“What is this?”
“He rattled off these numbers. And said, ‘Valerie’s still waiting.’ Maybe he’s full of bull.”
“Could be.” Troy shook his head. “But he could be legit. Cinco just called. The woman they autopsied
yesterday was IDed as a college student from Houston. Valerie Monroe’s still missing.”
“Oh my God.”
“When did you last hear from this guy, Elaina?”
“He called my room earlier.” She looked down at her notes again.
“Which room?”
“My hotel room,” she said absently. “What are these numbers?”
“Elaina.” Troy’s patience was unraveling. “
Which
room?”
She finally met his gaze. “The first one.”
“He hasn’t called you since you moved?”
“No.”
“But he got your cell number somehow. That can’t be an easy thing to get. It’s not like you’re listed in the phone book.”
“No, but I’ve given my number to a lot of people,” she said. “Practically everyone I’ve interviewed here. I told them to call me if they thought of anything that might help the case. But that doesn’t matter nearly as much as what this man
said.
He told me Valerie’s waiting.”
Her gaze locked with his, and he could practically read what she was thinking. How would the caller know Valerie was still missing if he wasn’t the killer?
“Maybe he’s just some jerk who likes toying with a federal agent.” Troy tried to sound hopeful, but it wasn’t very convincing. “Cinco said there’s a press conference about to happen. Maybe word leaked out that the most recent Jane Doe isn’t who they’d expected, and this guy’s using that info, trying to pull your chain.”
Elaina looked at her notes again. “I think it’s him.
And I think he’s playing games with me. Taunting me. He used that phrase again. ‘She’s my best hide.’”
Troy cursed and stared out the windshield.
“Wait a second,” she said, and he heard the note of dread in her voice. “I think I know what this means. These are coordinates.”
“Coordinates?”
She glanced up. Her eyes were intense, alert. But not nearly frightened enough for someone who’d just received a call from a serial killer.
“Longitude and latitude,” she said. “GPS coordinates. It’s like we thought—he’s playing games here. And he just handed me a big clue.”
Mia leaned over her worktable, careful to position the tape precisely along the elastic waistband of the running shorts. When the clothes came from a perpetrator, she took samples from the inside of the collar, the armpits, the inside of a hat—any area that rubbed against skin and was likely to absorb sweat. When the clothes came from a victim, her best bet was the waistband.
“Another rape kit?”
Startled, she glanced up to see Kelsey Quinn standing in the door of her laboratory. The forensic anthropologist was in her typical uniform of jeans and a T-shirt. The brown patches on her knees told Mia she’d been toiling in the dirt this morning, probably at one of the older excavation sites on the grounds. Besides being a world-renowned forensics laboratory, the Delphi Center also had the macabre distinction of being one of the world’s top decomposition research facilities.
“Not exactly a rape kit,” Mia said, “although it’s
possible she was raped.” She resumed her task, pressing the adhesive side of the tape to the waistband, then carefully lifting it away. “These clothes were recovered from Devil’s Gorge. I’m trying to get skin cells of the perpetrator.”
“Assuming there was one,” her friend said from the doorway. “I got your message. I take it those clothes are from one of the missing hikers?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re looking for touch DNA?”
“Yep.” Mia carefully laid the tape beside the other strips she’d already collected. “If he removed these shorts from the victim, he probably deposited skin cells on the elastic. The other hiker’s shorts are made of spandex, which isn’t as conducive to this sort of testing.”
Kelsey leaned against the door frame but didn’t venture into the room. She knew Mia wouldn’t appreciate someone breathing down her neck while she examined evidence. Tracers tended to be neat freaks, a trait born of many hours spent on witness stands explaining to defense attorneys that blood, semen, and other evidence was not the result of contamination in the lab.
“And what’s the razor blade for?” Kelsey asked.
“That’s my backup method. In case the tape fails to lift any skin cells, I’ll gently scrape the fabric and see what I can get. I can do it later.” Mia raised her eye shields and leaned back against the counter behind her. “What do you have for me?”
“I looked through our records and made a few phone calls,” Kelsey said. “No human skeletons recovered from Devil’s Gorge in the past five years.”
Mia sighed. “I figured as much. My detective seems pretty thorough.”
Kelsey lifted an eyebrow. “
Your
detective?”
“The detective who brought me this case,” she corrected. “Ric Santos with San Marcos PD. I figured he checked on any skeletal remains. I was thinking, though, maybe someone found a partial. Is there a record of any human bones at all from that area? Both missing hikers are female.”
“Closest thing is a long bone that came into my office about six months ago. Some rock climbers found it near an abandoned campground.”
“But… ?” Mia sensed a dead end.
“Microscopic examination showed osteons lined up in rows.”
“I know you’re going to tell me what that means.”
“Osteons are small, circular bone structures. In humans, they’re scattered randomly throughout the bone cortex. In animals, they tend to be found in rows. The bone was an animal femur, probably from a small cow or a deer. It’s usually pretty easy to tell what I’m dealing with just by looking at the context—deer don’t have fingers, people don’t have hooves, that sort of thing. But if it’s a single bone, maybe carried somewhere by a scavenger, I usually have to look at it under a microscope to be sure.”
Kelsey nodded at Mia’s worktable. “So it seems the missing hikers are still missing.”
“Well, thanks for checking.”
“Hope your evidence there yields something better.” Kelsey smiled slyly. “I’ve met Ric Santos. I wouldn’t want to disappoint him, either.”
• • •
Elaina’s heart sank as she gazed down at the map. “This place is
enormous.
”
Troy handed her a plastic bag and started the car again. “Eighty-five thousand acres,” he said as he pulled out of the gas station parking lot.
She studied the outlines of Laguna Madre National Wildlife Refuge. “It looks pretty untamed, too,” she said. “The entire southeast boundary looks like inlets and coves.”
“It is. What did Breck say?”
Elaina set her jaw and gazed out the window. “Pretty much the same thing he said when I told him about the first call. It was a prank.”
“He really believes that?”
“I don’t know what he believes,” she said sourly. “Evidently, the tip line has had hundreds of pranks since the day it was set up. He says this is probably more of the same.”
“Yeah, but none of those pranks came in on an investigator’s cell phone.”
“I pointed that out.” She refolded the map so that the section showing the wildlife reserve was on top. “But did he listen? No. Unless I come up with something, and I quote, ‘solid,’ this tip doesn’t merit anyone’s time.”
She looked out the window. In the last twenty minutes, the scenery had gone from fertile farmland to scrub brush mixed with pockets of wet. They were nearing the coast.
She cast a sideways glance at Troy. He had a strong profile. He was only thirty-five, but he had faint lines at the corners of his eyes, probably from so much time spent
in the sun. She liked the lines. They made him seem wise beyond his years.
She looked away. She could feel herself falling for this guy. With every day, with every minute they spent together, she could feel herself letting go of that hard-won control, letting her emotions take over. She took a deep breath and summoned her courage.
“Listen, Troy.” She cleared her throat. “You brought up a good point earlier. One I’ve been thinking about.”
“What’s that?”
“Work-life balance and all that ‘crap,’ as you called it.” She looked at him but couldn’t read his expression. “The fact is, I have no life. I can’t. At least not right now. Maybe someday, but for now, I really need to focus on what I’m doing here. I can’t mess up. I can’t afford mistakes. There’s too much at stake—not just for me, career-wise, but for this case and these victims. I can’t be distracted and miss something important.”
He smiled, but he didn’t seem amused. “So I’m a distraction, huh? And here I thought I was helping you.”
“You are. You have.” She looked at the map in her lap. “I want you to know I appreciate it. Your taking me to the Delphi Center and introducing me to your friend, and giving me the lay of the land down on the island—”
“But you don’t want to sleep with me.”
“No. I mean, we hardly know each other.”
“And you don’t do flings, is that right?”
Her stomach tightened. “That’s right.”
“And you don’t need any distractions.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, no problem.”
She looked at him. Was he serious, or was he teasing
her again? She couldn’t tell, so she was going to go with serious.
The car filled with silence. She looked at the map in her lap. She looked at Troy. “Are you still up for this?”
“You mean now that you’ve told me you’re not going to jump me in return for my services as a tour guide?”
She chose to ignore that. “I understand if you need to get back. We’ve been gone all day. I can always come back tomorrow—”
“Bad idea. Eighty-five thousand acres of marshland isn’t a great place for you to be wandering around alone.”
“I could bring someone. Maybe Maynard or Weaver.”
She saw the muscle in his jaw tighten. “I’ll take you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’ve already given up your whole Monday and—”
“You really want to lose a day on this thing just because you’re afraid you can’t control yourself around me?”
She blinked at him. “I can control myself.”
“Good. That makes two of us. Now, quit asking whether I want to be here. I’m here. Let’s get this done.”
Now she was the one to get annoyed. “I’m just pointing out that you’re about to drive this nice car of yours into a swamp. And then we’re on foot, from the looks of it. And it’s got to be ninety-five degrees outside.”
“One-oh-one,” he corrected. “And yes, I’m up for it. It’s you I’m worried about. I picked up some stuff for you at the gas station.”
Elaina lifted the bag from the floor and poked through it. Water. Sunscreen. Flip-flops. She pulled out a pair of pink hibiscus-print shorts and glanced at him.
“
Are we going to a luau?”
“That was all they had,” he said. “You’re going to melt in those pants you’ve got on. And forget the heels.”
They passed a sign for the reserve, and Troy turned onto a narrow road.
“You’re wearing pants,” she pointed out. And cowboy boots. And a black T-shirt that was sure to absorb heat.
“Jeans breathe. Whatever synthetic stuff that suit is made from doesn’t.”
“We should have taken
my
car,” she said pointedly. “I’ve got tactical pants and ATAC boots stashed in the trunk.”
“ATAC boots?”
“All-Terrain, All-Conditions. I started keeping them with me for just this type of emergency.”
“Looking for bodies in a swamp? You do this a lot?”
“It’s his pattern,” she said.
Troy rolled his Ferrari to a stop beside a wooden guardhouse and paid the awestruck attendant a few dollars. They entered the park and followed a narrow road that curved south. Troy kept glancing at the phone in his hand. They’d been using his for navigation because Elaina’s didn’t have nearly as many bells and whistles on it.
“According to this, we’re about three and a half miles from where we want to be,” he said.
“And we’re about to run out of pavement.”
Her prediction proved correct as the road veered west, away from their destination.
“I need a place to park,” he muttered. “Somewhere not too soft.”
Elaina pointed to some scrub brush sitting on a gentle rise to their east. He found a gap in the foliage and eased into the space between.
She glanced around warily. “Are you sure this is the best place to—”
“Yes.” He leaned across her, popped open the glove compartment, and pulled out a pistol, which he tucked into the back of his jeans.
She didn’t ask if he had a permit for it. She didn’t want to know. After he got out of the car, she kicked off her shoes, slipped off her belt—along with the holster attached to it—and shimmied out of her pants. The shorts he’d bought were hideous, but at least they had belt loops. She transferred her weapon and slipped an extra magazine into her pocket, alongside her cell phone.
She climbed out of the car, and the humidity settled over her like a blanket. They’d parked in the shade of a few scraggly bushes, but the land all around them was baking beneath the late-afternoon sun. Bushes and patches of water dotted the grassy prairie. In the hazy distance, she saw the blue-gray line that would be Laguna Madre.
“You think we’d be better off by boat?” Elaina asked.
Troy glanced up from his digital map. “Not according to this. Plus, it’s low tide.”
“Which direction?”
“About three miles south.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
He gave her a look that told her she had no idea what she was talking about. Then he tromped around the back of the car, and she saw that he’d managed to scrounge up a gym bag from somewhere. He took the plastic bag from her hands and stuffed the water bottles into the duffel. Then he squirted a big glob of sunscreen into his palm.
“
This has insect repellent in it.” He handed her the bottle. “Put some everywhere you can reach.”
He crouched at her feet and began slathering her legs. She focused on covering her face and neck. When her legs were finished, he rubbed the extra lotion over his face and hooked his arms through the duffel like a backpack.