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“That’s quick work.”
“Time’s the issue. When they verify these two victims are part of our stream, we can pull in more resources. It’s Santiago and Carmichael we need. We verify the first victim, we’re closer to ID’ing the killers. The first is going to be closer to home, closer to where they knew – and were known. The first is key.”
She looked toward the board. “But Campbell may not have time for that.” As she rose, Banner started to get to his feet. “Sit. Eat. I want to update the board. It helps me think.”
She got to work. “Why don’t you brief the others on the two stops we made?” she said to Banner.
“The lieutenant’s running searches on missings who have homes or businesses in the city here, figuring maybe they got somebody we haven’t found, and are using their place for their killing room.”
“Have to be private,” Roarke speculated. “Soundproofed. Even gagged, such matters made noise. And low security or they’d show on disc when bringing in a victim.”
“We stopped at two, eliminated them. Regular civilians living there.”
“Others to eliminate,” Eve said. “We’ll spread out tomorrow, bring in some uniforms. They’ve got a place, one they’re comfortable in. One they could take Kuper to. One where they’re working on Campbell right now.”
“Downtown,” Roarke added.
“Probability’s high. Peabody, put the sector on screen.”
While they ate, while they worked, Jayla Campbell struggled to rise above the pain. Going under it was a kind of escape, but they always brought her back, gave more.
She’d stopped trying to understand it. It simply was.
How long she couldn’t tell, not any longer. Hours, days, weeks. There was only pain and fear, and the certainty there would be more.
They’d had sex on the floor, against the wall, sometimes blessedly out of sight. Though she could hear them grunting or wailing, laughing.
They liked when she tried to scream, when she cried and begged. So she tried not to, but sometimes she couldn’t stop. Just couldn’t stop.
They looked so ordinary. Monsters shouldn’t look so ordinary, so much like ordinary people. The woman was pretty, in a hard, slutty sort of way, and the man – good-looking, sort of gangly and… stupid, she thought now.
He went along with anything the woman said.
Cut here, she’d say – and he would.
They were eating now, and the smell of the Chinese takeaway made her want to gag. She hadn’t eaten since the party. Sometimes they dribbled water in her mouth, but they never gave her food. Sometimes the water was laced with salt, and they laughed and laughed when she choked.
Monsters shouldn’t look like ordinary people.
They’d taken her clothes, but she’d gotten over the worst of that. Neither of them touched her in a sexual way – as if she cared about that now. They saved the sex for each other.
They were naked, too, as they ate, and sometimes they smeared sauce on each other and licked it off.
That, too, made her want to gag. At least she could close her eyes or turn her head. When they were involved in each other, she barely existed for them.
She wished she would stop existing for them.
They talked eagerly, avidly.
He said they were star-crossed lovers. The woman – Ella-Loo – loved when he quoted Shakespeare or talked about how they were lovers like Bonnie and Clyde.
She didn’t know who Bonnie and Clyde were, but the woman did; and she’d laugh and strike poses that made the man – Darryl – moan or lick his lips.
She listened to them when she could, to every word. If she lived – and she didn’t believe she would, but if – she would remember everything. She would tell the police everything. And she would hope with every cell in her pain-filled body, the police killed them in the bloodiest, most brutal, most horrible way possible.
She wanted to kill them with her own hands.
She wanted her mother. She wanted Kari. Sometimes when she floated away, she wanted Luke, and his shy smile.
