Once Gone

“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.