Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [103]
“It’s not over, Kimberly.”
“Of course it is. We didn’t find the second girl. Now all we can do is wait.”
“No. Not this time.” Her father took a deep breath, then gently pulled away. He looked at her in the dark, breathless night, and his face was as sad as she’d ever seen it. “Kimberly,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, but this time, there weren’t just two girls. This time, the man took four.”
Rainie was huffing badly by the time she made it down to the crime scene. Lanterns marked the trail, so the footing wasn’t bad, but geez Louise, it was a ways down the mountain. And for the record, while it was now after midnight and the moon ruled the sky, apparently no one had bothered to tell the heat. She’d soaked through both her T-shirt and hiking shorts, ruining her third outfit of the day.
She hated this weather. She hated this place. She wanted to go home, and not to the high-rise co-op she shared with Quincy in downtown Manhattan, but home to Bakersville, Oregon. Where the fir trees grew to staggering heights, and a fresh ocean breeze blew off the water. Where people knew each other by first names, and even if it made it hard to escape the past, it also gave you an anchor in the present. Bakersville, where she’d had a town, a community, a place that felt like home . . .
The pang of longing struck hard and deep. As it had been doing so often these days. A ghost pain for the past. And it filled her with a restlessness she was having a harder and harder time trying to hide. Quincy could sense it, too. She caught him watching her sometimes with a question in his eyes. She wished she could give him an answer, but how could she, when she didn’t have one herself?
Sometimes she ached for things she couldn’t name. And sometimes, when she thought of how much she loved Quincy, it simply hurt her more.
She found Mac standing with a cluster of three people over by the body. The first guy appeared to be the Medical Examiner. Second guy had the look of an assistant. Third person was a woman with short red hair and lots of freckles. She was built like a firecracker, with the muscled legs and broad shoulders of a serious hiker. Not the ME’s office. Probably leader of the search-and-rescue operations.
Thirty seconds later, Mac made the introductions, and Rainie was pleased to find out she was right. ME turned out to be Howard Weiss, his assistant was Dan Lansing, and the redhead was Kathy Levine, who had indeed organized the search.
Levine was still talking to the ME, so the three of them broke away, leaving Mac and Rainie standing over the partially wrapped body.
“Where’s Quincy?” Mac asked.
“He said he needed to have a fatherly chat with Kimberly. I took one look at his face and decided not to argue.”
“They fight a lot?”
“Only because they’re too much alike.” She shrugged. “Someday they’ll figure that out.”
“What about Kaplan and Watson? Are they gonna join the party, or are they not allowed off the base?”
“Not known yet. Watson has a full-time job at the Academy, so while the FBI is definitely assembling a team, it probably won’t involve him personally. Kaplan, on the other hand, is lead investigator on the Quantico homicide. So he has plenty of time, but lacks jurisdiction. Given that he’s a resourceful man, I figure in another hour or two, he’ll crack that nut and show up with full NCIS entourage. Oh, aren’t we the luckiest duckies in the whole wide world?”
She peered down into the black plastic body bag, the contents clearly lit by one of the generator-powered lights. “Whoa.”
“Nearly two dozen puncture wounds,” Mac said. “And countin’. Poor girl must’ve wandered right into the thick of things. After that, she never stood a chance.”
“Her purse? The gallon of water?”
“No sign yet. We don’t know where she was abandoned, though. In daylight, we can find her trail and backtrack. Probably discover her things along the way.”
“Seems strange she’d drop the water.”
He shrugged. “In this heat, a gallon of water is good for about