Don't Look Back (11 page)

Jamie swallowed hard and focused.

She’d extracted the mitochondrial DNA from one of the bones and sent it off to be examined and possibly matched with a missing person or a missing person’s relative.

A whistle sounded, announcing Dakota’s imminent arrival. Jamie smiled to herself and realized how much she appreciated the man. How she wished . . .

“Hey there, Jamie. You making any progress?”

“Yes.” Then she frowned at him. “You shouldn’t be here. You should be home resting.”

“I’ve got a whopper of a headache, but no other concussion symptoms. I’m good.”

“Hm. I wonder what your doctor would say.”

He shrugged. “Same thing he said when he gave me the antibiotics.”

She waited. He didn’t offer more so she pushed. “Which was?”

“I’ll be fine in a couple of days and to take it easy.”

Against her will, she felt her left brow arch. “And this is taking it easy?”

“I’m in the air-conditioning instead of the blazing hot sun digging up bones.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Okay, I guess that’ll have to do for now.”

“Great, so what you got?”

“I’ve got a female between the age of eighteen and twenty-five, but probably on the younger end. It’s hard to tell exactly how long she’s been dead. But going by the fact that there’s not a lot of tissue left on her body, no hair anywhere, the climate we live in, the ground she was buried in, I’d say she’s probably been dead between three to five years. Our entomologist has the insect inclusions and will be able to give you a much better estimate of post mortem inclusion than I. And by measuring her femur, I’ve concluded that she was most likely between 5’5” and 5’7”.”

Dakota took notes in his ever-present notepad. “All right. Let me know when you get the PMI back from the bug guy. I’m going to get Jazz to pull up all of the missing persons reports from five years back that match this description.”

“Great. And you might want to expand the search into surrounding areas.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that.”

“I know it’ll make it harder to narrow down, but . . .”

She shrugged and Dakota nodded. He pulled out his phone and stepped from the room.

Jamie turned to the second skeleton she’d finished laying out yesterday. The similarities between the two skeletons chilled her – to the bone.

Did she dare voice her suspicions to Dakota? Would he think she’d totally lost it? That everything that had happened up to this point in her life had finally caused her to crack? If she were totally honest with herself, she would admit she’d wondered it herself initially. And yet . . .

She walked over to the second body and studied the tibia, three of the fingers, both ankles, the left radius. All broken. All healed before death.

More whistling.

Dakota rounded the door and stopped when he saw her. “What is it?”

She shook her head. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

Dakota frowned and pushed the Stetson to the back of his head. “No I won’t. What is it?”

“I think the same person killed both of these girls.”

“Well, that’s kind of what we thought when we found the second set of bones in the same area as the first.”

“I know.”

“So what’s crazy about that?”

She looked him in the eye. “Because I think the killer is the same person who took me almost twelve years ago.”

If she’d hauled off and slugged him in the gut, he wouldn’t have been more surprised. And he couldn’t deny the dart of skepticism that shot through him. Still . . .

“Okay, what makes you think that?”

She drew in a deep breath and studied him. He knew she was looking for any sign of doubt. He refused to let any show on his face.

Then she nodded. “Look at this.”

He rounded the table nearest him and walked to stand by her side. In a methodical, professional teaching voice, she proceeded to walk him through what she’d learned about each victim. “See the bones? They’ve been broken. And healed back.”

“Okay. People break bones.”

“From what I can tell – and later I can give you the scientific rundown of how I know this – but all of these bones were broken about the same time. And all healed back around the same time.”

That caught his attention. “Maybe she was in a car wreck or something.”

“That’s a possibility.”

“But?”

“But, look at this victim. I call her Chloe.”

He raised a brow. “You name them?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I feel so bad for them. They died so young. They deserve names, and until I can find out who they really are . . .”

Dakota felt his heart squeeze with love for this special woman. The dead and the living, it didn’t matter. She treated them all with respect. “Who’s that one?” He gestured to the other skeleton.

“Bianca.”

“Fancy names.”

“I know. We girls secretly wish we had exotic names.” She led him back over to Bianca. “Look at her vertebrae and the ribs.” He leaned in, wondering what she wanted him to see. As he studied the area, he noticed a gouge in one of the bones. “Wait a minute. What’s that depression? Is that supposed to be there?”

“No, it’s not.”

“So what is it?”

“A knife wound.”

Sickness curled inside him. “He cut her throat?”

“To the bone.”

“What about . . .” He had to see. He walked over to the one she called Chloe and looked at the same bone. Then he looked up at Jamie. “It’s the same, just a slightly different angle.”

“I know.”

“So why do you think it’s the same guy who took you all those years ago?”

“Because of something he said.”

Dakota frowned. “What was it?”

She closed her eyes. “He liked to slice and stab.”

“Slice and . . . come on, Jamie, make this a little easier for me, would you?”

She fidgeted. Which was odd. He’d never seen her exhibit any sign of discomfort while in her lab. Here, she ruled. She was confident and in charge. She blew out a breath. “He explained how he would kill me. First he would slit my throat and then make the final stab into the rib cage and up into the heart. He wanted to see the – and I quote – ‘blood and water flow.’”

He couldn’t move. Even though he’d seen just about all there was to see, sometimes the evil snuck up on him and took him by surprise. Surprise at the depravity of human nature. Surprise at what one person could do to another. He couldn’t dwell on it for long or he’d go crazy. “Wait a minute. That’s a biblical reference, isn’t it?”

“You know your Bible?”

“Hey, I’m not a complete heathen.”

She gave him a soft, knowing smile. “I know you’re not. You just don’t talk about your spiritual side very often.”

“I know.” And he didn’t want to talk about it now.

But he had to know about her.

Catching her hand, he stared deep into her eyes, wishing he could see beyond what she would let him. See past the shadows that never really left her. “How did you survive?”

At first, she didn’t answer, but she didn’t look away either. She licked her lips and said, “God.”

Dakota nodded. “I thought you might say that.”

“Why?”

“Because it shows in your life. In your words and your actions.”

She gave a little laugh. “But I sure wasn’t living for him when everything was happening. I was mad as fire at him for a long time.”

That surprised him. “Really? I wouldn’t have expected that?”

“Why not?”

“Because you seem so . . . so . . . into God.”

She smiled. “I am. Now.” Then the smile slid from her lips and she shuddered. “But when he had me, I knew I wasn’t leaving there alive.”

“And yet you did.”

“Yes.” She picked up one of the bones and traced the broken part that had healed. “I did.”

“How?”

She sighed. “Other than giving God the credit, I’m not exactly sure. I’ve thought about it, of course. When I let myself. And the only thing I can come up with was that eventually my anger overcame my terror. And I was actually able to start thinking. Analyzing. Learning about him. Figuring out what made him tick.”

“So what was it?”

“He was ‘the hero.’ At least that’s what he called himself. Hero. He had to feel like he was saving me. Rescuing me.”

“From what, for crying out loud? He’s the one that put you in the situation in the first place!”

“Yes, well, it didn’t take me long to realize this guy was insane. Literally. So, I played along with him. And let him rescue me.” A frown flickered. “Only somewhere along the line, I started to believe it.” She waved a hand and blinked. “I was really messed up for a while, Dakota. You don’t even . . .”

Dare he ask? Did he even want to know? “Rescue you from what, Jamie?”

“The pain.”

Jamie wasn’t exactly sure why she was opening up so many old wounds. Wounds that had scabbed over and healed, for the most part. Now, she was tearing them open, revisiting a place in her life she never wanted to go back to.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have much choice. It was only a matter of time before Connor and Dakota sat her down and made her relive her eight-week nightmare, especially now that she’d let it out of the bag that she thought the guy who’d killed these girls was the same one who’d snatched her.

Her back ached. And she still needed to go over the two older files of the bodies that had been found in the same area as the two skeletons she now had in her lab.

Dakota’s phone rang and he walked to the other side of the lab to answer it.

She let herself bend forward and touch her toes to relieve the tense muscles at the small of her back.

Returning footsteps had her straightening. The grimly satisfied look on his face made her frown and ask, “What is it?”

“Jazz found some information about that shirt we found with the first body.”

“Oh good.”

“With the information you gave her about the label and her computer expertise, she was able to determine it came from an exclusive and well-known retail store and was from the 2005 line.”

“So, if our girl bought it new, she died in 2005.”

“You estimated she’d been dead about three to five years. That would put her right at being dead for five years. Then Jazz ran a search on missing girls during that time period, using your age range, isolating the geographical area to Spartanburg and the surrounding cities and counties for a sixty-mile radius. I’m thinking that because the graves were found here and the fact that you disappeared from here, this is his home base. He’s got a setup somewhere local.”

Jamie swallowed. How close had she been living all these years to her attacker?

“Anyway, using your information, she came up with seven possibilities.”

“Seven? That’s all?”

“Yes. So I’ve got someone contacting these seven families to see if one of them can identify the shirt.”

“What if it was a shirt he put on her?”

“Then we’re out of luck on that angle.” Dakota paused, then asked. “What were you wearing when they found you?”

She blinked. “The clothes I was wearing the night I disappeared.” “And they found you weeks later. Did you wear the same thing the entire time you were held by him?”

She shook her head. “No, he . . . gave me stuff to wear.”

“So he let you loose occasionally?”

Jamie folded her arms across her stomach and nodded. “He let me shower, use the bathroom, take care of personal . . . um . . . issues. He liked me to be clean. I think he had some kind of dirt fetish or something.” Why she felt embarrassed telling this to Dakota was beyond her. Then she shuddered. “But I never felt clean even after the showers.”

Dakota’s throat worked and she wondered what he was thinking. Then he said, “Obviously there was no way for you to escape him or you would have.” He stated it with such assured belief that Jamie momentarily went still. He noticed. “What?” he asked.

The lump in her throat took her by surprise. “I don’t know. Thank you for saying that. I’ve wondered if . . .”

“If you should have been able to get away from him.”

“I tried to fight him one time, but he was so strong. Unbelievably strong. It was almost like a supernatural strength. He just held me off with one hand and broke my arm. Just squeezed and twisted until it snapped.” She bit her lip and pointed to her lower left arm. “And he did it with one hand.”