“With a woman you’re attracted to,” Skye added. “No need to deny it. No way you can please everybody.”
“I tried explaining that to them, tried telling them that Lakin has barred any of us from going near Stacey’s case and that means looking for Clay is off-limits.”
“But they don’t understand why the mighty Harry Drummond would take that from a lowly detective like Lakin. Am I right?”
Instead of answering, Harry lifted his shoulder. “I’m not sure what to say or do to convince them.”
“Rock and a hard place, huh? Harry, if these friends of yours are that upset over something that’s completely out of your control, then maybe they were never such close friends in the first place.” She touched his arm. “Elizabeth would want you to be happy. You know she would.”
“I guess we’re done talking about the Spencers?”
“I am. I’m talking about Deborah Mack.”
“Do you think Jennifer’s still alive just because of some video that could’ve been taken a couple of hours after she was abducted and then murdered?”
Skye reached into Kiya’s strength and pulled out an answer she had to believe in. “That girl is alive, and we’re going to find her.”
“Then we need a plan,” Josh stated, arms crossed, leaning against the door frame. “Maybe it’s time to set a trap near the gas station. We know he’s hung out there at some point. We just pulled off an in-your-face snatch and grab. He’ll be pissed. So he might come back just to prove he can.”
“Harry’s headed to that neighborhood this afternoon to talk with a boy who saw a strange man in the woods there a few nights ago. We might be able to nail down a description.”
“From a kid? It’s better than nothing.”
Leo stood next to Josh. “I put Winston to work breaking down the comments left on those victim websites. It’s a slog through them all, but I think in the end, it’ll be worth it. Maybe our best way to track his location, the real one, not all the fake IPs.”
“Why’s that?” Josh asked.
“Law of averages says he has to make a mistake sometime. When he first started leaving posts, he might not have been as careful as he is now. After all, no one knew this guy was even out there.”
Judy pushed her way past the crowd and into the small break area. “Guys, you gotta see this. I just received an email through our website. And it’s either a sick joke or our killer wants to play. I’m not sure which.”
They all dispersed to the front counter where Judy had her laptop open with the email front and center. There in bold letters, the message was clear.
Tell Jennifer’s mom it’s too late. She might as well go back to Montana. Her daughter’s never coming home again.
“How does he know Deborah’s in town?” Skye asked, glancing around the outer office. “Where is she? Deborah?”
“I waited until she went to the bathroom to show you guys this.”
“Good call. Leo, can you…”
“I’m on it,” he stated, moving toward the conference room. “I’ll try tracking the IP myself.”
Josh followed him down the hallway and stopped him before they could enter. “Winston? Any change in attitude?”
“Some. He’s less surly anyway. I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell me what’s going on with him?”
Josh shook his head. “That’s for him to do. But we all have personal issues to deal with at some point. Just keep me in the loop.”
“Will do.”
Josh left it at that. For two hours the team had their heads down at their laptops, noses to their keyboards, hunting, searching.
Leave it to Reggie to be the one who found a pattern. “This guy’s server has files all over the place, scattered. On purpose, I think. But in one of his folders, he has a log detailing house addresses and notes on each potential victim.”
“Where are these addresses?”
“All over northern Seattle neighborhoods. This guy gets around. Phinney Ridge near Woodland Park. A massive bunch in places like Lawton Park, then back to Woodland again and Meridian to the east. A handful in Fremont, but the greatest concentration focuses on a U-shape section around the zoo from Phinney Avenue to Green Lake Way.”
“Lots of joggers around that park,” Skye added. “Maybe several caught his eye, and he followed them home.”
“Yeah, well, he picked one out in particular. There are at least a page and a half of notations on her, a woman by the name of Sharon Ortega.”
Skye exchanged looks with Josh. “A trap, you say? Wouldn’t it be a kick to stake out Sharon’s house and see what crawls out of the sewer?”
His lips curved. “I’ll call Dad and ask if they can extend their babysitting duties through the weekend.”
Thirteen
Sharon Ortega’s craftsman bungalow sat on a quiet, tree-lined street with a front entry garage in the older section of Phinney Ridge. It had a steep set of steps that led to the front door. There wasn’t much of a yard, but Skye noted that the woman’s flower beds were overgrown which provided perfect cover for a peeping Tom.
A deeper background on the potential victim revealed a type developing. Like Stacey Dysart, Sharon had gone through a messy divorce. With no children of her own, she lived alone with a Yorkshire terrier named Buffy. Instead of staying home, Buffy often went everywhere with her owner, including to work.
She’d recently received a promotion at her job as a mortgage broker and sometimes worked long hours into the evening. Her work schedule created an environment for anyone who needed time to enter her home during the day when she was away, time for reconnaissance, plenty of opportunity to snoop and poke around her house and learn as much about their prey as possible.
Sharon had recently reported to police that she thought someone had been stalking her. The cops had taken down the information and filed it away in a drawer.
Staking out her house proved to be a challenge because of hard-to-find street parking. So they got creative and made up a magnetic sign they stuck on both sides of the minivan that read, “Classic Remodeling.” They found a house under construction, waited almost two hours for a spot to open up when all the workmen left for the day, and when it did, they swung to the curb and put out traffic cones to signal they’d be there a while. Nothing like an obvious set up to hide in plain sight.
“I hope this works,” Skye muttered. “The good thing is we won’t be sitting here that long. What would we do if that church around the corner didn’t provide the perfect lookout perch?”
“We’d have to go with the house under construction with no view from above.”
“Let’s just hope the neighborhood watch is inactive or lazy. I’d hate to have to explain to Seattle PD, Lakin in particular, why we’re squatting on the old chapel roof.”
The church in question had once been a Spanish mission. It had a courtyard out front complete with paving stones and a fountain in the center. It still had a rusted bell at the top and a stone cross as part of its ornamental gable. But its religious affiliations were long gone. Somewhere along the way, someone had decided to get rid of the pointy, red-tiled roof and go for a cheaper version that made it look territorial in design. Despite keeping the adobe parapets and arched doorways, it seemed a bit neglected and forlorn.
These days the building was used as a community center, a gathering place for local meetings. On weekends it was home to senior craft events year-round. In the winter, during bad weather days, they always set aside a corner niche for an indoor farmers market.
The building still had purpose, but this night the place sat dormant, quiet, which would benefit their camping out on the roof, undetected.
The night air hung heavily with a mix of jasmine and eucalyptus, a pleasant waft as they climbed to the top to set up shop, hoping their man would see fit to wander around the neighborhood tonight.
Looking through binoculars to test the line of vision and distance from Sharon’s house, Skye let out a pent-up sigh. “Are we on the r
ight track? Could this really be our guy?”
“Look at it this way. If it’s not him, we at least get another perv off the streets.”
“I can live with that. You always know how to make me feel better.” Skye looked above her head at the clouds moving in and sniffed the air. “Jeez, I hope it doesn’t rain.”
“It should hold off until morning.”
Skye used her goggles to scan the area and get a feel for the neighborhood, pointing out the rolling hills and pretty houses. “I didn’t realize Phinney Ridge was this amazing.”
Through his own binoculars, Josh studied the other side of the old church down to the first intersection, making sure there were no heat images that he’d missed. He picked up a few false sightings from a cat on the prowl and a man out walking his dog, but other than that, the neighborhood was a perfect picture of suburban solitude. “Denny Faraday in accounting lives here somewhere, inherited a house from his parents when they died.”
“Denny Faraday? Is that the guy who hardly ever comes to any social events?”
“That’s him. Says he doesn’t like parties.”
For the next hour, they sat there and chatted about a litany of Denny’s complaints over the years until finally switching topics all the while scanning the area for movement.
It was almost midnight when Skye broke open the thermos of coffee to keep them alert. Yawning, she handed off the cap so Josh could take a sip. “Jeez, we’re getting old. This is way past our bedtime. I’m feeling a wave of sleepiness hit me.”
“Go ahead and take a nap. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”
“You’re joking? Sleep on a roof? I may be fighting drowsiness, but I’m not that desperate.”
“Afraid you’ll miss all the fun?”
“Something like that. I keep checking the schedule Reggie printed out and if our suspect keeps to his timeline, he’s running late.”
“You wanna call it a night?”
“No way.”
Thirty minutes later, Skye caught a partial heat image, a flash trying to hide behind a tree. “There. To the left of the intersection.”
Through the lenses of his goggles, Josh picked up the shape of a man, keeping low to the ground and moving to the next set of trees closer to Sharon’s place. “Movement at three o’clock, heading through that line of shrubbery.”
Skye aimed her beam toward the general vicinity. “That explains the trampled hollyhocks. Look, he’s making his way down the fence line toward our target.”
“Dressed all in black, head to toe. How close should we let him get?”
“At least to Sharon’s property line. Better would be him coming through the backyard and crouching behind her shed.”
“You’re cutting it close.”
“We want him on her property, no question about his full intent then.”
Even as they dropped down from the roof, they were discussing the best way to come in from behind and surprise him.
“You take the left side, I’ll take the right. Be careful,” Skye cautioned as they split up. She took off through a dirt trail that ran past the house from the back while Josh came in from the street side and the front.
But in the end, each took up a position on opposite sides of the house. From their vantage point, they had a clear view of the man as he approached Sharon’s bedroom window. They watched as he began to fiddle with removing the screen.
Josh was the first to break towards the suspect.
Skye heard Kiya growl and let out a low moan. As if their guy knew that Josh had been there all along, the suspect turned and calmly took aim, firing one shot from a handgun.
Josh felt a jolt, a hot, searing pain through his upper arm as he stumbled to the ground.
Before the gunman could take another shot, Skye hurled her body into him from behind, knocking him to the ground with a thud. She could feel the air go out of her lungs. Stunned, it took her a few seconds to regain her feet. Before she could stop him, the suspect was up and running, taking off towards the six-foot-high wooden fence that separated the backyard and the dirt trail.
Skye took off after him.
Josh was back on his feet, racing after Skye as she gave chase. The suspect cleared the fence in one single vault with Skye on his heels. She was about to leap up and over when two more shots whistled through the air just above her head, one tearing into the wood.
Josh jerked her back and down to the ground just as another shot rang out. They both hit the turf, hugging the ground. Motionless, they listened and waited until the suspect’s footsteps faded down the pathway.
“That was close.”
Josh moved his shoulder around in a circular motion and sucked in air. “Did you see how fast that gun came out?”
Skye glanced over at him and for the first time noticed the hole in his jacket. “Did he get you?”
“It’s a scratch.”
“That’s what I said when it happened to me.”
“But this really is. The bullet grazed my jacket. That’s all. We need to get out of here before the cops show up.”
She started to rip open his shirt sleeve to get a better look, but Josh stopped her. Instead, he pointed at the fence.
“Look at that. He must’ve scraped a knee or an ankle, see the blood. We need to get a sample before the police get here.”
She stepped closer and spotted the red splotch about the size of a nickel. From her jacket pocket, she took out the only thing she had, an unused Kleenex, and dabbed at the reddish stain, transferring the sticky wetness onto the tissue. In the distance, she heard sirens responding to the calls from the neighbors. “That should be enough to get DNA. Let’s get out of here, the window’s closing. The cops are probably racing up Aurora Avenue as we speak.”
****
Back in the van, she settled behind the wheel and gunned the engine. In the rearview mirror, she got a glimpse of the first officer arriving on the scene as he pulled up in front of Sharon’s house. She let out a breath as she took the first left out of the subdivision and followed the road around the backside of the zoo.
At the first available place to pull over, she came to a stop and glanced at Josh sitting in the passenger seat. He’d taken off his jacket to reveal a red pool of blood soaked onto his shirt and trickling out of a small hole. “Let’s get something for that wound.”
“No need. Just get us further down the road.”
She obliged by pulling back out onto the roadway. “What are you not telling me?”
“I think he was waiting for us. I think it was a trap. He baited us and we fell for it. Nothing he does is a coincidence.”
As that idea sunk in, she slowly turned to meet Josh’s eyes. “He knew we were there? He wasn’t going to break in at all. He was waiting for us to make our move and then whip out that gun, right?”
“Exactly. Which means none of that data Reggie is gathering matters much.”
Skye took several minutes to mull that over. “Maybe not…yet. But there’s always a chance Reggie could stumble onto something we need and don’t know it yet. Did you get a good look at the guy?”
“A general description. White male. Five-eleven. Black hair. Brown eyes. You?”
“The same. That pretty much fits half the males in Washington. But did you see the way he cleared that fence? Our ruthless, sicko killer is athletic. Why didn’t he put on a mask or something to disguise himself?”
“Because he’s not afraid of being caught.”
“That’s nuts.”
“He’s arrogant. He doesn’t think he’ll get caught. And before you wonder about Kiya, she tried to warn me, I heard the growl, but he drew that weapon out of his waist too fast for me to react.”
“Same here. I heard Kiya but by that time the guy already taken aim. Look, it’s too late to catch the ferry. Might as well go back to the office and spend the night there. We need to at least get some antiseptic on that wound.”
“It’s no big deal.”
She grabbed
his hand, clutched his fingers in hers. “We’ll sort this all out. I don’t like us taking chances like that and being so...”
“Unprepared? Vulnerable? Yeah. Well, now you see why I don’t want you out there walking the streets.”
“Point taken. Point made,” she stated knowing he was right. As she headed over the Aurora Bridge southward toward downtown, she didn’t like admitting he was right.
Things were changing. Criminals were a lot more dangerous, more cunning. Maybe she’d already lost her edge, lost her advantage.
****
For the third night in a row, Harry had taken Deborah out to dinner, visited over the meal, and enjoyed her company. After dropping her back at the hotel, he was headed home, listening to his police scanner—a habit he couldn’t seem to break—when he heard about the commotion happening in Phinney Ridge. Disturbance. Shots fired. Suspect or suspects on the run.
He let out a loud groan before making a U-turn and heading back into downtown to the Foundation.
Harry pulled into his usual space in the parking garage next to the Ander minivan. Once he spotted Skye helping a wounded Josh out of the front seat, he darted over to help. “How bad are you hurt?”
“Not bad,” Josh said through gritted teeth. “It stings. Mostly. The bastard was waiting for us. We walked right into a trap.”
Skye glanced around at the cars parked on the first level. She recognized all of them. “Looks like the gang’s all here. Judy stayed late because of Reggie. But why didn’t the others go home?”
“Last I checked, the team was onto something,” Harry informed her. “But that was hours ago, before supper.”
They took the elevator up to the third floor and were surprised when Leo greeted them at the door.
“How did you know it was us?” Skye asked, dragging Josh into the outer office.
Judy leaped up from the sofa where she’d been trying to nap. “Holy crap! Is that blood?”
Reggie walked out of the conference room, head down and began to talk a mile a minute. “You know that message we got about the bug…” He finally looked up. “Hey, what’s wrong with Josh. You get shot?”
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