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“HowdidIknowthat you would be here?” Theo asked as he took a seat at the conference room table.
He’d changed clothes since leaving the office around five hours ago. He sported a mustard yellow sweater that had a thick collar with two wooden buttons near the neck. Not a lot of men could pull off such a color, but Theo managed to do so in spades.
“Your amazing skills as an investigator, I’m sure,” Brook quipped as she reached for her coffee mug. She’d brewed a fresh pot about twenty minutes ago. “Why aren’t you out painting the town?”
Brook kept to herself that she knew he was seeing Detective Hadley Soerig.
“My parents are driving in tomorrow morning from New York. We’re going to do a bit of Christmas shopping together. I forgot to grab my laptop before I left the office earlier, so I figured I’d stop by now instead of having to make a separate trip in the morning.” Theo studied the massive murder board that she’d put together. He didn’t say a word about how redundant it was when the same information resided on the monitor, which she had turned on so that she could look through her notes. “Getting anywhere?”
“Not really.” Brook had kicked off her high heels hours ago. She crossed her ankles as she rested her feet in the chair next to her. “I’m going over the missing person reports. I think we can safely determine that the women went missing after hospital charity events. Bit was able to gather information regarding the fundraisers, but Detective Soerig promised to send over a list of attendees by Monday.”
“Dr. Cranston had an alibi for the night that Natalie Thorne went missing, and it doesn’t appear that he was at the charity event, either.”
Theo had followed the light blue strings that led to Dr. Cranston’s photograph that Brook had pinned to the wall. Several blue threads also led to Dr. Kolsby, but he’d been out of town when Laura Keery had gone missing.
“Dr. Kolsby garnered our attention due to his so-called confession to Millie Gwinn,” Brook pointed out after taking a sip of coffee. “Dr. Cranston led you directly to the burial site, but he received a call from someone, asking him to meet in private. Blackmail? We won’t know until Detective Raines calls Cranston back in for questioning.”
“I spoke to Raines earlier today.” Theo must have taken off his winter coat before walking into the conference room. She’d heard someone activate the biometric scanner, so she hadn’t been startled by his presence. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, though. “Raines was hoping to wait for potential DNA evidence from either the skeletal remains or what remained of their clothing.”
“That could take weeks,” Brook said with a grimace. She rested the back of her head against the chair. “Given what Sylvie overheard at the café earlier today, Raines certainly has enough to bring Cranston back in for questioning. Sylvie was finally able to upload everything about Andrea Firth’s disappearance.”
“I saw that Sylvie stopped into the police station to speak directly to the officer in charge of Firth’s case. Apparently, Andrea Firth was caught stealing drugs from the hospital’s pharmacy. She showed up at the event to talk to her supervisor, hoping to salvage her job, I guess. The officer had no idea that Andrea had any kind of friendship with Devin or Nolan.”
“I’m sure their fathers did what they could to avoid that from happening, but it still doesn’t explain why these missing person cases weren’t connected by law enforcement. They all worked for the hospital.”
Brook was well aware that a lot of crimes slipped through the cracks, but the hospital should have been able to connect the dots. It shouldn’t have mattered that each of the women had worked in different departments. Millie made mention that over a thousand employees worked at the hospital, but someone still should have found it odd that four staff members had gone missing in the span of three years without giving notice or providing a forwarding address. Do they really believe employees with professional degrees just leave and never use the hospital as a reference?
“Let’s start at the top,” Theo said as if it wasn’t closing in on midnight on a Friday night. He even reached for the carafe that she’d set down in front of her. Kate always made sure that there were a few clean mugs positioned on a small tray in the middle of the table. “Our first victim, based purely on time of death, was Margo Urie. What do we know about her?”
“Brunette, twenty-five years old, and she worked in admissions.” Brook didn’t bother to lift her head. She just tilted her face toward the murder board that she’d worked on all day while keeping her coffee cup steady. “We know from the examination of her skeletal remains that she was stabbed on her right side. From the missing person report, she went to a fundraiser for the new pediatric ward a couple of days before she disappeared.”
“From the hospital?”
“According to the report, she left her shift at the hospital and didn’t make it home.”
“Car?”
“Never found.”
Theo frowned as he reached across the table for the remote. Brook was well-acquainted with that knowing expression, so she lowered her feet to the ground and slowly rotated her chair so that she was facing the 4k monitor.
“Brook, all four vehicles of the victims were never discovered.” Theo’s attention averted from the screen to her. “What are the chances of that? Hiding a car has got to be even more difficult than hiding a body. VINs are hard to erase.”
Brook continued to sip her coffee as they let the details of such an anomaly settle over them. Different scenarios played through her mind, and she kept coming back to the one that made the most sense.
“The unsub could be setting up meetings with the victims.”
“What does he do with the vehicles afterward, though?” Theo asked as he set down the remote. He’d accessed each and every missing person report that Sylvie had uploaded into the file. He left all four tabs open as they stared at the lines that he’d highlighted. “Lake?”
“Some of these women were abducted and killed in the dead of winter,” Brook countered, though she wasn’t ruling out Theo’s theory. “First thing Monday, start looking for large bodies of water. It can’t hurt to check them out while we’re waiting for the police to figure out which gear this investigation should be in.”
“Do you think they’re getting pushback from the brass?”
“I think they want to make sure that they have all their ducks in a row before they get their hands dirty,” Brook clarified as she pulled her tablet closer. She was mindful of spilling her coffee as she quickly typed in some instructions for Bit. “I’ll have Bit comb through the victims’ cell phone locations, DMs, and emails for any sign that they were meeting someone. Each of them disappeared either on their way home from work or vice versa.”
“Are you suggesting that the fundraising events don’t come into play?”
“Quite the opposite, Theo,” Brook said as she finished typing her note. She shifted her focus back onto the screen where the important sections remained highlighted in the reports. “It’s all connected. We just need to figure out how and why.”
