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Amber saw Simon nod. "The files gave us a lot, but going there will help us get a sense of what happened and how the killer could have made his approach."
"All right. I'll take a car out to it. Follow me, and I'll show you the scene and talk you through what happened when we get there, but I'll need to get back here to coordinate things afterward."
Amber looked over to Simon, who nodded, obviously liking the fact that the police chief was prepared to help them like that. The two of them headed back out to their car, following behind Chief Williams as he led the way through the city's streets.
Again, Amber had the sense of a peaceful, leafy town, presumably the kind of place where nothing like the murders normally happened. It was large enough that it would have some crime, but a serial killer was something else entirely. She saw coffee shops and bars, pedestrians out on the street wrapped up against the cool air. It might have been a pleasant scene except for what had happened in the town.
Amber could see the river ahead, glinting in the sun while the water rolled on peacefully, oblivious to the violence that had taken place so recently and to the fact that there was a killer out there somewhere, maybe already plotting his next murder.
Amber could see the bridge now. It was a concrete and steel suspension bridge, its posts reaching up into the sky like fingers, while its length stretched out over the water, its metal painted a deep green, police tape marking a small stretch of it as the crime scene. Amber, Simon, and the police chief had to park at one end of the bridge before walking out along the pedestrian walkway to the spot where Mia Wilson had died.
Amber could hear the cars around her; it was busy in the day. Amber guessed that it wouldn’t have been this busy at night when the murder had taken place.
"We couldn't keep the bridge closed for long," Chief Williams said as the traffic buzzed by. "Just long enough for the coroner's people to collect the body. Thankfully, it was late at night, so there wasn't as much traffic to divert."
Amber tried to imagine what the bridge would have been like at the time of the murder. She looked out along its length, trying to imagine Mia making her way along it in the dark with no one else around. It would have been lonely and terrifying. Had she been running from someone? Had she already known by that point that someone was stalking after her, ready to kill her?
"When your people got here, was there anything that seemed odd or out of place?" Amber asked Chief Williams. “Anything that didn’t seem to fit?”
"They didn't report anything. We didn't get much of a forensic sweep here at this first scene, either."
"Your people thought it was suicide?" Simon said. He kept his tone neutral, but it was obvious that the police chief heard an accusation there in the words.
"It seemed like the most logical explanation," he said. "And it's not like our teams found anything at the second scene either to point towards a killer. Look, I have to get back to the department. Take a look here as long as you need to. There's a location for the second murder in the case files."
He left, hurrying back to his car and heading off. Amber looked over to Simon.
"Looks as though we're on our own with this one," she said.
Simon nodded. "He probably has a lot to coordinate back at the department. Besides, not every local police department is going to want to ride along on the case for the whole thing."
Amber knew that he was thinking of Detective Angelique again. Even Amber found herself wondering what the detective would make of all of this.
Together, they approached the taped-off area, careful not to disturb anything that might be evidence, although given the heavy traffic over the bridge, she suspected that any evidence that had been there would be gone by now. Even so, Amber leaned over the railings there, looking for anything that the killer might have left behind, any fibers that the cops might have missed, or any marks to show signs of where a struggle might have taken place. Amber could see the approach in either direction, and that caught her attention a little.
“How did the killer manage to sneak up on her?” Amber asked.
“Maybe he hid behind the girders,” Simon suggested. “In the dark, it would be hard to see.”
“Maybe,” Amber said, but she wasn’t entirely convinced.
"There's nothing here," Simon said. He was looking up rather than down. "There are cameras near the end of the bridge, which is presumably why we have the footage of a figure in a hoodie, but I doubt they'll give us our killer. If they were going to, the police would already have a picture of his face up for everyone to see."
"We should still check," Amber said. It was important that they didn’t cut any corners, not when any small clue might be the one that gave them the killer’s identity.
Simon nodded. "We should also check in with the coroner to see if there's anything their people noticed that can add to the information in the files."
That made sense. First, though, Amber wanted to check out the site of the second murder. Maybe there, they would find the evidence they needed to finally start making some headway in this case.
CHAPTER SIX
"This bridge isn't the same as the other," Amber said, looking around at the bridge on which the second murder had taken place.
Instead of a long suspension bridge, this was a stone-built span with multiple arches, each one carved with small decorative figurines.
The traffic wasn't as busy here, either, with just a few cars rolling across. Amber guessed that in the dead of night, it would have been absolutely quiet. It could have been terrifying for Kelly Wasner, making the journey across it if she had any idea that someone was following her.
Did she, though? Did she know that someone was stalking her, ready to kill her, or had the first she'd known about it being when a noose had gone around her neck, pulling tight?
