Unspeakable (30 page)
Elaina could almost hear her heart pounding. Gun enthusiasts and law enforcement buffs. “You said ammo cans. What about an airtight plastic box secured with a
bungee cord?” She remembered Troy opening it in the swamp.
“That sounds right,” he said. “Why, did you find one?”
“At one of the crime scenes.”
“You’re serious? You weren’t putting me on about the murder investigation?”
“No.” She gazed at the nonsensical words displayed on the screen. “And I’m beginning to think maybe the killer is hunting these treasure hunters.” She glanced at him. He was wide-eyed now, and she realized she’d said too much. “It’s just a theory. I don’t really know for sure what the connection is.”
“Whoa. That’s just…” He turned to look at his computer. “Wow.”
“Is there any way to know who goes out and visits these sites?”
“Well, these boxes don’t contain logbooks, like normal caches. Like I said, the sport is pretty underground. You wouldn’t really want your name written down in a box with some of this contraband, would you? But online is more open because it’s sort of a gated community. Lots of people jump on to log their finds.”
“Show me what you mean.”
He clicked into a new screen and pointed to it. “Most people post comments after they visit a place. ‘Major bushwhacking involved,’ for example. Or ‘Excellent hide.’ There’s a lot of dialogue back and forth, but no spoilers. Ruining someone’s hunt is considered a major party foul.”
“I see.” Elaina skimmed the list of comments. The
participants had screen names like Moun10 Bkr and HunnyBooT and MadDawger. “Would you be able to track someone, maybe by their screen name?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “But it would take some doing. This sport has hordes of followers, especially around here.”
“Why around here?”
“San Marcos is a college town. So is Austin. Anywhere a lot of young people converge, you’re likely to find a big community.”
Lito Island definitely qualified as a place young people converged—it was the spring break capital of the state.
Ben’s phone rang, and he snatched it up. She saw him check his watch and could tell by his conversation that she’d made him late for something. He needed to get back to work, and Elaina needed to get back to the island.
But not before she completed her mission.
“I can see you’re swamped here,” she said after he ended the call. “You’ve been gone two weeks, and I’m sure your workload didn’t miraculously disappear while you were on vacation.”
“Sure didn’t.” He leaned back in his chair and watched her. His tone was glib, but his face looked far more serious than it had when she’d first walked in here.
“I need your help,” she said.
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
“Because you’re smart.” It was an obvious attempt at flattery, but she was inching toward desperation. “I’m going to give you a list of the seven victims, along with the locations where they were last seen and where their remains were found. I need you to find out if there’s a concrete link to this treasure hunting.”
“
Seven
victims?”
“Yes,” she said. “And those are just the ones we know about. He’s working so fast now, we can hardly keep up with him.”
Ben watched her for a moment. “Do you know their user names?”
She scoffed at him. “I don’t even know for sure that they were involved in this game, or whatever you call it. But this connection keeps cropping up, and it needs to be explored. Can you do it?”
He smiled slightly, but the amusement was long gone now. “Exploring in cyberspace is my specialty.”
Elaina gazed down at the files fanned out across the bed. Two boxes down, one to go, and still she and Ric Santos had found no piece of evidence to link anyone in the missing hiker cases to any of the suspects on her list. Files blanketed the bed, the sofa, the coffee table. Elaina had volunteered her suite as a workroom—what else was she going to do with all the space?—and she and Ric had put in a good four hours together this evening. But they’d had no luck, and finally the detective had excused himself to his first-floor hotel room to catch up on e-mails from his office. Elaina, meanwhile, had plodded on.
She rubbed her tired eyes now and stared down at a typewritten statement taken by the San Marcos police officer who’d interviewed a roommate of one of the missing women. She was in the Wilderness Club, the roommate had reported. She liked to hike and rappel and mountain bike. She frequently went for all-day treks alone on the nature trails near San Marcos.
Wise idea? No. A straight-A student with a major in
biology should have known better. But Elaina had studied enough murder cases to know one of the problems with young people was that they considered themselves invincible. Those terrible things on the news—those things happened to other people, not to them. Not to privileged young women just months shy of graduation with their whole lives ahead of them. They had always been, and always would be, the lucky ones.
Until suddenly they weren’t.
The officer’s report contained no mention of any sort of high-tech treasure hunting. No mention of any computer games. No mention of any special equipment—such as a GPS—that the hiker might have habitually carried along. Had she been searching for a cache the day that she’d gone missing? Or had she simply been out enjoying the scenery? Maybe someone had spotted her on a trail, closed in for the kill, and then planted her remains somewhere, possibly near a cache site. And yet her remains had never been found.
Elaina hadn’t figured out what was going on, but she felt certain the killer viewed it as a game. Seven women dead, maybe more. A quiet rage fermented inside her as she thought about someone getting off on that.
A knock at the door, and she glanced at the clock. Just after ten. It might be Ric, back for more file sifting. Or maybe it was Troy.
Elaina climbed off the bed and walked over to check the peephole.
Brenda.
She undid the latch and pulled open the door.
“Here we go!” Brenda beamed at her, and Elaina
glanced down at the tray laden with chocolate-dipped strawberries, a bowl of whipped cream, and a bottle of champagne.
“I think you have the wrong room,” Elaina said.
Undeterred, Brenda eased past her and ferried the tray over to the coffee table, then glanced around for an empty surface. She spied a place on the minibar and set down her load.
“It’s our champagne turn-down service,” she announced proudly. “It’s part of the honeymoon package. I tried to bring it the other night, but you were out, so…” Her voice trailed off, but not before Elaina detected a hint of I-know-your-little-secret in her tone. She realized there was only one good reason the island gossip broker would personally deliver this tray to her door instead of asking someone else to do it.
“This isn’t my honeymoon,” Elaina said.
“Well, I know
that,
but you may as well enjoy.” She smiled brightly. “It’s included in your room rate.”
“But I thought—” And then she remembered Mia’s words today, and her mouth clamped shut.
“Would you like the turn-down service, too?” Brenda nodded at the bed, which was awash in papers.
“That won’t be necessary.” Elaina forced a smile as she ushered her toward the door, snatching her phone off the table as she went. “Thanks for stopping by.”
When she was gone, Elaina jabbed Troy’s number into the phone.
“Champagne and strawberries? Is this your idea of a joke?”
“Come again?”
“I’m in the honeymoon suite,” she said. “And strangely, the staff seems to think I’m paying the
honeymoon
rate here.”
“You’re telling me someone brought champagne to your room.”
“Yes!”
“And you’re complaining?”
“Yes! I didn’t give you permission to pay for my hotel room.
Or
my lab tests. Just what are you trying to prove here?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“I don’t need your money, Troy. And what am I going to do with all this champagne and strawberries and whipped cream?”
“I can think of plenty of things you could—”
“I’m putting this room on
my
credit card. And please don’t pick up any more bills behind my back.” The princess phone jingled, and Elaina eyed it hotly. Now what? Were they sending up a masseuse? She clicked off with Troy and grabbed up the clunky receiver. “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me, Brenda. I just got down to the lobby and noticed your car in the parking lot. You left your lights on.”
“It’s someone else’s.” Elaina had pulled in before six o’clock, and she hadn’t been using headlights.
“Gray Ford Taurus? Row closest to the building?”
Elaina huffed out a breath. “I’ll be right down.”
She slammed down the phone, slipped her feet into the nearest pair of sandals, and headed down to the parking lot, where she found her dinged-up Ford sitting in the front row of spaces, locked tight as a drum.
With the headlights on. Maybe she’d turned them on when she’d swung by the Brownsville office and used the parking garage.
“Going someplace?”
She glanced up to see Troy crossing the lot toward her. She opened the car, switched off the lights, and headed back to the inn. “To bed.”
“Want company?”
She shot him a glare as he held open the door for her.
“Just thought I’d ask.” He smiled. “How goes the investigation?”
Elaina ignored Brenda’s interested gaze as Troy stepped into the elevator with her.
“I spent the day at the Delphi Center, talking to some friends of yours. Mia and Alex? Your name came up. I’m sorry you weren’t there.”
He winced. “I’m not.”
The elevator doors parted, and Elaina tried to mask her annoyance as he escorted her down the hallway. She opened her hotel room with a key card and walked into the suite.
Troy stood just inside the door, staring at the paperwork that blanketed nearly every surface. “Looks like you’ve been busy.”
“Ric and I spent tonight culling through files.”
“Who’s Ric?”
“Homicide detective down from San Marcos.” Elaina dropped her keys back in her purse and turned to face Troy. “Mia mentioned him, remember? Looks like his cold cases are linked to the murders down here.”
“What’s the connection?”
“Ketamine,” she said. “And something else I just
learned about today at the Delphi Center. It’s this game—”
“Extreme caching.”
“You know about it?”
“Talked to Jamie today, and she filled me in. I stopped by to update you.”
“You interviewed our witness?”
“You got a problem with that?” Troy propped his shoulder against the wall.
“As a matter of fact, yes. She gave a formal statement just this morning about finding Valerie Monroe’s body. She’s part of this investigation.”
“Good reason to talk to her,” he said.
“You’re walking a fine line here, Troy. Researching a book is one thing. But this is an
active
case. We don’t need outside interference—”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
She stared at him. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow. Day after today. ’Bout eight hours from now.”
“I’ve got a task force meeting.” She gestured to the floor. “Then I need to finish going through these case files with Ric.”
“Let him go through his own case files.” He pushed off the wall. “I’ve got a lead for you.”
“What is it?”
“Came from Jamie,” he said. “You might say it’s from the underground.”
“I’m on duty. I can’t just shirk my responsibilities to go off on some treasure hunt with you.”
“You really think the break you need is going to come from these old papers?”
“It could,” she said. “There might be a name. Maybe a common witness, a common suspect—”
“Then let Ric find it. What time’s your meeting?”
“Eight.”
“I’ll pick you up at nine-fifteen.” He reached for the doorknob. “Dress for the heat.”
Elaina awoke to the bleat of her new phone. She squinted at the clock. Nothing good ever came of a phone call at 4:42
A.M.
She dragged her cell off the nightstand. “McCord.”
“It’s Loomis. Meet me at the marina in ten minutes. We’ve got another missing girl.”
Nine minutes later, Elaina slid into a parking space between an LIPD cruiser and a Taurus nearly identical to her own. She scraped her hair into a quick ponytail and joined the huddle of men beside the bait shop.
“That was at oh three hundred,” Loomis was telling the group.
Elaina scanned the faces and recognized about half of the task force.
“The apartment was unlocked,” Loomis continued. “She entered and found the subject’s purse and cell phone sitting on a kitchen counter. No sign of the subject. That’s when she called the police.”
Cinco met Elaina’s gaze across the huddle. He was dressed just as she was in khaki tactical pants and ATAC boots, with a sidearm secured to his belt.
“
About fifty minutes later,” Loomis went on, “a patrol officer doing a routine drive-by noticed the white Kia Spectra parked here at the marina with the driver’s-side door open. Upon investigation, he discovered a pair of women’s sandals and a red Speedo bathing suit folded on the front passenger seat.”
