Well, shit.
Anson scowled and tapped on the window. Interview over.
“We’ll contact the public defender’s office,” Fuentes began.
“No, I’d like to make a call,” he said. “I know a lawyer who’ll help me.”
“If that’s what you’d prefer,” she said, her voice calm but her body tense. The lawyer was inevitable, but Matt wished they had gotten more out of him first.
Matt and John Anson walked down the hall. “We have enough to keep him over the weekend,” John said. “Once the search is complete, we’ll have more.”
“I don’t like that he’s not worried,” Matt said. “As if he knows we won’t find anything in his car or apartment. We need to find the secondary location.”
Catherine had determined from the beginning that there was a remote, secondary location where the victims had been detained for several days before they were killed. That was based partly on forensics, and partly on logistics. So Reid likely had good reason to believe they wouldn’t find evidence in his apartment. Fortunately, now that he’d been arrested, the FBI and sheriff’s department were going to learn every detail of his life: friends and family, if he had access to a vacant building, if he had a second vehicle.
“We have a good team here,” John said. “We’ll find a thread and pull. No one is going to rest until we have what we need to keep Garrett Reid behind bars for the rest of his life.”
Matt hoped that was true, but hoping wasn’t one of the pillars of law enforcement. His confidence was shaken, and he wished they had found at least ketamine on Reid’s person, which would have been far more damning.
John opened the door to the small conference room that they’d been using for their task force meetings after Matt and his team came down from Quantico. Matt walked over to the credenza and grabbed a lukewarm bottle of water. Kara hadn’t checked in yet; she was part of the team searching Reid’s apartment.
“Have you heard anything from the search?” he asked John.
“Not yet,” he said, unconcerned, glancing through messages next to where he had a small workstation. “I need to work on getting the warrant expanded to cover Reid’s finances, credit reports, phone records. I want to get to the judge before he leaves for the night. If I interrupt his weekend, he’ll be in a dour mood. You can use this conference room if you need it. I’ll check in once I have more.”
John tossed half the notes, and put the rest under a notepad, on which he wrote a quick note. “If you need me, text.”
John left and Matt pulled out his phone to text Tony a status report.
Garrett Reid was only one of fourteen men with access to the resort who fit Catherine’s profile. When they took race out of the profile, there were forty-two possibilities. Of those, two-thirds were vendors or part-time employees. But they had prioritized the initial fourteen men because most serial killers rarely deviated from their own race. So they’d run basic background and criminal searches on the forty-two, but deeper backgrounds on the fourteen.
And none of them had any serious bumps.
In addition, Catherine was adamant that the first victim would connect to the killer, even if only in passing. The first victims were Emily and Josh Henderson. And while Emily was originally from California, like Reid, they were raised a hundred miles apart and had no obvious friends or associations in common.
Matt was certain Catherine would say the answer lay in one of two possibilities: either they hadn’t yet uncovered the connection that surely existed between Reid and the Hendersons, or there had been another victim—someone killedbeforethe Hendersons. Historically, a serial killer’s first victim was often someone familiar to them: a neighbor, a co-worker, a casualacquaintance. Someone who unknowingly ignited the spark of violence and ended up on the killer’s radar.
The FBI research team had already combed through unsolved homicides, but they hadn’t found any missing couples matching the demographics of the three murdered pairs. If Garrett had started with a single victim—most likely a woman—it would be far more difficult to identify her, given the much higher number of unsolved single-victim murders.
Because Matt’s Mobile Response Team had only been brought in three weeks ago, they were playing catch-up. It was impractical to follow the fourteen men who fit each point of Catherine’s profile, but now they could home in on Garrett Reid. Matt lamented that they didn’t already have more information about this guy. They knew he was born in Pasadena, California, and had worked at several resorts over the last five years, but there were gaps in his employment history. He had no criminal record, no active social media, and was living in an eight-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom apartment twenty minutes southwest of the resort, right off I-95.
An apartment that would be near impossible to bring any of his victims to without being seen.
Forensics confirmed the victims were kept alive for up to five days after their abduction—again, confirming Reid’s apartment was impractical and he had access to a second location. While there was no evidence of sexual assault, each body bore signs of brutal torture: blunt force trauma, shallow cuts, stab wounds, and widespread bruising. Once dead, each victim had been wrapped separately in plain cotton sheets, then the couples were tied together at the waist with common nylon cord, and dumped in the ocean. The tide carried them to shore within days. Yet, Reid didn’t own a boat and they hadn’t identified a boat he could easily access.
Autopsies confirmed the victims were already dead beforeentering the water. The lab was still analyzing trace evidence but hadn’t pinpointed the location of the killings or where the bodies were dumped. The best estimate put the range along the coast—from South Carolina to northern Florida.
Jim Esteban, their forensic crime scene expert, believed the bodies had been discarded no more than two miles out from shore. Any farther, and the damage from currents or marine activity would have been more severe.
Reid had access to a secure second location, someplace he could hold the victims for days without fear of discovery. But he had maintained a normal schedule. No sudden leave. No extended absence. Catherine narrowed the search radius: the secondary site had to be within a four-hour drive. Eight hours, round trip. Close. Controlled. Hidden.
Matt’s phone vibrated. It was Kara.
“Hello,” he answered.
“Nothing,” Kara said.
“I need more than nothing.”
