Obsession (3 page)

Where was she? Why had these crazy people taken her and the others? For money? The trembling started again, first in her legs, then in her arms.

Maybe they were planning something really bad. Like in the movies when they tortured their victims or cut them into pieces.

She had to get out of here.

Walk. Just walk.
You’ll figure something out
. Her mother would be upset. Maybe her dad, too. And Dan. Tears burned her eyes as Andrea hugged herself. He had warned her about stuff like this. And she’d listened. She was smart. Always watchful. She never drank too much like some of her friends.

But she hadn’t expected the evil Dan had warned her about to come in the form of a nice lady who clipped coupons. Andrea had seen her plenty of times at the super Wal-Mart nearest her house. She carried one of those ridiculously massive binders with coupons stuffed into the pockets of the plastic pages inside. She had told Andrea about taking the coupons from the newspapers others tossed away. Stupidly, Andrea had suggested she check the recycle bins in neighborhoods like her own.

After that, every week on recycle day Andrea had been giving the woman whatever coupons had been jammed into the Wednesday and Sunday papers. They even laughed about that crazy coupon reality show. A bitter taste welled in her throat. She shouldn’t have trusted a stranger, even one who looked like she could be anyone’s mother. 

A thump overhead made her freeze. Her heart thudded hard. Were they coming back?

Andrea couldn’t breathe…couldn’t think.  The silence screamed in her ears as she listened harder than she had ever listened in her life. Her heart pounded faster and faster, made her chest ache.

Please don’t let them come back!

Last time they had taken a girl. Andrea tried to remember her name. Mason or Macy. She’d been gone for what felt like hours.

Even though Andrea couldn’t see shit, she lifted her gaze to the ceiling. She hadn’t heard any shouting or crying from up there. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt the other girl. Maybe this was a mistake...a joke. Some crazy sorority prank. If some of those crazy bitches had set this up Andrea would beat their effing asses.

Another thwack overhead made her jump. The girls huddled in the corner started to moan and sob. Their misery grew louder and louder with every shuddering breath that filled their lungs. 

“Be quiet!” Andrea whispered. “They’ll hear you!”

But the girls didn’t stop. She put her hands over her ears to block the sounds. She didn’t want to hear them. She didn’t want to be here. This wasn’t supposed to happen to a girl as smart and careful as her.

A door slammed.

The moans and sobs hushed as if a switch had been flipped.

Heavy footfalls echoed in the darkness.

They were coming!

Adrenalin fired through Andrea’s veins, clearing the fog from her brain but doing nothing for her frozen limbs.

Run!
There was nowhere to run.

Hide!
There was nowhere to hide.

Fight!
She was too weak to fight.

Warm pee trickled down her thighs.

Chapter Three

Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, 5:00 p.m.

Dan watched as Jess placed the photos on the case board, then sketched a timeline. Beneath each photo she wrote the relevant information. Name. Address. The names of family and close friends. Then the date, time and location of disappearance.

Exhaustion tugged at his ability to concentrate. The past three days he’d worked night and day and he had nothing to show for it.

He stared at the photos and another wave of regret and urgency washed over him. How could his and two other departments have slogged through every aspect of these girls’ lives and have nothing?

Jess faced the group assembled at the conference table and adjusted her glasses.

When had she started wearing glasses? He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and fought the wave of melancholy. The idea that she was really here still amazed him. Startled him on some level. He’d fully expected her to flat out refuse his request. But she hadn’t done that. She’d dropped everything and come to his rescue.

After that night ten years ago—the memory was permanently seared into his brain—he wouldn’t have blamed her for turning him down.

For nearly two decades he’d kept up with her career. Jessie Harris had climbed the ranks at the Bureau like a fire scaling a mountainside in the driest part of August. According to his liaison at the local Bureau office, she was one of the sharpest profilers on staff at Quantico. She possessed an innate ability to nail an unknown subject’s motive with uncanny accuracy.

He’d stopped asking about her a couple years ago. Hell it was way past time he’d gotten on with his life. Two doomed marriages were two too many. He’d met Annette and decided it was time to move on and start a real family.

Only that hadn’t happened. Annette had gone back to her ex and that was that. He caught himself before he shook his head. This case was far too important for distraction. Escape, he realized. His mind needed the escape. As tempting as it was, that was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

“Gentlemen,” Jess said, drawing his attention back to her. She paused. “And Detective Wells,” she added with a quick nod to the one female member on this task force besides herself. “I’ve provided my preliminary profile for your review. It’s on the table.” She gestured to the neat stack of stapled documents in the center of the conference table.

Each coversheet carried the BPD logo, not the Bureau’s. Made sense. Jess was here in an unofficial capacity. Dan wondered how her husband felt about her rushing to the aid of her former lover. The wedding band she wore was simple, not a piece of jewelry that would draw the eye. Yet, he had spotted that delicate gold band the instant he saw her standing in his waiting room. 

Focus, Dan
. 

The stack was passed around, the final copy of her profile landing in his hands. He flipped over the cover sheet and stopped. Turned another page and then another. Each was the same. “The pages are blank.” What the devil was she doing?

Patterson, Griggs, and the two detectives, like Dan, stared from the unmarked white pages to the woman standing before them.

She waited, hands on hips, until the muttered remarks had ceased. Then she gestured to the packets they held and announced, “This is the profile I developed based on the findings you’ve provided.”

Dan opened his mouth to demand an explanation but she silenced him with an uplifted palm.

“If you,” she sent an accusing look at him, “called me down here to do your job for you, then you’ve vastly overestimated your charm and my patience.”

“What in blazes is the meaning of this?” Griggs demanded.

Roy Griggs had done police work too long to be yanked around by anyone, Quantico’s hotshot profiler included. Dan couldn’t believe Jess would pull a stunt like this without some point she felt genuinely compelled to make. There had to be a point.
And it better be good
.

Jess acknowledged the senior cop, in terms of service, with a nod. “If you’ll give me about two minutes, I’ll gladly tell you.”

Dan relaxed. His lips twitched with the urge to smile. There wasn’t a damned thing humorous about this case. It was her. He’d almost forgotten how she loved to get under the skin of authority—any authority. More than two decades in the northeast hadn’t changed her much. Her manner of dress was more sophisticated but beneath that stylish veneer she was still the same old Jess, he would wager. When the lady had a point to make, she intended for the room to listen. Didn’t matter who was in the room.

“There are two potential explanations for the disappearance of these young women.” She directed everyone’s attention to the photos on the board. “One is,” she crossed her arms over her chest and stared straight at her attentive, however annoyed, audience, “that they left of their own accord and they don’t want to be found. They’re certainly all of the legal age to make that decision and the only cause to consider vulnerability in these disappearances is the statements of the families who say the actions are out of character. Frankly, their statements are of little consequence, in my opinion. After all, what parent is going to say otherwise?”

“Not possible,” Chief Patterson objected. “We’ve been through that scenario already and it’s off the table, Agent Harris.” He sent a livid glare in Dan’s direction. “I don’t know why you’re behind the curve here, but I know the Parsons family nearly as well as I know my own.”

“Macy and Callie are honor students,” Griggs added his two cents. “They’re good, smart girls. They wouldn’t do this to themselves or to their families.”

“I suppose you also know those families nearly as well as you know your own,” Jess suggested. “Like Chief Patterson knows the Parsons.”

The tension thickened, forcing the air out of the room. Any inkling of humor he’d felt at her tactics evaporated. Sweat lined Dan’s brow. Jess needed to get to the point. If her intention was to piss off everyone at the table first, she was well on her way.

“Damn straight I do,” Griggs mouthed off. 

“Burnett?” Patterson demanded. “What kind of dog-and-pony show is this?”

“Jess, maybe—”

Her hand went up to silence Dan a second time. “All right then,” she said calmly. “Let’s explore the other possibility.”

Dan gritted his teeth to keep his mouth shut. Her pointed censure had signed him up for that same PO’d club his colleagues had already joined. She was the only one still calm and wherever she was going with this presentation remained frustratingly unclear. These people—
he
—needed help. Not a block of instruction in identifying intent or motive.

“It appears we all agree that there is only one feasible explanation. These girls,” she indicated the photos again, “were taken against their will by someone who means them harm since there has been no ransom demand. We could be looking at a human trafficking ring, a sexual predator, or just a plain old psychopath.”

A quiet, heavy with agony, coagulated in the air, making a decent breath impossible.

“If that is, indeed, the case,” Jess continued, “you,” she pointed to Griggs, “you,” then Patterson, “and you,” her attention rested finally on Dan, “are missing relevant details in your investigations.”

Disgruntled glances were exchanged but no one argued. She was right. It was difficult to argue with that. Guilt added another layer to the burden already straddling Dan’s shoulders and knotting in his gut.

“Every single one of you has been in this game long enough to understand the one fact that makes all the difference in this case and all others.” She paused, made eye contact with each member of the task force. “When a person commits an act against another person, violent or otherwise, that act is always driven by motive. Always. Whether the act was impulse or calculated, a motive exists. There are no exceptions. Whoever took these girls, whether one unknown subject or four, had a motive.”

Jess moved to the table and leaned down to flatten her palms on the shiny, manufactured wood surface. “We have to find that motive. Otherwise we won’t be looking for four young women.” She pointed to the photos on the board. “We’ll be looking for four bodies.”

That heavy silence continued to reign for one, two, three more beats.

“Did you come all this way just to tell us what we don’t know,
Special
Agent Harris?” Griggs spoke up, breaking the spell she had cast. “Or are we going to talk about what we do know?”

Jess straightened, eyed him with blatant skepticism. “I read the interviews with family and friends. I studied the photos of the homes and the places where the girls were last seen. Pardon my frankness, Sheriff Griggs, but what you do know is irrelevant to this case, as far as I can see. It’s all that you don’t know that makes the difference.”

Face beet red, cheeks puffed with outrage, Griggs visibly braced for retaliation but Jess beat him to the punch. “These girls didn’t vanish without someone somewhere seeing or hearing something. It may be the smallest detail. So small that it seems insignificant to the person who knows it. So commonplace, it goes unnoticed. But it’s there and we need to find it. If all four of these girls were taken by the same unsub, then there’s a connection we’ve missed. This one seemingly insignificant thing they have in common could be the key we need for a break in this case.”

“Agent Harris,” Detective Wells said, “we haven’t found even one person these girls have in common. Not a friend or minister or employer. Nothing.” Wells shook her head. “None of the associates or intimates has a record or history of trouble or violence. If we’re looking for a serial perpetrator, wouldn’t there be some of those details you’re talking about in his background? Some suggestion of unacceptable or questionable behavior?”

Wells made detective last year and she had quickly shown she was one of the best Birmingham PD employed. Despite twenty years in law enforcement, Dan found himself on the edge of his seat in anticipation of Jess’s answer to the detective’s provocative query.

“Study your serial offenders, detective. Whether they’re killers or rapists or plain old peeping toms, the experts often disagree as to whether they were born that way or evolved as a result of environmental factors. But the one thing those same experts all agree on is that these offenders have a single trait in common. Not one was a serial anything until he committed that first act. As far as evil goes,” she shrugged one shoulder, “I’ve spent a dozen years studying the subject and there’s one thing
I
know for sure.” Her expression grew distant, breakable somehow.  She blinked and seemed to push whatever had distracted her aside. “If you want to know what evil looks like, look in the mirror.”

She leaned down, flattened her hands on the table once more and went face-to-face with Wells. “Any one of us is capable of evil, detective. We all have a line. It’s not crossing it that separates us from the Ed Geins and Charles Mansons of the world.”