When his father disappeared, he knew it was his mother’s fault. She was loud and disrespectful, and she slept with other men. Even then as a child, he’d known it. He’d seen it. For years he’d blamed his mother and wished he had the courage to kill her with his bare hands, watching her eyes bulge, squeezing her throat until every bone in her neck broke.
But it was his fault, too. His failure as a son. If only he’d been older, smarter. If he’d followed his father and begged him to take him, too.
For a long time he’d thought his father was back in prison, but his mother denied it. Said he wasn’t coming back and to forget him. How could he do that? How could he forget his own father?
His dad would understand the feelings. The pictures that popped into his mind all the time.
When he looked in the car next to him and saw a pretty woman, he could imagine her naked and bloody beneath him-a vision so vivid he believed he could touch her and feel warm blood on his fingers.
Or when his mother was around and he dreamed so distinctly of going into her bedroom and cutting her throat. He’d wake up after that smelling blood, certain he’d done it, needing to check that he hadn’t somehow killed his mother in his sleep.
He never had.
Or when he saw his brother and wondered if he had the same feelings, that maybe if he talked to him and explained everything clearly, he would have a partner. Someone to help. Someone who understood.
But he didn’t dare go after his mother, and didn’t dare tell his brother. It was just him, alone. He had to figure everything out.
He stopped the slide show and stared at a picture of Becca dressed in plastic wrap. She wasn’t dead, but waiting. Becca had been the best. Why? Why had he felt complete with Becca and not Angie or Jodi?
Because she wasn’t a slut. She wasn’t like them. She was pure and beautiful and whole.
He needed to find another girl like Becca. Elizabeth Rimes, his MyJournal penpal in Georgia, would be perfect, but she was too far away.
He needed someone here in San Diego.
But soon he’d go to Elizabeth. And they’d have a real relationship, date, see each other like boyfriend and girlfriend. He’d be ready for her then, because he’d have gotten all these strange needs out of his system.
So if he couldn’t have Elizabeth tonight, he knew exactly who could replace her.
Already, he felt better.
TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY afternoon, but Carina and Nick were sitting in the windowless task force room painstakingly reviewing all three autopsy reports for any odd detail or stray piece of evidence that might offer them another direction in which to look.
But there didn’t appear to be anything other than the differences they’d already noted. Until Carina saw something odd in the personal effects record.
“It says that only one earring was found with both Becca and Jodi.”
“Is that unusual?”
“I can see how an earring might fall out, especially with a body that has been manhandled, but one earring in both victims? Angie had six ear piercings, three on each side, and she still had six posts in her ears when she was found.”
“Maybe the killer kept an earring as a souvenir,” Nick guessed.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It’s good news. It connects him with his victims.”
Patrick walked into the room. “What does?” he asked.
“Angie was missing a navel ring. Becca and Jodi were each missing one earring.”
“That’s creepy,” Patrick said.
“You can say that again. So what brings you down here?”
“Good news, bad news,” Patrick said.
“What else is new,” Carina grumbled. “Give me the good news first.”
“I have proof that Scout used a Sand Shack public computer.”
Carina grinned. “Really? When?”
“Several times over the last three months, usually in the late afternoon during the week.”
“Only three months?”
“That’s all MyJournal has archived.”
“But the time frame suggests that he’s a college student,” Nick said. “He comes by in the late afternoon.”
“Nothing he said using the Shack computer system was incriminating. Most of it was viewing MyJournal pages and surfing the Internet. But I have every private message or public post he made through that server on a grid to see if we can find a pattern or anything that identifies him.”
“We need to talk to the employees again,” Carina said. “Someone might recognize a general description. What about the library?”
“I went there, showed the librarian Kyle Burns’s photo like you asked, and she put on thick glasses and was noncommittal. The woman can’t see more than two feet in front of her is my guess.”
Patrick sat down and slid the files across to Carina. “You think it might be the manager?”
“I don’t know. He loosely fits Dillon’s profile. Under thirty, college student, underachiever.”
“How is he an underachiever? He works full-time and goes to school.”
Carina rifled through papers until she pulled Kyle Burns’s transcript. “I had one of the uniforms pull his transcript. He was in and out of college for three years. His grades are good, not great. His advisor put a note in his file that he aspired to do great things with his life, but didn’t have the focus to stick with any one thing. His strength is management because he’s neat, organized, and disciplined.”
Nick nodded. “Our killer is organized, but I wouldn’t call him disciplined.”
“Still, Burns fits. He lives alone in a small duplex near the university. He has the light brown hair the half-blind librarian noticed. He has access to the Shack public computers. I think we need to interview all the employees again while Burns is off-site.”
“He doesn’t work Sundays,” Nick said.
“So we go there and talk to the employees, then track everyone else down at their homes. I have the files here. We were focusing on friends of Angie, so we only talked to the employees who regularly worked the same shifts as Angie. Now we need to dig deeper. We have a connection with the Shack and the killer-assuming Dillon is right and Scout is who we’re looking for. We focus there.”
“One more thing popped,” Patrick said. He put a printout in front of him. “This is a private message to an Elizabeth Rimes that he sent through the MyJournal server using the library Internet connection. He talks about his cat Felix being hit by a car.”
“And he told Becca that someone shot his cat.”
“When we pulled down messages from the Shack from the last three months, and reviewed all public comments posted by Scout that are stored indefinitely, he’s told several female MyJournal members over the last year that his cat had been killed. Died of cancer, hit by a car, drowned by his roommate.”
“For sympathy,” Nick said.
Patrick concurred. “Women are suckers for a good cat sob story.”
“Oh, stop that,” Carina said. “They sympathized because they didn’t think anyone would lie about something like that. It’s the old ‘help me find my lost puppy’ trick that pedophiles use to lure kids away.”
“Now where?” Nick asked. “Do we have an ISP?”
Patrick sighed, sat down. “Not yet. We know that Scout was in both the Shack and the library. We can get a warrant to search a house or business if we can get a name that goes with the profile-Dillon already convinced the DA of his reasoning, and he’s ready to take the stand on it if questioned. But because the MyJournal site is a free Web page, no one has to give truthful information. We have an e-mail address and it goes to a free e-mail account that is open, but it’s been inactive since Scout registered with MyJournal two years ago.”
Carina stood and walked over to the map. Red pins showed where the victims were abducted, blue pins where their bodies were found. “Angie was last seen more than ten miles from where her body was found, but Jodi and Becca’s bodies were found where they were last seen. Why?”