by Paris Hansen
Turning away from the board, she looked at the task force members sitting around the table. The two FBI analysts Brian Mills and Lily Dixon, typed away at their laptops, looking at each other every so often, then back at their screens. They were in charge of taking every theory someone on the task force had and finding information on the internet to either support it or debunk it. Sloane had always been a fan of doing her own research but having the two analysts on the team would make things a lot easier and probably a lot quicker.
Further down the table, San Francisco Police Department Homicide Investigator Taylor King and Special Agent Silas Gardner talked in hushed voices, seemingly going over their notes from the day. At the same time, Agent Trevor Morrissey read through a file in front of him, his hand poised over a notepad next to it.
Reid paced the room while talking to Cade. He was likely getting a recap of how their day had gone and whether she’d behaved herself. It wasn’t like she needed a babysitter, but it seemed they believed she did. The thought had anger simmering in her belly, but she quashed it. She couldn’t really blame them after what she did. Plus, it was their careers on the line if she fucked up. Sloane understood their need to protect that.
They both must have felt her eyes on them as they stopped talking and pacing at the same time, then turned to face her. Cade smiled, which Sloane tried not to let affect her, but the more he did it, the harder it was to ignore. Reid’s demeanor didn’t change at all as he saw her watching them. If anything, he seemed more annoyed than he had when they’d walked in.
The anger she’d tried to get rid of started simmering again. Reid had no business being pissed about her presence. He’d been the one to interrupt her life, not the other way around. As much as she didn’t want to work with him, she wasn’t going to walk away because dealing with him was too hard. Catching their unsub was too damn important to let Reid Morgan get in the way.
“He’s finding them at a different hospital this time,” she said much louder, so everyone in the room would hear her.
“If that’s what he’s using as his hunting ground,” Reid said, immediately discounting her theory. “He could just as easily be finding these women at a birthing class or while they’re out shopping.”
“The first set of victims all attended different birthing classes at St. Joseph, except for Danielle Zimmerman. The two newest attended different classes at Williams Memorial,” Lily said as she looked at a piece of paper next to her computer.
“None of them had much in the way of overlapping shopping habits either. They didn’t live close enough to each other to visit the same grocery stores. Maybe a couple of them went to the same department store or warehouse store before their murder, but not all of them. They didn’t go to the same church or have jobs in the same area. If he’s not finding them at the hospitals, then he’s just finding them randomly out in his daily life, which seems a bit farfetched to me.”
Sloane wanted to kiss Brian and Lily for backing up her theory with cold hard facts. It was frustrating as hell that Reid still didn’t believe her or trust her after all this time. Why the hell had he brought her in if he wasn’t going to listen to what she had to say?
“So, we should look into people who may have gone from working at one hospital to the other over the last five years. Or who could have ties to both hospitals,” Sloane pointed out, then paused when a memory hit her. “What about Melinda Lewis’ husband, Martin? He works in medical insurance, right? Could he have worked on cases for both hospitals? Maybe he found the victims through their insurance claims.”
She watched as Lily and Brian both took notes with one hand while typing away with the other. It was a scarily impressive talent, one she kind of wish she had. It would make writing a hell of a lot easier.
“What’s their motive?”
Reid again. It was like he was making it his personal mission to piss her off or take the wind out of her sails when she finally thought they might have a lead.
“Melinda was on your list of suspects five years ago. You thought she was good for it because she was pissed she couldn’t have a baby, while it seemed everyone around her was being blessed with the miracle of new life. Her social media rants and in-person meltdowns kept her on the list. So, what if they were doing it together. He would find the victims; she would scope them out, then they’d attack them together,” Cade suggested.
“We checked in on them earlier today. There’s no evidence they have any children living in that house,” Gardener said. “According to the wonder twins over there, neither of them have any other property in their names. If they were behind this, then they’d have to have the children there.”
“Unless they were selling them,” Reid countered.
“Yeah, but then that would work against their sole desire of becoming parents, wouldn’t it? If their yearning to have kids is what made them suspects, getting rid of the kids wouldn’t make sense,” Taylor pointed out as she tugged on the end of her auburn ponytail.
The investigator was still young, and Sloane could tell that speaking out against a federal agent, and the man who was essentially her boss at the moment, made her nervous as hell. Taylor was the lone SFPD member assigned to the task force this time around. Her boss Lieutenant Gary Banks was rumored to be around, but Sloane had yet to see him. With a case this big, it was weird to only have one person representing the local PD, but Reid had mentioned their resources were spread thin, and the investigator who worked the case the last time had retired.
“So, are we ruling the Lewis’s out as suspects then?” Cade asked from his spot at the back of the room.
He’d since moved away from Reid but hadn’t taken a seat at the table. Cade leaned against the large windows overlooking the city, allowing his gaze to drift around the room, taking everyone in. The way he scanned each of them reminded Sloane of how she worked. He was looking for their tells. For slight flickers of emotion or ticks of eyes, fingers, even toes. Something that might give away what the other person was thinking or feeling. Whether or not they were lying or hiding something. What made them vulnerable. What could be exploited to make them act the way he wanted or say what he wanted.
It was a terrible thing she’d learned from her parents back when she was a small child. But then, as she got older, she realized the benefit of being able to read people. She could use it to her advantage, maybe even use it to save her life.
Which she did. More often than she could count.
“I think we can rule them and the Deckers out,” Sloane said before telling the rest of the team what she and Cade had learned that morning.
“So, their daughter’s Black and can’t possibly belong to Maggie Whitten. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have given Maggie’s daughter to someone else to defy detection, then kill some other woman somewhere else for her baby,” Gardner pointed out. “It’s obvious the unsub doesn’t care about race here. And we’ve brought up the possibility the killer went somewhere else during the five-year dormancy. Why not the Deckers?”
“Okay, then we leave the Deckers on the suspect list until we corroborate their story and check on their whereabouts for the last five years,” Cade agreed. “Corey Decker gave me the information for both lawyers who worked the adoption, as well as the birth mother. What about the other suspect from before?”
There was only one other suspect from the earlier case, who seemed just as improbable to Sloane as the rest. Crystal Melvin had been on their list because she’d attacked her husband’s pregnant mistress. Kendall Benson, the mistress, had been understanding enough she never pressed charges against Crystal. Instead, she felt horrible for being the reason Crystal snapped.
To Sloane, the incident meant very little. Crystal Melvin wasn’t the first woman in history to attack her husband’s mistress, and she wouldn’t be the last. Everyone else on the Mommy Murderer task force was in a frenzy over it, assuming it was the perfect evidence proving a woman was behind the murders.
Sloane always saw the mu
rders as a means to an end, not someone acting out their rage-induced fantasies. Crystal Melvin had been devastated to learn that her husband knocked up a woman he met at the gym after years of trying to have a baby together. In a moment of rage, she attacked the woman, grabbing her hair then smacking her in the face. Kendall had barely been pregnant enough to show, and Crystal hadn’t brought a weapon. There was no premeditation, no real threat to be had considering Kendall was 5 inches taller and had at least twenty pounds of pure muscle on her attacker. If she’d chosen to fight back, it would’ve been over in seconds.
The profiler that Quantico sent to review the case determined Crystal Melvin had snapped that day. She couldn’t take her rage out on Kendall, so she used the other women as surrogates. He explained away the botched c-sections as Crystal using the moment to also get what she needed maternally. When the extraction of Maggie’s baby was successful, and things ended, Crystal had reached her endgame. She no longer felt the need to make Kendall pay.
Nobody seemed to care that they had no evidence to prove Crystal’s involvement in the case. And when she didn’t suddenly show up with a baby, she continued to remain at the top of the suspect list. At least until Maggie woke up, but even then, some believed she was somehow involved.
“Crystal Melvin moved to Ohio four years ago. I spoke to her earlier. She said she needed a change of scenery as soon as her divorce was final. She also told me she hasn’t been back in California since. Her financials and internet footprint confirm that,” Trevor said as he closed the file folder he’d been reading through. “Looks like the three suspects from before are off the hook, so what does that leave us with?”
Sloane sighed. “Not a whole lot.”
Turning back to the board, she looked at their victims again. Time was ticking away, and they still had nothing to work with. The unsub was escalating, changing his timeline and his entire operation. For all they knew he could be abducting another woman as they went around the room fixated on dead ends. They were once again trying to make things fit when they didn’t, and it was frustrating.
Her gaze landed on Danielle Zimmerman’s picture, and once again, she was struck by the differences between her and the other victims. There was something there. She knew it. Yet, she had no idea how to get everyone else on board. All she knew was that she had to try.
Someone else’s life depended on it.
Chapter Nineteen
“We need to change our focus,” Lily announced, bringing Sloane’s attention back to the people sitting around the table.
The brunette analyst didn’t look up from her computer as she made her announcement, proving how good she was at multitasking. Without missing a beat, she swiped at her bangs that were a little overlong, then kept up with the furious typing she was doing before she started talking again.
“You looked at those three women originally because their desperation to have a baby was the perfect motive,” Lily said, continuing her point. “Except everyone knows money is usually the motive behind just about everything. The dark web is filled with black market baby sales, and sadly most of it has nothing to do with fulfilling someone’s desire to have a baby. Pedophiles, human traffickers, cannibals…”
“I’m sorry, what?” Taylor asked, her face scrunched up in horror.
“Yeah...the dark web is a really fucking dark place,” Brian shuddered, then fixed the glasses that had slipped down his nose. “There are auctions for just about any terrible thing you can think of. But if you’re not into getting into a bidding war and just want to pay a flat price for something...someone, you could post a classified ad of sorts letting people know what you’re looking for.”
“Jeezus.”
Sloane had no idea who’d muttered the word, but she couldn’t agree more with the sentiment. She was no stranger to the atrocities of the dark web, though it had been a long time since she’d had to be acquainted with them. There were a lot of sick fucks in the world, and they had appetites that needed to be satiated. The thought that Maggie’s daughter might have been sold to one of them had her clenching her hands into fists at her sides. The pain of the pen biting into the palm of her hand was more than welcome.
“We’ve got feelers out looking for the sale of babies now and five years ago,” Lily said. “It might take a while, though, as things are very well hidden in the dark.”
“Thank you. Hopefully, those searches will come up empty. How did we fare with people who’d moved or been incarcerated for the last five years?” Reid asked.
“We’re still combing through the list. You’d be surprised how many people were arrested over the last five years, or who moved away, then came back.”
“Keep us posted,” Reid instructed, then turned to look at Sloane’s whiteboard. “What did you guys learn from talking with the victim’s family members?”
Sloane looked around the room but couldn’t tell if any of them had learned something as interesting as what she and Cade had while talking to Maggie. She started to speak but was interrupted by Trevor.
“I spoke to Sean Robinson over the phone since he moved back to New Orleans to be closer to his family after Vanessa died. He was happy to help, though it sounded like he didn’t want to rehash things. I asked him whether Vanessa ever mentioned feeling like she was being watched or followed, and he said he thinks she might’ve mentioned something like that, but he couldn’t remember. They’d been dealing with a lot right before she was killed. He admitted they’d had a few arguments, one of which dealt with him never listening to her.”
Sloane nodded. “I remember he told us about their fights too. He’d been trying to talk her into moving to New Orleans, but she’d just gotten the head chef job at Seasons right before she found out she was pregnant. She’d been worried her pregnancy was going to kill her momentum and figured moving to New Orleans would definitely do the trick.”
“He told me the same thing. So, Vanessa may or may not have said she felt like she was being watched.”
“Alright, so she’s inconclusive. Cade and I got confirmation from Maggie Whitten today that she felt like she was being stalked. She’d told her husband, but he didn’t believe her and made her doubt what she was feeling.”
“What an ass,” Taylor muttered, then gave Sloane an apologetic look.
“No need to apologize. The man is an ass. But between Maggie and what Troy Simpson said, we’ve got at least two victims who felt like someone was watching them before their attacks.”
“Make that four,” Gardner said, the sound of his gruff voice surprising them all. “King and I spoke to the first two victim’s significant others, and both Whitney Granger and Sharon DeLong mentioned being followed or watched before their attacks.”
“After my meeting, I talked to Alison Bowers’ best friend. She said Alison was extremely paranoid in the weeks leading up to her attack but never actually voiced any concerns. Just a lot of looking over her shoulder and not leaving her house as much. We know she’d ordered a security system that was supposed to be installed the day after her attack. I’d think it would be safe to say she’d make number five.”
Everyone nodded, agreeing with Reid’s assessment. That just left Sabrina Moreno and Danielle Zimmerman. She looked over at Trevor, who’d been assigned to speak with Sabrina’s husband, Tony. The man was in the middle of a massive court case and would be difficult to pin down.
“I left a message for Tony Moreno, but I still haven’t heard back from him. I did speak to Sabrina’s sister, Sasha. She said her sister was worried about her safety, but assumed the paranoia stemmed from the case Tony was working on. He’s on the prosecution team for the Joey Altman case.”
Sloane wasn’t all that familiar with the Altman case, having only heard about it on the way to the disposal site that morning. If the radio host was to be believed, Joey Altman was hooked up with the mob, and anyone involved in trying to put him away for the murder of his wife and her lover needed to be in protective custody.
“That’s o
ne of the reasons it took some convincing to get Jennings to agree we’re dealing with the same unsub as before,” Reid admitted. “Like most people, she believed Sabrina’s abduction was somehow tied to her husband’s case. At least until we found her body, and she was no longer pregnant.”
“Sloane and I also talked to a few of Danielle Zimmerman’s neighbors and her best friend today. She’s our anomaly in this case so far. She never mentioned feeling watched or followed, which I think adds to that. It gives credence to Sloane’s theory that her attack was more of an attack of desperation than part of a well-thought-out plan. Until her, and even after her, the unsub was methodical and organized. Even when things didn’t go the way he planned; he didn’t panic. He took care of business and didn’t deviate.”
Reid turned to look at Cade. “So, you agree that Danielle’s attack being different from the others means something?”
Cade nodded. “Yes. This unsub is orderly. He plans things out as much as he possibly can. Finding them, picking them out. The following them around so he knows their every move is part of that. I think Danielle was a victim of opportunity when he got too desperate to wait.”
“Maggie Whitten left town a day before Danielle’s attack. She went down to San Diego to stay with her parents for a few weeks because her husband was out of town on business. Maybe she’d been the unsub’s intended target, and when she was suddenly gone, he freaked out,” Taylor suggested.
Sloane looked over at the younger woman dumbfounded. She’d completely forgotten about Maggie’s trip to San Diego. It hadn’t seemed significant at the time, but she should’ve put two and two together. Maggie didn’t like to be alone while her husband was out of town, especially if he was planning to be gone longer than a week. The trip had been planned for months, but unless he watched her 24 hours a day, it would’ve been nearly impossible for the unsub to know about her plans.