by Katee Robert
The interest in Travis’s blue eyes sharpened. “Someone’s left me a love note, didn’t they?” He leaned forward, the chain of his cuffs clinking. “Has someone been naughty, Agent? Did they sneak into a sorority house and stab those sluts to death? Tell me the details and I might have some information for you.”
Dante held himself perfectly still, his expression bland. “You have a wild imagination.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t get much in the way of entertainment.” His gaze slid to Clarke. “You’re pretty enough. Pickings are slim here, you understand.”
She huffed a laugh. “Prison has dulled your skills, Berkley. I heard you were a charming fucker, but all you’ve done in the few minutes since we arrived is verbally jack yourself off.” She leaned back and dropped an arm over her chair, every inch of her posture screaming belligerence. “This is a waste of time. He doesn’t know anything useful.”
Dante picked up where she was headed with that and shrugged. “Crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”
Berkley raised his eyebrows. “Does that dog and pony show actually work on people? You’re Feds. You don’t just drop by out of the goodness of your heart. Something happened, and you think I might know something. Considering my skill set and history, that something is pretty little sorority girls getting sliced up in the night.” There was that flicker again, the one far too close to lust for Dante’s liking.
It wasn’t unexpected. Obviously Berkley got off on murder or he wouldn’t have done it. Most sadistic killers had a degree of sexual deviancy involved, and Berkley was no different. The thought of women being hurt aroused him. Frankly, Dante had seen worse.
But those other murderers hadn’t victimized Lei Zhang.
Get a hold of yourself. You met the woman once. You don’t have a right to feel protective of her, and it’s fucking up your ability to do your job. You have to maintain distance.
Easy in theory, but something about Lei had gotten under his skin.
Clarke must have seen something on his face, because she leaned forward, drawing Berkley’s attention. “Fine. I’ll play. Have you been talking, Travis?” She almost purred his name. “Have you been spilling all the dirty details of that night to your fan club?”
“And let every asshole with a knife think he can replicate what I did?” Berkley snorted. “Not likely. Copycats are for losers.”
“Copycats are for losers,” Clarke repeated slowly, sinking a world’s worth of derision into the four words. “Travis Berkley, you’re wasting my time. Though, I have to say, your fan club leaves something to be desired. They couldn’t even get your name right.”
“You’re looking for something specific.” He shifted again, eyes narrowing. “What name did they use?”
It wouldn’t hurt anything to tell him the truth—and it might just rile him up enough that he told them something useful. “A fan left a very specific love note—for Trevor. Not Travis.”
Berkley went completely still, the very essence of a predator sensing prey. Only for an instant, and then he was back to the belligerent asshole. “Shame they couldn’t manage one thing right.”
They wouldn’t get anything from him. If Berkley knew something, he wouldn’t share it with them, if only to dangle the knowledge of how fucking superior he was over them. He wasn’t really why they were there anyway. Dante pushed to his feet. “I think we’re done here.”
“How’s my Lei-Lei doing these days?” The amusement disappeared from Berkley’s face, and the mask dropped fully for the first time since they walked into the room. “I hear she spends her time hunting corpses with a little doggy friend. Fitting. Lei-Lei always was a bitch.”
Dante held open the door for Clarke and stalked out of the room behind her before he could do or say anything to feed into Berkley’s ego. They found Franklin back in his office. “We need to see his cell.”
Franklin raised his brows. “Let’s go.”
Ten minutes later, Dante was looking at the space where Berkley spent most of his time. There was no clutter. The only thing nonregulation was a stack of books next to the bed and a picture taped to the wall. Dante riffled through the books. Two thrillers that had obviously been read a few times, judging by the broken-in spines. There were no papers inside or writing in the margins, so he set those aside. The third book made him stop cold. Cadaver Dogs Handbook. This one, too, had the markings of being heavily read. He looked up to find Clarke holding the photograph. “What is it?”
She tapped it against the back of her free hand. “Polaroid. Looks like some random clearing in some random woods, except . . .”
“Except?”
She flipped it around. Two numbers had been written in pen on the back. “Call me crazy, but these sure look like they could be coordinates.”
He looked at the numbers. “We’re going to need to bring this with us.” Dante was hardly an expert, but he’d bet his badge that those numbers pointed to a place somewhere within driving distance of Stillwater, Washington. Berkley was too damn smug for it to be anything else.
Coordinates. A book on cadaver dogs. Taunting comments about Lei Zhang.
It all added up to a shitstorm of epic proportions.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Pick her back up.”
Luna Henderson had no more tears left. No more horror. No more strength. She knelt in the damp underbrush and stared into the blank gaze of her dead best friend. No more. He’d made sure of that.
She reached out a shaking hand and covered those unseeing blue eyes. I have to run. I have to get help. She managed to lift her head enough to look around. He’d taken them from the city and into the mountains, but she’d lost all sense of direction in the darkness, and when dawn finally came, she might as well have been on the moon.
And Jennifer was still dead.
All her friends were still dead.
“Pick her up, love.”
She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Hated the voice that poured over her like honey, the same one that had coaxed her into one drink and then another. Just one more, love. Take me home with you. No one has to know.
She’d done this.
It was all her fault.
A rough hand gripped her hair and forced her head up. “Look at me. You pick up that bitch or you drag her, I don’t care, but move her body now or I’ll kill you where you kneel.”
If she gave up, there would be no chance of escape, no opportunity to survive. Luna sucked in a breath and used the exhale to shove to her feet. She could do this. She would do this.
She gritted her teeth and hooked her hands under Jennifer’s armpits and began to drag her. Luna’s world narrowed down to each step she took. Step. Breathe. Drag. Repeat. Time lost meaning. The trees blocked the sun’s path from view, so it might have been one hour or seven before he finally called a halt to her progress.
“Nice job, love. Great job. Now, on your knees like a good girl.”
She stared down the barrel of a gun, and the strength went out of her legs. This was how it ended. There would be no chance to run, no way to get help.
No justice.
His lips pulled into a smile that made her skin crawl. “Good-bye, Luna.”
Dante’s phone had half a dozen missed calls on it when they exited the prison. He dropped into the driver’s seat and turned the engine on, letting the AC get started while he waded through them. “Look up those coordinates.”
“Already on it, boss.”
He shook his head at Clarke’s sarcastic tone and scrolled through his phone. Two calls from Detective Smith. Two from a number he didn’t recognize, and two from Britton. He considered and called Detective Smith first.
The gruff man answered almost immediately. “We have a problem.”
Not words anyone wanted to hear in the middle of a murder investigation. “I’m listening.”
“Our three victims weren’t alone in the house. We thought it was mostly empty because of spring break, and a lot of kids go home or travel or do what
ever the fuck college students do with a week off. But there are two girls unaccounted for. Jennifer Baldwin and Luna Henderson.”
He slumped back against the seat. Damn it. Making sure those three girls were alone in the house was the first thing they should have done. He’d taken it for granted that the PD had cleared it first. Sloppy on my part. With the girls being scattered to the winds, he should probably give them a break, but there were two girls who had been missing for well over twenty-four hours at this point. If they were alive, it was a goddamn miracle. “Any idea how our guy got them out of the house without someone seeing?”
“No.” Detective Smith spit the word like something foul tasting.
Fuck. Dante pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re catching the next flight back to Seattle. We’ll start from there.”
“See you then.” He hung up.
“Shit,” Clarke breathed.
More bad news. They weren’t going to catch any breaks on this case—that much was clear. “Where do the coordinates lead?”
“An access road in Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest. It’s roughly two hours from Seattle—and about an hour from Stillwater.”
Dante cursed. “We have jack shit. Berkley is clearly involved, but there’s nothing obvious in his mail, and it’ll take weeks to wade through it to figure out if he was talking to someone in code. We have three dead girls, and now we have two missing girls from the same sorority. All within easy driving distance to Lei Zhang and Emma Nilsson.”
“Think they have something to do with it?”
He threw the car into gear and backed out of the space. “We can’t discount anything. Considering the rape aspect of the murders, it’s more likely the unsub is a man—”
“Except the unsub couldn’t follow through on the rape, so there wasn’t anything left behind that couldn’t have been done by a woman.”
He couldn’t argue that point. His gut said Lei had nothing to do with those girls’ deaths, but if he told Clarke that, she’d accuse him of thinking with the wrong head. Better to discount Lei and Emma in the normal way. “We need to figure out where they were during the time of the murders.”
“Oh, that’s easy. Lei and her dog were in Colville National Forest on a search for the victim of a murderous husband. There are half a dozen witnesses that were with her at any given time, and she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to slip away to Seattle.”
He growled. “If you already looked up her alibi, why the song and dance about her possibly being guilty?”
“Because you need to face the fact that something about this woman is throwing you off your game. I don’t know what it is about her, because I’ve never seen you go all googly-eyed.” She shuddered. “It’s creepy as fuck.”
“Clarke.”
“I’m serious.” She held up a hand. “She’s more likely to be the victim than the killer, but we can’t take anything for granted.”
Damn it. She was right. He’d taken one look at Lei’s big, dark eyes, and some part of him had wanted to shield her from what was coming. She’d gone through the worst the world had to offer, and instead of letting it beat her, she’d come back swinging. She hadn’t let Berkley break her—not in that sorority house, and not during what came after.
He knew he had a white-knight complex—one didn’t end up in the BAU without at least a dose of it—but it’d never hit this hard. Though my parents might disagree with that. There’d been comments about his “bleeding heart” for as long as he could remember. Dante blew out a careful exhale. “Noted.”
“Good. Now that we got that out of the way . . . I might have found the alibi for Lei, but I don’t have one for Emma.” Clarke settled back in the passenger seat and propped her boots on the dashboard. “I chatted up Stillwater’s sheriff when I called to request a follow-up, and from what he let drop, Emma doesn’t leave the house.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
He’d noted that the blonde seemed skittish having them in her home, but he’d chalked it up to the fact that they were delivering unwelcome news. It was possible that was actually guilt . . . He shook his head. “It’s possible. At this point, anything is possible. That said, the semantics of it are complicated. I only saw one vehicle out there. If she was hiding another one, wouldn’t Lei know? Unless you think Lei is part of it?”
“I don’t know what to think—which is the point.”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. They wouldn’t figure out any answers on this drive. There were too many questions in this case, and even the answers they came up with just spawned more questions like some kind of hydra.
Dante switched gears. “I don’t like the access road being part of this. That picture doesn’t show any kind of road, and it looks like it hasn’t seen human interaction in years—if ever.”
“He’s playing games.” Clarke twisted to face him. “Want to bet that if we took Lei and her dog out to that point, they’d pick up on the scent of a body—and that would lead us to the two missing girls?”
“I’m not taking that bet.” It seemed like exactly the sort of thing Berkley would orchestrate. Except . . . “It’s too easy.”
“Easy?”
“Yeah, easy. Berkley plays games—”
“I just said that.”
“Right, but this is a guy who dated a girl for months before he even tried to get her to break the rules to bring him into the sorority. Berkley gets off on getting away with murder—not on being a criminal mastermind who likes to lead the cops around by their noses. It doesn’t jibe. It’s too heavy-handed, too attention grabbing. If all he needed before was to get away with murder to get off on his superiority, why is he throwing up these ‘Look at me’ signs now?”
Clarke shrugged. “Maybe prison changed him. It tends to do that.”
“Yeah, maybe.” It still didn’t sit right. Something about this scenario wasn’t adding up. Unease slithered through Dante, leaving him cold. They were playing on someone else’s game board, to someone else’s timetable. The only way they had a chance of solving this was to get ahead of the unsub and anticipate his moves.
Something they hadn’t managed to do in the twenty-four hours since they’d gotten the case. That had to stop. Now.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
She leaned against the door with everything she had, blood making its way lazily down the bridge of her nose to bead and drop to the ever-growing puddle on the hardwood floor. He’s coming back. And when he does, he’ll kill me just like he’s killed the others. The screams had stopped some time ago. It might have been seconds; it might have been hours. Lei had no concept of time anymore. The sky on the other side of her window remained dark no matter how long her friends suffered. Unrelentingly dark, just like the house after the power went out.
Travis. Travis did that.
He’d done all of this.
Her arms shook from holding the door shut. Or holding herself up. She didn’t know which was which anymore.
On the other side of the thin wood, down the hallway in the direction of the stairs . . . a floorboard creaked. Even though she braced for it, his voice still jarred a small sob from her lips. “Lei-Lei, it’s time. Open the door and let me in.”
Lei shot straight, her scream firmly on the inside of her lips. Sweat made her tank top cling to her body and plastered her long hair to her head and neck. She reached out, and then Saul was there, jumping onto her bed and licking her face. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
I’m not fine. I’m not anything resembling fine.
She didn’t have nightmares now as often as she used to, but she’d trained herself years ago to keep her screams silent. Better that than have Emma rush in, see the memories lurking too close to the surface, and be dragged down in the process. No, Saul knew, and that was more than enough.
She rested her forehead against his shoulder, letting his steady breathing soothe hers out. There would be more nightmares before this thing was done, and not all of them
would happen while she slept.
Saul whined again, and she sighed. “Yeah, let’s get you out.” Lei pulled on a pair of shorts, her running gear, and slipped into her holster. She usually settled with pepper spray, but normally the only thing she was worried about was a cougar getting too frisky. I could just stay inside and use the treadmill.
But that felt too much like hiding.
Hiding worked for Emma. It was how she dealt with stress and her complete lack of trust in anyone who wasn’t Lei. Maybe it would have been different if either of their parents was more supportive. At least Lei’s parents tried, even if they missed the mark by a mile. Emma’s mother just devolved into a strange kind of psychological warfare via holiday cards. No wonder Emma shut herself off from the world if that was the only model she’d had growing up.
That wasn’t how Lei functioned, though. If she walked into this house with the intention of never coming out again, she might as well put a bullet in her brain and bury herself right then. “Come, Saul.” She grabbed her nine-millimeter off the nightstand and slipped it into the holster, twisting a little to ensure the fit wouldn’t hinder her movements. Thirty seconds to pull on her shoes and key the alarm and she was out the door, Saul at her heels.
Lei kept her pace nice and slow as they headed across the yard and into the trees. She’d beaten down half a dozen trails over the years, and she aimed for one that would be a nice five miles. Enough to burn off some of her anxiety without tiring her out too much.
After the first mile, her shoulders relaxed. By the second, her mind had cleared. There was only the pounding of her feet to the ground and Saul’s happy panting next to her. He loved running. It was one of the few nontracking activities that he did with total abandon, and it chilled him out the same way it did Lei. Nothing mattered except their next breaths, the next footfalls, the next mile.
She caught sight of something bright pink through the trees and stumbled to a stop. “What the hell?” They were still well within the property line, and one of the first things she’d done when they’d bought the house was go around to all the potential access points and post NO TRESPASSING signs. A fence would have been nice, but the property was too heavily wooded and too large an area to make that a feasible option. They’d never had an issue with trespassing before, though once a lost hiker had wandered in. The poor woman was so relieved to see another person, she’d burst into tears on the spot. Not exactly a threat.