by Paris Hansen
“I had this awful feeling for a few weeks before I was attacked. I told Dan I thought someone was following me, but he laughed it off; told me I wasn’t that special. I told him I thought someone was watching the house, and again he laughed it off.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Cade asked.
Sloane shook her head. She knew exactly why Maggie never went to the cops about her suspicions. What could they have done? There was no proof someone was out there. And even if there was, he hadn’t done anything wrong at that point. Stalking was hard to prove, which was why most of the time, people didn’t bother doing anything about it. They couldn’t until their stalker did something to hurt them, and most of the time, by then, it was too late.
“If my own husband didn’t believe me, why would the cops? Plus, I knew there wasn’t anything they could do. A girlfriend of mine was stalked by an ex. She reported him repeatedly, yet nothing ever happened. Thankfully he got bored, but until then, she felt terrorized and unsafe. In my case, I eventually started to believe I imagined things. That my maternal instincts were kicking in because I was so close to the end of my pregnancy. But I knew something wasn’t right. I should’ve trusted my gut.”
Sloane hated dredging up these feelings for a woman who’d already been through too much. They asked her a few more questions to see if she could remember anything else about the man who hurt her. While her brain had blocked out most of the attack, she knew without a doubt it was a man who’d cut her open and took her baby. And she knew he was unassuming and rather bland. Unfortunately, none of that was much to go on.
“If we brought you pictures or had you come in for a lineup do you think you’d be able to ID him?” Sloane asked, although she hoped it never came down to that.
As much as she wanted to catch the guy, she didn’t want Maggie to have to face him. She knew Maggie would want to do whatever it took to make him pay for what he did to her, even if that meant looking him in the eye while she testified against him. Sloane hoped it would never come to that.
“I think so. I don’t think I’ll ever forget his eyes. You know I’ll try anyway, no matter what.”
“I know,” Sloane said softly before glancing at Cade, who gave her a tip of his head. “We should get going. Thank you for agreeing to talk to us, Maggie.”
“I hope I was at least sorta helpful,” Maggie laughed as she followed them.
“You were very helpful,” Cade told her as he shook her hand, then made his way through the now open door.
“So, are you an FBI agent again?”
Sloane shook her head. “Nope. Just a civilian consultant reluctantly brought in to help with the case. I want to get this guy this time. I will get this guy this time.”
“I know you will,” Maggie said assuredly. “Maybe before you head back to Washington, you can stop by and sign my copies of your books?”
“Of course. I can’t believe you have them. I would think you’d have had enough of the gore and suspense to last you a lifetime.”
Maggie shrugged. “For some reason, I find them therapeutic. Now, please tell me you’re going to hook up with that before you leave town.”
Sloane’s gaze followed where Maggie pointed to find Cade standing by the car. Now it was her turn to shrug.
“I wouldn’t say no, that’s for sure. But you know that’s not why I’m here.”
“True, but I’d really love to live vicariously through you. Did you see his ass in those pants? And the way he was looking at you when you weren’t paying attention...I’m surprised my house didn’t burn down.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Sloane laughed, shaking her head. “I’ve got to go. I’ll keep you updated on what we learn when I can. I know this is going to be the end, Maggie. I hope what we learn by the time this is over will help you, even if it’s only a little bit.”
“It will. I’ll at least get some closure when all is said and done. And that’s all I can ask for.”
Reaching over, she pulled Maggie into a hug, then said a quick goodbye. As Sloane made her way down the stairs and the walkway, she felt two sets of eyes watching her. It was an odd sensation, but one she’d never mistake. And neither would Maggie or the other victims. Whether they talked themselves out of it or not, they knew they were being watched, at least Maggie and Tasha, and Sloane would bet the others would have the same story.
She’d known deep down the unsub watched his victims before he attacked them, and now she knew she was right. That’s how he knew when they’d be alone and most vulnerable. Sloane felt like they’d just made a breakthrough even though they were nowhere near figuring out who their unsub was. But it was something, at least, and it had been far too long since they’d had any kind of lead in the case. She’d take the small victories, knowing eventually they’d lead them to winning the war.
Eventually, she’d get to watch the unsub pay for everything he’d done, and she couldn’t wait.
Chapter Seventeen
Cade’s ass hurt, which he knew was a weird thing to consider when he was in the middle of interviewing a potential suspect, but he couldn’t help it. They’d only been in the Decker household for maybe ten minutes, yet the hard as granite loveseat he was sitting on with Sloane was making him wish he’d opted to stand while he asked Corey Decker about his past.
“I’m not sure what I can tell you, Mr. Cade.”
“It’s Agent Cade,” Cade corrected him even though he knew the other man had only addressed him as Mr. to try to undermine him.
It was the kind of bullshit he’d expect from someone like Corey Decker. He wanted to be taken seriously, wanted to be the man in charge all the time. The way he sneered at Cade and Sloane when they arrived had given him a heads up that Mr. Decker didn’t like people who had authority over him. Cade couldn’t wait to use that against him.
“Why don’t you start by telling us where you were yesterday.”
“Do you have a specific time frame in mind?” Decker asked, his gaze flitting between Cade and Sloane.
“How about the entire day...start to finish.”
Decker gave Cade a dirty look, which he assumed the other man thought was menacing enough to send them packing. All it did was make him need to cover up a laugh with a cough. He glanced to his right, where Sloane sat quietly observing them both. She didn’t even bother to hide her reaction to the look. The smirk on her face would only make the man angrier.
“I worked all day. You can ask anyone.”
“You worked for twenty-four hours? I didn’t think your employer was open that long.”
Decker sent him another glare, but Cade just smiled at the man. “This is a lovely place you have here. You guys haven’t been here that long, though, right? You lived somewhere else five years ago when your wife was a suspect in an FBI investigation.”
“So.”
“So, why did you guys downgrade? Your previous house was in a pretty affluent neighborhood, big and luxurious. This one...not so much, yet you’ve decorated it like it is. I assume this is your idea of a formal living room.”
“What are you getting at?”
Cade smiled at the man, knowing he was hitting a nerve. “You and your wife make decent money as managers at one of the warehouse stores in the area. There’s no real reason I could see for you downgrading your home.”
“I’m sure you read the file from before. We needed the money for treatments and adoption, so we sold our house. It’s not a crime to sell something we own, is it?”
Shaking his head, Cade watched Corey Decker closely. “No. But it is a crime to suddenly have a baby that doesn’t seem to have gone through legal channels. There’s no evidence your wife was ever pregnant, nor could we find any adoption proceedings for your family through any of the agencies in the area. So, where did your daughter come from, Mr. Decker?”
Anger flashed across Corey’s face, but a peaceful, almost bored facade immediately replaced it. Cade knew immediately he wasn’t going to like the man’s answer. No
t that he’d been all that convinced Corey Decker, or his wife Molly were behind the killing spree, but he knew the one tentative thread they had connecting them to the case was about to unravel.
“We adopted our daughter four years ago through private adoption. Our lawyer handled everything with the birth mother’s lawyer. We made sure everything was on the up and up for this very reason. We didn’t want people to think we’d stolen our child or killed for her. I can give you our lawyer’s number if you’d like and the number of the birth mother. She’s since moved to Oregon, but I still have her contact information just in case. The adoption is closed, and the birth mother isn’t interested in knowing our daughter, but we thought someday she might.”
“I’ll take both of those numbers when you have a moment, thank you.”
Decker gave him another glare but got up from a couch that looked just as uncomfortable to sit on as the one he and Sloane were using. He turned to Sloane as soon as the other man was out of the room. Her brows furrowed as she nibbled on her lower lip.
“What do you think?”
She shrugged. “The man’s an ass, but I think he’s telling the truth. If he was hiding something or trying to get away with something, I don’t think he’d be so boldly in your face. He might not like authority, but I’d bet he spent a lot of money making sure he could prove their daughter was legally theirs so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the suspicion they did before.”
Cade agreed with Sloane’s assessment. If the Decker’s were guilty of anything, Corey Decker would’ve been a lot less hostile. He started to ask Sloane another question but stopped short when the man in question re-entered the room with a stack of papers in hand. He shoved the papers at Cade but didn’t sit back down once Cade accepted them.
“I thought you might like copies of the adoption paperwork and some of the bills we got from the hospital and the two lawyers. I didn’t make copies of everything cause there’s an entire box worth but figured this would give you an idea of where the money went. We paid for everything, every doctor’s appointment, every billable hour either lawyer had.”
“Thank you. This is very helpful.”
“Like we told you the first time, we may have wanted a child more than anything, but we were never desperate enough to do what you accused us of. Neither my wife nor I could’ve ever hurt someone like that and then make matters worse by stealing their baby. And all those poor babies that died unnecessarily...it just...thinking about it makes me sick.”
The thought of it all made Cade sick too. How anybody could do what the unsub had done to those women and those children was beyond him. Despite having a job where he was supposed to get into the warped minds of killers and other bad guys, he still struggled to understand anything when kids were involved.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak to us today, Mr. Decker. It has been beneficial to our investigation,” Cade said as he stood and reached his empty hand out to the other man.
“It’s not like I had much of a choice,” the other man mumbled but took Cade’s hand anyway.
Sloane stood and offered her hand as well. Once the pleasantries were over, Corey walked them to the door, but it opened before he could shove them through. Walking into the room was Molly Decker, looking far better and healthier than the pictures they had of her from the first time around. She looked happy, although the smile on her face abruptly fell when her gaze landed on Sloane.
“Daddy!!!!” an exuberant voice yelled from behind Molly, who was pushed out of the way so a small body could run into the waiting arms of her father.
“Hey, baby girl. I missed you guys,” Corey said to his wiggling daughter as he pulled her into his arms then stood up to face his wife. “They were just leaving.”
Cade looked back over at Mrs. Decker, who gave them a far scarier glare than her husband had. “Mrs. Decker,” he said softly. “We’ll get out of your hair. Thanks again, Mr. Decker.”
Following quickly behind Sloane, he slipped past an angry mama bear in Molly Decker and was thankful when he made it outside unscathed.
“She’s a hell of a lot scarier now than she was five years ago,” Sloane said as soon as they were in his car and pulling away from the curb.
“Yeah. Five seconds in her presence and I knew I didn’t want to wrestle with her. Must be that thing I’ve heard about moms being fiercely protective of their young.”
Sloane laughed. “Wouldn’t know much about that myself, but I could feel it. I’m surprised she didn’t rip our eyes out for looking at her kid. Although I’m glad I got a good look at their daughter. I knew the timing didn’t work out, but seeing her for myself, there’s definitely no way that could be Maggie’s daughter.”
“You’re right. There’s no way that child could be related to Maggie Whitten.”
“She was beautiful though, those dark eyes and that dark skin, gosh and those curls,” Sloane paused for a moment, thinking. “I never really thought the Deckers were involved before, but their story made me so sad. Two people who wanted a child more than anything, but no matter how hard they tried, it just wasn’t happening for them. Meanwhile, there are so many people in the world having kids they don’t want and either abandoning them or abusing them. It just isn’t fair.”
“No. It’s not fair at all.”
“At least they got their happily ever after, even if it cost them an arm and a leg.”
Cade didn’t say anything in response, but he agreed. He’d seen firsthand how unfair the world could be and was glad the little girl the Deckers adopted had people who loved her the way they did. Putting together their family and finding their happiness hadn’t been easy, and it had set them back financially and emotionally, but it was worth it for them.
As he maneuvered his way through the residential streets, Cade found himself hoping the others had better luck with their past suspects and victim interviews than he and Sloane had. While finding out Maggie had felt like she was being followed before her attack was helpful, they needed more.
There were still a few more stops on the list he and Sloane had been given. Maybe they’d get lucky with one of them and get the lead they desperately needed. Without it, he feared another woman’s life would be snuffed out too soon, and the guilt over not being able to stop it might be too much to bear.
Chapter Eighteen
By the time Sloane and Cade made it to the office, Reid had the rest of the team in the conference room ready for the debrief. Giving her ex a quick once over, Sloane tried not to laugh. He looked like he’d spent most of the morning going round and round with people a lot higher up in the food chain than him. His suit was rumpled, his tie loosened and off-center. His short hair was all over the place, which happened whenever he rubbed his hands over his head too many times.
Sloane could only imagine the bullshit he had to listen to and argue against while upstairs. She’d been there, done that, and hated every single second of it. When she left the FBI, she hadn’t missed the endless meetings, the never-ending paperwork, or the bureaucratic bullshit. She’d had enough of those to last her a lifetime and then some.
Bypassing a seat at the table, Sloane made her way to one of the whiteboards she’d set up the night before. Along the top of the board were pictures of the first six victims and written beneath them was information that could be used to find commonalities between them and their killer like their age, place of employment, and doctor. Then she’d written where they were attacked or abducted from, and where their bodies were found under that.
Below the first set of victims, she’d added Sabrina Moreno and Tasha Simpson and their information. Picking up one of the dry erase pens, she noted Tasha’s disposal site, then put the lid back on the pen. As she tapped the pen against her chin, she let her eyes roam along the board, top to bottom, left to right, and then the opposite, bottom to top, right to left.
With the information all in one place, she hoped she’d be able to see patterns otherwise easily missed. Many agents liked to create a
crime board on their computers, allowing a program to look for patterns and commonalities. That wasn’t her kind of thing. Sloane needed to have everything in front of her at once, which was a little old school, but it worked for her. She even used the same set up in her house while writing a book; it helped her think and put pieces together. Thankfully, Reid still understood and accepted the weird way she worked and gave her room to do things her way.
She started looking at the commonalities between the victims first. With the first set, all but one had gone to the same hospital for their doctor’s appointments, but only two had seen the same doctor. They had different professions, lived in different areas, had different marital statuses, and different racial and financial backgrounds. Their ages ranged from 23 to 40, with the 40-year-old victim being the only one that didn’t see a doctor at St. Joseph Hospital.
Five years ago, Sloane had a feeling they needed to look into Danielle Zimmerman more than they did. She was the oldest victim, the only one that didn’t go to the same hospital, and the only one whose attack didn’t seem as organized as the others. Sloane’s gut told her Danielle’s attack was important and could help their investigation. Of course, no one agreed with her theory.
Which was why they now had a new set of victims and were right back where they were five years ago.
Anger and frustration came roaring back to life in her chest, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. She needed to focus on what she could do at the moment and not what should’ve happened years earlier. Shaking off the unwanted feelings, she focused on the information they had on Sabrina and Tasha. Their similarities started the same way the others had. Both saw doctors at the same hospital, although it was not the same as the earlier victims. Which likely meant the unsub had found a new hunting ground.
“He’s finding them at a different hospital now,” she stated, although she wasn’t sure if anyone heard her.