Angel Dance (Danny Logan Mystery #1) (9 page)

“Question,” Gus said. “How did the deadbolt get locked from the outside if her keys were inside?”

“There’s other front-door keys floating around,” I said. “Robbie has one. There must be more.”

“And either Gina, or the person who abducted her, left everything as it sits, and then used the spare key to lock up, all nice and neatlike,” Dwayne said.

“And then drove away in a waiting vehicle other than this one,” I said, pointing to Gina’s BMW.

“Either way, somebody went to a pretty good deal of trouble to leave us this confusing scene,” Dwayne said. “They’re trying to throw us off.”

“Got that right,” I said. “Seems to me that the voluntary disappearance scenario is pretty straightforward. She staged the place to look normal, she locked up using a spare key, and she left in another vehicle, either one she’d stashed or with another person.” Toni nodded her agreement.

“And the involuntary disappearance plays out one of two ways,” she said. “Either she locked up like Danny just said, and then drove off with someone who turned out to be a bad guy, or she was snatched, the bad guy cleaned up and used a spare key to lock the door, and then he drove off with her. Either way, it doesn’t look like there was any struggle here.”

“Could she have been grabbed somewhere else?” I suggested.

“If that were true, how did all of her stuff end up back here—her purse and her keys?” Toni asked.

“Good point.”

“Do we have a last known sighting yet?” Dwayne asked.

“No interviews yet,” Gus said.

“The last I saw her was about five thirty last Thursday,” Robbie said.

“Our plan is to start in with interviews at Pacific Wine and Spirits today,” I said. “Maybe we’ll be able to locate someone who was either with her later or at least saw her later that night.”

“Good,” Dwayne said. “We haven’t done anything yet, so you won’t be stepping on our toes. Give us a list of whom you talk to and a copy of your notes when you’re done. So that we don’t double up on people and piss them off, we won’t schedule any interviews until we hear from you.”

I turned to Robbie and said, “Robbie, would you get us a list of everyone at your company who Gina works with or who she might have been friendly with on a social basis? If you can schedule time with them starting at about 3:00 p.m., that would be great.”

“Sure,” Robbie said. “I can set you up in a conference room if you’d like.”

“Perfect.”

“We’re trying to find out who saw her last, and when that was, what was she wearing, what was she doing, what kind of mood was she in, that sort of thing,” Dwayne said. “And we also want to find out who her friends are, does she have a boyfriend, who she hangs out with, where she goes at night—all that kind of stuff. Even little things could be helpful.”

We agreed that we’d call with an update later in the afternoon.

Before breaking, Robbie said, “I have to say, I’m impressed with the procedures and the methodology. I guess I didn’t know how you guys went about solving cases, but, somehow, seeing the process makes me a little more hopeful.”

“What’d you think,” Gus said, “we just sit around like Colombo and wait for clues to fall into our laps?”

“I honestly didn’t know what to think,” Robbie said. “Fortunately, I’ve never been through anything like this.”

“Well, we don’t sit around and wait,” Dwayne said. “We develop the clues. We go after them. I was kind of trained on the job as I went, but this guy—” here he pointed to me, “—this guy got the best training that money can buy in the U.S. Army and at the FBI. Special schools, that sort of thing.”

I said, “Like a lot of other problems, solving a missing person case lends itself to a logical, step-by-step procedure. We all know the procedure—we don’t have to reinvent it. Experts have worked it out over the years, and the four of us are pretty well versed on the steps to follow. We simply apply the procedures we’ve been taught to the facts as they exist on each case. When we flush out a clue, we modify our approach to accommodate it. If we follow the steps and get a little lucky here and there and things work out like they should, we should be able to develop a chain of clues that ends up leading us straight to Gina.”

“With a whole lot of legwork and questions and answers along the way,” Dwayne said.

“Sounds reassuring,” Robbie said.

We don’t have all the answers, but we know the steps. Poor Robbie doesn’t know any of this—he’s completely in the dark and probably has no idea how the process works, or for that matter, if there even is a process. I imagine suddenly discovering that crimes get solved by following playbook-like procedures developed over the years would be somewhat comforting to a logical person like Robbie. He seemed much relieved.

“Alright,” Dwayne said. “Robbie, thanks for opening up the place this morning. Now, we all have jobs to get to. Let’s get it done.” The group began to break up, but Dwayne grabbed my sleeve and whispered to me, “Hold up a second.”

~~~~

When Robbie had driven away, Dwayne said to Toni and me, “I talked to the homicide guys yesterday afternoon after you left. It turns out they do have a possible serial killer working in this area. Apparently, they’ve just recently discovered a pattern in about four killings in the greater Seattle area, about one per year.”

Just the possibility of this happening to Gina was enough to raise my blood pressure. Unfortunately, my hometown is infamous for being ground zero for some of the worst serial killers of our time. I’m talking about the real nice fellows like Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and the like. I think there’s something in the Seattle weather that triggers some sort of short circuit within these lunatics. Someday, scientists will nail down the connection.

Dwayne continued. “This sick bastard who’s doing it tends to torture his victims before he kills them. Then he has sex with the body.”

Toni looked confused. “That describes maybe a dozen different serial killers,” she said.

“That’s true,” Dwayne said. “Unfortunately, that in and of itself isn’t what makes this guy unique. What does is that after he’s killed the poor girl, he mutilates her body the same way each time. Homicide wouldn’t tell me what or how, except to say it involved dismemberment.”

“I guess that would make the crimes tend to stand out,” I said.

“True. Fortunately, there haven’t been very many victims. Unfortunately, this has made it so that the pattern got missed until now.”

“That’s not good,” I said. “Any lifestyle pattern to the victims?”

“Young, pretty, all live alone.”

“Prostitutes?” Toni asked. Many serial killers focused their attention on prostitutes, thinking, correctly, that the shadowy lifestyle of women engaged in prostitution made them less likely to be missed than your average woman.

“Two of the victims haven’t been identified yet, but the other two were definitely not prostitutes. One was a U-Dub student; one was a nurse. The U-Dub student lived in the U-District, the nurse lived off Eastlake Drive on Lake Union.”

“Great,” I said sarcastically. “Right in our area.”

“It gets worse,” Dwayne said.

“How’s that?”

“Like I said, there’ve been four killings in the last five years. So far, they’ve discovered a body each summer.”

“And—?”

“And they haven’t found a body yet this summer that matches the MO.” Dwayne paused, then said, “If he’s killing one girl each summer, the bastard’s due.”

Although the odds of Gina having fallen victim to this particular maniac were low, it didn’t stop a dread from instantly filling my body, almost as if a flatbed truck had suddenly parked on my chest. If nothing else, it made the possibility that Gina could have been abducted and killed by any number of twisted psychos all the more real. It didn’t have to be this guy—there were plenty of madmen to go around. Dead is dead.

My mind raced, but didn’t land on an answer. “I don’t know how to respond to this,” I said, finally. “With no facts, no evidence, nothing, I think we should keep this little nugget to ourselves unless the family brings it up directly. They’re scared enough as it is. No sense creating any more dread in their lives.”

“We agree completely,” Dwayne said.

~~~~

Toni and I hopped in my Jeep and drove back to our office. Neither of us spoke. I guess there’s nothing like the potential threat of a sadistic serial killer to throw a wet blanket on the mood.
Gina
, I thought to myself,
I sure as hell hope you’re running some sort of scam, some sort of deal. I know you probably think you’re tough and in control, but there are some really sick sons of bitches out there, and I hope to hell you haven’t met up with one of them.

Finally, Toni couldn’t take the silence any longer. “Boss, I know what you’re thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You can relax. I’m convinced. Gina didn’t get caught up by this shithead, or any other for that matter.”

“I hope you’re right. Why do you say that?”

“Too many odd things about what’s happened—mostly about the condo, I guess. That place is clearly staged.”

“You think?”

“Oh, hell yeah. I think everything we’ve found is exactly the way somebody wanted it to be found. Right now, I think the most likely somebody is Gina herself.”

I swerved to avoid a double-parked delivery truck, then straightened back out. “You sound pretty sure of yourself. Why would she do that?” I asked.

She was quiet for a few seconds. “I don’t know that. Yet. But I’m going to find out. Anyway, that’s my theory.”

“Well, I hope you’re right.”

“Count on it.”

Toni’s smarter than I am. I found her confidence somehow reassuring.

~~~~

Later that same day at three, we pulled into the parking lot at Pacific Wine and Spirits in the SoDo industrial district on the south side of Seattle, near the Mariners’ ballpark. As he’d promised, Robbie had a conference room reserved for us. The view through the room’s large picture window featured a nice vista of gritty warehouses and busy loading docks. Through gaps in the buildings, the big orange overhead cranes on the waterfront several blocks to the west were visible. Not exactly a five-star view, but the room itself was nice—big conference table, comfortable chairs.

In the first hour after we got settled in, we talked to four different people from the finance section. Each of them had been with the company since Gina had graduated from college and started working there, five years ago. They all knew Gina because she’d been their boss for the entire time. Unfortunately, they were also married with their own family lives outside of work and none of them hung out with Gina or even considered themselves friends. In fact, they agreed that although Gina was friendly enough at work, she did not seem to make friends easily. If she had an inner circle, they agreed, none of them were in it.

Nonetheless, we were able to ascertain that all of these women had a good deal of respect for Gina as a boss. All four agreed that Gina was a very focused, driven person and that she wasn’t prone to small talk or office chatter. She was fair, hardworking, very shrewd and very hard-nosed. Shortly after she’d arrived, she uncovered the fact that the previous controller was skimming money from the company and cooking the books to cover it up. Gina went to her dad, and the offender was summarily fired. Gina got the controller’s job. Now, five years later, she was the company’s chief financial officer. Today, if a supplier or a customer tried to take advantage of the company, she hammered them without mercy. There was unanimous agreement that Gina had turned a floundering business with a questionable future into a very profitable ongoing concern in five years.

Next on the list was a woman who each of the others had identified as being Gina’s closest confidante at work. Ms. Regina Campbell was the company’s current controller—she answered directly to Gina. She entered the conference room at 4:00 p.m. on the dot. She was probably thirty years old, blonde hair, average height and weight; not beautiful, but better than cute—call her pretty. No wedding ring. I introduced us and asked her to have a seat. She told us to call her Reggie.

“Reggie, thanks for talking to us this afternoon,” I started. “As you’ve probably heard, we’ve been hired by Gina’s family to help locate her.”

Reggie nodded.

“We’ve just gotten started, and one of the first things we wanted to do is talk to the people she works with.”

She nodded again.

“Maybe you can start by telling us what you do here and how what you do interacts with what Gina does?”

She nodded. “First off, I appreciate you talking about Gina in the present tense,” Reggie said, sniffling. “I get these ominous vibes from the press. They seem to think she’s already dead.”

“We don’t think so,” I said. “In fact, if we thought that was the case, there’d be no reason for us to be doing what we’re doing. We’re working on the assumption that she’s not dead. We don’t know why she’s disappeared, but we want to find out. If she’s in trouble and needs help, we want to be there.”

“Good,” she said. She reached for a tissue from the box on the table. “I moved to Seattle five years ago—about the same time Gina started with the company. Gina’s probably my best friend. As the company controller, I work closely with her—you probably already know she’s the CFO. I talk to her maybe a dozen times a day.”

“Did that contact lead to your friendship?” Toni asked.

“For me, yeah. We work together a lot. We’re both single. We both went to college—I feel like we have a lot in common.”

“When you say—‘for me’—what do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, if you know Gina, you’d understand,” she said. “How should I put it—Gina doesn’t share much. She keeps her feelings pretty well bottled up inside. I think it was the way she was brought up. I know Mr. Fiore, and I think he’s a nice guy, but I get the impression that they had a pretty strict upbringing—Gina and Robbie. Anyway, she doesn’t open up very easily.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Toni said. “You said Gina’s your best friend. How does that jibe with this?”

“She’s
my
best friend,” Reggie said. “I’m not sure I’m
her
best friend. For that matter, I’m not sure she has a best friend. It would have to be someone from outside work.” She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a tissue.