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Child to remain with family while investigations continue.
CHAPTER
9
THEY DRIVE IN the rusty Land Rover in silence. Every now and again, Jess glances Griffin’s way, willing him to speak, but she doesn’t dare open her mouth. After about a quarter of an hour of driving, he meets her eye.
“Stop staring at me,” he growls.
“Tell me why you believe me. The detective at the hospital said you think something’s connected.”
He looks her way sharply. “You heard that?”
“Tell me.”
Griffin hesitates, then takes a turn off the road. He pulls down a darkened track, stops the car, and switches off the engine. Jess looks out the window, and in the silence she suddenly realizes how isolated she is, how stupid she’s been. Griffin leans toward her and her hand flies to the door handle to escape, but he reaches down into the footwell and pulls up a black rucksack. She’s breathing heavily, and he notices what she was about to do. He gives her a disparaging look.
“For fuck’s sake,” he mutters. He pauses. “You squeamish?”
Jess glances at the bag. What could he have in there? A dead animal? Chopped off fingers? “I don’t know,” she says nervously.
He scowls at her for a moment, then opens the top of the rucksack. “This all started about two years ago,” he says. He pulls a scrappy cardboard file out of the bag, resting it on his lap and opening it. With his other hand he turns on the overhead light.
“I was called out to a crime scene of a woman, strangled and raped, obviously been tied up and tortured before she was killed.” He shifts through a pile of what Jess recognizes as crime scene photographs, and hands her one. She gasps. In the harsh light, she can see pale skin, dark bruises. A face, eyes closed. “She was twenty-one, a waitress at a local café. Her name was Lisa Kershaw.”
Jess looks again. The body is naked, ligature marks clear on her neck, wrists, and ankles.
“So you are a detective?” she asks.
“I was,” he says gruffly. He quickly moves on. “Then two more bodies were found.” He hands her the photos. Two more women. Naked. Dead. Jess cringes at the images. “Daria Capshaw and Sarah Jackman. Strangled, tortured, and raped.” He talks with the manner of a man getting something off his chest: words that haven’t been spoken for a long time, released in a flurry. He turns and looks at her. “So that’s three. We have a serial killer.”
“I didn’t hear about any of this on the news,” Jess says, stunned. “How come?”
“My chief was worried about the publicity encouraging the killer. So we kept it quiet. But then more major crimes came in. Two rapes—home invasions, lengthy and brutal. At first we didn’t think there was a connection.”
“And there was?”
Griffin nods. “The victims had heard someone on their property before the attacks. Footprints were found in the flower beds, a star-shaped pattern traced back to an old-style Adidas running shoe, also found near the body of Sarah Jackman. But it was odd. Killers don’t usually devolve. They start with rape, then move on to murder as they get confident. They don’t go backward. So we wondered whether there had been more murders we hadn’t noticed.”
Jess sits forward in her seat. It seems dreamlike, Griffin’s recounting of death and violence. But how could these possibly be linked to her?
He turns to the next photograph and Griffin points, his face grim. “Two more, same MO as the first—raped and strangled.” Grainy, dark photos, bodies hard to make out. “Happened a few years before. But in two different counties, so nobody joined the dots. Unsolved.”
“And then what?”
“We linked up, started a task force. But we found nothing. And it went quiet. Until these two.”
He points again. “Emily Johnson and Isabelle Richards,” he says. “Both sex workers. Hit over the head with what the pathologist believed to be a hammer, then stabbed to death.”
“It’s different,” she says.
“It is. But that’s a lot of violent unsolved murders for England. Especially when you consider most homicides are committed by someone known to the victim.” He looks at her, thinking. She’s started to shiver in the cold car, and wraps her arms around herself, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Then a year ago, there’s another home invasion,” he continues slowly. “A couple. They’re threatened with a handgun, flashlight shined in their faces. They’re separated, tied up. The woman, raped repeatedly. For hours.” Griffin’s voice is low; he’s talking slowly, his words measured. “The husband is beaten severely and knocked out with a log from the woodpile. When he wakes up, his wife is dead. Bludgeoned to death in the same way, her hands bound with cord from the curtains.”
Griffin goes silent for a second, and Jess can see his jaw muscles working, obviously trying hard to get a grip on himself. She can tell these unsolved murders have taken a toll on him. “If we’d caught the guy before …” Griffin stops again, and Jess can only imagine the guilt he must have felt, knowing someone else had died on his watch.
Griffin takes a deep breath, then looks over at her. “But then the trail goes cold.”
“Nothing since then?” Jess asks in disbelief. “Nothing for a year?”
