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Not me.
I didn’t forget them.
Ashley Moore. Aged twenty-eight. Brown hair, warm brown eyes, killer smile. She was a first-grade teacher. She loved complicated jigsaw puzzles and hosting small dinner parties for friends.
Madison Silvo. Aged twenty-five. Brown hair, green eyes. She’d been in tech. Had just moved into the house she would be raped and murdered in two weeks before. She hadn’t even unpacked her kitchen yet. She didn’t have a big social circle, but she had a tight-knit family who loved her.
I remembered them.
I always would.
Both their before pictures, happy and excited about their lives. And the ones after what that bastard did to them. Sliced them up. Tortured them for hours.
Leaving not a single goddamn bit of evidence to help us nail him.
I’d been counting down the days since Madison’s murder. The twelve months closing in minute by minute.
I guess the clock had run out.
I knew the call would come.
Guys like this, they didn’t look at their two victims, nod their heads, say they’d done a good job, then hang up their rapist and murderer caps.
Some continued the exact pattern until they screwed up and got caught.
Others escalated.
It seemed this guy was particular about his pattern.
Which I guess was good, in that it didn’t mean an increase in victims. But also bad because it meant he was careful and controlled enough not to screw up.
Except, of course, he had.
This woman was alive.
I wondered, as I drove down the familiar streets of Navesink Bank toward the little starter home community where her house was nestled, if she knew how lucky she’d been.
If she didn’t yet, she soon would.
The news was going to go nuts with this.
Then she would learn what she’d so narrowly avoided.
The victim’s house was the center one in a cul de sac, a small white ranch that couldn’t be more than a thousand square feet. The front porch looked like it was all but crumbling, but the front flower beds had been lovingly cared for.
We had to check them for shoe prints.
We didn’t even have that much so far.
“How she doing?” I asked, nodding at the female police officer as I walked up the driveway. It was cracked and needed to be repaved, but weeds weren’t poking out of the spaces.
“Kind of withdrawn into herself,” she told me.
Maggie Judd was one of only two female police officers we had on the force. From what I understood, one was on during the day, one at night, on the off-chance we needed a female officer.
Maggie was tall and lean with her blonde hair pulled back from a Barbie-doll pretty face with ice-blue eyes.
“Not surprised. She didn’t need to go to the hospital?”
