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She’d tried to free herself, tugging at the restraints, hoping she’d dislodge the rusty hardware from the walls and break out of there, but it hadn’t happened. Instead, her wrists had pulled against the rope until her skin was burned raw and now throbbed with searing pain.
Every now and then she screamed, hoping someone would hear her, but no one did. Only the howling wind replied with strong gusts and the smell of rain in the air. In the distance, thunder rolled, and the occasional lightning lit up the cabin for a fleeting moment, before allowing darkness to return.
Her teeth clattered and her breath shattered with sobs. Who had brought her there? Why couldn’t she remember? She was still wearing the same clothes as when she’d left the house; she remembered that much, sneaking out dressed in a V-neck T-shirt and some frayed jeans, and a new pair of sneakers she had in her bedroom closet, in a box, unopened. Otherwise, she would’ve had to go to the door to get her shoes and risk getting caught.
She wished she’d been caught instead of being here, even if her mother would’ve grounded her for a year. Sobbing bitterly, she called out for her mother, although she knew she couldn’t answer.
No one was there but her, alone in the dark, chained to the wall in a dilapidated cabin about to fall apart in the storm.
Still standing, she almost dozed off, but woke with a start when her head tilted to the side, leaning on her arm. Darkness was complete, not a single shred of light coming from anywhere. Lightning, now farther away, barely flickered, unable to tear the shroud of blackness that surrounded everything. Gusts of wind still came inside through the crevices between the logs, chilling her blood.
Then the sounds changed. The way the wind fell on her skin was different. A strong gust engulfed her entire body as a squeak made her hair stand on end. The door had opened. She could see the faintest trace of light in the gray clouds masking the moon through its opening. Then the squeak was heard again as the wind died, and with it, that trace of light coming from the moonlit clouds.
The door had been closed again.
She was no longer alone.
Panic rushed through her body in myriad needles poking her skin, urging her to run, to escape. Shrieking, she tugged against her restraints as hard as she could, but nothing happened. The chain didn’t budge, only clinked and grated in a muted protest of rusted iron.
Frozen in place, she listened intently, hoping to hear something, and she did. Someone was breathing next to her, close. Terrifyingly close. She pulled away until she backed herself against the wall, whimpering. That breath was drawing closer and closer, until she could feel it, heated and smelling of cigarettes, searing her skin. A bolt of lightning lit the room enough for her to see a man’s silhouette.
“Please,” she whimpered, “please, no.” She sobbed, unable to control herself, gasping for air.
His hands brushed against her, slowly, taking their time contouring her body, sending icicles through her blood. When he reached the neck seam of her T-shirt, he grabbed it with both hands and ripped it effortlessly.
She screamed, kicking and writhing against the restraints, but only the wind answered her call.
The wind, and his laughter.
THIRTY-ONE
ALANA
Sometimes Kay felt she didn’t belong in Mount Chester anymore. Not professionally, anyway. The town was growing quickly, becoming a distant Silicon Valley suburb, but it still very much worked as a small town.
It seemed the tricks of the trade that had made her successful as a profiler for the FBI didn’t necessarily apply here, in a small town. Victimology, for example. She’d examined closely the backgrounds of the two girls, Jenna and Kendra, looking for places where their lives had intersected. Chances were the unsub had seen them somewhere, and that was a surefire way to identify where that could’ve happened.
But in Mount Chester, the two girls’ lives overlapped almost entirely. They went to the same school, hung out at the same mall, visited the same coffee shop, and went to the same movie theater, a small one nested inside the Winter Lodge. Why? Because Mount Chester only had one of each of those places.
Her tried and tested methodologies were failing to identify the unsub, and Kendra was still missing. She’d been gone almost twenty-four hours. Kay knew well what that meant.
She’d looked at phone records, and examined Kendra’s social media streams, splitting the task with Elliot. This time, nothing of any importance was revealed. Meanwhile, the BOLO was still out on Gavin Sharp, but he seemed less and less likely to have had anything to do with Jenna’s death or Kendra’s disappearance. Did he belong in jail? Absolutely. However, she’d had to withdraw the existing arrest warrant and replace it with another, charges reduced from aggravated sexual assault and murder to a banal statutory rape. A misdemeanor.
He’d probably never be caught. Overworked and understaffed SFPD would always deprioritize the execution of his new warrant in favor of other, more serious ones. Dangerous criminals were a priority, and Gavin Sharp was no longer listed as one. If he’d got away with it for a year, he’d get away with it for good. The statute of limitations would apply.
Earlier that day, she’d spent two hours buried in data while Elliot had interviewed Tim Carter. He’d returned with little useful information; just validation of what they already knew. Jenna had started sleeping around sometime last April, and then the website appeared. Kay had asked her old FBI analyst to lend a hand and track down the money trail leading to that website. Someone must’ve paid to have it up online; that didn’t come for free for a reason.
Frustrated, she turned her attention on victimology again, while Elliot drove them to Alana Keaney’s residence.
What did the two girls have in common, other than everything pertaining to their environment?
Both were brunettes with blonde highlights in their hair. For Jenna, that was the old look she used to have in her college application photo; then that had changed to a more rugged look, an uneven cut without the highlights. Jenna came from a struggling family; her mom was a nurse, her father a veteran on disability. Kendra’s family was well-off, her parents were successful winemaking entrepreneurs. Yet, no ransom call had been received, confirming Kay’s suspicion it was the same unsub.
The K-9 unit had tracked Kendra to the nearby winery guest parking lot, where she must’ve climbed into a car and vanished. There was no camera surveillance covering that area. They had no license plates, and no idea who the unsub could be. Deputies had been interviewing potential witnesses all day: winery customers, delivery people, the postal worker who delivered their mail. No one had seen a thing.
Both girls were unattached, not dating anyone at the time the unsub came into their lives. Both of them had abandoned behaviors—Jenna’s self-imposed isolation, and Kendra’s peaceful routine—to go out with the unsub. That person must’ve been someone they both knew, someone with enough pull, enough appeal to make them leave their homes without talking to anyone about it.
There was no way of knowing who that could’ve been, not when she couldn’t narrow down the suspect list. Everyone knew everyone and met with everyone everywhere; that was the reality of rural communities. However, kidnapping people and holding them hostage was still difficult. The unsub needed space and privacy. A budding sexual predator would be younger, maybe in his early-to-mid-twenties, not the typical mid-twenties to mid-thirties she used in her serial killer profiling based on the highest probability of suspect age. That probability was founded on thousands of cases studied and analyzed. The career span of a serial killer usually encompassed several years of activity, making age analysis somewhat irrelevant in her present case. As for the age they usually started killing, statistics pinpointed that at about twenty-seven.
