drank too much. The drinking aside, though, he was a useful source of information. Alex had a working relationship with Hank that, over the years, had produced a lot of give-and-take. As a Washington, D.C. detective, Hank Donovan had access to information that was occasionally useful to Alex, depending on which Lancaster & Jordan case she was working. And Alex—as an off-the-books investigator who had worked in the underbelly of legal investigation for nearly a decade and was still close to a dozen or so shady friends from Alleghany, many of whom had graduated from juvenile offenses to more sophisticated forms of crime—had her fair share of street connections that were sometimes useful to Hank’s investigations.
