Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [7]
But it was Lydia who had put them on the map as the firm that could solve the unsolvable. Her New York Times best-seller about the Cheerleader Murders, a case she had solved while consulting with them, had catapulted Mark, Hanley and Striker into the national spotlight.
Jeffrey, Jacob, and Christian had flown out to a suburb of New Orleans to investigate the disappearance of four high-school girls. Later dubbed “the Cheerleader Murders” by the local media, these girls, all blond with blue or green eyes, had been on the same pep squad. They were among the prettiest, most popular girls in school, by all accounts bright, with good grades and good manners, from happy homes. Looking at their faces in photos, Jeff could easily see what features were attractive to the killer, or so he thought. They were nearly identical in demeanor, with the same bobbed silky hair, wide smiles, unblemished skin. They could have been sisters.
After four weeks, the girls were presumed dead. Jeffrey and his partners, called in by the local police, were working under the assumption that whoever was doing the abducting was a man connected with the school: a gym teacher, bus driver, janitor. They had several suspects under surveillance. They were leaning pretty heavily on a mentally retarded janitor who had a history of violent behavior during periods in his life when he neglected to take his medication.
But nothing felt right. The pieces weren’t falling together. So, as was often his move when he hit a dead end, he called Lydia in for a fresh perspective. Her gift for intuiting elements of a case that eluded him had been an aid to him many times before. Jeffrey, a confirmed “just the facts” man, had learned respect for Lydia’s intuitions and their value in an investigation where the facts led nowhere.
Lydia was displeased when she arrived. “Well, ‘You can take the man out of the Bureau …’ right, Jeff? This is a typical FBI witch hunt,” she complained. “I have a feeling you guys couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
She was referring to their treatment of the suspects. During the investigations, long-buried secrets had been surfacing like bodies dredged from a river. The gym teacher’s wife had accused him, during a vicious custody battle, of sexually molesting his daughter. A bus driver had revealed that he was a recovering crack addict. A female gym teacher, who was big and burly like a man, was discovered to have had a sex-change operation. They were shaking up that quiet suburb and actually not getting anywhere.
Lydia began speaking to the girls’ classmates. The picture they painted was not the idyllic one presented by parents and teachers. A tight clique, popular and beautiful enough to be the envy of every other girl in the school, the girls were nonetheless secretly feared and hated by most of their friends and classmates. Viciously mean and brutal, they were predators, choosing the homeliest and most unpopular students to taunt and humiliate.
Their most recent victim was a sixteen-year-old by the name of Wanda Jane Felix. A notably overweight, unusually tall, bespectacled girl with poor personal hygiene and a severe case of acne, Wanda had few friends and was painfully shy. By all accounts, she was a kind and exceptionally smart girl. But having moved to the area only at the beginning of the school year, she must have been lonely. In short, she was an easy mark. The four girls had befriended