“Happily.” Lincoln returned the smile and punched the down button. It wasn’t every day he found someone else as eager to shun the light of day as he was. Lab rats and librarians, and Lincoln’s forensic specialty qualified for both. He mentally thanked his uncle every day for putting that bug in his ear.
“Did you do your undergrad here too?” Lincoln asked as the elevator slowly descended.
“UVA.”
“And you didn’t want to stay there?” He gave a lecture at Charlottesville twice a year. It was gorgeous, with its neoclassical architecture. It felt like a larger version of Chapel Hill to him. A bit creepy with the whole secret society thing, but he got over that for a day of reveling in college town nostalgia.
“Wanted to come home,” Jeremiah said.
Not a nostalgia Lincoln understood, but one many other people did. “You grew up in Apex?”
“Roanoke, technically,” Jeremiah said as they stepped out of the elevator and started down a hallway. “My parents moved there from here when I was three, but Apex is home. Family goes back generations, and the archives are unparalleled. Having access to those for my thesis has been invaluable.”
“What are you writing on?” Lincoln asked, even as ninety percent of his attention was on the climate-controlled archive rooms on either side of the hallway, visible through double-paned insulated windows.
“The effects of global warming on Appalachia populations.”
“And the archives here have weather data too?”
“Some, but it’s the local farming, crop, and trade records that are most informative. I can see what people were growing, buying, and selling, which tells us a lot about how people were moving through these mountains.”
This kid was good. That was a lesson Lincoln didn’t often teach until halfway into forensics. And if Jeremiah knew how to think outside the box like that, he might be helpful in other ways too. “That might feed into my research. I may have some questions for you.”
“Of course. Anything I can do to help.”
“Likewise.” He wouldn’t be here long and he still felt guilty about that, but maybe he could be of some help to Jeremiah while he was here.
“Good to hear after the past few months.” Jeremiah swung open the door at the end of the hallway, revealing the main archives work area, four wooden tables arranged in front of rows of stacks that stretched to the back of the cavernous room. “Your key card will also get you into the private work area over there.” He pointed at a door to the right of the workbenches. “Harry used it for special projects. Your husband mentioned setting some stuff up for you.”
“Fucking hell.”
Jeremiah chuckled on his way back out the door. “Good luck with that,” he called, voice echoing down the hallway.
More true than Jeremiah knew, proven as Lincoln inspected the private work area. Papers were scattered across two tables, a pile of microfiche sat next to the reader in the corner, and archive boxes were stacked at random about the room. He’d been “married” to Carter for less than twelve hours and yet the “Story of my life” that escaped his lips felt like the most truthful thing he’d said all day.
Six
Turned out, there was an organization—of sorts—to Carter’s mess. A couple figure eights stalked through the two tables, a rifling through printouts and photos, and Lincoln had it mostly sorted out. Piles were organized around Dr. Fear’s four activity cycles. For a three-year window before the first couple killed in each cycle, Carter had pulled county hospital and census records as well as university enrollment and employment records.
The pile of microfiche next to the reader was from thirty-two years ago and didn’t correspond to any of Dr. Fear’s cycles. Lincoln assumed that was the thing Carter had been originally looking into here in Apex. Lincoln moved on from that stack, even though a part of him desperately wanted to dig deeper into it, wanted to figure out what Carter had been doing here and what he was looking for. Maybe Lincoln could help. Curiosity, cat, and all that. But they were here on the clock, on a different case, and Lincoln needed to focus.
Glasses on, he pulled a legal pad and pen out of his bag, claimed a chair at the table with the pile that had Anthony’s hospital record flagged on top, and drew the mess of records toward him. Two hours later, he’d confirmed Carter’s initial assessment. No other trace of Anthony, and no trace of his wife or any of the other five people killed in that cycle of Dr. Fear’s activity twenty-five years ago. Anthony had blown out a tire on the interstate and run into the guardrail. He’d been brought into the ER to stitch up a few cuts and to confirm no concussion. He hadn’t been in the county hospital more than twenty-four hours, his car in a garage in Apex only long enough to replace the tire.
Lincoln pushed the now neatly arranged stack of papers aside to make room for his pen and paper. He scratched out a list of other archives and records to pull—all local. Carter had done a good first cut by searching hospital, census, and university data. He’d confirmed that Anthony wasn’t from Apex. So now they needed to focus on the narrow time period when he was in Apex—DMV, police, and garage records. Who was on the scene? Who towed the car? Where was it towed to? Who worked at that garage? The same for the hospital personnel that treated Anthony and, if they could identify them, any hotel or restaurants Anthony visited during his twenty-four hours in Apex. Who had he crossed paths with? That was the list Lincoln ultimately needed.
He flipped the sheet of paper and made another list—all the characteristics of Anthony that he could recall off the top of his head. Basic demographics—age, race, height, weight, hair color, eye color—then education, places of residence, any medical conditions, and last but not least, his fear: the dark. For his wife, Rebecca, also murdered, it had been rats. Dr. Fear had trapped them in a rat-infested basement with no lights. Kept them there until they’d succumbed to their fears and begged for their deaths, then delivered a single kill shot to each of their heads.
A phantom tickle of flames licked the soles of Lincoln’s feet, the tips of his fingers, the ends of his hair, as it often did when he dove into this case. He had to stand and walk around the tables to shake it off. There was only one other thing that scared him worse than fire—performing in front of strangers—and he’d had to contemplate both today.
He made another lap around the tables before sitting at the one with the pile that had Zia’s hospital record flagged on top. He didn’t expect to find Ruby or Chase but having fewer names to look for made fast work of the stack. He didn’t find them, nor did he find Zia’s murdered girlfriend, Quinn. Nor any other patients in common with Anthony’s stack; not surprising given the years apart, but still no commonalities. And there was nothing else in the records, or the similar lists Lincoln made, that pinged any of his investigative senses. No characteristics shared, no crossed paths—virtual strangers, and like Anthony, Zia was the only one with a fleeting connection to Apex.
Just two people passing through a college town off a major highway that led toward DC, where they had both lived at the time of their deaths. Maybe that could be discounted as coincidence. Except when Lincoln found Dr. Fear’s first victim from his second cycle twenty-two years ago in the stack Carter had pulled for that time window, coincidence seemed less likely. And when he found the first victim in the stack from twelve years ago, coincidence would have flown right out the window if the archives dungeon had any.
Fucking hell, was this it? Was this the missing link they’d never discovered? The first victim in each of Dr. Fear’s cycles had passed through this tiny town? Had he identified them here? And if so, how had that one victim led to the others in each cycle?
He needed to call Ollie. And Carter.
He needed to get out of this room before the phantom flames licking his feet somehow morphed into reality and burned all these archives to the ground. Fear and excitement powering his steps, he traded his glasses for his phone and impatiently took the elevator up to the main level, nearly running into Jeremiah on his way out the front door.
