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“Yeah…same for you if you get a yay or nay on the hand measurements.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Sullivan said.
With the ghost of that smile still on his face, he walked back into the interrogation room. Rachel, feeling a familiar stirring of urgency, hurried back to eh front of the building. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, she felt that she was rushing against the clock. Because one way or another, tomorrow was her final treatment and her flight for home left tomorrow at one in the afternoon.
Sure, she wanted this killer caught as soon as possible—assuming that it wasn’t truly Stanley Cooper—but she also wanted to close it before she left. It wasn’t anything about making sure her name was tagged to a closed case on the other side of the country, but simply needing to know all loose ends were closed before she got on that plane tomorrow.
So, with that imagined clock ticking away in her head, Rachel hurried out to her car and once again found herself heading back to the lake.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Sophia Ross was beginning to really hate this new schedule she’d committed herself to. For the past three months, she’d woken up at 3:30 so that she could be at work by five, one of the first in the labs. Usually, she was out by 1:00, and she’d then go home and join two Zoom meetings to go over new research and developments. She hadn’t been getting much sleep as of late, but work so going very well so she supposed it was worth it. Also knowing that she and her boyfriend would be taking an Alaskan cruise in two months was a huge bonus as well.
Currently, it was 2:12, and she was running rather late. She’d already let her collaborators know that she wasn’t going to make the 2:30 meeting. She hated to miss it; there was such a feeling of progress in regards to an approach she’d been assisting with for about four months now—an approach they hoped to be able to test in lab environments within just another few months.
Her thoughts shifted from the Zoom meeting to Derik, her boyfriend. They were supposed to do dinner and a movie tonight, but she was tired and wasn’t sure she had it in her. Even if this new schedule did make her more productive, it was leaving her absolutely exhausted by four in the afternoon. She was going to have to see what she could do to switch things up when she and her boyfriend got back from the cruise.
Currently, she was walking through the breezeway between the back of a little research center situated at the back of the learning labs at a cancer research clinic a mile and a half away from Seattle General. She worked three days a week, spending the other two analyzing research from home for several different North American research centers. She and Derik lived together and he, too, worked from home as a software engineer. It was a cozy little life they'd garnered for themselves, and she was starting to wonder if Derik might propose on their cruise. While they were living rather blissfully as it was (aside from being tired all the damned time), having that commitment from him would seal the deal.
As she came out of the breezeway, she reached for her cellphone but then rolled her eyes at herself. Somehow, she never got used to not having her phone on her. On the days she worked at the learning labs, she always left her personal phone in her car. If she expected recently graduated college students to give her their undivided attention and keep their phones stowed away, she knew she needed to do the same. So to make it easier, her personal phone stayed in her car—though she did have a secondary one the school paid for tucked away in a drawer in her desk in the event of emergencies.
The breezeway emptied out into a set of stairs that led down to the parking garage. It was still rather crowded, and she thought she might just manage to miss the traffic after all. She knew she was running late, but she figured she still had an hour or so before—
She caught the movement from her right at the last possible moment. Someone lunging at her, a man with a dark face…no, not a dark face, a dark mask. A cliched ski mask, of all things. She paused for a single moment, her heart starting to slam in her chest, but then his hand was on her shoulder. She opened her mouth to scream, but a fist came sailing at her face. It struck her right in the nose and mouth, cutting off her scream for help.
Sparks of darkness erupted in her vision, and she then felt the man's other hand close around the back of her neck. She understood what he was doing at once, but the realization didn't properly have time to sink in. He shoved her head hard into the roof of the nearest car, and the world went hazy with pain and a sickening thud.
She wobbled backward, the sark sparks evolving into a curtain. And the last thing Sophia Ross saw before he blacked out completely was a smile among the scant opening in the mask. It was perhaps the worst thing she could see before the darkness claimed her.
***
She'd been late. She'd been almost an hour late coming out of the building and into the breezeway, and it had pissed him off. It had made him nervous. And in that hour, as he stewed and waited in his own car, his need to kill her grew. It grew into some poisonous, rotten thing, and he'd ended up changing his plan.
He'd brought a knife—the same knife he'd intended to use on Emma Willis before she fell out of the window. He'd planned to just jab it into Sophia's heart a few times and leave her bleeding in the parking garage. But that was when he'd thought things would be the same as every other day he'd followed her to this building, to the learning center. With so much uncertainty mingled with the still-growing desire to kill her, he'd shifted. he wanted to watch her suffer…to watch her squirm the way she was making him squirm.
He wanted to hear her beg. He wanted to hear her explain to him why she found it perfectly acceptable to take stem cells from human embryos. He wanted to watch her suddenly change her opinion when her life hung in the balance.
So he'd knocked her out, and now, with her body limp in the back seat of his car, he could only hope he'd not be pulled over. So he kept to the speed limit and avoided all busy intersections. And as he closed in on his home, the smile he'd felt on his face while he'd slammed her head against the car started to come back.
He was already coming up with ways to make her hurt…to make her scream.
Just a week ago, this had all been simply about proving a point and getting an important topic in the headlines again. But now something had changed inside of him and he was going to see just how far he was willing to go as he took Sophia Ross home and further prove his point.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
With no one home, Staley Cooper's residence was eerily quiet. It had the feel of a house that had been abandoned for years despite all the evidence to the contrary. It simply felt stale. Rachel felt like a true intruder as she made her way across the house and sat down at Cooper’s workspace.
She wasted no time and instantly used the first password Cooper had given her to unlock the laptop. She found the home screen practically empty, with just a few random icons littering it. She opened up the browser and logged into his personal email account. It almost felt too easy, and it was yet again a further inclination that it wasn't likely Cooper was the man they were looking for.
When she opened up his inbox, she saw just how organized Cooper was. It took some searching, but she soon found that he had folders for each of the people he’d interviewed for his paper. There were twenty-three in all. With just some random clicking and searching, she ascertained that some of the messages went as far back as two years, while others had come in as recently as three weeks ago. The folders appeared to be in alphabetical order.
She started looking at the dialogues from the very top of his saved folders. The first folder consisted of three emails from a specialist in stem cell research out of London. The conversation consisted of Cooper asking the specialist for numbers pertaining to research conducted three years prior. He got a response two days later with a few attachments. The next folder was a bit more interesting. It took her a few mails into an exchange that consisted of a dozen to understand that this person was a former recipient of stem cells. She had only glowing things to say and seemed to get defensive when Cooper suggested there could be downsides. The patient did admit that she'd suffered from serious hemorrhages and her doctors had issues trying to raise her blood platelet count afterwards. The exchange ended in a few short exchanges, and even in reading them, Rachel could sense the tension.
As she made her way through the third folder—a lengthy exchange from a doctor out of Chicago—she understood that this process could go on for quite a while. Instead of scanning each folder, she read the name of each folder to see if she recognized any names. After all, she had heard a collection of names over the past few days; if she could link them to Cooper’s research and paper, that might go a long way to finding some answers.
She read through all of them, beginning to wonder if she’d made a mistake. Maybe Cooper was their guy. Maybe she was trying too hard, looking for shadows that weren’t there while the killer was already in an interrogation room.
But then she saw one name out of the group that she recognized. It was second to last on the alphabetized list.
