“We’re going to be smart about it. We’ll find a way to push them open, with a long pole or something like that.”
There had once been handles; they had been removed, Kara noted.
“Let’s start looking,” Kara said. “How far do you think we need to be?”
“As far away as we can get,” Matt said. “Maybe ten, twelve feet?”
Kara was pretty good at identifying danger, but she couldn’t imagine what was on the other side. Hell, she couldn’t have imagined half of what they’d already faced in the last forty-eight hours.
“But you’re staying put,” Matt said. “I don’t want you walking on that leg any more than necessary. I’ll look around for something long enough to give us distance from the doors, but strong enough to push them open, okay?”
Reluctantly, she agreed. It was easier to agree than argue.
24
Matt and Kara had been missing for forty-eight hours.
Catherine was stuck. Jim was back with the ME and talking to Quantico about the lab results, but hadn’t returned with anything actionable. Michael was finishing the third round of staff interviews. Sloane had good information from Blanche Richardson, but only about Garrett’s personality.
Still, everything Catherine was learning about Garrett’s personality was shifting her profile of him. What particularly stuck was that Blanche still cared about him. He hadn’t hurt her—physically or emotionally.
Garrett was kind to the women he used. He was honest—they knew he wanted money and nice things, and they happily gave him everything he wanted because he gave them somethingtheywanted. She didn’t think it was just about sex, though that was certainly part of it. It sounded as if Garrett listened, which made him a good observer of human nature.
Jeff Maddox also had keen insight. The fact that he appreciatedGarrett’s help and intelligence while distancing himself from Garrett because of his lack of empathy showed Catherine that Garrett was either uncomfortable with emotions or incapable of feeling them.
Becca McCarthy was an outlier. Both Maddox and Blanche believed that Garrett had once been serious about his high school sweetheart. That indicated he had some sort of emotional core, though it was twisted and off-kilter.
And the biggest takeaway: no one suggested that they had seen any violence in him. Just the opposite. Garrett Reid walked away before confrontation.Even his parents and his brother said he wasn’t violent. He had no history of violence, though he had tormented people emotionally—such as hitting on his sister-in-law and seeming to enjoy her discomfort. What his college roommate said was key—he just didn’t care. He didn’t connect with people emotionally, but could fake it when it benefited him.
If he truly had no natural leanings toward violence, did that mean his partner, hisfemalepartner, was the violent half of their relationship? Did he kill to make her happy?
He had participated in the killings, assisted in the abductions, yet... the murders were hands-off. They weren’t personal acts of homicide—like stabbing, or strangulation, or even poison.
One victim fell to his death. Another bled out. Another died of blunt force trauma, but it was a repeated trauma that resulted in internal bleeding, which killed him. One drowned. Perhaps Garrett and his partner were one step removed from the deaths. They all died by circumstance, not by a specific act.
Catherine was reasonably certain that Garrett didn’t personally know any of the victims. She suspected that wasn’t true of his partner. One of these victims—most likely one of the women—was personal. One of these women had a connection to the partner, Catherine would stake her reputation on it.
She looked at the photo of Emily Henderson. An accomplished lawyer at thirty-six. Newly married. Attractive, wholesome, girl-next-door...
Thirty-six. She was also the oldest of the three women—four, if Catherine included Kara. Did that mean something?
The first victim—or victims, in this case—were almost always connected to the killer, but they hadn’t found any connection between these victims and any of the potential suspects on their list. Ryder was looking at a suspicious death in Scottsdale during the time that Garrett Reid worked there, but it seemed like a long shot.
Yet... what if one of the women working at the resort had a connection? That was a much narrower pool to work from.
She called Ryder. “Do you have a list of single, Caucasian female employees under forty?”
“Michael has it. He’s been including them in his interviews all morning.”
“Okay, thank you.” She should have known that Ryder and Michael were on top of it. “Have you received a report from the sheriff’s department regarding Reid’s activities?”
“He hasn’t left the hotel.”
She straightened. Why hadn’t she thought of this last night when she learned Graves took him to a hotel? “His partner—she was there.”
“Excuse me?”
“They need to see each other. She was at the hotel last night. Ryder, we need to go there now and look at the security footage.”
