“Uh, sure.” Skye reached out her arms and the baby fell into them, curling up against her chest.
That’s the picture Josh saw when he walked through the door carrying a box of clothes—his beautiful wife clutching an adorable infant up against her heart. He captured that image and put it to memory, knowing full well Skye wanted a baby. Maybe it was time to bring up the subject of adoption and stick to it. So far, they’d tabled that discussion at least a dozen times, using a variety of excuses.
As quickly as he considered bringing it up, he put the idea on ice. Who in their right mind would bring a child into the mix when mommy went out every night to face the bad guys? How would that even work anyway? Better if he stalled. Bringing up that quagmire topic would lead straight to quicksand for sure—for now anyway.
Chapter Six
Once Josh and Skye got the couple and baby settled into the apartment, they headed to the Artemis Foundation—Skye’s three-hundred-square-foot dot of a space in the same high-rise that housed Ander All Games.
If they wanted to catch the man responsible for mutilating three young women, they had a lot of work to do.
From its inception, the foundation had been set up with one purpose in mind—to locate and bring back the missing: those who’d disappeared under questionable circumstances, who’d vanished without a trace. Their age or gender didn’t matter.
But somewhere along the way, the dynamics of their mission statement had changed. Families with missing loved ones or victims of violent crimes often became disillusioned with the system that couldn’t provide them with answers. When they showed up at Skye’s door looking for help, she didn’t have the heart to turn them away. Assisting law enforcement to solve certain homicides had now become part of their everyday routine.
Skye understood better than most how family members suffered, many times for years without resolution. Her own parents had been in the same boat—heartbroken from the moment they’d learned their twelve-year-old had been stolen off a playground in broad daylight, with them at a barbeque mere feet away.
But thanks to Kiya and the power of her Nez Perce heritage, that little girl had escaped her captor. She’d managed to outsmart Ronny Whitfield, the sexual predator who had nabbed her.
Since that day, she’d grown stronger. And the night she walked down a certain alleyway only to save Josh Ander from a mugging had been her turning point.
Together the two had built The Artemis Foundation into more than a local clearinghouse, more than just a database, more than a physical place to collect and then sit on a pile of useless data.
To make the most of that data, Josh had put together a team of computer hackers—Leo Martin, Reggie Bechtol, and Winston Reeker. They excelled at banging through firewalls to retrieve and accumulate streams of information that often turned into key pieces of the puzzle used to nab the bad guys.
Always up for doing whatever was necessary to crack a case, Leo, Reggie and Winston had taken to hanging out here. Whenever they weren’t upstairs at Ander All Games, they could be found manning the bank of phones or organizing the massive amounts of case files.
This morning, while Josh signed checks, Reggie and Winston tackled the mail together, sorting through mountains of letters containing pictures sent in by families from as far away as Florida.
Skye tacked the photographs up on the map she had on the wall and stacked the letters on the corner of her desk to enter into the database.
Leo strolled through the door, his arms full of books and papers. An imposing figure at six-three, his height made a lot of people gape, but it was likely the dreadlocks down to his shoulders that had them taking a third hard look. Like Reggie and Winston, Leo was young, brilliant, and had shunned the standard path to a nine-to-five job. Working as contractors for Ander All Games, the hours the trio put in earned them plenty of money. Yet each man lived without many of the trappings associated with a six-figure income. They had apartments in the city, and somehow managed to avoid owning a car, although Winston did go everywhere on his ten-speed. All three men shared one valuable trait—a willingness to go the extra mile for the foundation. Each had a good-hearted nature that made for an enjoyable work environment. They often clowned around to cut the tension that built up in the office.
Skye had long decided the place wouldn’t be the same without them or their dazzling technical contributions.
Leo let the heap of folders fall into a vacant chair and slapped down a printout of names onto Skye’s desk. “That list you emailed me after Gwen DeLargo went missing yesterday keeps growing. Take a look at the statistics I extracted last night while Winston ran the names.”
“What am I looking at?” Skye asked, thumbing through the pages. “I gave you the list of Seattle’s missing females I’d accumulated over the last few years. I wanted you to make sure I hadn’t missed any.”
“I improvised and added to your instructions. I went back farther than you had, as far back as fifteen years. Our list shows forty-five young women have gone missing from an area that spans as far north as Bellingham, Washington and as far south as Medford, Oregon. And as you can see, I branched out west to Idaho.”
“But these names can’t all belong to our killer,” Skye stated, not wanting to believe there were so many women who’d gone missing at the hands of their mutilating monster. But something about Leo’s face told her he felt different.
“That’s what I thought, too. But you know what they say about assumptions. Most of these are teens who went missing from schools, malls, parks, public places, even three from a library. I narrowed down the field, chose not to include those over the age of thirty, or who didn’t fit your profile.”
“Leo, I appreciate your initiative but there’s no way to know for certain these are all connected, no way at all,” Skye declared. “Our guy mutilates his victims.”
Stubbornly Leo hung in, clinging to his theory. “Just hear me out. All the women on that list share one common, undeniable denominator. No one has seen or heard from them since the day they disappeared, no bodies located, none ID’d, no activity on their social security number or credit cards. Zero. Winston and Reggie were very thorough on that score. They triple-checked the info against the names and dates of birth. So if they haven’t been found we don’t know they weren’t mutilated.”
“We don’t know for sure they’re dead, either,” Josh added from the doorway. “And a fourteen-year-old rarely has her own credit card to follow a paper trail,” Josh continued as he handed Leo a check. “Here you go. Your Christmas bonus.”
Leo took the paper, stared down at the amount. “Contractors don’t usually qualify for bonuses.”
Winston came around the corner. “It’s for our work here, isn’t it?”
Josh smiled. “You guys often work late into the night. You deserve to get paid for it even if it only comes once a year. ” When Winston tried to hand the check back to him, Josh held up both hands. “If you don’t want it, donate it to the charity of your choice.”
“But all of us came on board knowing this is volunteer work,” Winston protested. “Okay, I’m donating it back to the foundation.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Skye added. “Josh and I talked about this. We’re able to keep our overhead and expenses to a minimum. We have a printer around the corner who donates paper stock each time we circulate flyers. You guys donate your valuable time every day to the cause. A bonus is long overdue.”
“If you’re sure. Then thanks, boss,” Winston said, finally tucking the check into his shirt pocket.
Skye shifted the conversation back to business. “If that’s settled, let’s get back to the list. Josh is right, teenagers don’t have much of a credit history.”
Leo picked up his train of thought. “It’s true someone that young wouldn’t but most have social security numbers you can plug into the system to see if they’ve been employed during the years they’ve been gone.”
“And no activity usually indicates… Siniste
r circumstances,” Josh noted as he used the corner of the desk for a place to sit.
“It doesn’t bode well, that’s for sure. When we compiled the list, we eliminated the ones we came across that you and Skye had already pegged as runaways.”
Josh winced. “That was a call we made based on information the families gave us.”
Skye folded her arms across her chest. “Just so you know, it was a case-by-case decision. We don’t lump kids in that category without strong indicators they bolted on their own. And in some of those disappearances, we’re still open-minded enough to keep them in a separate database.”
Leo shifted his huge feet. “It’s a good move. But after excluding them that left the forty-five names. The most interesting one we ran across is the oldest case and involves the youngest victim. An eleven-year-old girl from Pocatello, Idaho, by the name of Camilla Prentiss who went missing from a neighbor’s house where she’d gone to babysit on a Saturday night. Camilla was never seen or heard from again. She just vanished out of the house, out of the neighborhood, out of town. The police files show she had a good home life and no reason to run away.”
“But I wanted you to focus on Washington State, specifically the Seattle area,” Skye said stubbornly. “So many other unrelated cases complicate matters.”
“I know but… There are four more in Idaho that fit, each about a year apart. It’s almost like every spring he had to… Make some kind of statement. There’s more. There’s a string of missing seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds from Oregon to British Columbia, sandwiched in between is Washington. According to info I retrieved online from websites established by some of the families, each girl seemed happy at the time she disappeared and by all accounts was heavily into school life, extracurricular activities and the like. Yet they went missing without a trace from around schools, football and soccer fields, and public parks. It might be a trivial thing, but some had even been seen partying after a basketball or a football game the night they went missing.”
“Nothing is ever too trivial because it’s an interesting detail we might be able to work into a pattern.”
“That isn’t all. You should know that even though I found a lot of disappearances, I eliminated those names where the ages didn’t fit. Let’s say, anyone on the list older than twenty-two, I excluded.”
“That could be a mistake in the long run,” Josh suggested. “We need to be able to consider all angles. This guy might nab an older girl in a pinch if he couldn’t find a teenager.”
Leo bobbed his head in agreement. “I’ve kept that age group in a separate spreadsheet. So, here’s the thing. I deleted all those missing from the Gary Ridgway era, since he’s been locked up for more than a decade.” Leo paused before going on, as if he dreaded mentioning the name. “I also discounted the ones Skye had already pinned on Ronny Whitfield—those Whitfield grabbed and shipped out to foreign countries, which accounted for a good many already on your list. Because of that, Winston and I wrote a specific program that pulled from two key factors—a young age and family stability. No one on our list had a reason to run off on her own. Not a single one. Our program has pretty much kicked out cold cases and narrowed it down to those forty-five that could be attributed to your guy.”
“Impressive,” Skye uttered, letting out an accepting sigh while Josh took the list out of her hands to peruse it.
“Thanks, but keep in mind this list may grow because it doesn’t account for any…”
“Who were never reported missing at all,” Skye finished. “Never passed onto any cop’s radar because they were never put into the system. It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of what we do.”
Josh went over Leo’s paperwork and let out his own pent-up breath. “So this is what was left. If this is the killer’s handiwork it shows he’s been a busy boy. Let’s say he began his killing around the age of twenty. That would make him thirty-five now. I wonder. Does he cover all this area because he lived in all these places or was he moving through these states for work?”
“And now, for whatever reason, he’s recently landed in the Seattle area to spread his perverted kind of…”
Leo was in the middle of his sentence when Skye didn’t wait for him to finish. “There’s just one problem with your leap in logic. While the stats are notable, and probable, the girls on that list are missing. We, on the other hand, have three real homicides with bodies that ended up in the morgue, murders that deal with females who disappeared several years back and have now reappeared. That means he didn’t just surface in Seattle last month. He’s been here for quite some time.”
“Then why start leaving them where they’re easily discovered?” Josh questioned.
Skye bit her lip. “That’s the big empty hole we have to somehow figure out how to fill. Obviously our guy isn’t opposed to exploring what other states have to offer. But if Leo’s info is even half accurate this is bad news. I thought maybe the guy was just starting out but now there’s very little chance of that.”
Josh jingled the change in his pockets in an edgy show of deep thought. “Let’s keep in mind that Bundy changed his MO multiple times. He’d break into a woman’s apartment one week, bludgeon her to death with a metal rod, and then go back to kidnapping them off the street or sweet-talking them into getting into his vehicle the next. He’d pull whatever ruse worked to gain access to a victim. The point is he didn’t stay with one method during the years he was active. When his urges got out of control he’d feed them by finding a way to get it done. His victims varied in ages and by the time he landed in Florida, Bundy had become a killing machine like the predator he was.”
“Thanks for that recap,” Skye muttered, sarcasm laced in her tone. “You know what this means, don’t you? We’ll have to contact the families of every woman on here and get the specifics of their daughter’s disappearance for our own benefit.”
She eyed Leo and added, “I know Winston and Reggie did the surface stuff. But I’m suggesting that we delve deeper than the general info you found elsewhere to better understand each victim and come up with a pattern, if there is one.”
“A painful undertaking,” Leo stated. “I’d like to recommend more training for all the volunteers. Interacting with family members is a tricky landmine. All of us struggle to ask the right questions in a professional way while maintaining a balance and avoid crossing an awkward line.”
“We’ll work on it. That’s why we have a team. When one bumps up against a tough situation, we hand it off,” Josh said, a grim reminder of why they did this job. Thinking of his earlier “baby moment,” he felt this might be an excellent time for a reminder of another kind. He turned to Skye, draped his arm over her shoulder. “It’s time you realize you can’t do everything, be everywhere, and take on every single task that comes into this office.”
Skye knew Josh meant well but it didn’t mean she could let go that easily. Of course, she had to learn to delegate, spread the tasks around to others as the foundation grew and took on more and more volunteers. Practicality had to be a virtue. After mulling it over, she decided it was in the best interest of the missing girls and their families to hand off some of the names.
“I’ve already been working with Judy Howe on how to deal with digging out the delicate information from a family member. Judy’s past with Berkenshaw makes her a great choice to be one of our go-to people able to successfully reach out to relatives. There’s a fine line to it. Making contact is difficult. You don’t want to give them false hope that their daughter is out there somewhere, that she might’ve survived somehow. The balance is about gaining as much info as we can and not yanking that hope out from under them. For months now, Judy’s been practicing her people skills and seeing a therapist twice a week. I think she’s ready to tackle this one.”
Josh’s face broke into a grin. “I agree. Judy’s been doing a damned good job of making her way back despite surviving a brutal attack from a sadist. The last time I talked to her, Judy brought up the ordeal he
rself without any prompting from me. She’s making remarkable progress, to think only months ago she lived her life in a reclusive environment.”
Skye beamed back. “Recluse no more. I’ll call her and get her to come in early today, call Travis, too. All of us will divvy up the list, start working it, obtaining last known addresses for the teens, exact locations of where they went missing, and get current phone numbers for their next of kin, start setting up face to face appointments if we have to.”
“I’m going out with you tonight,” Josh stated out of the blue. “There’s no point in arguing about it either.”
She narrowed her eyes. “A serial killer delivers flowers to me personally at home and you think I’d be foolish enough to turn down company or go out by myself? Tsk, tsk, after all this time you still underestimate me.”
“Who, me? No way. It’s going up against that hard head of yours time and again that has me prepared for battle each time I mention helping you on the streets.”
Skye took hold of his shirt with both hands, pulled him closer in front of Leo. She smacked his lips with hers in a fierce kiss. “Besides, we make such a good team and you’re my right-hand man,” she cracked. “How could I go out at night without you to protect my back?”
“’Bout time you realized it.”
Assembling the team was the easy part. Skye had a long list of people willing to help. Longtime friends like Velma Gentry and Lena Bowers had become staples. There were others on standby that could be counted on when the foundation needed to rally ground troops for searches or make phone calls.
Getting down to the nitty-gritty was a piece of cake. But reaching out and touching base with moms and dads who were still hurting from a disappearance was another matter entirely. Some of the couples hadn’t even stayed together. Divorce often occurred after the traumatic loss of a child. Statistics proved that. But these particular instances when a daughter went missing without a trace could put a different kind of pressure on a relationship. No closure, nothing to latch onto, meant it was easier to go their separate ways than to deal with the pain together.
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