The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

I continued to stare at him.

He laid it out.

“The boat is pretty much a dead end. We’re still working it, though, even if our witness saw someone from a distance past midnight, so they didn’t see much, and it’s highly doubtful this guy would make that stupid of a mistake and leave that trail. My guess, definitely he wouldn’t use his own boat, even if he thought he’d picked a late enough time he’d go unseen. We gotta roll on the thought that anything could be important, and if we find the boat, it might give us something. But it’s a lot of legwork. Maybe every fifth house in this county, the owners got a boat.”

There were three large lakes in this county, so big they crossed into two surrounding ones, so I had little doubt that was true.

“Boats are titled, and this one had an outboard, so it’d need to be registered. That said, there are folks who live up here away from the crowds, and how that could mean folks could get in their business who aren’t real big on following government regulations or having them infiltrate their life. So we figure anywhere upwards to a quarter of the boats in this county, especially a small craft like the one described, the owner didn’t bother to register it.”

I figured that was true too.

“You can also rent fishing boats from a couple of places at the marina, but there aren’t many of them. Even fewer of what there are, they’re light with a dark stripe. We’ve isolated them, covered them, and forensics are going through them one by one to see if they can put Malorie in a boat. This is probably wasted effort. I’d put money down she was tarped before she was put in there because we know she was killed before she hit her home state. And you can’t rent a boat for the night or overnight. Day rentals only and contracts all state return is by nightfall. No boats were out, unreturned. So if it was one of those, the guy helped himself so we couldn’t track him. But we’re eliminating that line anyway.”

“Cameras at the marina?” I asked.

“Some, not comprehensive views. But the angles they had, you’d have to swim to a boat to take it without being seen, and I wouldn’t put that past this guy.”

I wouldn’t either. He’d be determined not to be caught and go that extra mile to make that so, and being in this competition with Bohannan, doing that even more so in order to best him.

Bohannan continued sharing.

“They sent agents to Berkeley. More than one person in Malorie’s dorm saw a guy hanging around that they didn’t get a good feel for. A couple even reported him. They saw him before she disappeared, but they haven’t seen him after. The witnesses were talked to separately, sat with artists separately, and the facial composites bear a resemblance, one that’s pretty striking. So it’s the same guy. No one has him in any classes or saw him around anywhere but loitering outside her dorm.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

He shook his head. “He looks a little like a guy who lives in the next town. A guy who’d have the skills to pull some of this shit off. But that guy has solid alibis for both murders. That said, I figure our guy will want to be closer to me. Never seen anyone like the man in the sketches around MP. Jace, Jess, Harry, any of the boys haven’t either. We aren’t releasing the composite because we can’t know our guy didn’t hire someone to lurk for that purpose, to throw us off on a line of inquiry that will lead nowhere, and we don’t want people to find his face on someone who isn’t going around killing girls. And our guy, he’s not gonna make it that easy. Still, we wanna find that man in Berkeley. If he was put up to it, it’s likely the bad guy did it without a face-to-face meet. But we need to rule that out. And we need to talk to him.”

I nodded, then asked tentatively, “She was killed before she got to Washington?”

“Malorie was serious and studious and kept to a schedule. So her roommate knew something was up right away. When her roommate couldn’t get hold of her, she reported her concerns the day before Malorie was dumped, but by that time, she hadn’t been missing for even a day. She was dead at least twelve hours by the time we found her. We estimate he had her less than twenty-four hours. On this particular mission, our guy didn’t have any interest in dealing with a scared, maybe fighting, likely erratic co-ed. Alice, he wanted fear and panic. Malorie, the element of surprise. This is him thinking this, baby, not me, but on that trip, he made her luggage.”