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“We’re trying to track down her whereabouts prior to coming here,” Sturgil told her, “Maybe that will help answer some questions.”
“Great,” Ryan said. “You can coordinate that with our research team,. They might be able to expedite the process.”
“Already on it, Detective,” Sturgil replied. “I gave them her phone number and vehicle information just before you got here.”
“Excellent,” Jessie said, eliciting a bashful smile from the officer. “What about cameras?”
“There aren’t any in the parkette,” Sturgil told her. “We also checked the houses across the street. No luck there either. We’re checking further up the road, just in case.”
Jessie sighed in frustration. Ryan picked up the questions where she left off.
“What else we do we know about Silva? Job? Marital status?”
“We haven’t had a chance to look into that yet,” Sturgil conceded. “I’ve only been here for forty-five minutes myself.”
“That’s okay,” Ryan told him. “You were so comprehensive with the other stuff that I thought we might get lucky on that front too. We’ll look into it.”
“Okay,” Sturgill said. “If you don’t need anything else right now, I’m going to get back to supervising the team.”
“That’s fine,” Ryan said.
Jessie watched him go and her eye was drawn once again to Gabriella Silva lying unceremoniously on the ground. Jessie imagined the woman earlier this evening, dressed up, excited about whatever event she had attended. And now all that was snuffed out with a few strikes from a heavy rock. Her dreams and aspirations were gone. All she had left was the hope that someone would get justice for her. And even that would be cold comfort. Jessie felt a pit of fury start to boil in her gut.
“Well, at least we can eliminate Harrison Buhner as a suspect,” Ryan said, looking for any silver lining. “He would have been at the station when this happened.”
Jessie wished she could be as upbeat as her husband.
“That’s good for him,” she noted, “but it doesn’t help us much. We’ve got so much information, and yet not one credible suspect. We’re back to square one, with a killer on the loose.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mark Haddonfield lay quietly on the top bunk in his jail cell.
Unlike his cellmate in the bed below, who was snoring loudly, he couldn’t get to sleep. Lights out had been at 10 p.m., and he guessed that it was well after midnight now, but he just couldn't get his brain to quiet down.
It didn’t help that the guard who patrolled his floor of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles wore shoes with loud, clomping soles that could be heard no matter how far away he was.
Mark supposed he should be happy that he was in this section of the jail at all. For much of his first two months here, he’d either been in the medical wing or in solitary confinement for what authorities deemed “his own protection.”
Part of that label was probably legitimate. He was a skinny, twenty-one-year-old former college student with pale skin, curly blond hair and glasses. Plus, he had a noticeable limp. He was a target, for sure. But Mark was pretty certain that as a serial killer responsible for the deaths of seven people and the guy who had almost taken out celebrated criminal profiler Jessie Hunt, prison officials didn’t want him mixing it up in general population.
But that had changed in recent weeks. After getting surgery for the torn medial collateral ligament he suffered at the hands of Hannah Dorsey over the summer, he was now limping far less, with a notably smaller knee brace than before.
Admittedly, entering general population had led to a series of pretty brutal beatings that the staff hadn’t rushed to stop very quickly. But lately, the other prisoners seemed to have gotten bored with him and moved on to fresher meat. He suspected that was partly because they weren’t sure how a serial killer might try to get retribution on them if they continued to pummel him. After all, he might not have much to lose. If he was convicted for his previous crimes, he faced life in prison, if not the death penalty.
Mark rolled over in bed and stifled a gasp at the surge of pain. If he moved wrong, the knee still acted up, and without the brace he invariably moved wrong. He flashed back to that late-night moment on the near-empty Santa Monica pier, when Hannah had dived at his legs and made contact with his left one, bending the knee awkwardly and sending him hobbling off into the night.
He gritted his teeth at the memory. Looking back, he was convinced that it was that injury that had led to his downfall. After that night, everything fell apart. He failed out of school and had to leave his UCLA apartment and move into a by-the-week studio just off Skid Row. He was in constant pain and unable to get to his chosen victims as efficiently as he would have liked. Plus, his limp made it easier to identify him, forcing him to hide in the shadows like an animal. Hannah Dorsey was largely responsible for his predicament.
He wanted to make that clear to Hannah’s sister, Jessie, his one-time inspiration and current nemesis. But she hadn’t returned to the jail since an initial visit, despite his repeated requests. He understood her reticence. After all, he had spent six months hunting down people she’d rescued from other serial killers and snuffing them out as a means of punishing her for not making him her protégé. And he had tried to kill her as well when she was in the hospital, incapacitated with multiple serious injuries, including some kind of head trauma.
But still, they had a connection and he felt certain that she would want to talk to him to better understand why he had to do what he did. He knew she must be dying to know the truth. And yet, other than that one brief visit, there was radio silence. He suspected that she'd been ordered by prosecutors not to communicate with him because it might compromise the case against him. Otherwise, she would have been back by now.
“Do you really think that’s why?” Jessie whispered in his ear. “Are you sure she doesn’t just think you’re not worth her time?”
“That’s not it,” he insisted. “She’s being prevented from visiting me. Remember, she’s a criminal profiler. It’s her job to understand how minds like mine work. She’d be here if she could.”
“Yor mind isn’t all that interesting,” Jessie needled. “If it was, you wouldn’t be staring at cell bars right now.”
