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“Okay. And that was last night?” the detective asked. “Right. We’re going to have to expedite this, even though it’s less than twenty-four hours. Finding her cell phone isn’t great news.”
The detective put the phone down and Laura got up, stalking over to her table. “What was that phone call about?” she asked, realizing a little too late that maybe her tone was snappier than she had intended.
“There’s a missing woman, and we just had her cell phone handed in,” the detective said. “Her name is Hayley Sommer. It looks like she’s been abducted.”
“This sounds like it’s one of our cases,” Laura said, glancing at Nate. His grim expression seemed to suggest he agreed.
“Well, it wouldn’t fit what you were looking for, only…” the detective started, sounding like she was thinking out loud. “She was last seen at a bar late last night, and the witnesses said she was really drunk when she left to walk home. The cell phone thing is new though, right? Your killer normally just kills them right on the spot.”
“Where?” Nate asked immediately, grabbing one of his pins from the pot.
The detective came over and leaned over their map, her finger hovering in the air until she found it. “There,” she said. She’d pointed to a road along the south edge of the town. Laura leaned in, as did Nate, examining the location.
“There’s nothing there,” Laura said. “No abandoned structures.”
Nate traced a finger along the road, back in the direction of the last victim. “Nothing…” he said, then traced it the other way. “Wait – here. What’s this?”
The detective leaned over them to answer his question. “Oh, that’s a shelter. It was used by the woodsmen a hundred years or so ago. There’s a lot of them around here. With modernization and then the protection of the woodland, they stopped being used. You find them all through the woods. Since the town has expanded, there’s even a few like that one that are pretty close to the roads.”
Laura looked at Nate, and Nate looked back at her.
“If she’s still alive…” she said.
“Do you think she is?” Nate asked. “He killed the others.”
“But he had to move her,” Laura said. “And even if she’s dead – we might catch a trace of him.”
“Let’s go,” Nate said, grabbing the car keys and starting to stride away already.
They had a chance to catch him – and maybe save a life.
Laura ran after him, beating him to the exit.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Laura’s eyes were wide and wild as they parked beside the road, the trees right next to them. She stared around in all directions for a clue as to whether he was here – how nearby he was. She couldn’t help but feel a fraction of the terror she had absorbed from Joy Kingsley. Here, the woods – it was his domain. This was where he stalked and killed them. And Laura was suddenly all too aware of the things she had in common with the victims, even if there were differences as well.
“Are you ready?” Nate asked. He was looking into the woods with a grim expression on his face. Laura sensed that he felt the heaviness of this place as well.
“I’m not sure I ever will be,” Laura said. “But we have to do this. This is what it has all been about, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Nate asked.
“The visions,” Laura said. She looked back into the trees. Beyond the first few trunks, visibility all but disappeared. The branches were tightly woven enough overhead, the trees evergreen and still leafy at this time of year, that the ground between them was shrouded in darkness even in the early morning light. “They’ve been leading me here. Telling me that I needed to look into these cases because they aren’t finished. There was another victim to come. And now maybe we’re too late – but we can still stop him from taking another life, two years from now.”
“I hope we’re not too late,” Nate said, then reached for the doorhandle. “But if we never go in, we will be.”
Laura nodded decisively and got out of the car herself. She winced at the sound of the slams as they both closed their doors, wishing it had been quieter. There was no way to tell how deep into the woods their suspect would be. No way to know if he had heard them and already knew they were coming.
Dear God, how she hoped they still had the element of surprise on their hands. Because she had seen how he hunted, and if he had been living here, he would know this area like the back of his hand. They would be sitting ducks.
And yet, what was the alternative? They could have scrambled the whole precinct and brought them down here, and all it might have achieved would be the guaranteed death of the missing young woman. The one he may have in there with him now. Despite the fact that his MO seemed to have been the same in the past – killing them right there and then – he had changed this time. Laura didn’t know why, and that terrified her more than anything.
And with even a ten percent chance that the woman might still be alive, they couldn’t go in all guns blazing and risk her death as a direct result of police actions.
“We stick together,” Nate said, standing beside her on the grassy side of the road, both of them facing the trees as though they were about to go over the edge of the trench into No Man’s Land. “If we split up, we’ll be targets. We have to stick together, no matter what.”
“Agreed,” Laura said. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She shouldn’t feel this nervous, should she? This was the kind of thing they did all the time. The kind of thing that was just part of their job. Going after a killer wasn’t exactly something new.
