The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [168]
Robby was waving his hands. “No, no. You’re missing the point. Someone was shot dead in that house. What if it wasn’t Farwell?”
Bledsoe sat down on the family room couch, eyes searching the floor. “It sure looked like him. We had his mug shots—”
“Yeah, from twenty years ago. Humor me. Call the ME, find out where they are in processing the body. See if they’ve run the fingerprints yet.”
Bledsoe dug out his cell phone, then punched in the number.
Robby stood there, trying to work it through. Feeling he was missing something, but not sure what. Then he realized what was bothering him. The email from the offender. He played it back in his mind: The hiding place smelled musty . . . it was small and dark. He watched everything through little holes in the walls. It had to be. If he was wrong, they would lose valuable time. But at the moment, there were no other leads to pursue.
Bledsoe’s shoulders fell. “Can you run them ASAP?” he said into the phone. “The body may not be Farwell’s. Soon as you get something, call me.” He shook his head, then closed his phone.
Robby grabbed Bledsoe’s arm. “I know where she is.”
“You know? Or you think you know?”
Robby hesitated. He had asked himself the same question. But he was relying on intuition . . . intuition and analytic logic. “How soon can you get a chopper here?”
“If there’s one in the air, ten minutes. If not, longer.”
“Make it ten. Karen’s life is at stake.”
THE PAIN WAS STARTING to reach her limits of tolerance. Vail tried pulling herself up to alleviate some of the strain on her shoulders. If her arms had been separated by just a few more inches, her position would be the same as the leg pull-up exercises she did to strengthen her abdominal muscles at the Academy gym. But because her hands were locked so close to one another, the increased strain on her arms only worsened the wrist pain.
“Shit,” she said. It was her first utterance . . . but not her last. Figuring that the intelligent offender would have gagged her had he thought her screams could be heard, she knew that calling out for help would be a useless exercise.
She did it anyway.
But after her first plea, she was stopped short by the feeling that someone was behind her. She spun her head around and saw, in the dim recesses of the small room, a figure dressed in dark clothing. Vail’s body swung from her sudden movement, allowing a sliver of light from the bulb to catch the shiny nylon of the pantyhose stretched across the offender’s face.
“Won’t do you any good,” the voice said. It was rough and strained, but confident.
“Who are you?” Vail shouted.
“I gave you more credit than you deserved.” He moved slightly to his right, making it more difficult for Vail to see him. It was a move of power, Vail was sure of it. He talked; she had to listen but could not look at him.
“Are you the Dead Eyes killer?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? Crack profiler, supervisory special agent and you ask a dumb question like that. What good is the title ‘special’ if you’re as stupid as the rest of them? Of course I’m the Dead Eyes killer!”
There it was again. The scent. She tried to force it from her mind, but it popped back in. The backyard. Sandra Franks’s yard, when she felt as if the killer was watching her, when she had run through the brush and sprained her knee.
“It is you,” Vail said.
“The light comes on. How very promising. Now for the million dollar question: Do you know where you are?”
“I’d say the million dollar question is who you are, not where I am.”
A snapping sound flicked in Vail’s ears before the searing sting of a whip slapped against her bare skin. “I ask the questions here, Agent Vail. Karen. Sweet little Karen.”
The bite from the whip was still throbbing and overrode all other pain; she bit her lip to contain the whimper that threatened to escape her mouth. She was not going to give him that.
“I’ll tell you where you are. You’re in the same place we grew up, the place where we watched