Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [36]
As he descended the path to the caves, he recalled how, years back, when he’d been at the Academy and dating Portia, the Cahill sisters had pulled the old twin switch on him—more than once. He’d always found them out, though, before he’d caught on to the mirror-image thing, because Miranda would not touch sugared sodas, and Portia could not tolerate artificial sweeteners. In the end, the three had become friends, and he’d come to admire their skills as agents as much as he’d once been taken by their beauty. He’d personally requested that John include Miranda in the team he was sending up from Quantico to work on this current investigation. She was one hell of an investigator, he was thinking as he walked back down the path toward the caves.
A small scrap of fabric clinging to the low branch of a shrub caught his eye and he leaned down to inspect it. It was pale green, nearly the color of the new leaves, and may have escaped notice for that reason. He called to one of the investigators who was headed toward him, and watched while the tiny scrap was picked from the branch with tweezers and placed into a plastic bag that was then marked.
Adam had just started back down to the caves when the cry went up.
“In here!”
It had been over an hour before Adam made his way into the cave. Due to the confined nature of the area, the crime scene investigators had closed it off to all except the most necessary personnel. In a case such as this, where there had been little physical evidence to date beyond the bodies of the slain women, contamination was not to be risked. So Adam waited along with his fellow FBI agents and members of the local police department until the scene had been carefully processed. Once inside the cave, he’d been grateful that the investigators had been concerned more with thoroughness than with appeasing the feds.
Blood was splattered on both the walls and the ceiling of the cave, so much so that in the glow from the lights, the walls almost appeared to be on fire. Pools of red, still sticky, covered the floor like a ragged carpet. Droplets were found toward the back of the cave, but nothing near the savagery close to the entrance.
“How do you read it?” one of the local homicide detectives asked Adam as the photographer began to do his job, the flash from his camera sending jolts of light through the narrow space.
“None of our victims had wounds that would account for all the blood you see in here. The smaller pool of blood on the floor at the back of the cave, that could have come from Karen Meyer. But the blood on the walls, the floor, the ceiling . . . that didn’t come from any of the three victims.”
“So you think that . . .”
“Yeah,” Adam said wearily. “We’re missing a body.”
The body didn’t stay missing for long.
Before the day had ended, Julie Lohmann, or what had remained of her, was found beside the stream that flowed through the back of the park.
“She just doesn’t fit the pattern at all,” Miranda had noted. “Nineteen years old, unmarried, no children. No connection with any of our previous victims. No similarities either. What are the chances there’s more than one killer?”
“None,” Adam said, shaking his head. “It’s the same guy.”
“What do you think happened here?”
“My guess would be that Julie was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Adam replied. “I think maybe she stumbled onto our man while he was in the process of either killing Karen Meyer, or while he was preparing to dispose of the body.”
“It must have really pissed him off. It takes a lot of rage to do what he did to her. I never saw so many stab wounds,” she said softly, then, almost as if thinking aloud, asked, “What would she have been doing here alone?”
“Meeting someone,” Adam supposed.
“Her boyfriend,” one of the officers told them