What Burns Within (30 page)

Craig held his ID up, and the woman pulled the door open.

He stepped inside the town house and followed her as she led him down the hall to a cozy living room.

“Can I get you some coffee, tea?”

“No, thank you. I’d like to speak to Michelle, whenever she’s ready.”

The woman looked up from the kitchen, visible on the other side of the counter that bordered the living area. “I’m Michelle.”

Craig felt his eyes pinch slightly as the woman turned, replacing the jug of milk inside the fridge, seemingly unaffected by his failure to identify her as the latest rape victim.

He’d seen a bit of everything from these women. Anger, emptiness, desperation…For a woman who’d been raped last night, she was really holding it together.

“You sure?” she asked again, pointing at her mug as she sat down across from him.

He shook his head as she crossed her legs, her hands folded on her lap. “Where do we begin?” she asked.

“You’re Michelle Bohner, and you phoned the station this morning to report that you’d been raped.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Well, I’d just come out of the shower when he grabbed me.”

“Did you see him?”

She shook her head. “No. I just felt his hands around my arms.” She took a sip of her drink. “He pushed me down the hall into my bedroom.”

“I know this might not be easy, but can you tell me what happened then?”

“He tied me up and raped me.”

Craig took as long as possible to draw a big question mark on his note pad before looking up. “Can you tell me how he tied you up?”

“He took the cord off my bathrobe and tied my arms to the headboard.”

“Together or separated?”

“Together,” she said, holding her wrists together and lifting them over her head. “Like this.”

Craig made another note. “Did he gag your mouth or cover your eyes?”

“He…” She looked away for a moment before uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “He covered my face with his hand and told me to shut my eyes or he’d kill me. I just did what I was told.”

“Okay, Ms. Bohner—”

“Mrs.”

“Sorry. You live here with your husband?”

“And ten-year-old daughter, Jolene.”

“Where was she when this happened?”

“She and her dad are away, camping. They won’t be back until the end of next week.”

Craig glanced at the bookshelf, a family photo on display. “What does your husband do?”

“Semi-retired. He used to be a mechanic, fixing fire trucks and stuff like that. Still goes in occasionally on call.”

“I see. So, what happened next?”

She shrugged. “He left.”

“How did you get free?”

“I worked my hands out.”

“Did you take another shower, wash the sheets on your bed?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Uh, is that a problem?”

“Michelle, we really need to bring in a team and have them look for evidence.”

“Isn’t my statement enough?”

“I’m afraid it’s exceptionally difficult to bring charges in rape cases and even harder to get a conviction. If we could find some DNA or fingerprints, we’d have irrefutable evidence to present in court that would help us put this guy away.”

She stared at him for a moment and then blinked. “I…I’m not sure.”

“Mrs. Bohner, I’m not going to lie to you. Without having rape-kit results and data from evidence recovery here at the scene, it will be virtually impossible for us to get a conviction.”

She stared at him and blinked again, the color starting to drain out of her face.

Ashlyn sat down on the couch, propped her foot up on a pillow and reached for the first folder. She wasn’t one to copy files and bring them home en masse. Typically, if a case had taken over her life, she’d be at the station anyway.

But something had niggled at her over the past few days, and she’d packed a bag complete with most of the general information on the abductions and arsons. When Tain had taken her back to the station to change she’d remembered to bring the copied files with her, and she silently gave thanks to what ever sixth sense had kicked in to motivate her to collect the data in the first place.

She opened the file on Julie Darrens and reached for a calendar and a pad of notepaper, her eyes already skimming the particulars noted inside, writing down
June 14
across the top of the blank page and underlining it, flipping the calendar back two months and noting as well that Julie Darrens had gone missing on a Thursday.

After she’d gone through the reports, Ashlyn set the file for Lindsay Eckert down, tapping her pen against the note pad resting on her leg, her fingers tugging their way through her hair.

She pulled the calendar out from under one of the other files and started counting. Not weeks. Nothing triggering there. Days between abductions? No. The intervals were random, scattered. She had a fleeting glimpse, a memory of doing the same thing, months before, when the missing teenagers’ cases had been gathering dust on the shelves, right around the same time that the drug case was limping along on life support.

She looked at the dates between when the two girls were found, but that didn’t help. They only had two.

Ashlyn pulled out her arson summary, making a new list, circling July eighteen. Why wasn’t there an abduction for July eighteen? Was it possible there was a body they’d missed? She thought about all the open, missing-kids files that had been pulled because of this, but she couldn’t recall one being brought to her attention that had seemed to fit the pattern.

Although she hadn’t had as much time as Tain to review all the files….

She counted the days between Julie’s abduction and when they’d found her body. Exactly forty full days had passed. Then she counted the days between when Isabella was taken and when her body had been carried from the burning building.

Forty full days.

She rested her cheek against her hand. It was something Craig had taught her, about looking at every angle on a case, even if it doesn’t make sense to you.

Forty days.

She got up without too much trouble, noticing it was even easier now to cross the room to her iMac. She turned it on, limping to the kitchen for a refill.

It had to mean something. Random abduction dates, scattered locations the girls went missing from. Only two things connected that she could see. Fire and forty days between when they went missing and when they were found.

Ashlyn sat down in front of her computer and clicked on the Safari icon, then typed in the keywords she wanted information about.

Sims nodded. “One and the same.”

“You’re positive?” Tain asked.

“I even phoned the manager of the recreation center and got a description. Thick black glasses, bleach-blond hair, blue eyes, bit of a spindly freak. The manager’s words, not mine,” Sims added quickly.

“So his purpose in being at the recreation center isn’t to use the weights.”

Sims stared at him for a moment, and Tain was convinced the man couldn’t have looked more surprised if Tain had grown a second head. “Guess not. He used to work for a photographer’s studio, taking school pictures and group photos and stuff. Six months ago he started working at Cargo Clearance.”

“Interesting.”

Sims didn’t pause as long this time. “It gets better. He took school photos at Holy Cross Elementary and Sacred Heart Elementary last fall. I double checked. Wilson took the school photos of them that have been printed in all the papers.”

“Please tell me he connects to Burnaby Fine Arts.”

Sims’s smile faded. “Sorry. At least, not that I’ve found so far, but I’ll check prior years. Could be she was in another group or something.”

“Do we know why he changed jobs?”

“No.” Sims passed Tain a slip of paper. “The manager wasn’t very keen to talk about it. I figured some face-to-face persuasion might be in order.”

Tain folded the paper and put it in his pocket, then snapped his fingers. “She was a Girl Guide.” Tain turned and walked away.

Ashlyn unlatched the chain lock and opened the door.

“How’s the leg?” Adrian asked, handing her a bundle of roses. She stepped back, setting the bouquet on the kitchen counter.

“Almost good as new.” She led the way into her living room and sat down.

“But you stayed home anyway? That’s not exactly the impression I had of you.”

Ashlyn felt her nose wrinkle, and her neck itched. “I was ordered to take a day off.”

“Ah,” he said, surveying the room, glancing out the patio doors. “So this is home?”

“For now. How did you find out where I lived?”

He sat down in a chair opposite from her, close to her computer. “I have my sources. Seriously, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Shouldn’t I be the one sending you an apology instead of you bringing me flowers?”

Adrian offered a sheepish grin. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“You were pretty choked.”

“And I had all night to think about what I might do if I was working on a case like this.” The smile faded. “I remember Carl bringing out that body, that one girl. It must get to you.”

She guessed he could understand, on some level, but this wasn’t something she was going to talk to him about. “Can I get you something? Tea, juice? My coffee maker is the third appliance this week that’s gone on strike, and I haven’t had a chance to deal with any of them.”

“I’ll give you the number for Bob. He’s the repairman we use at the hall.”

“That would be great.”

His eyes surveyed the room, the few scattered, framed photographs she’d managed to get up since moving in, the lingering boxes waiting to be unpacked, stacked against the far wall, the plants gasping for water. Adrian’s gaze lingered on the computer. “What on earth are you looking at?”

“Something about forty-day calendar cycles used in ancient times. Apparently some are advocating for the return to a forty-day month.”

“Like the people who pushed for a change in daylight savings time?”

“It’s not quite the same. I suppose there’s a group out there voicing an opinion for just about everything.”

He scratched his head. “Shame more people don’t lead productive lives instead of whining about when to move clocks forward and back. What are you reading about this for, anyway?”

She bit her lip and looked slightly to the left of him. “Just something that came up.”