Born to Die - Lisa Jackson [117]
“This is Shelly Bonaventure,” she said.
“That actress who died recently. I know she looks a little like Jocelyn, and you. Suicide, wasn’t it?”
“That’s the official version.”
“You think she’s part of this? Seriously?” he asked, obviously skeptical. “Other than her looks, what kind of connection is there to the others?”
“She was born in Helena, Montana, as were Jocelyn Wallis and myself.” Kacey pointed to the picture she’d printed off of Elle’s Facebook page. “This is Elle Alexander—”
“The woman in the one-car accident last night.”
“Yes, and this woman is still alive and works at a local gym.” She slid the brochure from Fit Forever. “A trainer named Gloria Sanders-O’Malley.”
“She from Helena, too?” He picked up the brochure, squinting as he studied her features.
“Don’t know,” Kacey admitted. “But I’m going to talk to her or check one of her social network sites. Lots of people list their hometown or where they’ve lived on Facebook or the like. If she’s not there, I’ll just talk to her.”
“And say what?”
“I haven’t completely figured that out yet,” Kacey admitted.
“Huh. Yeah. How do you tell someone you think she’s next on the list of some psychopath, especially when there’s no real link established yet?”
“I’m working on that, along with finding out if Elle gave me false information or really didn’t know where she was born.”
“I don’t know about this,” Trace said after a long, silent moment.
“You came here,” she reminded him. “With pictures of Jocelyn and Leanna. Don’t you think it’s damned odd that so many women who look so much alike, who are in their early thirties, are dying?”
“Yes . . . I do . . . but what are you really saying? You think a serial killer is searching for a type? And that the victims aren’t random targets? That he stalks them? That maybe he knew these people while they were in Helena?”
“That’s probably unlikely,” she admitted, as frustrated as ever. “Shelly left Helena when she was really young, and if Elle was there, she didn’t know it. Her birth certificate’s from Idaho.”
He slid the picture away from the others that were clustered together. “So she’s different.”
“In that respect. But she’s in the region. I don’t know.” Again she looked at the picture of the woman to whom Trace had once been married. “What about Leanna?”
He made a face. “She said she’d once lived around Helena, but she didn’t remember any of it, either. I think her parents split, but the truth is, I don’t know much about her. She liked it that way. Didn’t want to talk about her childhood.”
“You don’t know where she went to school? Or her friends?”
He shifted in the chair. “I met her in a bar, it went down hot and heavy, and she ended up pregnant. We got married a few weeks later. Then she lost the baby and split.”
“Leaving Eli?”
“That’s the kind of woman she is. Not that I want it any other way. If she tried to take Eli from me, I’d fight her till the end. The marriage was one of those six-week wonders.” Another swig from his bottle. Kacey watched his Adam’s apple move, then turned her attention to the images.
Another woman near her age, who looked like her, who’d lived around Montana’s state capital, possibly born there, and who was now missing.
“Here’s something else,” she added. “I just found out that the man who I thought was my father wasn’t. My mother had an affair with a doctor in Helena, and even when my dad found out, he kept raising me as his own.”
“So?”
“These women don’t just look alike. Some of us are dead ringers for the other. For a while the staff at St. Bart’s thought I was the woman in ICU when Jocelyn was brought in.”
“You think you’re related to these victims, these women? That this one guy fathered all of you, and now he’s . . . what? Knocking you off?” He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.
“I know it sounds crazy, but there’s a connection there. I’m not making it up. Come into the den. . . .” She scraped her chair back and led him to her computer, where she pulled up the information she’d gotten from Riza and printed it out.
He read