Page 14 of Keeping Collette

“Nothing yet. I’m going to go to the office after I finish here. I feel like…” she trailed off. Penni was, no doubt, friends with all the guys at Alliez. Not to mention her friendship with Astrid.

“Feel like what? You can tell me. I won’t say anything.”

Maybe if she said it out loud, and to someone who knew the organization, perhaps she could be reassured that nothing was amiss. “I don’t know why I’m feeling this way, but it’s like they’re keeping something from me. Something important.”

“What makes you say that?” Astrid asked, as she came back into the kitchen.

“It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s probably all me, expecting a miracle to happen.” The last thing she wanted to do was disparage her boss’s husband’s employer in front of her.

“No, don’t dismiss it, just because of who you’re talking to,” Penni admonished gently. “If you’re feeling this way, then call them out on it. Ask them directly.”

Astrid leaned over the counter and grasped Collette’s hand. “Callum hasn’t said a word to me, but I can say if they find anything new, they’ll investigate it thoroughly before passing the details onto you. They wouldn’t want to give you false information or make you worry unnecessarily.”

“I guess.” Collette didn’t want to make the situation more uncomfortable than it was starting to feel. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to cause issues. I’m grateful that they’re helping. At least they believed me and didn’t come up with bullshit excuses like the police did.”

“You’re not causing issues,” Astrid reassured her. “Trust them, Collette, they know what they’re doing.”

“I know.” And she did, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to completely ignore her instincts that they were keeping something from her.

Whatever it was, she would find out. Deal had better be ready to answer her questions, because she wasn’t budging from his office until he gave them to her.

Chapter Eight

Deal studied the information in front of him. For the last few days, he and Cass had been working through the old case files of the missing people who’d turned up dead near where Courtney’s phone had last pinged. He’d even driven out there to see if he could find anything relating to Courtney.

The houses in the neighborhood were on the older side, a lot had unkempt lawns. The strip mall, where they last placed Courtney, only had two shops that were occupied. The rest had boarded up windows, and graffiti colored the walls. He’d ventured into the convenience store to ask if there were any security cameras he could access, but the guy behind the counter was so high, Deal was surprised he wasn’t floating.

He’d scoped the area out and did find one camera, but it was pointing at the counter, which was on the opposite side to the entrance, so whatever it recorded—if it did, and he doubted it actually worked—wouldn’t be of any use to them.

The frustration that they seemed to be going in circles was getting to, not only him, but also Cass. The only thing they’d been able to determine, was that all the victims had been killed in the same manner—heavily beaten with their throats slit—but had been disposed of in different locations.

“Why the fuck don’t the police realize they’ve got a serial killer on their hands?” he muttered as he closed the file and leaned back in his chair.

“They’re scared of freaking out the public,” Hound commented.

He looked over at his friend. “I get that, but we’ve got eight victims in the space of two years. Surely they’re going to have to realize that they’re all connected.”

“Maybe they do know and are digging into it.”

“Without asking the public for some information? Seems weird.” Deal didn’t buy it. The police were being ignorant, for whatever reason. That was his theory anyway, and if he was proved wrong, then he’d gladly cop it on the chin.

“It’s possible they’ve asked around the location, but given what you told me about it, any information would be unreliable.”

Hound made a good point. Given the condition he’d found the shopkeeper in, not to mention the state of the houses in close vicinity, it was likely most of the people were drug users, or dealers. The type of people who claimed to know nothing when it suited them. And if they weren’t into drugs, they were too afraid to say anything should something happen to them or their families. “You could be right. I doubt they’d cooperate with the police, and if they did, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that everything they say is a big lie.”

Deal pointed to the other pile of files. “Those are still missing people who we have no trace of. From everything we’ve found, this appears to be a particular collection point for traffickers. We know they like to change locations, because the dates when they’ve gone missing span across a five-year period. But what was different about those eight people? Did the killer cherry-pick who he took and killed? Did the killer move to the area in the last two years? Were they somewhere else where they did the same thing?”

Deal closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, so many unanswered questions. He’d been hoping to find something that wouldn’t put Courtney in the same bracket as the people who’d disappeared from the same location, but with every passing minute it was becoming more and more impossible not to think that Collette’s sister could have been this fucker’s next victim.

He had to find a connection between them all. Something that they all had that appealed to the killer.

Deal opened his eyes and met Hound’s gaze. “I’m going to have to tell Collette. I can’t put it off any longer. Cass told me two days ago that I had to tell her what we were thinking, but I wanted to give the files one last look in the hopes that something showed up. Something I’d missed on the previous times I’d read over them.” Which he hadn’t, but now that he had another thought, he’d go back over them again. That didn’t mean the time to give Collette an update wasn’t now. “I keep emailing her to say that we are still looking into things, and when we had something, we’d be in touch.”

“Given how passionate she is about finding her sister, it’s surprising she hasn’t pestered you more.” Hound said.

Deal thought the same thing. The way Collette had easily accepted his emails shocked him. He’d expected her to be ringing him daily. Or at least to have come to the office to demand answers.

Or maybe she was too scared. Sometimes it was easier not to know things and believe that hope was still alive, rather than getting information that would kill that dream with a few words.