Aim to Kill (5 page)

“Thanks again, Rick,” Greg said as they walked out.

It was the middle of the lunch hour and the building was quiet. Olivia closed her office door and collapsed into her chair, burying her face in her arms.

How could she live with herself? Missy’s killer had walked free for thirty-four years because Olivia had helped convict the wrong man. Now, she’d found evidence linking twenty-nine murders—twenty-nine!—and she could do nothing about it.

Missy’s killer was in Seattle. She was as certain of that as she was of the sun rising tomorrow. And he would kill again.

What could she do to stop him? She wasn’t a field agent, at least not anymore. She was a scientist. She needed more information. She needed to talk to the Seattle detective in charge and find out if there was a DNA sample. Expedite the analysis. Figure out how and when the killer steals the trucks so that they could focus on auto thefts and perhaps catch him that way.

She couldn’t do anything more from her desk three thousand miles away from the crime scene.

“Olivia, are you going to be okay?”

Greg stood in the doorway. She was definitely not okay, but she couldn’t tell him that.

“I’ll be fine.”

Vacation.

An idea crept into her brain. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the only thing she could think of that might work.

But she needed Greg’s help. “Greg, I want to go to Seattle.”

“What?”

She put up her hand, palm out. “Hear me out, please?”

He sat in the chair across from her desk and crossed his arms in silence, his face unreadable.

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “You agree that the information I pulled together is solid, right?”

He shrugged. “It’s promising.”

“Greg, please.”

“It’s good circumstantial evidence, but without opening up those cases we can’t get the information we need.”

“Right. I understand that. And without that information, we can’t open the cases.”

“Catch-22.”

“But if I go to Seattle, with my experience and my access and my reports, I can help focus the investigation. I know what they’re doing—all the right things to track a standard killer—but by the time they see the connection, he’s going to be gone. They need to see the big picture. I can give them that edge.”

“Rick said to stay out of it.”

“I know, but—”

“Olivia.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Unofficially. I’ll take a week’s vacation. Go to Seattle and offer my help—unofficially,” she repeated, “and we’ll go from there.”

“They’ll never go for it. Most local cops would rather drink acid than call in the Feds. They’ll laugh you right out of the police station.”

“Don’t underestimate my ability to persuade them.”

Greg frowned and readjusted his glasses. “No, when you set your mind on something, you usually win.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“I know.”

“Well?”

He sighed, and she knew she’d won him over, at least a bit. “What do you want me to do?”

“Be my boss.”

“Your boss?”

“Call ahead to Seattle and tell them I’m coming.”

“I don’t understand—oh, no.” He stood and started pacing. “No, I won’t let you put your job on the line chasing a theory. You’re not an agent anymore. You gave it up nine years ago to work here. I’m not an agent, either. I can’t just assign you to a case. No.”

“This is important, Greg. I may not be an agent, but I know how to do the job and more important, I know evidence. I know this case better than anyone else.”

She came from behind her desk, rested her hand on Greg’s arm, imploring him with her eyes. “Please, Greg. I’ll be careful. But I have to do anything I can to stop this killer. Please.”

Greg stared at her hand. She’d surprised herself: she didn’t like touching people. It had been a sore point in their marriage. She’d often jumped when Greg reached for her.

She loved him, in many ways. He was smart, very smart. Attractive, with light brown hair peppered with gray and intelligent blue eyes. Physically fit, even though he was nearly ten years her senior. They shared a love of science, a faith in facts. They were workaholics, both relishing problem solving and long days in the office. Their mutual love for science had kept their marriage intact for a time.

But Greg wanted more from her than she could give.

Why had she even married him in the first place? She often wondered. He was safe. He never pried, never questioned her, never challenged her quirky ways.

But she hated giving up her private space. Didn’t like sharing a house with someone. Sex was fine, but she couldn’t give herself over completely to him. Not just her body, but her mind. Her dreams.

Her nightmares.

When he’d said he wanted children, she wanted out. How could she bring another human being into such a violent world? How could she ever hope to protect her child from evil?

She would never take the risk. Never give birth to a beautiful child who could all too easily die a painful, brutal death.

She dropped her hand and turned away. She’d thought she convinced Greg to help, but maybe she really was on her own.

“All right,” he whispered. “Exactly what do you want me to do?”

Her heart rate raced. He
would
help her. “Call the Seattle chief of police and tell them you have someone familiar with the case willing to come out unofficially with information that might help them catch a killer,” she said quickly before he could change his mind. “They might hem and haw, but they’ll take the help—they have PR problems, too. If it ever got out that the FBI offered assistance and they didn’t take it, they’d get blamed for the next murder.”

Greg didn’t hide the surprise on his face. “That’s quite—Machiavellian,” he said.

“I’m willing to do whatever it takes to stop this predator.”

Greg took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Sighing, he put his frames back on and said, “I’ll do it. But don’t make me regret it.”

CHAPTER

5

Zack Travis slammed the phone receiver down on his desk so hard the mouthpiece broke. He stared at the chunk of plastic and blinked. Why did he let Vince Kirby get to him?

He knew why, but didn’t like to think about it.

He looked up and saw a couple of the guys in the bullpen staring at him.

“Kirby,” he said, and several heads bobbed in understanding. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief that he didn’t have to explain further. Yeah, they all hated the reporter who portrayed their department as incompetent and overpaid (now, there was a real joke). But Zack’s reasons were more personal than the newspaper’s animosity toward the Seattle P.D.

Damn Kirby. Just talking to him brought back conflicting memories. Anger and deep sadness. Because every time he talked to Kirby, he thought of his dead sister. Having him reporting this case was going to poke at old wounds, but Zack was determined not to let Kirby get under his skin any more than he already had.

“What’s up?” Boyd asked, jerking Zack from his thoughts.

Zack picked the broken plastic off his crowded blotter and tossed it into the trash. “Kirby’s running with the damn serial killer angle.”

“Oh.” Boyd frowned and looked down at the pen he twirled between his fingers.

“What?”

“Maybe he’s right,” Boyd said.

“Hell, I
know
he’s right, but the last thing we need is every
friggin
’ mother picketing the station, or a copycat pervert snatching little girls off the street. One twisted killer is enough.”

Two girls, abducted, raped, and stabbed to death. One was nine, the other eleven. Both had blonde hair. Both were playing with friends and wandered only a short distance away. He wished he could picture them alive, playing, laughing. Instead, he could only picture them under the coroner’s knife.

The first, Jenny Benedict, had been in a park with neighborhood friends. She went to get water from the fountain and two girls saw her willingly walk off with “some guy.”

When Zack learned the father was allowed only supervised visitation with his daughter because of a bitter and prolonged custody battle, he wanted the man to be guilty. He tried everything to get him to confess. But in the end, Paul Benedict wasn’t a murderer. He was a father beyond grief, as destroyed by the news of his daughter’s murder as any innocent man would be. More so, perhaps.

I should have been there. Protecting her.
Benedict’s words haunted Zack. Too close to the way Zack felt about his sister Amy.

I should have been there.

But what could he have done? Amy hadn’t been a little kid, and she sure as hell hadn’t wanted anything to do with her brother, the cop.

The second girl, Michelle Davidson, had been riding her bike when she raced ahead of her friends, trying to beat them home. Her bike was found in the yard of her next-door neighbor. Michelle was found dead three days later.

That was early yesterday morning, thirty-six hours ago. Now the press was all over him. They didn’t care that the parents were grieving or that he’d slept no more than four hours a night since the first victim was murdered three weeks ago, or that he spent two hours yesterday afternoon watching the autopsy of someone far too young to die.

“Did you run the killer’s M.O. through the computer?” Zack asked Boyd. The single best thing about the young rookie was his skill with all things electronic, in particular, computers. It would have taken Zack endless hours to plug in the information with his hunt-and-peck-and-erase system, and then he’d probably have to redo it because of mistakes. But Boyd was of the next generation. He was a whiz with the damn thing and took over that end of their work.

Boyd nodded. “I printed out the report. There are several unsolved cases. Seven years ago in Austin,
Texas
, four blonde girls were abducted in a six-month period. No suspects, no witnesses. The bodies were displayed in the same manner.”

“Fully clothed, underwear missing, hair cut,” Zack mumbled.

“Ten years ago in Nashville four girls were killed who matched the M.O. An eyewitness gave a description, but it didn’t lead anywhere.”

“Do you have it?”

“Nashville is digging it up and said they’d fax it by the end of the day. But there wasn’t enough information for a composite.”

“At least it’s something.” Like hell it was. Zack glanced at his watch. It was already five o’clock here; there’s no way Nashville would be getting them anything tonight. “What about the tattoo?”

Jenny Benedict’s abductor had some sort of tattoo on his upper left arm. The two girls who watched her leave couldn’t tell what it was, but a tattoo was better than nothing.

“The Nashville witness also mentioned a tattoo, but no description of it was in the file. I asked them to check on it.”

“Two cases?”

“You said go back ten years. That’s what I found.”

Zack’s instincts screamed that this guy had left a lot more than eight dead girls in his wake before hitting Seattle. He was too damn slick; he had to have had practice. And since Zack suspected that he’d been at this for a long time, the killer might have left something more of himself at the beginning of his crime spree.

Serial killers worked hard to perfect their murders. They preyed on humans for their own sick pleasure. Though they often looked normal, acted normal—even charming, like Ted Bundy, or attractive, like Paul Bernardo—beneath the surface they felt no remorse, no empathy for their fellow human beings. They were cunning, and constantly striving to commit the perfect crime.

Right now, Zack didn’t have much to work with. The trace evidence they’d collected at the two crime scenes was still being analyzed. Their best bet at this point was carpet fibers collected from the victim’s clothing. Unfortunately, the samples were from two different vehicles, which didn’t make sense to Zack. One was a late-model Ford Expedition, the other a late-model Dodge Ram. Two very popular trucks that could belong to one of thousands of men in Seattle alone. This morning they’d run registration reports for both types of vehicles. Now, they were manually comparing the lists to see if any address had both truck types registered. Zack didn’t expect the results until tomorrow. He’d been frustrated that with all the technology they had, and the ability to run instantaneous registration reports for the two vehicles, running a comparative match was impossible because the “program didn’t work that way,” he was told. What was the point of technology if it couldn’t do what he needed?

This morning, the coroner had sent a DNA sample to the state lab. Even though Doug Cohn had asked the state to rush the analysis, it could still take weeks, maybe months. Once complete, he’d enter the information into the national DNA registry, CODIS, and see if there were any hits. Unfortunately, with tight budgets across the country, law enforcement primarily entered DNA information only in active cases. Ten years ago it wasn’t a common practice, and twenty years ago—forget it. All the cold cases had to be entered manually, and unless there was funding for it, the work was done haphazardly if at all.