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That didn’t reassure Faith. To be fair, Hilary didn’t look very reassured either.
The detective sighed irritably. “Who the hell is this guy? How do you kill three people—two of them in broad daylight—and leave no footprints, no fingerprints, no DNA, no witnesses, nothing. It’s just insane. There’s not even a connection to the victims. He’s like the invisible fucking man.”
The agents didn’t say anything. Both felt the same frustrations, and neither felt it would be helpful to lecture him the way Michael had lectured Faith.
Turk whined softly, and Faith said. “Go hunting, boy. See if you can pick anything up.”
Turk trotted away dutifully, nose to the ground. Faith looked down at the body of Lorraine Hayes and wondered what the poor woman’s last thoughts might have been. Was she caught unawares the way Cassidy and Samantha were, or did she have time to see the danger coming for her?
Michael answered that question a moment later. “Hey, Faith? We have footprints.”
Faith and Hilary both lifted their heads in excitement. “We do?” Faith asked.
Michael waved them over. They jogged to where he was standing, and he pointed at the ground. “This is Lorraine Hayes,” he said, pointing at the daintier of the prints. He pointed at a larger but less well-defined print. “And this is our killer. If we follow the prints…” he walked further from the body. “We see that the killer entered the path here.” He turned around and started back toward the body. “He walked at a fairly swift pace. So did Lorraine. Right here, he stopped, and began to sprint. You can see that because of the lengthening strides.”
He walked ahead ten yards and said, “This is where Lorraine started running. So they were about ten yards apart when Lorraine saw him. Within another ten yards, he’d closed the distance and killed her. Her body was positioned close to where she died, not exactly the same place, but close enough that wecan deduce that he stripped her, positioned her and poured powder over her in the same place. He didn’t move the body at all.”
“He caught her quick,” Hilary observed.
“My guess is she was frozen in terror for a second or two before she started moving,” Faith said. “She didn’t have time to get away or call for help.”
Turk barked, and the three of them turned toward him. He stood at the edge of the trees bordering the path. “What is it, boy?” Faith asked as the three of them approached. “What do you smell?”
Turk took a hesitant step into the trees, then put his nose to the ground. Faith held her breath, but a moment later, he lifted his head, shook it and growled irritably.
Faith sighed. “That’s all right, boy,” she said. “You did your best.”
“I’ll get officers to look here and see if we can find our guy. Judging by the footprints, I’m thinking he cut the tread off of his soles so we couldn’t identify the shoe, but we can get a shoe size at least and extrapolate height and weight from there. This is good evidence.”
Faith wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince himself or the two of them. She looked back at the body of Lorraine Hayes and fought the urge to give into despair. She was determined to follow Gordon’s advice and accept that she couldn’t save everyone. She was determined to follow Michael’s advice and see the positive in the evidence that they had found at this crime scene.
But it was hard to do that while she was staring at the body of yet another innocent woman whose life had been taken while they chased their tails looking for the killer.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lillian Martin sipped her wine, a chianti—West’s favorite—and watched the news on her tv, a brand new discount smart tv to replace the one she had smashed a couple of weeks before.
She really needed to find something to take her anger out on besides TVs.
“At least I’m not in a hotel anymore.”
She had rented an apartment four miles away from Faith Bold’s apartment, far enough that it was unlikely they’d run into each other at the grocery store, but close enough that if Lillian felt a need to drive certain points closer to home, she could do it.
If the news was anything to go by, she would need to drive those points closer to home.
The news anchor was reporting on the murder of an electronics store clerk who had a tv placed into his hollowed-out abdomen with the messageThis is your fault, Boldtaped to the top. And somehow, the news, the police, the FBI and the general public had all decided that this was probably unrelated to the West case and to Faith Bold in general. "Experts" believed the man was targeted by thieves who had staged the gruesome murder to try to hide behind the West case and throw the police off the scent. They pointed to the stolen smart TV and the empty till as evidence of that.
Lillian stared at the stolen smart tv and resisted the urge to crack it in half over her knee. She shouldn’t have stolen the damned thing. That was her mistake. That’s why they were able to put this off as a simple robbery.
But the cash she didn’t have a choice about. She didn’t have a job. She’d gotten the apartment by forging documents. As long as she paid rent, that wouldn’t be a problem, but if she was going to pay rent, she either needed a job, or she needed to steal.
She sighed irritably and tossed back the rest of her glass before pouring more wine. She wanted to tear the place apart. She wanted to scream until her throat bled. She wanted to find Faith Bold, tear her eyes out, shove them down her throat, then stomp on her throat until both the throat and the eyeballs popped.
But that wasn’t what West would do. West would evaluate the situation, identify mistakes, and make a plan that would avoid those mistakes in the future. So that’s what Lillian would do.
“Yeah, except that West would become so fucking obsessed with that bitch that he would get himself thrown into prison for the rest of his life.”
She could feel her hands starting to shake. She was close to seeing red.
