He’d let go of this one circle because he still had his other, the place he kept much closer to his heart, the ones he could visit whenever he wanted, the best prizes he’d kept close.
Those he would never let go of without a fight.
Six
“Weren’t you a little hard on Tennison back there?” Josh asked once they were on the road back to Seattle.
Deborah, Jenny, and Winston had hitched a ride in the minivan, leaving Harry behind to deal with Tennison. Reggie and Judy were hauling Leo and Brayden back to the house in Reggie’s car.
“Maybe I was. But seeing those remains scattered all over that little field didn’t have to happen. All this time and I thought I’d built up a rapport with King County. It seems I was deluding myself. Why didn’t they ask for our help sooner? It wasn’t until Emelia went missing. And then, Harry reached out to Tennison. That’s the only way we got the names of the victims. Why didn’t just one family member break the chain of silence and reach out to the Foundation, pick up the phone and let us know they needed help?”
Josh squeezed her hand. “I see your point. I like how you stuck up for the whole team back there.”
“I liked that, too,” Winston echoed. “What’s the next step to finding Emelia?”
“We do our thing, go through the files and see if we can pick up a pattern. Try to figure out what makes this guy tick.”
“I’m in for as long as it takes,” Jenny stated. “I see now why you guys do this. I wouldn’t be sitting here if not for all of you. And if there’s a chance that Emelia is still alive, I want to be a part of finding her.”
Skye shifted in the front passenger seat, turning to see the faces in the back. “It’s obvious I underestimated this guy. Which is another reason I’m pissed. He obviously spends more time with the victims than I originally thought. We’re not talking about a fast kill, and he’s done with them. No. He drove that Range Rover down I-90 east for a reason. We know it wasn’t the dumpsite we found because there was no fresh…” Her voice trailed off.
“You get the idea.” A headache droned like a drum. To ease the tension, she massaged her temples with her fingertips. “It tells me there’s a second dumpsite. That’s where he headed in the Range Rover. We need to find out if there are more victims that we don’t know about, or maybe he’s taking Emelia somewhere new.”
Deborah’s eyes widened as she stared at Skye. “You mean with Emelia he might be starting a new…whatever I saw back there. Why on earth would a human being do that?”
“Several reasons. One, it looked to me like the circle we just left was complete, full up. Nine victims could’ve been his maximum goal for that site. Two, he decided with Emelia that it was time to move on somewhere more accommodating. Three, it’s possible Brayden might’ve been right. Our killer could’ve had his eyes on that spot and knew the moment we breached his domain.”
“I’m going with number one,” Josh offered. “Based on the small size of the field, it seems more plausible that he found somewhere else for Emelia because he’d run out of room.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” Skye noted.
“I don’t know if I’d agree,” Winston revealed, uneasy about divulging something he’d held back. “I might pick the third option. I didn’t mention it at the time because it seemed insignificant, but while we were hiking around the park to get to the river, I saw a drone hovering overhead. I took a video of it with my phone.” He handed off the device to Skye for her to view. “That’s a fairly high-tech item and pricey.”
Skye watched the video, stunned to see the drone follow their movements all along the path until they reached the fire road. “I wished you’d said something at the time.”
“I’m sorry. But drones are everywhere these days. It could’ve belonged to a kid just fooling around. I didn’t know.”
After handing the phone back, Skye drummed her fingers on the middle console. “Email that to every member of the team. We’ll have a quick meeting back at the house to go through Tennison’s file folders again. This time we’ll pick apart the police reports. And we’ll need to keep an open mind. There’s no guarantee that the victims we know about will match the victims at the Snoqualmie River location.”
“Jeez, how many victims do you think he has?” Jenny wondered aloud.
“Good question. Let’s see if we’re able to pinpoint when this all started.”
Josh put forth the question on everyone’s mind. “You think he’s been at this for longer than five years?”
“Unfortunately. But serials have to start somewhere. It’s up to us to figure out when that was.”
Back in their Magnolia neighborhood, Zoe met them at the backdoor. In a soft voice, she pointed out, “It’s all over the news. Boneyard found by the Snoqualmie River. They think nine bodies.”
“Where’s Sierra?” Skye asked.
“In the den playing with her dolls. Don’t worry. She didn’t get anywhere near the TV. I made sure of that. I found out the deets from the Internet.”
“Good girl. Thanks, Zoe. When we get finished eating, you might want to keep Sierra occupied upstairs for about an hour while we delve into each of the victims. Make up some excuse to get her upstairs.”
“No problem. Is Brayden with you?”
Skye gave her a quizzical look. “He’ll be along any minute. He got a ride with Reggie. Is there something you want to tell me about Brayden? What’s going on with you two?”
When Zoe spotted Brayden getting out of the car, she gave Skye a nudge. “Not now. We’ll talk later. By the way, I ordered Chinese food from The Magic Wok for everyone like you said. Deliver should get here in fifteen minutes.”
“Good. After hiking across Ames Lake and back, we’re all starving.”
When the doorbell rang, Josh paid for the food delivery while Deborah and Judy carried the bags into the kitchen.
Jenny and Winston sorted through the orders, handing out cartons of fried rice, an assortment of appetizers, wontons, spring rolls, along with a variety of main dishes like dim sum, noodles, beef, and chicken.
The crew dug in, chowing down with gusto. And with Sierra in the room, they watched their language. They didn’t mention murder or victims. Instead, they cracked jokes about Reggie’s driving and laughed about some silly show on Netflix.
But as soon as they’d finished the meal, Skye cued Zoe to escort Sierra out of the room. From there, the talk turned serious.
Skye laid a hand on the stack of folders. “I have the nine victims here. But before I start, I want to say that I don’t think this is the beginning. Tennison obviously believes that it all began in the summer of 2017 with Miranda Bennington.”
Josh pulled the whiteboard into the room and tacked up a photo of a pretty, brown-haired, petite girl. “Thanks to Zoe for pulling up driver’s license photos of our victims and printing them off, we see what these girls looked like in life. This was eighteen-year-old Miranda, who had just moved into her UDub dorm room one hot August weekend in 2017. After she’d unpacked her stuff, she mentioned to another student that she planned to go out to buy some supplies for school later that evening. We know now that she went out but never made it back to the dorm.”
Skye handed off another picture to Josh. “This is nineteen-year-old Hayley Lopez. Four months after Miranda disappeared, Hayley left her job at a craft store one night in December a few days before Christmas. It was nine-thirty in the evening. She was never seen or heard from again after that night. Even though police found her car parked in the same spot where she’d left it at noon to start her shift, either Hayley never made it to the vehicle and was abducted on the walk across the lot, or she made it there and found the car disabled and wouldn’t start. It doesn’t specify there was anything wrong with the car in the police report.”
“So the perpetrator grabbed her as she walked across the lot,” Judy restated.
Skye nodded. “That’s the logical conclusion.”
“The file mentions
CCTV,” Brayden pointed out. “That’s gotta help ID a suspect, right?”
“We’ll get to that in a minute,” Skye noted, flipping over one file, and opening another. “The video is what Tennison used to link the cases together. CCTV captured the same vehicle circling the lot before Hayley’s disappearance and some of the others. And I’ll delve into that more after we get all nine victims listed on the board. I will say this now, though. If Miranda and Hayley and the others are found to be part of the dumpsite at the river, then we know definitively that we’re dealing with the same offender. But let’s be clear. If the Range Rover is linked to our serial killer, then where is Emelia? And where was he going with her? Two questions we have yet to answer. So, for now, let’s move on and get all the victims on the board.”
“You’re suggesting we have a second dumpsite,” Leo stated. “And the Range Rover was blowing down I-90 to get there.”
“That’s what I think, yeah. Okay, so two months after Hayley went missing, enter Cassie Arnett, who was taken from the Sea-Tac Airport on a cold Friday morning in February, her body found a day later at Ames Lake. Cassie is the reason we found the dumpsite. Without the killer leaving Cassie where someone could find her, we wouldn’t be this far along. But with Cassie’s abduction and murder, the killer learned from his mistakes. And we’ll talk about those mistakes when we discuss the CCTV.”
Skye handed Josh another photograph, this time he held the picture of a perky redhead. “In August 2018, Ellen Thorburn was a twenty-one-year-old artist with a bright future in design when she went missing after a night out drinking with her girlfriends. Ellen never made it back to her loft in the Arts District in Capitol Hill.”
“This really is frightening,” Deborah muttered, leaning into her daughter. “To listen to this happening all over again. It makes me remember how scared I was when I couldn’t find you.”
Jenny put an arm around her mom. “Maybe you should go home then and get some rest. Maybe you’re not up to hearing this”
“No, no, I want to,” Deb insisted. “I told Harry I want to do my part. All these girls deserve to have someone looking for them. I want to contribute to this team any way I can.” She glanced over at Skye. “Sorry, I interrupted you. Go on. I promise to be good.”
“It’s okay. You’re allowed to get emotional. Everyone in this room is,” Skye said, her way of dealing with the interruptions. She gave Josh another picture for the board. “This case is baffling. It’s a true mystery that happened at the start of January 2019 after the Christmas break. We have a blonde cheerleader from Redmond, a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school named Mikayla Hedges. Mikayla stayed home sick with the flu. No one really knows what happened to Mikayla because she vanished from her mother’s apartment sometime between noon and three o’clock that afternoon. Her mother’s last conversation with Mikayla happened at eleven-fifty that morning. When her daughter didn’t answer the phone around three, she got worried and left work early to go home and make sure Mikayla was okay. The teenager wasn’t there. Her bed was messy but empty. No one has set eyes on Mikayla since that afternoon.”
“Wow. This guy doesn’t appear to have a type, does he?” Leo stated. “Not like Bundy. He’s all over the place.”
“That’s a fair statement. With this guy, no woman is safe on the streets,” Josh replied as he taped another picture to the board.
Skye cleared her throat. “Four months after Mikayla went missing another teenager disappeared in early May. Seventeen-year-old Jamie Colombe left a baby shower held in her Sand Point neighborhood for her older sister. After the shower ended, Jamie walked out the door around ten o’clock that night to walk four blocks to her house. Four blocks. Jamie never made it home. Her mother had stayed behind to help her other daughter clean up after the party. The mom thought Jamie had made it home safely and went to bed without checking on Jaime. But at six the next morning when the mother got up to go to work, that’s when she realized Jamie hadn’t slept in her bed. After spending several hours trying to track Jamie down, the mother reported her daughter missing at ten that morning.”
“In other words,” Winston stated. “The killer had a twelve-hour head start.”
Josh nodded. “In almost all these cases, the killer has the advantage. Time is on his side.”
Judy raised her hand. “Jamie’s the full-blooded Nez Perce, right? She’s the one who was three weeks away from graduating high school, right?”
“With honors,” Skye added. “Not only that, but Jamie disappeared at a time when she had told several family members that a guy had been following her home from school, driving a black SUV with tinted windows. She didn’t know what kind of SUV, just that it had blacked-out windows. Those notations were in the police report, and I believe they’re significant.”
“That’s a link right there,” Reggie pointed out. “He used the SUV that he prefers to steal.”
Skye got up to hand Josh another photograph. “Brie Kennemore was about to celebrate her eighteenth birthday on September sixth, 2019, when she disappeared in broad daylight after working the Labor Day lunch shift at a fast-food restaurant in the Beacon Hill area of town. Brie never made it home to the barbecue her family had planned that afternoon. Instead of eating ribs, Brie’s family spent the next several weeks actively looking for her. Because Brie, like the others, hasn’t been seen since that Labor Day.”
Another photo followed, and Josh stuck it to the board with the rest. This picture was a smiling, happy-looking twenty-year-old.
Skye tapped the photo. “To get 2020 off to a bang, Clare Diaz went to a friend’s New Year’s Eve party. The police report says the partygoers suggested Clare had a few drinks but was not drunk when she left shortly after ringing in the New Year around twelve-thirty. Clare was on foot. Like Jamie Colombe, Clare lived in the neighborhood and had less than six blocks to get home. Somewhere along the route that morning in North Seattle, Clare vanished. And, like the others, no one has heard from Clare in seven months.”
“The abductions are getting closer together,” Brayden noted.
“You got it. Moving on. Just eighty days later, twenty-two-year-old Anne Harding, a kindergarten teacher on the job for less than a year, went jogging on a Saturday, the first day of spring. That’s four months ago for anyone who’s counting. Anne never made it back to her apartment. Her mother reported her missing the next day, a Sunday because Anne failed to call her like she always did. Anne’s mother lives in Tucson and always talked to her daughter on Sunday mornings.”
“So if Anne Harding was the last body buried at the river, then he’s taken Emelia to the new place,” Reggie tossed out. “That’s a sobering thought.”
“It is, which brings us to what happened last night with Emelia Navarro. Brayden brought us into this because Emelia didn’t show up to her programming class. Thanks to CCTV captured at the end of the complex right in front of Emelia’s unit, we saw what went down. Dragged into a vehicle against her will, Emelia became this guy’s tenth victim, the tenth that we know about.”
Skye stopped to sip from a glass of water to soothe her dry throat. “Aside from Emelia’s case, in five of the incidents—Hayley, Ellen, Jamie, Brie, and Clare—grainy CCTV surfaced showing a vehicle circling each victim several times before the women disappeared. But the kidnapping itself always happened somewhere off camera, conveniently just out of range. Based on what happened to Emelia, this fact was the one thing that linked their cases together. But, unlike Tennison, Josh and I are convinced there are other victims out there who’ve fallen prey to this same predator.”
“It didn’t start with Miranda,” Jenny determined.
Skye pointed a finger at Jenny. “That’s right. And we know because we saw what was in that field with our own eyes. Until we know for certain that those remains found by the river equate to the names on the board, we move forward, keeping in mind there are probably other victims.”
Leo shifted in his chair. “Yeah. Because Anne Harding’s remains looke
d so badly decomposed, I doubt the medical examiner will be able to provide us with a cause of death. The rest was more skeletal than anything else. Those bones had been there a long time.”
“Exactly. Same with the skulls scattered around the site,” Josh added. “Unless there’s obvious head trauma or some evidence of a gunshot wound, we may need to leave cause of death out of the profile for now. We all know the drill. If he strangled or used a knife and it didn’t leave a nick or a mark on a bone, it’s almost impossible to come up with what the killer used to kill these women.”
“My guess is he strangled them,” Winston said with a grimace.
“Maybe.” Josh tapped the board. “But however they died, these are crimes of opportunity.”
“And we feel comfortable saying that he’s a decent car thief,” Skye noted. “Leo should do his thing and pull a list of juveniles caught or convicted of stealing cars. Throw in the usual traits of a youthful serial killer wannabe and factor in torturing animals, maybe include peeping for good measure.”
“You got it,” Leo said.
“And the rest of us?” Brayden asked. “What about me, Winston and Reggie?”
Josh slapped his hands down on the table, leaned toward Brayden. “I need you guys to do fieldwork. Find his alternate dumpsite. We know there’s a seventy-five percent chance that it’s down I-90 East because the Range Rover was spotted heading that way.
“How do you want us to do that?” Winston prompted. “Use our crystal ball?”
“If our guy used a drone this afternoon, then so can you,” Josh fired back.
“Cool,” Brayden piped up. “I’m game. I could see myself flying a drone into those woods.” He nudged Reggie in the ribs. “What about you? Are you up for another trek in the wilderness? Cause this site has to be in a remote area, not like the one at Ames Lake.”
Reggie’s lips curved in a sly grin. “What are we waiting for then? Why are we still sitting here when there are seven hours of daylight left?”
Down Among The Bones Page 8