Wednesday—3:29 p.m.
“What do you mean, the computer chip is fried?” Hope all but shouted into the phone. “It’s practically a new car!” Just out of warranty, in fact.
She listened to the mechanic’s explanation, which was in truth no explanation at all. He didn’t know what had happened. He only knew that a very expensive computer chip had to be replaced. Naturally, he didn’t have the part on hand. It would take a few days to get the new chip in and have it installed.
She banged the phone down with a vengeance, and Raintree lifted his head slowly to look at her. “Bad news?”
“I’m without a car for a few days.” She began to leaf through the yellow pages on her desk. “Who would you recommend I call about a rental?”
“You don’t need a rental car,” Raintree said.
“I’m not going to let you chauffeur me around town for days,” she argued. And her mother’s mode of transportation was an embarrassment. The car did get good gas mileage, but it was only slightly larger than a cigar box, and had a nasty habit of dying at stop signs and red lights.
“How are you with a stick?”
“Excuse me?”
“Standard transmission,” he said, lifting his gaze to her once again. “Can you handle it?”
“Yes,” she said tersely.
Raintree had taken her seriously this morning, she supposed, since he hadn’t touched her all day. Not inappropriately, not casually, not at all. That was what she wanted, right? So why was she still so on edge in his presence that she wanted to scream?
“I’ll loan you my Challenger,” he said. “We’ll run by the house tonight and I’ll get you a set of keys.” When she hesitated, he added, “If Leon was without a car, I’d make the same offer to him.”
A part of her wanted to refuse, but she didn’t. It would just be for a few days, after all. “Sure. Thanks.”
Raintree sat well away from his computer, studying the thick file in his hands. They had the initial crime scene report from the Sherry Bishop
case, such as it was, and were awaiting the coroner’s report at any moment. Another detective, Charlie Newsom, stuck his head in the office Raintree and Hope shared—at least for the moment. He looked at Hope, openly interested with those sparkling eyes and that killer smile. Charlie was probably one of the nice guys, not a stinker at all. He didn’t put her on edge in the least. “I ran that check on Stiles. He was locked up in the county jail last week for drunk and disorderly.”
“He bonded out?” Gideon asked.
Charlie shook his head. “Nope. He’s still there.”
Which meant he couldn’t possibly have been the one to take a shot at Raintree—or her—yesterday.
Gideon ran his fingers over the top photo of a woman killed in a rural part of the state four months ago. There were others just like it beneath, some with poor lighting, some from less gruesome angles, but this was the photo that spoke to him.
Marcia Cordell had very little in common with Sherry Bishop. Marcia had been a thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher in a small county school. At the time of her death she’d been wearing a loose-fitting brown dress that might have been purposely chosen to hide whatever figure she had. She wouldn’t have been caught dead—or alive—with pink hair or a belly button ring. She’d lived not in an apartment but in a small house off a country road, a house she had inherited from her father when he’d passed on five years ago.
What she and Sherry did have in common was that they were both single. Instead of filling her lonely nights with music and a job at a coffee shop, Marcia Cordell had filled her emptiness with other people’s children, two fat cats, and—judging by the photo on his desk—an impressive collection of snow globes from places she had never been. They’d also both been murdered with a knife that left a similar wound. Sherry had been killed by a slash to her throat, but Marcia had been stabbed half a dozen times before her throat had been cut. The angle and depth of the final wound was the same in both cases, though, and there was destruction at both scenes, as if the murderer had gone into a frenzy once the murders were done.
And one of Marcia Cordell’s ears had been severed and taken.
Investigations in understaffed jurisdictions were often shoddy and incomplete, but the sheriff’s office had done a fairly good job with this one. The case file was slim, but the sheriff was still actively pursuing the case and had been very cooperative over the phone. He’d invited Gideon to visit the crime scene, which had been well preserved, as Cordell had no immediate family and had left no provisions for her little house. Not that anyone was likely to want it after what had happened there.
Was it possible that Marcia Cordell’s ghost was still there in that house, waiting for justice? Possible, but not necessarily likely. Still, this had been a particularly grisly murder, maybe even grisly enough to keep Marcia’s spirit around for a while. If Marcia Cordell knew he was determined to find the woman who’d killed her, would she be able to rest in peace?
The stack of files on Gideon’s desk was disheartening. If he had the time, he could solve them all. He could find the bad guys, put them away, send the spirits of those who had been murdered to a better place. But dammit, there was so much darkness he couldn’t keep up with it all. One man couldn’t possibly fix the ills of the entire world. It was a world he couldn’t possibly bring a child into. He couldn’t fix it all, not for a child…not for Sherry Bishop and Marcia Cordell.
“You okay, Raintree?”
He hadn’t even heard Hope enter the office. “No,” he said. “I’m not okay. I think we have a serial killer.”
Wednesday—11:17 p.m.
Gideon hunkered down beside the body that lay atop the cheap carpet in a semirespectable hotel room. The victim’s red hair covered most of her face, but he could see more than enough. Like Sherry Bishop, this woman had been killed with a knife. Unlike Sherry Bishop, this woman’s death had not been quick. The scene looked more like the photos from the Marcia Cordell homicide.