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4:25 p.m.
A charcuterie board had been set out on the kitchen counter. Fiona snagged a black olive and laid out paper plates.
They’d visited Amy-Rose Rydell’s family’s home and then Lily Hayes’s. Amy-Rose’s family didn’t think anything was missing, but they weren’t as close as they used to be and had no idea about anyone named Skipper. They did say she was a bit wild and they thought she partied too much. Lily Hayes’s family said nothing was missing as Lily still lived at home. She’d finally been coming into some money from a side job that she said was delivering groceries, but they didn’t believe her. When asked what they thought she might be doing on the side, they answered with silence and shrugs.
If both women were into partying and maybe even stripping or escort service work, that might be how the killer found them. Ty ignored the food. The interviews had been hard to conduct because he kept losing his train of thought, and eventually Violet took the baton. His focus was on Josiah, and the fact he had a son. A son the killer knew about.
Would Josiah even want to know Ty was his father? Would he want a relationship with him? Questions fired in his brain like a semiautomatic. Tonight, he hoped for some answers—the kind that required more than head nods and one-word responses.
“Who put this together?” Ty asked. “Looks like the froufrou stuff Cami feeds us when we work through lunches.” Looked pretty. A grown-up Lunchable minus the chocolate sandwich cookie. She’d never found his comments amusing.
“Yeah, and they’re delicious without putting forth a lot of effort.” Fiona pointed to a large to-go sack that read Blue Fin Grill. The adult lunch-meat board had been catered.
“What’d that cost?”
“Me less time,” Fiona shot back, popped another whole black olive in her mouth and snagged a cube of cheese.
“That’s all processed,” Violet added, and dropped her purse on the kitchen counter by the fridge.
Fiona made a display of shoving a piece of pepperoni in her mouth and going gaga over it. “So did you catch the killer?” she asked to annoy Violet.
Ty chuckled.
“You know we didn’t.” Violet didn’t always understand jokes. Or maybe she didn’t find them all that funny. At least not Fiona’s.
Asa raised his head from the dining room table turned into conference table. They’d set up an official command post at the sheriff’s office ten minutes away in Manteo, but were using the beach house too. The view was amazing and breathed some hope into a vicious case.
They’d borrowed a whiteboard from the Manteo FBI resident agency and had already taped the photos of Amy-Rose Rydell and Lily Hayes on the board along with pertinent information and the photos of the missing women with flowers in their names.
“What did the Rydell and Hayes families have to say?” Owen asked. He had his laptop out in front of him with the high-tech geopattern software open, but he’d also tacked a map onto the living room wall and placed pins marking the locations where the women lived, worked and often visited.
“Let the man eat. He gets hangry,” Fiona said.
Under normal circumstances, Fi would be right, but not today. Today he’d pretty much lost his appetite even though his stomach was so empty he’d felt his last swig of water slide down, leaving a cold wake from his gullet to his gut. “I’m not hungry.”
Asa and Fiona both snapped to attention.
“How bad was it at Bexley Hemmingway’s?” Fiona asked.
Violet sat poker-faced and silent, leaving the conversation to Ty’s discretion.
“This killer might have targeted a woman I cared about when she was a child and he might target Bexley.” He explained about the guy named Skipper—a possible lead. Their only possible lead right now. “I feel responsible, but I’ll go by the house later to pick up the sketch her son said he’d draw.” He nearly choked on the words her son.
“I can have him in five minutes,” Selah said through the computer screen, pushing her chunky black glasses back up on her nose.
Ty didn’t protest or it’d stir up questions he had no intention of answering and instead walked to the whiteboard and added information about the women’s partying, a mysterious side hustle, and the possibility things had gone missing. “What did you find out at the ME’s office this morning?”
“No signs or evidence of sexual assault on either victim. They’d been fed—and not shabbily either. Medical examiner found remains of steak in Amy-Rose’s stomach,” Asa said. “She died not long after eating. Cause of death is overdose. High levels of Xanax in her system. We won’t know if Lily Hayes is the same until the tox screen comes back.”
Four to six weeks. Unlike cool criminal TV shows.
“But,” Asa continued, “we can make an educated guess it’s the same. These women who’ve gone missing are overlapping in time, so I believe he’s keeping them all at once. Working on them individually. We’re talking at least eight, maybe more. He’d need a place to keep them.”
“Any evidence of physical abuse?” Violet asked. “He feeds them well and he keeps them alive for a period of time. I have to wonder if Amy-Rose and Lily Hayes were casualties in a much bigger plan. To do that much work on them—Amy-Rose more than Lily—and then to kill them? No. He wants every inch of their bodies and then to collect them like a garden of flowers. One murder does nothing. Two, with a religious calling card, brings us out here.” Her gaze connected with Ty’s. “This guy was willing to give up two of his victims in order to snag our attention—Ty’s attention. He knew there had to be some kind of overt religious undertone. Thus the note card.”
Fiona strode to the whiteboard to add updated information. “The medical examiner did find evidence of torture. Amy-Rose had several broken fingers that hadn’t healed properly, a broken wrist, and a few burn scars on her armpits, the bottoms of her feet, and her groin.”
“He’s hurting them in places that won’t affect the tattoo work, which tells me he wants perfection on the visible skin,” Violet said.
