The Night Monster_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [60]
His barking grew louder. I saw people pop their heads out of their cars and from windows inside the building. Buster was going to stir the whole place up if I didn’t do something. I opened the driver’s door, and my dog happily scrambled out.
I locked my car up, and dragged Buster inside by the collar. The desk sergeant was yakking on the phone, and I got onto an empty elevator without being spotted.
Next stop was the War Room. I made Buster lie down in the corner, where he promptly fell asleep. Then I got to work.
In the room’s center was an oval table covered with empty coffee cups. Sweeping them into the trash, I pulled a photograph of Naomi Dunn from her file and placed it on the table. To the right of Dunn’s photo, I placed a photo of Cindee Hartman from her file, and to the right of that, the photo of Sara Long I’d been carrying around. Then I found a yellow legal pad, and ripped away three sheets.
I placed one sheet beneath each of the photos. Using a black Magic Marker, I wrote down the date of each woman’s abduction, and beneath that, the things that linked them—age, athleticism, and the fact that they were all nursing students.
I stepped back to stare at the information. One thing immediately jumped out at me. Cindee Hartman had been abducted four years after Naomi Dunn. Then there was a sixteen-year jump to Sara Long’s abduction. That was a long time. Serial abductors were similar to serial killers in that they tended to abduct in cycles. I didn’t see a cycle here, and kept studying the women’s photographs.
A hand touched my arm. I was too absorbed to turn around. Webster shouldered up beside me. Webster had worked Vice before joining Missing Persons, and had seen her share of ugly. The expression on her face was particularly grim.
“Something wrong?” I said.
“We just found two more victims,” Webster said.
CHAPTER 29
he victims’ names were Victoria Seppi and Karen Kingman.
Seppi was from Chatham, a small town thirty miles due west of Daytona Beach. She had been studying nursing at a Daytona community college when she’d gone missing from her dorm room in the fall of 1999. Tall and athletic, Seppi had swum competitively in high school and played water polo at the YWCA. She was so similar to the other victims it was unnerving.
Because Seppi had been living in Daytona at the time of her disappearance, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office had handled the investigation. At first, the cops had focused on Seppi’s boyfriend, a biker with a string of arrests for selling speed on Daytona Beach. When the biker had come up with an airtight alibi, the case had gone cold, and the investigation had been put on the back burner, where it had remained until now.
I found myself shaking my head as I read the Seppi report. Back when I’d run Missing Persons, I’d made it my business to be familiar with every “open” missing person case in Florida, but I had never heard of Victoria Seppi. That was because the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office hadn’t classified her as missing, but had simply left the case open. I didn’t know what their thinking was, and probably never would.
I went to the next report. Karen Kingman had been a nursing student at Pensacola Junior College when she disappeared in the summer of ‘04. A native of the nearby town of Brent, Kingman had played tennis in high school and gone to the state championships in singles twice. The photo in her report showed an athletic young woman with dimples in her cheeks, shoulder-length blond hair, and a radiant smile.
Kingman’s abduction had occurred over the Fourth of July weekend, when her apartment complex was nearly empty. While there had been no witnesses, the evidence at the scene had indicated that Kingman had not gone quietly. Her blood had been found throughout her apartment, along with several torn pieces of clothing that had been identified as hers.
Pensacola is in Escambia County, and the local sheriff