Chapter 5
“Stay,” Grant ordered Avery.
“I’m not a dog,” she murmured.
“You know what I mean,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt. “Stay low, stay quiet and most of all...” he met and held her gaze, “stay safe.”
She opened her mouth as if to protest and closed it again. “Okay. Now, go. I want to know what the bitch is saying while pretending to be me.”
“On it. And we’re getting you a phone as soon as I can break free. I don’t like that you have no way of contacting me if we should be separated.”
“I’m in full agreement. Since everything I brought with me went with the car, I have nothing.”
“We’ll work on that, too,” he said and pushed his door open. “I’ll be back as soon as I reasonably can. Lock the door behind me.”
“Just go,” she urged him and slid down in her seat.
Grant got out and closed his door. He waited until he heard the sound of the door locks engaging, then strode toward the trio of Agent Bradley, Sheriff Taylor and the imposter. Glancing briefly back at the rental car, his lips twitched.
Avery was still slumped low in her seat with only her nose and the top of her head rising above the dash. He hoped she kept her word and stayed where she was. The woman had a mind of her own and a habit of rushing headlong into danger.
At least, that’s how Grant saw it.
Her time undercover had proven she had patience and cunning; otherwise, she wouldn’t be alive today.
“Ah, there you are, Mr. Hayes,” Melissa Bradley said.
Grant nodded to the FBI Agent and the sheriff before turning to Avery’s doppelganger. “Agent Hart,” he said with a casual lift of his chin, while studying her face for any sign of guilt or fear of discovery.
The woman had a hell of a poker face and dipped her head slightly, acknowledging him like she knew him. She was good at the charade. He had to give her that.
“I got here as soon as I could,” he said. “Please, bring me up to speed on what we have here.”
“We haven’t identified the victim yet,” Sheriff Taylor said. “I don’t recognize her as being from around here.”
“I have our people in the San Antonio Field Office searching the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System for recent missing women who meet the victim’s characteristics. Given that victim number two was from San Antonio, they’ll start searching in a four-hundred-mile radius.”
They walked with him to where the latest victim lay in a bed of rose petals, her long dark hair spread out around her shoulders.
“Based on her level of rigor mortis,” the imposter stopped at the foot of the shallow grave, “she’s probably been dead ten to twelve hours, placing her time of death between one and three o’clock in the morning. That gave our killer the cover of night to position the victim.”
Grant stared down at the dead woman’s pale face. Tiny pinpoints of red and purple splotches marred her skin like the woman he’d seen in the M.E.’s office, indicating asphyxiation.
Then it struck him, and his heart constricted. She looked a lot like Avery with her black hair carefully draped around her shoulders. “Have all the victims had long dark hair?”
“So far, yes,” the Avery imposter said.
Grant tensed at her voice that sounded so much like Avery’s. He could understand how Agent Bradley would have assumed she was her FBI colleague.
Why would this woman impersonate a federal agent? What did she hope to gain from it?
Grant grit his teeth, fighting the urge to grab the woman and shake the truth out of her, to call her bluff and expose her for the fraud she was. But if there was even a slight chance she was working with the killer, she could lead them to him and possibly save the next victim.
He focused on the victim, studying how she lay, her presentation so similar to the woman in the M.E.’s examination room. The signs of asphyxiation were evident on her face. Her shirt lay open enough to display the letters carved into her skin, the dried blood dark, almost black.
WTD.
“Any guesses on what message he’s trying to get across?” the sheriff asked.
