Already Taken (Laura Frost FBI)

CHAPTER TEN

“I’m just not seeing it,” Laura sighed, rubbing her hands over her face. It was only mid-morning on their first day of the case, but she was already feeling frustrated.

The first thing you needed in a case with multiple victims was the link. The thing that connected them. Maybe they were all acting coaches who trained the same actor. Maybe they were all twins. Maybe they’d all had a near-death experience which should have claimed their life, but didn’t. Whatever it was—there was always something.

The fact she hadn’t found something yet didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It just meant she wasn’t doing her job very successfully.

There was one thing she knew for sure. There had to be a link between the two victims. If this was some kind of random spree killer, then it might be hard to trace. It might even just be that they had both interacted with the killer at some point. But if they had, that was something they might be able to trace, too, with a lot of work.

Whatever it was, it was beyond the obvious. Under the surface. Something that wasn’t public knowledge. And if it was something that not many people knew about, then the killer would be someone from a small pool of people. If they could figure this out, they could find him.

They needed to figure it out.

“Well, I mean,” Agent Moore said, shrugging carefully, “she was single, right?”

“Yes,” Laura said. She frowned. “You think that’s relevant? It’s not a match. He was married.”

“Yes, but his wife was out of town,” Agent Moore said. She sucked in a breath and shook her head, as if what she was about to say was terrible. “I don’t like to think the worst of people. But do you think it was possible they were… you know?”

Laura stared at her for a moment. Agent Moore made a face, a kind of strained expression with her pink-lipsticked mouth.

“Having an affair?” Laura suggested, when the end of the sentence was not forthcoming.

“Yeah,” Agent Moore said, hushed, as if she didn’t want the old deputy to overhear such a scandalous thought.

Laura thought about it, then shook her head. “We would have seen something. We have all of their social media accounts, we’ve accessed their private messages and their emails. There’s nothing even remotely suggestive from anyone, and no contact between the two of them.”

“That we know of,” Agent Moore insisted. “What if they used secret, private accounts and made sure to log out of them every time? Or, what if they sent each other messages and then deleted them as soon as they’d finished the conversation, so no one could find them by accident?”

Laura gave Agent Moore a sideways look. “You sound like you know a lot about how to hide talking to someone.”

“What?” Agent Moore’s cheeks blazed bright red. “No! Only because I saw it on a detective show on TV!”

Laura chuckled to herself and shook her head. The rookie was green in more ways than one. Easy to tease. “Well, if they did that, we’ll have to find evidence elsewhere. Then we can ask the tech forensics team to dig into their browser history, IP addresses, their devices, and whatever else they need to try and figure it out. But we can’t really ask them to undertake that big of a search without having something to base it on, and right now that’s nothing more than a guess.”

“So, what do we do?”

What did they do? Laura thought the question over, searching her mind like it was a database of past cases, looking for the next direction to go in.

The most useful thing, of course, would be to have a vision. But while she was sitting there waiting for it, it wasn’t going to happen. The visions didn’t just happen on their own. She had to touch something, to come into contact with it. Something linked with the vision she would have. It could be anything, even something that had the barest possible link. Something the killer had touched.

Unfortunately, with the lack of physical evidence involved in the case so far, they had nothing like that sitting around the Sheriff’s station. Nothing was going to come to her if she just sat here and did nothing and waited. Besides, she also needed to do real investigation work—not just to try to catch the killer faster, but because that would also help to give her excuses she could use to explain away how she knew what the visions told her.

Laura drummed her hands on the desk. “We need another lead,” she said. “Let’s look in another direction. The data from the telephone companies that we asked for should be coming through soon, and we’ll be able to read it and find out if they ever called or texted each other. What about the bank statements? Have they been sent over yet?”

Agent Moore hummed, tapping on her cell phone to open up her emails. “Yes! Looks like they came in about five minutes ago.”

“Great, then let’s get started,” Laura said. “Forward the records from Janae Michaels to me. You look through James Bluton’s. Anything suspicious, you flag it up. Anything like a bar or restaurant, you flag it up. When we compare, we might get something.”

Agent Moore nodded, biting her short fingernail with concentration as she sent the data over. “Done,” she said. “I’ll start reading it now.”

They lapsed into silence for a while, each of them barking out the occasional restaurant chain brand. Once, James had taken out $300 from an ATM with no explanation, but there was no repeat of the incident.

“We can ask his wife about that later,” Laura said. “Listen to this—last month, Janae Michaels stayed in a hotel for two nights. But it was only about two hours out of town. That’s not far, right? You’d almost prefer to just drive there and back again rather than having to pay for a hotel, don’t you think?”

Agent Moore pursed her lips. “Maybe. I only learned to drive last year, so before that I would have taken a train or bus and then stayed in a hotel to avoid the hassle.”

Laura blinked at her. “Why didn’t you know how to drive?”

“Because of the commune,” Agent Moore said cheerfully. “We didn’t do driving lessons. But I needed a license to get into the FBI, so I learned.”

Laura shook her head in wonder. “Alright, so there could be a reason for staying at a hotel two hours ago that was innocent,” she said. “What about him? Bluton? Where was he around those dates? If we can place him in the same town, then maybe we can say they did know each other after all.”

“Hang on,” Agent Moore said, her voice rising higher and getting faster. “What did you say the hotel was called?”

“I didn’t,” Laura said. “The Great Maple Ohio.”

“This is it!” Agent Moore exclaimed, pushing her cell across the table and tapping the screen excitedly. “Look! Two nights’ stay. He was there on the exact same dates!”

Laura examined the line items carefully, making sure the rest of the entries were different. She wasn’t about to accuse the rookie of being stupid, but things happened sometimes. It would have been embarrassing if it turned out they were both looking at the records of the same person.

But they weren’t. Michaels and Bluton had spent their money on different things while they were out in that other town.

This was a lead.

“Well, well, well,” Laura said, looking the items over again. She hit search on the computer, looking up the details of the hotel. They could call, but if they were going to do this properly, they should go there; a two-hour drive wasn’t much. The hotel might give them another lead, and there was the possibility of watching the CCTV footage or showing the photographs of the deceased to different staff members. This would be a much easier and more comprehensive investigation if they went there in person.

And, against all odds, it looked as though the rookie might have good instincts after all. There was actually a real possibility that she might have been right about there being an affair.

“Grab your coat,” Laura said, nodding to the back of Agent Moore’s chair. “I’ll go tell the Sheriff we’re heading out for a while.”