“But I want to help you.”
Daniels shook her head. She was as stubborn as a mule, and he decided to play the last card in his hand. “If I told you that I have a video of Creepie and his partner trying to abduct your niece, would you change your mind?”
Her eyes grew wide. “What are you talking about?”
“Did your sister tell you about what happened at Galleria mall?”
“Melanie said two men tried to grab Nicki, but Nolan stopped them.”
“I have a surveillance video taken at the mall. Let me show it to you, and explain why I think it was them. You can judge for yourself.”
“All right. But I need to pay for my own dinner. Bureau rules.”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
She asked her phone for directions to Country Walk, and an automated voice gave her instructions. Then she merged into traffic and got back on the road.
Chapter 33
Wheelchair Etiquette
“I want to be straight with you about something,” Daniels said as she pulled into a parking space at Country Walk and silenced the engine. “I had no idea how identical Nicki looked to Cassandra. Had I known, I would never have posted the videos.”
Her voice was riddled with guilt. Lancaster had worked stings as a cop and never liked them. There were often unintended consequences to setting a trap that no one ever saw coming. As he started to get out, she grabbed his wrist.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“I don’t think you’d do anything to hurt your niece,” he said. “But you must have realized that another teenage girl might bear a resemblance to Cassandra. And that by posting those videos, you’d put that girl in harm’s way.”
Her lower lip began to tremble.
“That never occurred to me,” she said.
“I find that hard to accept,” he said.
He was roasting without the AC and tried to get out. She kept holding his wrist.
“Please believe me,” she said.
“But I don’t,” he said. “If you were an ordinary cop, that would be another story. But you’re an FBI agent and you also went to Dartmouth, which is Ivy League. You’ve got to be pretty smart to get into that place. The sting you created had the potential to hurt an innocent girl. You knew that, but you still went full steam ahead.”
A single tear ran down her cheek. She wiped it away and took a deep breath.
“All right. I knew there was a risk, and so did my superiors,” she said. “But we took it anyway. We didn’t really have a choice, considering the circumstances.”
“You’ve lost me. What circumstances?”
“If I tell you, you have to promise you won’t talk about it.”
“You have my word.”
She reached into the back seat and grabbed her briefcase. Holding it in her lap, she unzipped an inside compartment and removed a large manila envelope with a drawstring, which she spent a moment undoing. From within came a handful of old-fashioned square photographs that was an inch thick. She passed the stack to him, and he thumbed through them. They were a collection of different young women taken before and after their lives were extinguished. In the before photos, the women were clothed and had smiles on their faces and looked either high or drunk. In the after photos, they were naked and tied up, their lifeless faces etched with anguish and pain. Unable to process anymore, he handed the photos back to her.
“That’s beyond horrible,” he said.
“Welcome to my world,” she said.
Dinner no longer sounded appealing. She found a Starbucks, and he went inside and bought two grande cups of Pike Place and brought them out to the car. He placed a handful of sugar packets and artificial sweetener on the seat between them, along with a pastry.
“Only one? Talk about showing a girl a good time,” she said.
“We can split it,” he said.
She leaned against her door and blew the steam off her drink. “I joined the FBI right after I graduated from Dartmouth and worked my way up the ranks. Maybe because of what happened to me in college, I became adept at catching sexual predators. I would stay up all night running them down. My bosses noticed, and in 2012, I was promoted to running the Violent Crimes Against Children/Online Predator Unit. I wasn’t on the job two weeks when the first photographs landed on my desk.”
“The killers sent them to you?”
“They were more clever than that. The victim’s photographs were taken on an old-fashioned camera, and the film was dropped off at a pharmacy to be developed. When the pharmacy processed the film and saw it was of a murder, the local police were contacted. The cops didn’t know what to do with the photos. They didn’t have a body or know the victim’s identity, so the photos were forwarded to the FBI. Since the victim was a young girl, the photos were passed on to me.”
She tore a piece off the pastry and popped it into her mouth.
“You can have all of it,” he said.
“Thanks. The first photos came from a pharmacy in Houston, so I flew in and worked with our office there trying to identify the victim. We eventually matched her to a body that had been found in a field on the side of a highway. She was an illegal Mexican immigrant who left her job at the mall one afternoon and never arrived home. There were no real leads in the case, so I went back to DC.”
“Those were the photos you showed Rusty,” he said.
“Yes. She was the first victim.”
Half the pastry was gone. It seemed to help her relax.
“Six months later, another set of murder photos showed up on my desk,” Daniels said. “Same scenario as before. Taken on an old-fashioned camera and dropped off at a pharmacy to be processed, this time in Atlanta. Again, the cops didn’t know what to do with them, so they were sent to the FBI, and I got them. I flew to Atlanta, and worked with our office there to identify the victim. She was another teenage girl who worked at a mall and never came home. The body was found in a field while I was there. It struck a nerve.”
“The killings in Hanover,” he said.
She nodded. “The Hanover killers also discarded their victims’ bodies in fields. It made me wonder if the murders were connected, so I had a forensics team compare the evidence from the Hanover killings to the killings in Houston and Atlanta. All four of the victims had worked in malls. They’d also been fed a meal before they were killed. There were enough similarities with the cases that forensics concluded the same pair of killers had murdered all four victims.”
“That must have freaked you out,” he said.
“It was very upsetting, to say the least. I went to my bosses and asked them to open an active investigation into the Houston and Atlanta killings. An active investigation means the bureau devotes a portion of its budget to a case, and is required to report its findings to the Justice Department every six months. My request got approved, and I’ve been chasing the killers ever since.”
“How many victims are there?” he asked.
“Fifteen so far. The photos show up like clockwork every six months. They rotate between Houston, Atlanta, and Fort Lauderdale. The killers have a unique calling card. In the before photo, the victim is wearing a gold Saint Jude medal, in the after photo, she’s not. Just when I get ready to shut the investigation down, I have to start it back up.”
“Why would you shut it down?”
“Bureau rules. If there’s no movement in six months, the case is put on the back burner, and the agent handling the case is given a new assignment.”
“Are you telling me that you’ve been working this case continuously since 2012?”
“Afraid so.”
“That’s seven years working one case. You must be frustrated as hell.”
“I am. But I can’t stop. I look at the photographs of these dead girls, and it rips me apart.” She turned her head and stared through the windshield. “I can’t remember the last time I had a decent night’s sleep.”