Once Gone

Chapter 5

The man kept a short but discreet distance from the woman, glancing her way only fleetingly. He placed a few token items into his handbasket so that he’d look like just another shopper. He congratulated himself on how inconspicuous he was able to make himself. No one would guess his true power.

But then again, he’d never been the kind of man who attracted much attention. As a child, he’d felt practically invisible. Now, at long last, he was able to turn his own innocuousness to his advantage.

Just a few moments ago, he had stood right next to her, scarcely more than two feet away. Rapt in choosing her shampoo, she hadn’t noticed him at all.

He knew plenty about her, though. He knew her name was Cindy; that her husband owned an art gallery; that she worked in a free medical clinic. Today was one of her days off. Right now she was on her cell phone talking with somebody – her sister, it sounded like. She was laughing at something the person was saying to her. He burned red with anger, wondering if she were laughing at him, just as all the girls used to. His fury increased.

Cindy wore shorts, a tank top, and expensive-looking running shoes. He’d watched her from his car, jogging, and waited until she’d finished her run and came into the grocery store. He knew her routine for a non-working day like this. She’d take the items home and put them away, take a shower, then drive to meet her husband for lunch.

Her good figure owed a lot to physical exercise. She was no more than thirty years old, but the skin around her thighs wasn’t tight anymore. She’d probably lost a lot of weight at one time or another, perhaps pretty recently. She was undoubtedly proud of that.

Suddenly, the woman headed toward the nearest cash register. The man was taken by surprise. She had finished shopping earlier than usual. He rushed to get in line behind her, almost pushing another customer aside to do so. He silently berated himself for that.

As the cashier rang up the woman’s items, he inched up and stood extremely close to her – close enough to smell her body, now sweaty and pungent after her vigorous jog. It was a smell that he expected to become much, much better acquainted with very soon. But the smell would then be mixed with yet another odor – one that fascinated him because of its strangeness and mystery.

The smell of pain and terror.

For a moment, the lurker felt exhilarated, even pleasantly light-headed, with eager anticipation.

After paying for her groceries, she pushed her cart out through the automatic glass doors and out into the parking lot.

He felt no hurry now about paying for his own handful of items. He didn’t need to follow her home. He’d been there already – had even been inside her house. He had even handled her clothing. He’d take up his vigil again when she got off work.

It won’t be long now, he thought. Not long at all.

After Cindy MacKinnon got into her car, she sat there for a moment, feeling shaken and not knowing why. She remembered the weird feeling she’d just had back in the supermarket. It was an uncanny, irrational feeling of being watched. But it was more than that. It took her a few moments to put her finger on it.

Finally, she realized it was a feeling that someone had meant her harm.

She shivered deeply. During the last few days, that feeling had been coming and going. She chided herself, sure that it was completely groundless.

She shook her head, ridding herself of any vestiges of that feeling. As she started her car, she forced herself to think of something else, and she smiled at her cell phone conversation with her sister, Becky. Later this afternoon, Cindy would help her throw a big birthday party her three-year-old daughter, complete with cake and balloons.

It would be a beautiful day, she thought.

Chapter 6

Riley sat in the SUV beside Bill as he shifted gears, pushing the Bureau’s four-wheel-drive vehicle higher into the hills, and she wiped her palms on her pants legs. She didn’t know what to make of the sweatiness, and she didn’t know what to make of being here. After six weeks off the job, she felt out of touch with what her body was telling her. Being back felt surreal.

Riley was disturbed by the awkward tension. She and Bill had barely spoken during their hour-plus drive. Their old camaraderie, their playfulness, their uncanny rapport – none of that was there now. Riley felt pretty sure she knew why Bill was being so aloof. It wasn’t out of rudeness – it was out of worry. He, too, seemed to have doubts about whether she should be back on the job.

They drove toward Mosby State Park, where Bill had told her he had seen the most recent murder victim. As they went, Riley took in the geography all around her and slowly, her old sense of professionalism kicked in. She knew she had to snap out of it.

Find that son of a bitch and kill him for me.

Marie’s words haunted her, drove her on, made her choice simple.

But nothing seemed that simple now. For one thing, she couldn’t help worrying about April. Sending her to stay at her father’s house wasn’t ideal for anybody involved. But today was Saturday and Riley didn’t want to wait until Monday to see the crime scene.

The deep silence began to add to her anxiety, and she desperately felt the need to talk. Wracking her brain for something to say, finally, she said:

“So are you going to tell me what’s going on between you and Maggie?”

Bill turned to her, a surprised look on his face, and she couldn’t tell if it was due to her breaking the silence, or her blunt question. Whichever it was, she immediately regretted it. Her bluntness, many people told her, could be off-putting. She never meant to be blunt – she just had no time to waste.

Bill exhaled.

“She thinks I’m having an affair.”

Riley felt a jolt of surprise.

“What?”

“With my job,” Bill said, laughing a bit sourly. “She thinks I’m having an affair with my job. She thinks I love all this more than I love her. I keep telling her she’s being silly. Anyway, I can’t exactly end it – not my job, anyway.”

Riley shook her head.

“Sounds just like Ryan. He used to get jealous as hell when we were still together.”

She stopped short of telling Bill the whole truth. Her ex-husband hadn’t been jealous of Riley’s job. He’d been jealous of Bill. She’d often wondered if Ryan might have had some reason. Despite today’s awkwardness, she felt awfully good just being close to Bill. Was that feeling solely professional?

“I hope this isn’t a wasted trip,” Bill said. “The crime scene’s been all cleaned up, you know.”

“I know. I just want to see the place for myself. Pictures and reports don’t cut it for me.”

Riley was starting to feel a bit woozy now. She was pretty sure it was from the altitude, as they climbed still higher. Anticipation had something to do with it, too. Her palms were still sweating.

“How much farther?” she asked, as she watched the woods get thicker, the terrain more remote.

“Not far.”

A couple of minutes later, Bill turned off the paved road onto a pair of rough tire tracks. The vehicle bounced along jarringly, then came to a stop about a quarter of a mile into the dense woods.

He switched off the ignition, then turned toward Riley and looked at her with concern.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asked.

She knew exactly what was worrying him. He was afraid she’d flash back to her traumatic captivity. Never mind that this was a different case altogether, and a different killer.

She nodded.

“I’m sure,” she said, not at all convinced that she was telling the truth.

She got out of the car and followed Bill off the road onto a brushy, narrow path through the woods. She heard the gurgling of a nearby stream. As the vegetation grew thicker, she had to push her way past low-hanging branches, and sticky little burrs started bunching up on her pants legs. She was annoyed at the thought of having to pick them off.

At last she and Bill emerged onto the creek bank. Riley was immediately struck by what a lovely spot it was. The afternoon sunlight poured in through the leaves, mottling the rippling water with kaleidoscopic light. The steady gurgling of the stream was soothing. It was strange to think of this as a gruesome crime scene.

“She was found right here,” Bill said, leading her to a broad, level boulder.

When they got there, Riley stood and looked all around and breathed deeply. Yes, she had been right to come here. She was starting to feel that.

“The pictures?” Riley asked.

She crouched beside Bill on the boulder, and they started leafing through a folder full of photographs taken shortly after Reba Frye’s body had been found. Another folder was stuffed with reports and photos of the murder she and Bill had investigated six months ago – the one that they had failed to solve.

Those pictures brought back vivid memories of the first killing. It transported her right back to that farm country near Daggett. She remembered how Rogers had been staged in a similar manner against a tree.

“A lot like our older case,” Riley observed. “Both women in their thirties, both with little kids. That seems to be part of his MO. He’s got it in for mothers. We need to check with parenting groups, find out if there were any connections between the two women, or between their kids.”

“I’ll get somebody on it,” Bill said. He was taking notes now.

Riley continued poring through the reports and photos, comparing them to the actual scene.

“Same method of strangulation, with a pink ribbon,” she observed. “Another wig, and the same type of artificial rose in front of the body.”

Riley held up two photographs side by side.

“Eyes stitched open, too,” she said. “If I remember right, the technicians found that Rogers’s eyes had been stitched postmortem. Was it the same with Frye?”

“Yeah. I guess he wanted them to watch him even after they were dead.”

Riley felt a sudden tingle up her spine. She’d almost forgotten that feeling. She got it whenever something about a case was just about to click and make sense. She didn’t know whether to feel encouraged or terrified.

“No,” she said. “That’s not it. He didn’t care whether the women saw him.”

“Then why did he do it?”

Riley didn’t reply. Ideas were starting to rush into her brain. She was exhilarated. But she wasn’t yet ready to put any of it into words – not even to herself.

She laid out pairs of photographs on the boulder, pointing out details to Bill.

“They’re not exactly the same,” she said. “The body wasn’t as carefully staged back in Daggett. He’d tried to move that corpse when it was already stiff. My guess is this time he brought her here before rigor mortis set in. Otherwise he couldn’t have posed her so…”

She suppressed the urge to finish the sentence with “nicely.” Then she realized, that was exactly the kind of word she’d have used when she was on the job before her capture and torture. Yes, she was getting back into the spirit of things, and she felt the same old dark obsession growing inside her. Pretty soon there’d be no turning back.

But was that a good thing or a bad thing?

“What’s with Frye’s eyes?” she asked, pointing to a photo. “That blue doesn’t look real.”

“Contacts,” Bill answered.

The tingle in Riley’s spine grew stronger. Eileen Rogers’s corpse hadn’t had contact lenses. It was an important difference.

“And the shine on her skin?” she asked.

“Vaseline,” Bill said.

Another important difference. She felt her ideas snapping into place with breathtaking speed.

“What has forensics found out about the wig?” she asked Bill.

“Nothing yet, except that it was pieced together out of pieces of cheap wigs.”

Riley’s excitement grew. For the last murder, the killer had used a simple, whole wig, not something patched together. Like the rose, it had been so cheap that forensics couldn’t trace it. Riley felt parts of the puzzle coming together – not the whole puzzle, but a big chunk of it.

“What does forensics plan to do about this wig?” she asked.

“The same as last time – run a search of its fibers, try to track it down through hairpiece outlets.”

Startled by the fierce certainty in her own voice, Riley said: “They’re wasting their time.”

Bill looked at her, clearly caught off guard.

“Why?”

She felt a familiar impatience with Bill, one she felt when she always found herself thinking a step or two ahead of him.

“Look at the picture he’s trying to show us. Blue contacts to make the eyes look like they’re not real. Eyelids stitched so the eyes stay wide open. The body propped up, legs splayed out freakishly. Vaseline to make the skin look like plastic. A wig pieced together out of pieces of little wigs – not human wigs, doll’s wigs. He wanted both victims to look like dolls – like naked dolls on display.”

“Jesus,” Bill said, feverishly taking notes. “Why didn’t we see this last time, back in Daggett?”

The answer seemed so obvious to Riley that she stifled an impatient groan.

“He wasn’t good enough at it yet,” she said. “He was still figuring out how to send the message. He’s learning as he goes.”

Bill looked up from his notepad and shook his head admiringly.

“Damn, I’ve missed you.”

As much as she appreciated the compliment, Riley knew that an even bigger realization was on its way. And she knew from years of experience that there was no forcing it. She simply had to relax and let it come to her unbidden. She crouched on the boulder silently, waiting for it happen. As she waited, she picked idly at the burrs on her pants legs.

What a damned nuisance, she thought.

Suddenly her eyes fell on the stone surface under her feet. Other little burrs, some of them whole, others broken into fragments, were lying amid the burrs she was plucking off now.

“Bill,” she said, her voice quavering with excitement, “were these little burrs here when you found the body?”

Bill shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Her hands shaking and sweating more than ever, she grabbed a bunch of pictures and rifled through them until she found a front view of the corpse. There, between her splayed legs right around the rose, was a group of little smudges. Those were the burrs – the very burrs she had just found. But nobody had thought they were important. Nobody had bothered to take a sharper, closer picture of them. And nobody had even bothered to sweep them away when the crime scene was cleaned up.

Riley closed her eyes, bringing her imagination fully into play. She felt lightheaded, even dizzy. It was a sensation that she knew all too well – a feeling of falling into an abyss, into a terrible black void, into the killer’s evil mind. She was stepping into his shoes, into his experience. It was a dangerous and terrifying place to be. But it was where she belonged, at least right now. She embraced it.

She felt the killer’s confidence as he lugged the body down the path to the stream, perfectly sure that he wasn’t going to get caught, in no hurry at all. He might well have been humming or whistling. She felt his patience, his craft and skill, as he posed the corpse on the boulder.

And she could see the grisly tableau through his eyes. She felt his deep satisfaction at a job well done – the same warm feeling of fulfillment that she always felt when she’d solved a case. He had crouched on this rock, pausing for a moment – or for as long as he liked – to admire his own handiwork.

And as he did, he had plucked the burrs off his pants legs. He took his time about it. He didn’t bother to wait until he’d gotten away free and clear. And she could almost hear him saying aloud her own exact words.

“What a damn nuisance.”

Yes, he’d even taken the time to pluck off the burrs.

Riley gasped, and her eyes snapped open. Fingering the burr in her own hand, she noted how sticky it was, and that its prickles were sharp enough to draw blood.

“Gather these burrs,” she ordered. “We might just get a bit of DNA.”

Bill’s eyes widened, and he immediately extracted a ziplock bag and tweezers. As he worked, her mind ran in overdrive, not done yet.

“We’ve been wrong all along,” she said. “This isn’t his second murder. It’s his third.”

Bill stopped and looked up, clearly stunned.

“How do you know?” Bill asked.

Riley’s whole body tightened as she tried to bring her trembling under control.

“He’s gotten too good. His apprenticeship is over. He’s a pro now. And he’s just hitting his stride. He loves his work. No, this is his third time, at least.”

Riley’s throat tightened and she swallowed hard.

“And there won’t be much time now until the next one.”

Chapter 7

Bill found himself in a sea of blue eyes, none of them real. He didn’t usually have nightmares about his cases, and he wasn’t having one now – but it sure felt like one. Here in the middle of the doll store, little blue eyes were simply everywhere, all of them wide open and sparkling and alert.

The dolls’ little ruby-red lips, most of them smiling, were troubling also. So was all the painstakingly combed artificial hair, so stiff and immobile. Taking in all these details, Bill wondered now how he could have possibly missed the killer’s intention – to make his victims look as doll-like as possible. It had taken Riley to make that connection.

Thank God she’s back, he thought.

Still, Bill couldn’t help but worry about her. He had been dazzled by her brilliant work back at Mosby Park. But afterward, when he drove her home, she’d seemed exhausted and demoralized. She’d barely said a word to him during the whole drive. Maybe it had been too much for her.

Even so, Bill wished that Riley was here right now. She’d decided it would be best for them to split up, to cover more ground more quickly. He couldn’t disagree with that. She’d asked him to cover the doll stores in the area, while she would revisit the scene of the crime they’d covered six months ago.

Bill looked around and, feeling in way over his head, wondered what Riley would make of this doll store. It was the most elegant of the ones he’d visited today. Here on the edge of the Capital Beltway, the store probably got a lot of classy shoppers from wealthy Northern Virginia counties.

He walked around and browsed. A little girl doll caught his eye. With its upturned smile and pale skin, it especially reminded him of the latest victim. Although it was fully clothed in a pink dress with lots of lace on the collar, cuffs, and hem, it was also sitting in a disturbingly similar position.

Suddenly, Bill heard a voice to his right.

“I think you’re looking in the wrong section.”

Bill turned and found himself facing a stout little woman with a warm smile. Something about her immediately told him that she was in charge here.

“Why do you say that?” Bill asked.

The woman chuckled.

“Because you don’t have daughters. I can tell a man who doesn’t have a daughter from a mile off. Don’t ask me how, it’s just some kind of instinct, I guess.”

Bill was stunned by her insight, and deeply impressed.

She offered Bill her hand.

“Ruth Behnke,” she said.

Bill shook her hand.

“Bill Jeffreys. I take it you own this store.”

She chuckled again.

“I see you’ve got some kind of instinct, too,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet you. But you do have sons, don’t you? Three of them, I’d guess.”

Bill smiled. Her instincts were pretty sharp, all right. Bill figured that she and Riley would enjoy each other’s company.

“Two,” he replied. “But pretty damn close.”

She chuckled.

“How old?” she asked.

“Eight and ten.”

She looked around the place.

“I don’t know that I’ve got much for them here. Oh, actually, I’ve got a few rather quaint toy soldiers in the next aisle. But that’s not the kind of things boys like anymore, is it? It’s all video games these days. And violent ones at that.”

“I’m afraid so.”

She squinted at him appraisingly.

“You’re not here to buy a doll, are you?” she asked.

Bill smiled and shook his head.

“You’re good,” he replied.

“Are you a cop, maybe?” she asked.

Bill laughed quietly and took out his badge.

“Not quite, but a good guess.”

“Oh, my!” she said, with concern. “What does the FBI want with my little place? Am I on some kind of list?”

“In a way,” Bill said. “But it’s nothing to worry about. Your shop came up on our search of stores in this area that sell antique and collectible dolls.”

In fact, Bill didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. Riley had suggested that he check out a handful of these places, assuming the killer might have frequented them – or at least had visited them on some occasion. What she was expecting, he didn’t know. Was she expecting the killer himself to be there? Or that one of the employees had met the killer?

Doubtful that they had. Even if they had, it was doubtful that they would have recognized him as a killer. Probably all the men that came in here, if any, were creepy.

More likely Riley was trying to get him to gain more insights into the killer’s mind, his way of looking at the world. If so, Bill figured she’d wind up disappointed. He simply did not have the mind that she did, or the talent to easily walk into killers’ minds.

It seemed to him as if she were really fishing. There were dozens of doll stores within the radius they had been searching. Better, he thought, to let forensics just continue to track down the doll makers. Though, thus far, that had turned up nothing.

“I’d ask what kind of case this is,” Ruth said, “but I probably shouldn’t.”

“No,” Bill said, “you probably shouldn’t.”

Not that the case was a secret anymore – not after Senator Newbrough’s people had put out a press release about it. The media was now saturated with the news. As usual, the Bureau was reeling under an assault of erroneous phone tips, and the internet was abuzz with bizarre theories. The whole thing had become a pain.

But why tell the woman about it? She seemed so nice, and her store so wholesome and innocent, that Bill didn’t want to upset her with something so grim and shocking as a serial murderer obsessed with dolls.

Still, there was one thing he wanted to know.

“Tell me something,” Bill said. “How many sales do you make to adults – I mean grown-ups without kids?”

“Oh, those are most of my sales, by far. To collectors.”

Bill was intrigued. He’d never have guessed that.

“Why do you think that is?” he asked.

The woman smiled an odd, distant smile, and spoke in a gentle tone.

“Because people die, Bill Jeffreys.”

Now Bill was truly startled.

“Pardon?” he said.

“As we get older, we lose people. Our friends and loved ones die. We grieve. Dolls stop time for us. They make us forget our grief. They comfort and console us. Look around you. I’ve got dolls that are most of a century old, and some that are almost new. With some of them, at least, you probably can’t tell the difference. They’re ageless.”