by Lisa Regan
“There’s one way to find out for sure,” Davey said.
“Bring him in,” Stryker said. “We’ll get a DNA sample and dental impression.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
For the second time that day, Claire found herself at police headquarters, lingering outside a conference room in the Office of Investigations. Connor had called her and asked her to meet with the FBI profiler. She was more than a little intimidated, especially standing outside the room listening to the woman give the group of seasoned investigators instructions like she was about to lead the charge in a battle.
“It’s very unusual for a victim to survive, given the level of rage we saw in this killer’s previous crimes. I think that Detective Parks is correct. Holloway likely reacted differently to the UNSUB than the other victims and de-escalated the assault. You need to take a very careful look at her life. She was the last person known to be in contact with him. You need to find out every single detail about her life for the last week. Try to pinpoint the date of the assault, if you can, and then figure out every place she went that day.”
“What about the husband?” Claire recognized Stryker’s voice. “He doesn’t fit the profile, but do you think he could have done it?”
“Profiles aren’t ironclad. We hope to be as accurate as we can. He fits certain aspects of the profile—he is Caucasian, an unskilled laborer, and although he’s not a teenager, as the father of a youth soccer player, he would likely not be out of place at a soccer match. But I still maintain you’re looking for a younger male. That said, you should rule out the husband before you go any further. That should be easy enough to do. Run his prints against the unidentified prints from the first victim, get a DNA sample and a bite impression. Did she find out that her husband was the Soccer Mom Strangler and decide to do a murder-suicide? It wouldn’t be the first time a wife was shocked to find out her husband was a serial killer. Dennis Rader managed to fool his wife for decades.”
“Who’s Dennis Rader?” Jade asked.
“BTK Killer,” Connor put in.
“That’s correct,” Agent Bishop said in an appreciative tone.
Claire edged around the doorway, trying to peek inside. Just what she needed, a hot FBI profiler in the mix. A woman who could talk shop with Connor and who was infinitely more impressive and interesting than she was. The woman’s back was to her, but Claire felt a sigh escape her at the sight of the woman’s long, shiny brown locks and well-muscled calves. To the woman’s left stood Jade Webb, silent, arms crossed over her chest, a sullen look of disgust on her face. Apparently, Jade was not as enamored of the FBI agent as her colleagues.
“Now Rader’s wife maintains she had no idea he was a killer. We had a case once near Seattle, the Traveling Salesman. He killed five women before he started sending the police notes. The murders were so spread out up and down the Washington coast that law enforcement didn’t make the connection until he started sending letters. We theorized that his first kill was closest to where he lived, so we took out a billboard and put a handwriting sample on it with the tip-line number. Guess who drove down the interstate and saw it?”
“His wife,” Connor guessed.
“What did she do?” Stryker asked.
“She went home and slit her wrists.”
“How do you know she saw the billboard?” Stryker asked.
“She called and left a voice mail for her sister before she did it,” Agent Bishop said. “She said she had seen the billboard, she knew her husband was the Traveling Salesman, and to tell the police to search his hunting cabin, which of course turned up all the trophies he had collected from his victims.”
“Holloway didn’t make any attempts to give up her husband as a killer, though,” Connor pointed out.
“No, but it is interesting to note that your department leaked the detail about the bite marks only a few days before Holloway went into the river.”
Claire knew from Connor that the bite mark leak had been a mistake, but none of the detectives in the room mentioned this.
“So you’re saying it was something her husband had done to her, and when she heard about the Soccer Mom Strangler doing it to his victims, she made the connection?” Stryker asked.
Agent Bishop shrugged. “Perhaps. We’ll know soon enough. Right now I’d like to see Ms. Fletcher, if that’s possible.”
Quickly, Claire slipped out of sight.
“She’s in the hall,” Connor said. “I’ll go get her.”
“No,” Agent Bishop said. “Not here. I don’t want her to feel as though she’s being interrogated. Is there a coffee shop nearby we could use?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Fifteen minutes later, Claire was sitting across from Agent Kassidy Bishop in a small coffee shop a few minutes from police headquarters. Claire had never been there, but she could see why Connor and Stryker had recommended it. It was roughly the size of a walk-in closet and completely empty except for the two of them.
“Ms. Fletcher,” Bishop said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Claire nodded.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” Bishop added. Up close, the woman looked familiar somehow. Her blue eyes were penetrating. If she weren’t smiling, Claire would have felt like prey. As it was, she already felt like the woman already knew everything Claire was thinking. She exuded intelligence, like perfume wafting across the table. Claire reached up and tugged at an unruly curl, reminding herself that she wasn’t an idiot. She was, after all, a college graduate now. She’d gotten into veterinary school, which was harder to get into than medical school.
A smile fought its way onto Claire’s face. “I’m not sure what I can offer you, Agent Bishop.”
“Call me Kassidy. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve read your file.”
“My file? Oh, right.”
Claire had nearly forgotten that she had an FBI file. Of course Kassidy had read it.
“You’re quite exceptional,” Kassidy said.
“Because I survived?”
“You must know that while stranger abduction is rare, the survival rate among victims is very low.”
“Yes, I’m aware.”
“We’re seeing more cases of children recovered alive after stranger abductions, but it is extremely uncommon.”
Claire shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “I thought we were here to talk about Leah Holloway. Although I’m not sure what I can tell you. I never met the woman before yesterday.”
“Fair enough,” Kassidy said. She took a sip of her coffee and set her cup back down on the table. Claire noticed how still the woman kept her body. No fidgeting, no shifting in her chair, no fingers sifting through her brown locks. She didn’t even seem to blink. It was unnerving. “You were the last person to see Mrs. Holloway alive. Have you ever heard of victimology?”
“Is that where police—uh, law enforcement—study the victim of a crime?”
Kassidy’s smile widened. “Yes, exactly. We study the victim closely, in the same way we would study a perpetrator. We find out everything we can about them, try to figure out what makes them tick, then we take that information and combine it with everything we know about the perpetrator, so that we have an idea of how the crime may have played out between them. Not all victims react exactly the same way. Sometimes, the way a perpetrator and victim interact tells us things about the crime and about the perpetrator. Now, I have spoken with Detective Parks at length about what you told him, but I’d like you to take me through the events of yesterday morning.”
Feeling better talking about Holloway instead of her own case, Claire started with hearing the sounds of the impacts on the overpass and ended with speaking to the group of detectives on the bank of the river. She didn’t talk about how her consciousness had separated from her body for the first time in years. She didn’t talk about the memories that the entire experience had dredged up or about the nightmares it had given her.
Kassidy asked, “Did Mrs. Holloway appear into
xicated to you?”
Claire shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t know. Like I said, I had never met the woman before, so I don’t know what she looked like when she wasn’t drunk. I just know that she was terrorized.”
“You mean terrified?”
“No, I mean terrorized. She wasn’t afraid to die. She was afraid to live. She was committed to dying in that river. You don’t—” Her voice cracked. Emotion hit her like a lightning strike. The sounds of Miranda Simon’s muffled screams rushed back at her. Pushing the memory aside, she gathered herself back up. “You don’t forget that feeling. You recognize it in someone else when you see it.”
Kassidy leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, her hands folded beneath her chin. She lowered her voice even though they were the only two in the place. “I know what it’s like to be terrorized, Miss Fletcher.”
And just like that, Claire knew why she was familiar. “You were attacked.”
Kassidy grimaced. “Yes. In my home. By a serial rapist who should have been in prison.”
It had been national news two years earlier. Claire couldn’t help but pay special attention to assaults and rapes that made their way into the news. Sometimes she had to stop watching the news. It was all too much—the damage human beings did to one another. But she remembered it now. The East Coast, a rapist on the loose, the FBI called in. A hard-won arrest. Then the rapist got off on a technicality and came after one of the female FBI agents. Kassidy Bishop. A shiver worked its way down Claire’s spine. She said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Kassidy told her. “It’s given me … perspective. As an investigator. I also have a gun and a large dog.”
Claire smiled, a genuine smile this time. “Me too.”
“What would you say if I told you that Leah Holloway had been raped a few days before she went into the river?”
“Is that the theory now? She was raped and then tried to kill herself, her kids, and her neighbor’s kids?”
“I don’t know. What made you think she was committed to dying in that river?”
Claire shook her head, but it was more to shake the horrible memory from her mind than because she didn’t know. “She pushed her daughter.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her daughter, Peyton, she was trying to wake her. She had climbed into the front seat with her mother. The car was filling up fast. The entire front seat was almost under. When Leah came to, she pushed Peyton—not to safety. She pushed her into the water. A mother’s instinct would be to save her child.”
Kassidy was nodding as she spoke. Her tone was conversational when she said, “Yes, but she drove her children off an overpass into a river.”
“I know. I get that. But you weren’t there. She looked into that little girl’s eyes, and then she pushed her deeper into the water.”
“Do you think the rape would be enough to send her over the edge?”
“Do you?”
Kassidy shrugged, a pained look crossing her face. It was the first sign of true emotion Claire had seen in the woman. A ripple in her otherwise pleasant demeanor. She said, “Rape would certainly be enough to terrorize someone. It would be enough to make someone want to die.”
Claire remembered how slowly her abductor had undressed the first time he raped her. The way the squeaking bed sounded like a sonic boom in the hushed room. It was hard to get the word out. “Yes.”
Abruptly, Kassidy said, “Does it get easier? With time?”
Her mask of cool efficiency was gone. Beautifully manicured fingernails tapped against the side of her coffee cup. She was just a woman. A survivor asking another survivor a question. Will I be able to do this?
Claire blew out a breath, not even realizing she’d been holding it. “Yes. It gets easier. With time, with therapy, with love.” She sought out a soothing memory to combat the horrific memories the conversation had brought to the fore. She thought about Connor. His kind eyes, the way she felt in his arms. “But you have to let people in. I mean, I think. I’m not that great at it.”
Kassidy laughed. “Neither am I.” A moment passed in easy silence. Then Kassidy added, “What happened to me—it wasn’t … sustained, like what happened to you, and yet, sometimes I can see how doing what she did might have seemed like a good option to Leah Holloway.”
Claire lifted her own cup to her lips. It was lukewarm but creamy and delicious nonetheless. There was a time, early on in her captivity, that sitting in a coffee shop, talking with another person, enjoying a latte would have seemed utterly impossible. Completely out of the realm of her reality. There was a time when she had considered going to the bathroom alone to be a luxury. For months during her captivity, she had had to relieve herself in a bucket in the corner of a cold, dim room, under the watchful eye of Reynard Johnson. She remembered being bound so that she couldn’t even reach her face to wipe away her tears. Being so starved and thirsty that she’d had to drink her own cold, dirty bathwater. The bad things, the truly horrific experiences in life, did give one perspective.
“There’s a secret,” Claire confessed. “To surviving. To living after.”
Kassidy leaned in closer. “Care to share it?”
“Ordinary moments are the miracles in life.”
“Go on.”
“There is so much evil in the world. People do horrible, horrible things to one another constantly, and when we’re not killing, maiming, raping, and betraying one another, we get to worry about accidents, mistakes, diseases, and acts of God—floods, fires, car accidents, plane crashes, cancer, doctors operating on the wrong body part. You name it. Turn on the news for five seconds. You’ll want to off yourself in no time at all.”
“I get a front-row seat to the really depraved stuff,” Kassidy admitted.
Claire shivered involuntarily, thinking of all the stories Connor had told her over the years about his own job. “In your line of work, you certainly do. It’s easy to catalog the bad things. There are so many. Your work is never done, and next to such a stunningly large and endless supply of horror, the good in the world can seem small and silly and pointless by comparison. People are always looking for something really huge to rival all the bad. They want supernatural things that defy all reason. Impossible feats. The truth is that every second of your day that you are healthy and unharmed is a miracle. Given all the things that can go wrong at any time, the idea that we should get any pleasure out of life at all, get through an entire day without anything truly terrible happening, is a miracle to me.”
“Perspective.”
Claire’s gaze dropped to the table. Her cheeks flushed. “I’m sorry. I probably sound hokey.”
“Not at all,” Kassidy said. “I appreciate your sharing that with me.”
The digitized beat of a cell phone ringtone filled the air. Kassidy fished in the purse she had slung over the back of her chair and came up with her phone. She silenced the ring and smiled at Claire. “Duty calls,” she said. “More horror. Looks like I’m off to Portland after this case.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jim Holloway’s mother was a chain-smoking waif of a woman whose voice sounded like tires on gravel. She answered the Holloways’ door wearing a sleeveless pink blouse and denim miniskirt, the colors doing nothing for her leathery skin and thin strawberry-blonde hair. Baby Tyler sat on her hip, and little Hunter clung to one of her freckled legs. She asked questions that she then immediately answered: “Who’re you? The police? Whattaya want? You wanna talk to my Jimmy? Wait here. Jimmy!”
The last word was a shrill bark that made both Holloway boys jump. The baby started wailing, and Jim’s mother patted his back, shushing him in her low, gravelly tone. He stopped crying and turned his head to regard Connor and Jade. His wide brown eyes were wet and wary, as if it were the detectives who’d just made such a loud, startling noise. He grabbed a strand of the woman’s hair and stuffed it into his mouth. Mrs. Holloway sighed noisily. “Wait here,” she instructed and disappear
ed into the house. They heard banging and some indistinct arguing. Then Jim Holloway appeared in the doorway. His freshly washed hair was combed neatly to one side, and Connor couldn’t help but wonder if his mother had combed it for him. He wore clean gray sweatpants and a red T-shirt that bore an old, set-in stain of some kind down the right breast side. His mouth worked, obviously chewing something. Connor was certain that his mother had prepared the meal.
Jim opened the screen door to let them in. Connor’s eyes were drawn to the couch where young Peyton slept, sprawled and sweaty, her little mouth partially open. “Catching flies,” Connor’s brother always said when his kids fell asleep like that. Connor could hear the girl’s light snores from where he stood.
“Did you guys find something out?” Jim asked, his expression earnest. “About Leah?”
“Mr. Holloway, we need to talk,” Connor said. “We’d like you to come down to the division.”
“Okay. Let me tell my mom.”
As he went toward the back of the house where Connor presumed the kitchen was, Jade said, “Well, that was easy.”
Connor shook his head. “This guy is not the Strangler.”
“And if he’s not, the dental impression and DNA will rule him out,” Jade said. “Assuming he’ll give it to us.”
“He will,” Connor said. “’Cause he’s not the Strangler.”
Jim Holloway was used to being told what to do. He sat in the back of Connor’s police-issue vehicle in complete silence the entire ride to the division. No questions, no protests. The only hint of nervousness was the constant drumming of his fingers atop his knees. He stared out the window the whole time. Like a well-trained dog, Connor thought.
At the division, they ushered him into an interview room and offered him some water, and then Jade read him his Miranda rights. When she asked if he understood the rights as she had read them, he laughed nervously. “Am I under arrest for something?” He said it as if it were a joke, like the idea was so absurd, it was humorous.